Larry Summers and Inequality

Felix Salmon wrote a very thoughtful account of the Larry Summers/Paul Krugman debate that occurred in Toronto on earlier this week. The account made me wonder, for the thousandth time, about Larry Summers – genius or cretin?

Here’s the passage that made me press my vote for the latter:

Summers also tried to defend inequality, at least in part, by saying that “suppose the United States had 30 more people like Steve Jobs” — that, he said, would be a good thing even as it increased inequality. “So we do need to recognize that a component of this inequality is the other side of successful entrepreneurship; that is surely something we want to encourage.” This might have been received better had Summers not earlier praised America, while pointing to Bremmer, as “the only country in the world where you can raise your first $100 million before you buy your first suit and tie”.
Bremmer is undoubtedly a rich and successful entrepreneur — and one who never wears a tie, to boot — but he’s making money entirely from the 0.1%, and at heart Eurasia Group’s business model is one which does better as the ultra-rich get richer. In the context of a debate about how to rescue the economy for the other 99% of us, it doesn’t much help to point to One Percenters like Jobs and Bremmer who have managed to do well for themselves in an otherwise stagnant economy.”
Salmon’s problem with Summers claim doesn’t seem, well, systematic enough, but at least it touches on the randomness of Summers’ claim. In fact, the Steve Jobs example falls squarely in the realm of pundit science, in which one uses some random example that has a sentimental hold on the audience to make a general point that is wholly lacking in other empirical support.
Summers notion that we would not have technological innovation, or at least diffusion, is really a matter that has been researched. In fact, it can be investigated in a number of ways. We can ask whether wealth inequality is really, throughout history, the only driver of innovation. We can ask if other kinds of inequality will work as well – for instance, being honored for merit. We can ask if inequality is even necessary – for instance, does a kind of non-monetary, non-honorific ideal also work to induce technological breakthrough. And we can ask, more narrowly, whether there is a metric by which we can measure business innovation and compare periods when there was less wealth inequality and periods when there were more as to groundbreaking technological breakthroughs.
If we want to have a coarse measure of the technology/inequality relation, we could look to eras where inequality was lessening and eras were it was increasing in the 20th century and ask if the eras of inequality increase correspond to technology breakthroughs. I think Summers would be disappointed: the major technology breakthroughs of the twentieth century, in chemicals, communication, medicine, computing, and agriculture all cluster in the 30s to 70s period. Well, to be fair, not all – transportation and radio were certainly transformed in the high inequality twenties. But the roots of the technologies in play were certainly due to state intervention and progressive programs in the 10s – the American car industry, for instance, was birthed by an almost prohibitive tariff congress let fall on foreign automobiles.
What you do find in the high inequality periods is a more intense diffusion of innovation. This, it must be said, seems to have come to an end, in America, in the 2000s, which was a dead zone in terms of major innovation. Whether a lesser inequality would have impeded the diffusion of technological products is an interesting question. Certainly, to an extent, the chance for profit – and hence, for some inequality – has helped inject innovations into the mainstream of so
Penicillin – its discovery, diffusion and patenting – is a classic case of the question of money vs. the social ideal. As is well known, neither Fleming, who discovered penicillin, nor Ernest Chain or Howard Florey, the Oxford chemists who re-discovered Fleming’s work in 1940, wanted to patent the drug. They couldn’t even see that it was the kind of thing that was patentable. The myth is that when penicillin was taken to America, Americans had a much different sentiment, and stole penicillin from the British. In a paper surveying this history, however, Robert Bud (2008) shows that the Americans were very hesitant about allowing private companies to patent materials or processes for which public research money had been granted.
“In the USA, similarly, the benefits of publicly-funded research were reviewed. A three
volume study of federal regulations was published in 1946 with a view to standardizing the
diverse regulations which had emerged across the public sector.56 Some agencies allowed exclusive
licenses to private contractors – essentially assigning them the patents, others permitted only
non-exclusive licenses. The report came down firmly on the side of the latter. Research funded
from federal funds was kept in the public domain. It was not as if the turbulent wartime years had
never been. The number of university owned patents increased from a handful during the 1930s
to about a 100 in 1950, but they did not keep multiplying, and did not exceed 150 until the end of
the 1960s.57 Penicillin development had disrupted the old world, rather than leading directly to
the new.
Even US pharmaceutical companies experienced the fruits of ambivalence about patenting.
In the 1950s the price of penicillin collapsed as new entrants piled into the industry, whose product
had not been patented. However there was a determination that the newer antibiotics, such as
the tetracyclines, should be much more closely controlled by US patents and their price was kept
from collapse. During the late 1950s the patent and profit mindedness of the industry was challenged
by both the Federal Trade Commission and the Senate as prewar concerns were brought
to bear on the newly booming pharmaceutical industry. Campaigners who in the 1930s had seen
patenting as a cause of the Great Depression continued their struggles through the 1950s, particularly
deploying Senate support.58 Gradually, however, the emphasis moved from a concern with
patents to anxieties about safety. Although the outcome would be the strengthening of the Food
and Drug Administration as the guardian of the public interest, the right to patent was untouched.”

