The New York Times International - 27.08.2019

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019 | 11

opinion

The essay prompted an outpouring

that persuaded Mr. Masumoto to hold

on to his Sun Crest trees and unleashed

a cult following for peaches that became

featured on the menu of restaurants like

Berkeley’s Chez Panisse.

Although she grew up on the farm and

never missed a harvest, Nikiko Ma-

sumoto had no intention to return home

when she went off to the University of

California at Berkeley, following her

father’s footsteps. But in 2011, she fol-

lowed him again, moving back home to

carry on the family legacy, convinced

that farming could be a vehicle for social

activism and civic responsibility.

She will inherit the challenge of re-

sponding to climate change. Last sum-

mer set records in Fresno: July 2018

was the hottest month in history, with 30

consecutive days in which the tem-

perature hit or topped 100 degrees. The

last five years are the warmest on

record in Fresno. Before that came two

years of severe drought, among the

driest ever, followed by torrential rains.

Mr. Masumoto believes the trees have

embarked on their own mysterious,

DEL REY, CALIF. When I first visited this
tiny farm town to pick peaches, I did
not expect to return. Certainly not
every summer. Yet in July, here I was
again, in triple-degree heat, for the
ninth straight year of a pilgrimage with
friends to an orchard just south of
Fresno, near the geographic center of
California.
We come to harvest peaches from a
tree we “adopted” on the farm of 65-
year-old David Mas Masumoto, a third-
generation Japanese-American farmer
who began his adoption program to
connect people to their food and to find
homes for old-fashioned fruit too deli-
cate for commercial sale.
He has succeeded in ways he could
not have foreseen. We are drawn back
each summer by the intense flavor of
the heirloom fruit, but even more by the
unexpected attachments that have
deepened over the harvests: bonds
among members of our multigenera-
tional team, ties with the Masumoto
family, and a connection to our dec-
ades-old Elberta peach tree.
This year in particular has under-
scored the most profound lessons of the
annual trek, which has become a win-
dow into the changing nature of a per-
petually fragile enterprise in a perilous
era. There is no longer any “normal” for
a Central Valley farmer.
Climate change has brought ex-
tremes in heat and precipitation that
play havoc with the harvest season, now
elongated and unpredictable. And farm
labor, long one of the few factors grow-
ers could control, has become equally
unpredictable, as immigration crack-
downs cause shortages and fear suf-
fuses the largely undocumented Mexi-
can farmworker community in the state.
When we return next year, we will see
one of the more tangible consequences:
Our peach tree will be two-thirds its
former height. All trees on the 80-acre
farm will be pruned to make them easier
to be cared for by women, who have
become by necessity the preferred
workers for this small farm during a
labor shortage that shows no sign of
abating. The Masumotos hope to turn
the challenge into an opportunity by
shaping the trees to produce fewer,
larger peaches, which command a
higher price.

Farmers are accustomed to forces

beyond their control — freakish storms,

droughts, tariffs, recessions, consumer

habits. Farms adapt, or they die. The

Masumotos would typically hire a dozen

workers during peak harvest; this year

they picked their entire crop with four,

plus the family — Mas Masumoto, an

organic entrepreneur and author; his

wife, Marcy, an educator and school

board member; their daughter, Nikiko,

a queer feminist performance artist and

farmer; and their son, Korio, who just

graduated from Fresno State.

The Masumotos are a California story,

unique in their blend of genuine down-

to-earth warmth and rock star status,

universal in their immigrant roots,

optimism and innovation.

Mr. Masumoto’s grandfather was part

of a wave of Japanese immigrants in the

early 20th century who quickly moved

from working in the fields to running

farms. By 1940, more than 5,000 Japa-

nese-operated farms produced 42 per-

cent of the state’s crops, despite racist

exclusionary laws that made owning

property difficult. Then came President

Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 order to

intern all people of Japanese ancestry in

a wide swath of the West Coast desig-

nated a theater of war. Mr. Masumoto’s

parents were among the more than

100,000 — mostly Californians, most

citizens — rounded

up and imprisoned.

They did not talk to

their children about

the trauma.

In 1987, the heir-

loom peach trees

that Mr. Masumoto’s

father had lovingly

planted were almost

lost. Mr. Masumoto

wrote an angry

op-ed essay that

year in The Los

Angeles Times in

which he explained his decision to

bulldoze and burn the trees because

consumers shunned the succulent

amber peaches they produced in favor

of red, tasteless orbs bred for durability

and appearance. “No one wants a peach

variety with wonderful taste,” he wrote.

evolutionary strategy for survival. He

and his daughter are experimenting

with ways to irrigate with less water,

which will become an even scarcer

commodity when the state’s first limits

on groundwater pumping go into effect

in the 2020s. They have ripped out

unproductive vines — they also culti-

vate a small crop of organic grapes for

raisins — and not replaced them, leav-

ing about 20 percent of their land fallow.

