Help John Jones

The most vivid economics in Looking Backward is not the Industrial Army, not the equal credit cards, not the great warehouses supplying the city. It's Julian West walking down Washington Street after his double-dream, seeing it as if for the first time, and starting to laugh.

"Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones, am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones. Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else. Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!"

He's laughing at the advertising. Miles of it — walls, windows, broadsides, pavements, everything except the sky covered in appeals of individuals seeking contributions to their support. And he has just come from a world where there is no advertising because no one competes, because no one needs to beg strangers to notice them before some other stranger does.

The "John Jones" passage is doing two things at once. First, it's economics: all this effort wasted on mutual cancellation, on ten thousand stores doing what one warehouse could do, each one eating the cost of fighting all the others in the form of real goods that aren't made or distributed because the labor went into the competition. "What with greed and what with spite some fields were flooded while others were parched, and half the water ran wholly to waste." The labor-as-water metaphor is Bellamy's cleanest, because it shows the waste as structural, not intentional. No one is trying to waste. Each is trying to win. The waste is the sum of all the winning.

Second: it's a moral shift in the indictment. The storekeepers and clerks who urged prodigality and waste on customers "were not a whit worse men than any others in Boston." They had families to feed. The system required them to place their individual interest before the common one. They didn't choose to be John Jones. John Jones was the only available identity in the market economy.

This matters because it changes who's responsible. The easy story is: bad people are greedy, fix the people. The Bellamy story is: the structure produces the behavior, fix the structure. You cannot ask the storekeepers to stop being John Jones while the system rewards John Jones and punishes anyone who acts otherwise. "They could not be asked to starve while they waited for an order of things such as I had seen in my dream."

The John Jones problem is still the central design problem of any economy: how do you get behavior that serves the collective when the unit that acts is the individual?

The 19th century's answer was: you don't, or rather you trust that the individual interest and the collective interest accidentally align often enough. The invisible hand. Bellamy thought this was obviously wrong — the evidence being the miles of competing stores, the four thousand manufacturing plants that spent as much energy undermining each other as making things.

The 20th century utopia's answer was: make the collective interest the only available interest by removing individual gain as a motive. Nobody gets more; everyone gets the same. The only available incentive is honor — the red ribbon, rank, the esteem of your fellow citizens. Under these conditions, cooperation isn't a sacrifice, it's the rational move.

Whether this works is a different question. Bellamy was optimistic about human nature in ways that subsequent history has complicated. But his diagnosis was sharp: the problem with John Jones is not that John Jones is selfish. The problem is that the system built John Jones out of a person who, under other conditions, might have been something quite different.

There's a ghost-face argument here, structural twin to West's vision of the tenement dwellers. Walking through the factory district, he sees "ghostly faces" superimposed on every brutalized form — the ideal face the person would have had if soul had been allowed to live. The ghost-face argument applied to economics: behind every John Jones is the person that person would have been if they hadn't been dropped into a system that required them to fight for their survival at everyone else's expense.

"The gentlest creatures are fierce when they have young to provide for."

This is not an excuse. It's a redesign specification. The question is not: how do we get John Jones to stop being John Jones? The question is: how do we build a world where John Jones was never necessary?