This story, rather than some random reference to St. Steven Jobs, has much more relevance to the question of the benefits of inequality. And it completely fails to validate Summers idea that if a man can’t be a billionaire, well technology will grind to a halt and our skyscrapers will fall.
Like so much of what Summers utters, his argument is bogus from the get go. But he continues to wow the rubes, including the ones at 1200 Pennsylvania Ave.

A more portable occupy wall street?

Occupy Wall Street seems to have adapted the tactic of the 30s Hoovervilles, and to have evoked a response from the governing class in the U.S. that is identical, almost to the letter, to that of Hoover to the veterans in D.C. But there is another tactic that the protestors in Hoover’s time did not possess: that “real time” link that comes with the web. Watching the police beat up Berkeley students and professors in the videos (such as here) means that the lies of the media can almost immediately be found out by the interested cybernaut.
The question is, how much does the interested cybernaut count?

I have been reflecting, from this apartment in Paris, about the difficult winter that lies ahead for these American troops, these soldiers of the 99 percent. My suggestion is that the Occupy movement become temporarily portable. That is, it will switch between on-site occupations and media occupations. I don’t really believe that the movement will die because the establishment press, having failed at mockery, is now trying to tabloid the movement to death, with fake concerns about violence and drug use. The tabloiding will, however, cause the support for OWS to fall in the polls. It is at this point that ever new tactics have to be used to fight back. To my mind, the teach in and ‘hearings’ may be the best method. The OWS can and should issue ‘subpoenas’ to, say, those who received golden parachutes from Bank of America and those who were just laid off with the usual kurtness to investigate unemployment in America, and how it works. Would the golden parachuters come?Of course not. But it would be easy to represent them – any grad economics student could fill in their place. By such devises, the ows people can really take the debate out of the hands of the establishment media.

The occupation movement, so far, has been brilliant at bringing imagination back to the political process. Un autre effort, messieurs et madams, si vous voulez etre libre!

Marie Antoinette's neoliberalism

The story of the economic crisis in Europe, as in the Anglosphere, is actually simple at the root. Two pages into Maurizio Franzini’s article, Why Europe Needs a Policy on Inequality, the reader trips over this paragraph:

“The proportion of the European workforce with a labour compensation per hour (wages plus social contributions) declining in real terms was 16.5% in the years 1996-1999 and 33% in 2003-2006. Moreover, 48% of the workforce during 1996-1999 and 61% during 2003-2006 saw their labour compensation per hour growing, on average, less than their labour productivity per hour. In the latter period, 23% of the workforce faced declining compensation with increasing labour productivity in their industry.”

There is a specter haunting the developed countries – the specter of the increase of exploitation. Wages are continuing to fall below the increase in productivity, and this means (sound the trumpets, please): you get one of those garden variety shortfalls of demand, and oversupply of goods, that so puzzles your elite capitalist type. He scratches his head, and then he dreams up his solution to the problem: why not reward the rich even more money, and take away the package of compensation (in the form of public goods) from the rest of the population? Somehow, a solution in which the elites engross even more of the collective wealth goes over well with the elites. They start writing grave articles about it. And sometimes they just throw together a mishmash of contradictions and claim that it is a program for the ages – thus, the current fad for expansionary contraction, which, like virgin births and perpetual motion machines, is proof that the verbal is triumphantly infinite, while the material is sadly limited to what can actually happen.

The poetic origin of the expansionary contraction comes from that mythical phrase of Marie Antoinette’s, let them eat cake. The EU bureaucrats have iced that phrase nicely with econo-speak, but strip off the icing and it’s the same old cake.

Here’s another passage from Franzini that should poke a hole in the American myth of Europe as a land of socialist equality:

“According to one study inequality in the EU is quite high but lower than in the USA: the Gini index is (with reference to data around 2000) 0.33 in the EU25, while it
was 0.37 in USA.

