Right Reason

The Political Economy of Knowledge in "Breaking Bad"

 

So you do have a plan! Yeah Mr. White! Yeah science!

- Jesse Pinkman

 

The difference between techne and episteme as well as the concerns which come from the in the popular show “Breaking Bad.” 

 

In the first episode of that show, when the two protagonists, Walter White, a brilliant chemist, and Jesse Pinkman, a drug dealer down and out on his luck, first meet to cook meth, Pinkman is dismissive of White’s systematic approach to the process. Pinkman is confident that his well-practice techne is sufficient, and is dismissive of the procedure that White creates to synthesize the meth. Objecting to White’s assertion that they won’t be adding chile pepper to their method, which was his specialty before teaming up with White, Pinkman asserts that cooking meth is art, and that he is an artist. Unimpressed, White responds that it’s all chemistry, all episteme. Once White finishes, though, Pinkman is astonished at the quality of the meth that White created, praising him as a great artist. Once again, White asserts that it’s all science; everything he did could be broken down to episteme, a system of principles, chemistry, which his knowledge of enabled his action. 

 

The differences between the techne, cooking meth, and episteme, synthesizing it, are further emphasized later on in the show during the first episode of the fourth season. In that episode, White is being held hostage by a local meth kingpin, Gus Fring, and White is arguing that he is needed because of his scientific skill. An assistant to Frings’s operation angrily argues that neither White nor his episteme are needed for Fring’s operation, saying: “It’s called a cook, because everything comes down to following a recipe.” White, once again the scientist, retort’s that assertion that everything can be reduced to art by peppering the assistant with questions about what to do given certain scenarios. “What happens when you get a bad barrel of precursor? How would you even know?” “What happens in the summer when the humidity level rises and your product goes cloudy?” An artist working simply off of his craftsmanship would not know the answers to such scenarios, which would ruin the batch of meth he is cooking. Someone working from the systemized knowledge of chemistry like Walter White, though, would be able to deduce the proper responses based on his knowledge of the principles involved.  Whereas techne, cooking, is concrete, and context dependent and thus cannot deal with situations it has no familiarity with, episteme is able to overcome such adversities because it is manipulating the world according to universal if-then statements. 

 

Walter White’s experience in the criminal underworld is illustrative of the the use of episteme in society. Of concern to studying how people cope with knowledge in society is how the episteme is stored and transmitted. In “Breaking Bad,” it is quickly apparent to those who meet him that White is a man who has innate access (by that I mean he doesn’t need reference to books or the internet) to knowledge about chemistry that no one else around him does. Those who decide to work with him can thus incorporate his knowledge of chemistry into their business models by having him be in charge of their meth production and by having White advise on such concerns. In addition, since White’s episteme is so unique, there are no close substitutes to him, and so whereas a lesser chemist may have been a disposable asset, White is essential because without White the organization wouldn’t be capable of producing meth of the purity he ensures. 

 

Thanks to Walter White, his business partners are able to act as if they had his knowledge of the general principles of chemistry. Within those associations, White is the store, so to speak, of that episteme, and cooperation with him is the means by which his episteme is transmitted in society. As long as White’s knowledge is unrivaled, White was able to create a sustainable specialization for himself within the criminal underworld of methamphetamine as a source of episteme, and is able to trade that knowledge for what he wants, be it money or security, with others. All-in-all, a division of labor is created which enables those ignorant of the principles of chemistry to benefit from it through cooperation with Walter White.  

 

The story of Walter White in “Breaking Bad” is also illustrative to why episteme alone cannot generate economic growth and material prosperity. With his episteme, Walter White is able to synthesize meth which is, by the end of the series, demanded across the world and makes him no small fortune., that he is in a position to provide as-if access to that knowledge to others is a matter of institutions and trade. When a meth head on the street is able to get an unparalleled high with the use of White’s special blue meth, they are able to act as if they had knowledge of how to create meth of that purity themselves. The precondition for this is a division of labor in which those meth heads are able to cooperate, though indirectly, with White in order to have access to his episteme. A division of labor, in turn, has preconditions of its own if it is exist, and there are rules of the game that have to be set to ensure that self-regarding cooperation is possible such as punishing transgressors and negotiating contracts. Since the meth trade goes on in the black market, institutions evolve within it, independent of the courts, which ensure the operation of this business and the division of labor which supports it. This division of labor, in turn, allows for White to be able to offer his episteme to society, or at least to those on the black market. 

