Racoons and Henhouse Economics

I know some folks who started raising chickens many years ago using an outbuilding near the edge of the woods as the henhouse. One summer I helped fence a little yard connected to the coop to serve as the chicken run. For several months there were happy chickens providing a good supply of fresh eggs to the family. In today’s economy this would have been a gold mine. 

Now, some of you will already be anticipating the demise of this poultry paradise because of the racoons that feature in the title. Others, perhaps a little more versed in country things, won’t have needed the title in order to start getting uneasy about a chicken coop built against the edge of the woods. 

Of course, we knew there were predators out there so we built a fence around the coop that Rikers Island would be proud of: tall, heavy-gauge hardware cloth with corner braces and t-posts along the length and its edges buried deep in the ground. But I for one never gave any thought to the branches of nearby trees that extended over the roof of the coop and chicken run.   

It was sheer carnage when the racoon finally invaded. Someone patched together the grisly evidence the next day. Dropping in from the branches overhead, the raccoon had killed almost every chicken in the coop. It did not eat all the chickens, mind you, just killed them. By my guess, it was able to choke down most of one chicken. But it killed everything in sight. 

This is what I call “henhouse economics.” 

The features of henhouse economics will be familiar to most of us. They involve expending enormous resources to solve short term problems or provide immediate gratification. Hen house economics do not care about the long term viability of their operations (for example, will there be chickens in the coop tomorrow if I kill them all tonight). They focus on parts rather than on wholes. They focus on things rather than ideas. Their logic is circular and unsustainable—a closed system in which entropy increases.

Henhouse economics is economic activity that combines predation, meaningless waste, and rapid exchanges in order to produce high currency-measured values with deferred or displaced costs. The racoon was in the henhouse as a predator; killed more than he could use and thereby wasted a valuable resource for himself and others; and did it rapidly in one fell swoop at no immediate cost to himself. Viola: henhouse economics.   

How does it work in the human sphere? Predatory behavior in business and politics is de rigueur. It appears in the relation of the powerful to each other, to the land, and to their customers or constituents. You can identify predatory behavior when commercial or political success is achieved not by supplying the best solution to a problem but by seeking to destroy other possible solutions. EVs not catching on? Let’s destroy the viability of other options in order to force the issue.

The largest corporations, for example, hunt smaller competitors and use their size temporarily to underprice commodities in one market to flush out the local competition. The more global your reach, the better leverage you have in destroying others’ viable solutions. In farming, wholesale destruction of natural resources like topsoil and the microbiome is the entry fee to the industry. And our massive electronic infrastructure depends on horrific conditions in Africa’s cobalt mines and what amounts to slave labor in many countries we will never have to see. Predation is the key to profit in henhouse economics. 

It nearly goes without saying that meaningless waste is a feature of henhouse economics. It is such an accessory of modern living that we would be disoriented without it. Single-use disposable packaging dominates commodity exchanges and is made necessary by the destruction of local markets in favor of the extended supply lines upon which our centralized commodity industries depend. The habits of thrift and conservation are things we expect poor people to practice, and it’s best they do it elsewhere. 

Rapid exchanges? Who wants to abuse land that will be in the family for generations? Who wants to spoil the water of a river from which local children and livestock drink? Henhouse economics depends on short-term profits and a reliable exit strategy. Let someone else’s kids deal with the polluted river after you sell the operation for a tidy profit. Recent generations of tech entrepreneurs have mastered the art of building enormous capital momentum in product-less businesses that they exit with a handsome payout before the business ever turns a profit. In the Marine Corps we would have called this kind of operation a self-licking ice cream cone. There are less polite metaphors.

Examples of the deferred or displaced costs in henhouse economics include damaging land that one plans to sell before the extent of the damage is clear; or it could be passing on debt or damaged ecosystems to future generations; or it could even be reckless damage to one’s own health through intemperance or a pill-popping approach to symptom suppression. Displaced costs are hidden from view, like sweatshops, strip mines, and psychological or cultural disintegration. We think it can go on this way forever because we have hidden the true cost.  

You will find henhouse economics in nearly every aspect of contemporary life. In medicine we produce drugs to treat problems caused by other drugs. In geopolitics we fight wars using proxy forces against whom we will fight our next war. In farming we use chemical fertilizers to make up for the loss of topsoil caused in part by excessive use of chemical fertilizers. We drive two miles to the gym to walk four miles on the treadmill.  

Your guess is as good as mine as to where this henhouse economics will put us. Usually folks propose one of two solutions: leave it to the market or let the government solve it. 

Free market types argue that the market will solve all problems. And if left to its own devices I have no doubt that it would come up with some kind of solution to the various ills caused by henhouse economics. But I wonder whether there are any truly free markets? Furthermore, markets are not distinct from the character of the people operating within them. Too often we act like the virtues that make an individual life happy and productive—like temperance and justice—do not apply to our activity in the markets. 

I can almost hear the eager government bureaucrats agreeing that the markets offer no hope. The government to the rescue! It is an inconvenient fact that the same kind of people run both the governments and the markets—people like us. Whereas the one might be chiefly motivated by profit, the other is motivated by power. Between the two, what practical difference is there really? The markets and the governments have for some time been locked in a mutual perversion of each other’s legitimate purposes with no end in sight.

American agribusiness is one of the best examples of how the markets and the government, far from providing solutions, actually contribute to henhouse economics. If you set aside a host of considerations about what is good for people — the generational thriving of families, transmission of local culture through family life and education, rootedness in the rich particulars of place, cultivation of personal virtue, and physical health — then maximizing economies of scale in farming  in pursuit of profit alone might seem like a good idea. In time this has resulted in massive farms, often owned by distant corporations, sustained by a variety of chemical inputs and government subsidies, and operated on industrial principles. If the markets provide the profit motive to the agribusiness corporations, the government provides the missing ingredient of profitability through subsidy. Governments also help prop up the largest corporations by imposing huge regulatory burdens that only they can afford while simultaneously making local exchanges fraught with legal intimidation.   

Cue the old line defending industrialized economies and their discontents in elite clubs and economics classrooms at tony universities: we have saved millions from starvation around the world! It is typical of henhouse economics to measure in quantitative terms only, and even then to measure as narrowly as possible to keep the hidden and displaced costs out of the equation. What about modern slavery? What about industrial economy induced starvation? What about the obesity epidemic? What about the body counts of our industrial wars of the 20th and 21st centuries? No, industrialism’s messiah complex is not a serious argument.

It is true that the modern era has seen incredible advances in many fields. We have developed expertise our ancestors could not even imagine. But we have also lost some essential expertise in our rush toward progress and profit. And not every expertise we have developed is good. 

We are experts at trauma care but not at healing; experts at pharmaceutical intervention but not at nutrition; experts at chemical fertilizer production but not at soil regeneration; experts at pesticide use but not at biodynamic polycropping; experts at law but not at living; experts at orthotics but not at body movement; experts at psychological operations but not at peace. I could go on. 

The promise of an ever expanding, ever-improving world of opportunities born of the free market on one hand or enlightened bureaucratic governments on the other is a Faustian dream. No, we cannot look for relief to the markets or to the governments—no one can do this for us. The only option is to govern ourselves with basic virtues like temperance. And temperance is hard. 

The starting point, it seems to me, is our individual effort to cultivate virtue and then to build harmonious communities with your neighbors. In these small communities regeneration is possible.