A more recent estimate based on a different methodology and on more recent data (2005) concludes that inequality in Europe is significantly higher, and not uch different from that of the USA: the EU-wide Gini coefficient is 0.369, not very far from the US level of
0.372.”

When people refer to Gini coefficients, it loses the great mass of people. But it actually does give us a way of thinking back through our recent cycle of exploitation. And interesting experiment in this vein was made by Stephen Adair, a professor in Connecticut. He took the Census’s Gini coefficient, that is, the measure of inequality, and he adjusted it back to its former levels in Connecticut and played the tape of inequality, so to speak, forward.

First, some back data: “Between 1970 and 2010, every state in the U.S. experienced an increase in inequality, but non greater than Connecticut, which went from the 36th most unequal state to the 2nd most unequal.”

Adair keeps the size of the income pool the same in one scenario, but adjusts the Gini coefficient down to the 1970 level. In Scenario b, he projects a neo-liberal distribution pattern by growing the size of the income pool, and retaining current levels of inequality. This is what he gets in Scenario A:

“…. a Connecticut in which the overall size of the income pool is the same, while hundreds of thousands of people experience significant upward mobility. This upward mobility is “achieved” by lowering the average value of those making over $200,000 from $387,650 to $235,000. It is not mathematically possible to keep the average household income the same and reduce the Gini to .337 without lowering this value. Scenario A illustrates a zero-sum game in which a decline in the incomes of the richest 8 percent “pay” for upward mobility for others.”

Here’s the neo-liberal scenario:

”Scenario B … maintains the Gini coefficient of 2010, but imagines a 10 percent increase in income levels by raising the household mean income to just over $102,290. Given the current distribution nearly half of the new income went to the top 10 percent, such the average income of households making over $200,000 went from $387,650 to $440,400.

Scenario B yields small increases in the number of households in each category above $45,000 and some small decreases in the lower income categories. There are, however, significantly greater reductions in the low income categories in Scenario A than in B, and greater increases in most of the upper income categories. .

Well over ninety percent of households in Connecticut would be more likely to experience an improved economic condition by returning to the rates of inequality in 1970 with no economic growth than they would with a 10 percent overall increase in the income pool with no change in the degree of inequality.”

We are drifting towards the wreck of the plutocracy. Scenario B is not going to happen – rather, we are going to have an overall shrinkage of the income pool, and an overall increase in inequality, given current tendencies. It is over, in the EU and the U.S., in the UK and Canada, with the fiction that we can join together a gilded age economy and a New Deal social welfare system. The plutocrats are fighting for the former, and nobody is fighting for the latter.

Humean anthropology and indolence: 3

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is, as its very title shows, something different than a mere history. History and natural history differ in their object: in the former, the object is the chronicle of human action, and in the later, of the development of living forms in nature. By shifting religion to the realm of nature, Hume was following through on the logic of a division that he articulates in the very first paragraph between reason and human nature. Already this division speaks to a certain incoherence in the pretence that man is, ontologically, on an equal level with ‘nature’. In other words, an incoherence of ontological scope. This incoherence haunts social science like a Cartesian demon, casting doubt on all attempts to ground a social science on the opposition between culture and nature, while at the same time making it impossible to simply combine the two without destroying the very meaning and savor of both categories. In the twentieth century, Levy-Strauss made of that opposition one of the founding social structures, the study of which is the object of anthropology, at least insofar as the society studied lacks a system of writing. I mention Levy-Strauss to signal a certain textual destiny that can assigned to Hume’s natural history. Although the essay is not shaped by the protocols of what we would call anthropology – it evidences no fieldwork whatsoever – it is, on the other hand, an argument about a certain product of human nature, religion, that is almost – Hume is very clear about the ‘almost’ – universal. And in as much as it appears in most societies, Hume feels that we can understand it as a system of beliefs by asking what qualities of human nature are expressed in it.

However, in posing the question in this way, we already suppose that it is not a product of human reason. Reason, here, will be regarded not as an expression of human nature, but as a mechanism that transcends human nature. Reason is a machinery that allows for a two-fold operation, beginning firstly with citation – breaking a certain phenomenon out of its context or situation – and secondly with analysis, breaking it down according to the rules of either deduction or induction. Hume thinks that the operation of reason, abstraction, contemplation, etc. is so little a product of human nature that most humans do it badly, if they do it at all. In a sense, Hume’s whole essay is at the polar opposite of one of Wittgenstein’s comments about Frazer’s Golden Bough (which is itself very much a descendent of Hume’s Natural History of Religion):

“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.