It’s also getting more difficult to keep

workers in an increasingly competitive

market. The fear among workers with-

out legal papers is so great that last year

a family backed out on the Masumotos

at the last minute, reasoning they would

be safer working for a labor contractor

on a large farm that would provide

greater anonymity.

In an age of such uncertainty, there is

something reassuring about the land,

and the trees, which persevere. The

half-dozen members of our team con-

verge on the Central Valley from Los

Angeles, Salinas, Sacramento and the

Bay Area, a mix of journalists, lawyers,

nonprofit executives, with a new recruit

or two each year to be inducted into the

familiar routines. There are the same

jokes, the same arguments, the same

Friday night barbecues, which started

in the back of a hotel in the shadow of

Highway 99. And there’s the tale of the

team member who forsook us one year

to hike the John Muir trail — and was

airlifted out after a medical emergency.

“The Peach Gods were angry!” Mas

Masumoto roared, with his wide, mis-

chievous grin.

The harvests become a way to mark

the years. Since our first season, Mas

had heart bypass surgery. He, Marcy

and Nikiko published a cookbook.

Nikiko gave a TEDx talk, performed at

the White House and was married this

spring, in the orchard between Rows 7

and 8.

The youngest on our team was in high

school when we first came to Del Rey;

now she works for a food-gleaning

organization. Team members retired,

changed jobs, wrote books. The daugh-

ter of a founding member took her

father’s place. The first grandchild was

born this summer.

There are no endings in farming, Mas

Masumoto says. There is just the next

season.

MIRIAM PAWELis the author of “The

Browns of California: The Family Dy-

nasty That Transformed a State and

Shaped a Nation.”

Miriam Pawel

Contributing Writer

The peaches are sweet, but growing them isn’t

An annual

picking trip

to a California

farm has

become a

window into

our daunting

climate

and work

challenges.

David Mas Masumoto inspecting peaches in his orchard in Del Rey, Calif., in 2013.

GOSIA WOZNIACKA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

policymakers to assign a dollar value
to human life — around $10 million in
2019 — to assess whether regulations
were worthwhile.
The revolution, like so many revolu-
tions, went too far. Growth slowed and
inequality soared, with devastating
consequences. Perhaps the starkest
measure of the failure of our economic
policies is that the average American’s
life expectancy is in decline, as in-
equalities of wealth have become
inequalities of health. Life expectancy
rose for the wealthiest 20 percent of
Americans between 1980 and 2010.
Over the same three decades, life
expectancy declined for the poorest 20
percent of Americans. Shockingly, the
difference in average life expectancy
between poor and wealthy women
widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years.
Rising inequality also is
straining the health of liberal
democracy. The idea of “we
the people” is fading because,
in this era of yawning in-
equality, there is less we
share in common. As a result,
it is harder to build support
for the kinds of policies nec-
essary to deliver broad-based
prosperity in the long term,
like public investment in
education and infrastructure.
Economists began to enter
public service in large num-
bers in the middle of the 20th
century, as policymakers
struggled to manage the
rapid expansion of the federal
government. The number of
economists employed by the
government rose from about
2,000 in the mid-1950s to
more than 6,000 by the late
1970s.
At first they were hired to
rationalize the administration
of policy, but they soon began to shape
the goals of policy, too. Arthur F. Burns
became the first economist to lead the
Fed in 1970. Two years later, George
Shultz became the first economist to
serve as Treasury secretary. In 1978,
Mr. Volcker completed his rise from
the Fed’s bowels, becoming the central
bank’s chairman.
The most important figure, however,
was Milton Friedman, an elfin libertar-
ian who refused to take a job in Wash-
ington, but whose writings and exhor-
tations seized the imagination of poli-
cymakers. Mr. Friedman offered an
appealingly simple answer for the
nation’s problems: Government should
get out of the way. He joked that if
bureaucrats gained control of the
Sahara, there would soon be a shortage
of sand.
He won his first big victory in an
unlikely battle, helping to persuade
President Richard M. Nixon to end
military conscription in 1973. Mr. Fried-

man and other economists showed that

a military comprised solely of volun-

teers, recruited by offering market-

rate wages, was financially viable as

well as politically preferable. The

Nixon administration also embraced

Mr. Friedman’s proposal to let markets

determine the exchange rates between

the dollar and foreign currencies, and

it was the first to put a price tag on

human life to justify limits on regula-

tion.

But the turn toward markets was a

bipartisan affair. The reduction of fed-

eral income taxation began under Presi-

dent John F. Kennedy. President Jimmy

Carter initiated an era of deregulation in

1977 by naming an economist, Alfred

Kahn, to dismantle the bureaucracy that

supervised commercial aviation. Presi-

dent Bill Clinton restrained federal

spending in the 1990s asthe economy

boomed, declaring that “the era of big

government is over.”

