It's an economics text!
Peter van Buren is trying to do a modern echo of Steinbeck's picture of America. Seems to be an accurate set of observations.

Steinbeck often gets credit for being a socialist, but he wasn't. The movie version of Grapes is pure Sovietism, going considerably beyond the book. In other books Steinbeck is firmly in favor of real capitalism and firmly opposed to financialism. He's a Populist.

I've often used his line about canning salmon with ledgers instead of workers. But I hadn't really analyzed the other side of Cannery Row. Rather odd, since I've read the book dozens of times, and more or less based my life on the Ricketts model.

In fact Cannery Row is an economics text. Every page tells in microscopic detail how people make a living, how they save for the future or fail to save, how and why they spend. Doc Ricketts had found a way to use specialized knowledge plus occasional hard work to make a decent frugal income. (I followed his** model and found that it works.) Mack and the boys were content with much less, and survived on occasional hard work plus no specialized knowledge. Lee Chong the grocer (We go see flog) is closer to conventional business, and Fauna the madam is the most conventional of all. She knows how to blackmail politicians to get what she wants, and she is an expert in managing and motivating employees and customers.

Each character demonstrates a different way of making an honest living, though all of them are outside the corporate mainstream. Corporations form a constant shadow and threat to these honest workmen, always ready to yank out the foundation of a real business.

The plot (if you can call it that!) is a fable about banksterism. Mack is always hatching bubbles and con-games and schemes to make The Big Kill. Mack has some bankster qualities: he knows the difference between a trading flog and an eating flog. His schemes fail because he isn't ruthless enough to starve thousands of people and destroy entire countries. Mack never realizes that you must have Chosen-style Ethics if you want to gain a Chosen-style Fortune.

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**Footnote: I found out later that the real Ed Ricketts was nowhere near as frugal as the character of Doc. The real Ed had to work much harder because he had unwisely chosen to support two complete households in a sort of informal polygamy. Two wives, lots of kids. I suspect the Doc character resembled the actual Steinbeck more than the actual Ricketts; nevertheless, the system worked for me.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 3:32 AM