But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.

When he explains to us that the King must be killed in his blood, because after the ideas of the savages, otherwise his soul will not be fresh, one can only say: where this practice and this idea go together, the practice does not spring from the idea, but they are both simply there. “

Hume, on the other hand, thinks it will never be plausible that religion – in his survey of it – comes from anything but stupidity. The “ignorant”, the “vulgar”, and the “ignorant vulgar” play a very strong role in Hume’s account, and help us understand another of the determinations of his initial separation of human nature and reason: it is from the standpoint of reason, which deduces the truth about God, that the historian can understand the history of religion, which unfolds as a series of misperceptions of God. Importantly, for Hume, as for Frazer, God is a phenomenon of belief, molded in the form of the God that is worshipped in the Christian church. When Hume finds, not unnaturally, that this concept of God cannot really be imposed on many of the religious phenomena he finds in the past, he attributes this to a primitive intellectual equipment.

It is in explaining that primitive intellectual equipment that we come upon a certain unarticulated primal supposition in Hume, concerning primitive man. Hume, while never fully spelling this out in his essay, evidently assumes Hobbes. He assumes, that is, that the primitive state was one of man against man, or perpetual and complete war. It is characteristic of that state that people are harried – they have no time for contemplation. The temporal/material condition for reasoning – indolence – is lacking. And this original lack impedes the habit of inquiry; for inquiry, like all human phenomena in Hume, is eventually founded in habit and habit’s social cousin, custom.

“Adam rising at once in Paradise, and in the full perfection of his his faculties, would naturally, as represented by Milton, be astonished at the glorious appearances of nature, the heavens, the air, the earth, his own organs and members ; and would be led to ask, whence this wonderful scene arose: but a barbarous, necessitous animal (such as a man is on the first origin of society), pressed by such numerous wants and passions, has no leisure to admire the regular face of nature, or make inquiries concerning the cause of those objects to which, from his infancy, he has been gradually accustomed. On the contrary, the more regular and uniform, that is, the more perfect nature appears, the more is he familiarized to it, and the less inclined to scrutinize and examine it. A monstrous birth excites his curiosity, and is deemed a prodigy. It alarms him from its novelty,and immediately sets him a-trembling, and sacrificing, and praying. But an animal, complete in all its limbs and organs, is to him an ordinary spectacle, and produces no religions opinion or affection. Ask him
whence that animal arose? hewill tell you, from the copulation of its parents. And these, whence? From the copulation of theirs. A few removes satisfy his curiosity, and set the objects at such a distance, that he entirely loses sight of them. Imagine not that he will so much as start the question, whence the first animal,much less whence the whole system or united fabric of the universe arose.”

This is interestingly wrong. It was even known to be wrong in Hume’s time: there was, by 1750, two centuries of material gathered and published by Europeans that showed, contrary to Hume, a deep fascination with how the whole system of the fabric of the universe arose, and even how animals arose. Hume was probably aware of Lafitau, if not the numerous Spanish works on the belief systems of the Indios. And of course since Hume’s time we are more and more aware that, whatever else interested Paleolithic humans, they were absolutely fascinated and even obsessed by an animal complete in its limbs and organs. But Hume’s Hobbesianism disallows at least one reading of the evidence. And, interestingly, sets the stage for one of Hume’s most ingenious suppositions, which will prove to have a long life in the 19th and 20th centuries.

comment on the NYT Stephen Roach piece at Room for Debate

Stephen Roach, the well named financial analyst, was asked about the crisis in savings in Japan and the United States in the NYT’s Room for Debate the other day. His response was essentially to knock the American middle class for living beyond its means (which used to be the bright side – remember the Ownership society? Remember ‘its your money’? Ah, the Bushisms of yesteryear). Anyway, I wrote a comment which, for some reason, the NYT chose not to publish, although I can’t see that it violated any policy of theirs. So, in the interest of keeping this comment around so that I can use it later, rather than flushing it into the cybervoid, here’s a link to Roach’s article and here’s my comment.