Liberal and conservative economists

conducted running battles on key ques-

tions of public policy, but their areas of

agreement ultimately were more impor-

tant. Although nature tends toward

entropy, they shared a confidence that

markets tend toward equilibrium. They

agreed that the primary goal of eco-

nomic policy was to increase the dollar

value of the nation’s output. And they

had little patience for efforts to limit

inequality. Charles L. Schultze, the

chairman of Mr. Carter’s Council of

Economic Advisers, said in the early

1980s that economists should fight for

efficient policies “even when the result

is significant income losses for particu-

lar groups — which it almost always is.”

A generation later, in 2004, the Nobel

laureate Robert Lucas warned against

any revival of efforts to reduce inequal-

ity. “Of the tendencies that are harmful

to sound economics, the most seductive,

and in my opinion the most poisonous, is

to focus on questions of distribution.”

Accounts of the rise of inequality

often take a fatalistic view. The problem

is described as a natural consequence

of capitalism, or it is blamed on forces,

like globalization or technological

change, that are beyond the direct

control of policymakers. But much of

the fault lies in ourselves, in our col-

lective decision to embrace policies

that prioritized efficiency and encour-

aged the concentration of wealth, and

to neglect policies that equalized oppor-

tunity and distributed rewards. The

rise of economics is a primary reason

for the rise of inequality.

And the fact that we caused the

problem means the solution is in our

power, too.

Markets are constructed by people,

for purposes chosen by people — and

people can change the rules.

It’s time to discard the judg-

ment of economists that

society should turn a blind

eye to inequality. Reducing

inequality should be a prima-

ry goal of public policy.

The market economy re-

mains one of humankind’s

most awesome inventions, a

powerful machine for the

creation of wealth. But the

measure of a society is the

quality of life throughout the

pyramid, not just at the top,

and a growing body of re-

search shows that those born

at the bottom today have less

chance than in earlier genera-

tions to achieve prosperity or

to contribute to society’s

general welfare — even if

they are rich by historical

standards.

This is not just bad for

those who suffer, although

surely that is bad enough. It is

bad for affluent Americans, too. When

wealth is concentrated in the hands of

the few, studies show, total consump-

tion declines and investment lags.

Corporations and wealthy households

increasingly resemble Scrooge Mc-

Duck, sitting on piles of money they

can’t use productively.

Willful indifference to the distribu-

tion of prosperity over the last half

century is an important reason the very

survival of liberal democracy is now

being tested by nationalist dema-

gogues. I have no special insight into

how long the rope can hold, or how

much weight it can bear. But I know our

shared bonds will last longer if we can

find ways to reduce the strain.

Economists are to blame for this mess

A PPELBAUM, FROM PAGE 1

BINYAMIN APPELBAUMis a member of The

New York Times Editorial Board and

the author of the forthcoming “The

Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free

Markets and the Fracture of Society,”

from which this essay is adapted.

MATT CHASE

lot of Jews were feeling, that a main-

stream Jewish institution would say

something that just felt so out of touch,”

she said. “That in part led us to really

want to not just say in words, but actu-

ally take action to show how the Jewish

community actually feels about this

moment.”

People involved in the new Jewish left

recognize that left-wing anti-Semitism

exists. But they generally don’t believe

it’s a threat on par with right-wing Jew

hatred.

“No political party or movement is

free of anti-Semitism,” said Ellman-

Golan, who had to deal with the fallout

from anti-Semitism at the Women’s

March. But, she said, “only one political

party is quite literally inciting white

nationalists to shoot up our synagogues,

drive cars into our peaceful protests,

mail bombs to members of our commu-

nity, burn black churches and mosques,

and open fire on Latinx people.”

The Jewish left rejects the idea that

anti-Zionism is equivalent to anti-

Semitism, but even more than that, it

rejects the idea that Israel is the guaran-

tor of Jewish safety or the lodestar of

Jewish identity. A central value of Jews

for Racial and Economic Justice, as well

as for much of left-wing Jewish culture

more broadly, is “doikayt,” a Yiddish

term that means “hereness.”

“Where we are is our home. This is

what we fight for. This is where we seek

kinship,” said Audrey Sasson, JFREJ’s

executive director. The first post-re-

launch issue of Jewish Currents fea-

tured an essay by the publisher, Jacob

Plitman, called “On an Emerging Dias-

porism,” which likewise celebrated the

value of “hereness.”

For those primarily concerned about

Jewish life in the diaspora, Israel, which

has courted anti-Semitic nationalist

leaders in Europe, isn’t really an ally,

much less an ideal. And Trump, who

always speaks of American Jews as if

they belong there, is a grotesque enemy.

He tells Jews committed to life in Amer-

ica that they owe loyalty to Israel, which

he sometimes calls, when speaking to

American Jews, “your country.” He says

this, and expects Jews to react with

gratitude.

Instead, many are reacting with a

redoubled commitment to multiracial

democracy and solidarity. Jews have

been taking to the streets because no

amount of support for a foreign country

can redeem what he’s doing to this one.

Trump revives

the Jewish left

G OLDBERG, FROM PAGE 9

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