 

  That people across society would put their episteme to use in order to satisfy the wants of other people in an impersonal division of labor, though, is itself that needs explaining. It seems obvious to us that people would use the episteme they have about certain topics in the division of labor in order to exploit their knowledge to gain a money income. When someone watches “Breaking Bad,” the ethical question which comes to mind is why is White using his knowledge of chemistry in the criminal underworld to get money not why is White using his knowledge of chemistry to get money. That White would also be alert to the opportunity of using his knowledge to sell specialized products to others is itself something not universal to human nature. Simple entrepreneurship may be, everyone may be an entrepreneur in a loose connotation of the world when acting as to better their situations, but not everyone is even aware of the opportunities to be an entrepreneur on the market. For Walter White to specialize as a meth synthesizer and for a division of labor to emerge with that as one of it’s important nodes, then White would have had to be alert (and willing) to that opportunity for specialization. Such a frame of mind is something that economics, whose basic organon is to explain all human behavior as instances of the maximization of an objective, well-defined function with only income and prices as its arguments, cannot explain. 

 

“Breaking Bad” is thus a distinctly bourgeois story. Walter White is neither using his knowledge of chemistry to get favors from a local prince nor is he using that knowledge in hope for seeing God in the geometry of creation as part of a perceived journey towards ultimate salvation. Both of those are very real possibilities,  Su Song (1020- 1101) built an immensely complicated water clock for the Han emperor in the 1090s that served the bureaucratic purposes of managing the Chinese state and Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was a Franciscan monk who pursued empirical research of the world throughout his life to better man’s understanding of God’s creation. Walter White created meth so pure that is purity became a mark of his work and sold it on the black market in order to get enough money to support his family after he receive a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Three different premises for the use of episteme in society, and only one corresponds to a scenario where there could emerge a society-wide division of labor that enables anybody who has enough cash to act as-if she knows White’s knowledge about chemistry. The profit-maximization in terms of money and income that explains so much of modern society is behavior which happens in context of a bourgeois society, and the emergence of that bourgeois society over history has involved phenomena not amendable to analysis simply in terms of indifference curves and budget constraints.

 

Others in society are able to benefit from the episteme of a few specific experts by cooperating in a division of labor which provides them as-if access to that knowledge. Within the grand system of human cooperation that is the market, someone is able to enjoy the benefits of a Coca Cola as if he had the knowledge of how to create it by buying it from a convenience store. Through self-regarding trade, the episteme of one is made available to another, and thus the knowledge of a few is made to service the many. The creation of this grand system must be understood within both institutional and cultural contexts that enable to emergence and continuation of the division of labor. Institutions are important because not all strategies of action are compatible with its maintenance, and if strategies that deny others their property titles are able to proliferate in society, then the division of labor will break down. Culture, all of whose aspects cannot be broken down as institutions understood as rules of the game, enables the enlargement of the division of labor by making people more alert to entrepreneurial opportunities on the market. 

Ethics and Poverty: More Than Warm Feelings

"The penury of these miserable masses of - in the main colored - people is not caused by capitalism, but by the absense of capitalism."
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action 

 

From “Bangladeshi Garment Workers and the Perversion of Ethics” by Mario Rizzo:

I am not saying that we should not have compassion for these people. What I am saying is that the whole of morality is not about feeling good. It is about doing good. And doing good is a complex affair. It requires attention to the unseen."

 

Whether it is about people not having health insurance or about people having to work in dangerous conditions, the human cooperation on the market is not about making what our feelings want to be. It's about serving human desires with limited resources, and ensuring those limited resources go to the most urgent ones as expressed by the price-system. Poverty exists, and as such human decisions about what is the most urgent desire must be made. The market-order will at times show us the great tragedy of such decisions having to be made, but that doesn't mean such decisions don't have to be made.

 

We simply do no favors to people when we make the costs of cooperating with them higher, even if we may feel better about it from the security of our arm chairs. When we make people have health-insurance, people on the margins will decide not to cooperate with some people based on the increased costs. When we make it such that employers have to invest in safety equipment in a third-world factory, some those employers will on the margins decide that they do not want to do business in that country. 