"Nice to see Roach talk his book - let's shove more money into Wall Street via IRAs and 401Ks. - Or, lets strip them of their tax deductibility and set up government retirement and education accounts which would be tax free and offer a modest but guaranteed return of 3 percent annually, as suggested by Teresa Ghilarducci. As Jim Mosquera in ‘Escaping Oz’ puts it: “At the last major stock market bottom in 1982, American households were not that interested in owning stocks. The growth of the stock industry was aided by the creation of IRA accounts (1974) and 401(k) plans (1980). IRA accounts came during the stock market bottom of 1974 and 401k plans arrived just before the major stock market bottom of 1982. Stock ownership comprised barely 12 percent of all household financial assets in 1982, where not 2/3 of investors have half their financial assets in mutual funds. Stocks litter IRA and 401k accounts, the most precious of saving vehicles. Fifty-four percent (54%) of households own stock mutual funds and 37% own individual stocks in their IRA accounts.” In 1982, retirement was much more secure than it is now. Our experiment with stock ownership has failed. It is time to admit it, and to shrink the funds Wall Street has to play with. This will re-set Wall Street so that it becomes of use, rather than what it is now - a wasteful casino that allocates capital with maximum inefficiency - and would actually help finance the operation of the government without tax increases for the 99 percent - although of course we need to hike the 1 percent tax rate to Eisenhower levels."

Hume and Rousseau on indolence: 2

Han Joachim Voth, in his essay, Time Use in Eighteenth century London: some evidence from Old Bailey (1997) cleverly figured out a way to quantify over time use in 18th century Britain by using the accounts of witnesses at trials. The question of whether and how much time discipline intensified among urban laborers (and agricultural workers) has been much disputed, as the Marxist claim that was backed up in the E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class has been tugged at here and statistically stiffed there. Voth concluded that the evidence points not to longer working days, but instead, to longer working weeks. The sixteenth and seventeenth century holidays were being cut down. St. Monday was assassinated. Another study of the decline of Saint Monday (the day that workers would sometimes take off to have a day of drinking and music) in 18th and 19th century Birmingham found that the Saint was not martyred all at once, but bit by bit.

The evidence, then, points to an increase in the working time of the laboring class in Britain in the 18th century. And yet, at the same time, one discovers a new sense of leisure among the ‘middling men’ – the bourgeoisie – both in the later start in life by bourgeois children, who were educated for much longer than laborer’s children, and in soft work and hard leisure – a certain non-differentiation of the two spheres. Gambling could be leisure, but for many it really did pay the bills. And the question of intellectual labor was still not wholly defined at this time. Research could be a hobby from, say, preaching.

What is important is that leisure and labor carry strong class colorations. As Joan-Lluís Marfany puts it in “The invention of labour in Early Modern Europe”:

…take the question of boredom, the history of which [Peter Burke] invites us to write. This is not, as it may seem, strictly an upper- class problem, but here too there is one important distinction to be made. The leisured classes get bored because they are idle; their problem, as Burke, quoting Henry Fielding, points out, is how to kill time. For the workers, the source of boredom is work. They too devise ways of passing the time, only in their case it is working time that needs to be passed. In conservative, idealizing literature, peasants are portrayed as people who like to keep always busy, to the extent that even in the long winter evenings when they get together to while away the time by telling stories, singing songs and playing games, they still manage to combine these activities with some useful task, such as, for instance in northern Catalonia, peeling or shelling corn cobs, or sifting Yet we might just as well look at it from the opposite angle. The cobs had to be peeled and shelled; the seeds had to be sifted; the stamens to be carefully plucked for saffron; the wool or the flax had to be spun: all tedious, repetitive tasks. Doing the work together to the accompaniment of stories, songs or games was a way of alleviating the mind-numbing boredom of the chores.”

These are quick glimpses of a deep and complex historical event, but they pose a question: how could Hume have gotten it so wrong? That is, how could he, and other European intellectuals of the time, have thought that they were living in the golden age of leisure?

Hume and Rousseau on indolence: a backwards glance 1

Indolence and leisure have long been outlier themes in philosophy and the social sciences. And yet, as I hope to show, they are connected by every family tie to the grander themes of reason, progress and culture, as these were articulated among the Enlightenment intellectuals of the eighteenth century.

Let’s start this inquiry with a conference held in 1966 when Marshall Sahlins surveyed the ethnographic evidence concerning the use of time by hunter gatherers, such as the !Kung and Australian aborigines, and used it as evidence for what he called the “original affluence”. Sahlins wrote: “A fair case can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other condition of society (1968 – quoted by Winterhalder (1993). Windterhalder’s essay, which advocates a neo-classical framework to explain the “original affluence” thesis instead of Sahlins’ own Zen economics, introduces the problematic with a clever comparison to the myth of the busy bee:

“More than ninety years ago entomologist Professor C.F. Hodge marked individ- ual honey bees to study their activities. He observed that between sunrise and sunset no bee worked more than three and one-half hours (see Hubbell 1988: 78). Compare this observation with the commonly held belief captured in the phrase, 'busy as a bee'. In popular wisdom the honeybee stands for bustling productive effort, its labours those of nearly ceaseless toil. Only the beaver equals its reputation as an icon of industriousness.1 But Hodge is right. Bees spend a lot of time doing nothing or wandering through the hive appearing to do nothing in particular. Only intermittently do they work hard (Seeley 1989). Beavers too are active foragers only a small percentage of the time (Belovsky 1984).”

The bee, the leisurely hunter, and sleep will all figure in one way or another in a backward glance at Hume and Rousseau’s conjectural histories of original man. Neither Hume or Rousseau are ‘typical’ Enlightenment figures, but their different philosophical anthropologies did influence two different lines of thought in the Occident.
…

Hume’s essays on economics and social theory were written, according to James Buchan, under Hume’s strategic impulse to introduce himself a second time into the world of the learned, or at least the Edinburgh part of that world, after his first foray, A Treatise of Human Nature, fell stillborn from the press – at least in Hume’s own, retrospective account. Hume wrote the essays while living in his mother’s house, Ninewells, outside of the village of Chirnside. Although Hume’s afterlife has been more lively in metaphysics, his essays certainly gave him a fair place in the prehistory of economics and political theory.

One essay in the second volume, On refinement in the arts, takes up the defense of luxury. The Enlightenment inversion of the values of Christendom made a special case of luxury. Denounced by the Church as a vice, and subject to various taxes, luxury was not only praised by Mandeville and the French libertine school, but praised, specifically, for its social utility. Mandeville’s argument (made in The Fable of the Bees, for that insect's folkloric properties can be made to serve enlightened ends) that private vices can be public virtues, gave a radical foundation to the separation of the secular and the sacred: if we grant, as the New Philosophers held, that government exists to promote the happiness of the people, than giving the sacred secular tools to pursue private vice snuffs out the public benefit – the commerce – deriving from them.

By the time that Hume came to write the essays in 1741, Mandeville’s wicked creed had diffused itself into the circles of the advanced thinkers. Myself, I want to look at Hume’s essay not so much for the defense of luxury as for his characterization of the human happiness that is the essence of public virtue, because it is subtended by what one might call a speculative anthropology – a conjectural history – that is more abundantly expressed in the Natural History of Religion. Against one of the powerful but under-recognized themes of that anthropology – the theme of indolence – I’d like to pit Rousseau’s anthropological conjecture in the Discourse on Inequality.

Here, then, is Hume’s analysis of human happiness:

“Human happiness, according to the most received notions, seems to consist in three ingredients; action,
pleasure, and indolence : And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according
to the particular disposition of the person ; yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting, without destroying,
in some measure, the relish of the whole composition. Indolence or repose, indeed, seems not of itself to contribute much to our enjoyment; but, like sleep, is requisite as an indulgence, to the weakness of human nature, which cannot support an uninterrupted course of business or pleasure. That quick march of the spirits, which takes a man from himself, and chiefly gives satisfaction, does in the end exhaust the mind, and requires some intervals of repose, which, though agreeable for a moment, yet, if prolonged, beget a languor and lethargy, that destroy all enjoyment.”

One should note that, though the structural place of this remark in his essay is directed towards building a case for further sociological observation, in fact, the natural history of the ‘quick march of the spirit’, and the exhaustion attendent upon it that requires leisure and play, has already, in Hume’s Treatise, been given a certain metaphysical, or perhaps I should say, anti-metaphysical, value in a passage highlighted by Buchan:

“But what have I here said, that reflections very refined and metaphysical have little or no influence upon us? This opinion I can scarce forbear retracting, and condemning from my present feeling and experience. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens that, since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
Play and amusement are ‘cures’ to the tangle of reasoning that has made Hume a monster to himself and – projectively – to others. Hume’s fall into monstrosity is imagined as a sort of foundering on an island –that is, it is a fall away from sociability,into what one might call primitive state of being, a Robinson Crusoe-like solitude. I will come back to that image later.
However, if in the Treatise the relaxation of the mind is a sort of film director’s cut that ends the curious metaphysical narrative, in the Natural History of Religion, relaxation – what I will call indolence – assumes a very different historical shape.