Indeed, we may feel better about ourselves forcing all that to be done, but by preventing people access to cooperation in the market-economy, we greatly harm their welfare. The market-economy is simply the greatest mechanism ever in the history of this world of exploiting the gains to social cooperation. The path out of poverty is not paved with the feelings of wealthy, as we in the first world are from a global perspective, do-gooders, but by human cooperation guided by abstract prices.

 

Countries are poor because they are not productive. Even though we may back away from saying the same thing about people who are poor (ignoring p=mc and the identity of wages as the first derivative of the production function with respect to labor when we do so), we cannot do so when we talk about wages. The only way to not be a poor country is to be a productive country. The only way to be a productive country is to exploit the gains from cooperation made possible by human cooperation guided by prices and, participating in the international division of labor.

 

One of many manifestations of Deidre McCloskey's Great Fact. 

Fundamentally, the jump in material welfare over the past two centuries was not made possible by people wishing better standards of living upon the poor, but by the poor having access to productive modes of social cooperation. It is social cooperation, and the hard decisions that come with making oneself an attractive person to cooperate with, that made the hockey stick possible, not warm feelings about another person's welfare. 

If we truly care about the destitute of the world, of those unfortunate enough to be born in societies in which they could not exploit the gains to social cooperation as we can, we must not saddle them with costs that make cooperating with them less attractive than it was before. Instead, we should allow the capitalistic ethos of free trade and free contracts to emerge in societies across the world, and be content with the knowledge that eventually things will get better. Neither Rome nor New York City were built in a day. 

The Greatest Democracy on Earth: The Free Market

 

 

The businessman who has made a fortune on the free market is the person who has served the interests of the nation, and the greater world, the most. He who has put resources into the most productive uses possible, and has satisfied the demands of his fellow human beings. He has demanded nothing of them but to be free to invest his property as he sees fit, and he has offered them the fruits of his efforts for suitable recompense. He has never had to coerce others into associated with him, every person who did so did so willingly knowing that their lives would actually be improved by doing so. When historians discuss whether or not he had a positive effect on humanity, no more is needed than to open his accounting books and see how many people voluntarily bought his products. The businessman at every moment in his career has had to position himself in order to serve the demands of his fellow human beings in the best possible way in order to stay competitive. Anyone is free to either buy from his competitors or to compete against him if they think that they can do a better job and serve society better. Despite this constant threat to his position, he manages to survive, and he does so only because he improves people's life in a definite manner. The businessman is thus the greatest servant to society, his means are neither fire nor force, but putting himself in a better position to serve others than his competitors.

Ultimately, the free market is the greatest of democracies. It demands no loyalty and the door is always open if anyone wishes to leave. Each person on the market is free to dispense with their resources as they see fit and those that they choose to associate with using those resources will prosper. In addition, how many resources one has is a direct result of one's voluntary cooperation with other human beings. Those who have more by either luck or inheritance must either put them to work for the good of others or see them waste away with time. There are some who may not like how individuals choose to use their wealth, or may think this to be inhumane system, but those are they who wish to use force and fire to impose their will upon society. They cannot make their vision possible by voluntary association, so they result to hegemony. By doing so they show themselves to be less than the businessman for when their vision fails, rather than accepting the choices of other human beings and trying to find a new vision that is more in accordance with those choices, they do not abandon it, but think that they are the wise sages who need to construct society in their image. The attempt to have voters choose the direction of government is a poor substitute to the power that consumers have to direct the processes of production within the market. There may be democratic elements within representative governments, but they are never as democratic as markets that allow the 49% to simply switch who they buy their goods from them. Within the markets, though, each individual has the ability to associate with whomever he wishes and it is this attribute that makes it the greatest democracy on earth. 

 

Of course whenever the government gives advantages to some whether that be in the form of tariffs or subsidies, they weaken the democracy of the market. A producer who has to lobby the government to create a tariff against a foreign competitor who is persuading consumers to buy from him with lower prices or a better product is resorting to hegemony. By asking for the protection, he is implicitly admitting that he cannot serve the best interests of consumers as much as his competitor, and needs to resort to force to associate with his customers. This is certainly a great evil. It is not an evil of the free market nor should it distract us from the democratic qualities of the free market. The problem is not even that he is asking for the tariff, the problem is that some human beings are given the coercive power to force others to pay a tariff. It is not a problem of the markets, but a problem of the government's use of its power within them, “crony capitalism” as many call it.