Fragments on Fragments

So. The summer is formally and finally over. I am back in New York for an extended time. At least until I can escape again. Looking back over the past few months during which I have spent much time away from the city in much more bucolic surroundings I am struck by the fragmentation of society, ideas, and particularly economics. It’s as if America and its values are simply shards of glass on the ground. Each bright and shiny. Each catching the sun to dazzle us. But no longer a coherent object. Was the glass a window? A vase? Or something else all together? Can we put it all back as one? Do we even try? Do we want to?

This is an intensely disillusioning perspective.

Take the so-called debate on the debt ceiling. It was a fiasco. An outrage. It exposed a level of immaturity in our politics that shocked many of our most seasoned and hardened critics. It scared the heck out of investors the world over. Suddenly investing in America became risky, not because of the economy, but because of the breakdown of discourse. We had regressed. We were unable to execute what was and still is a purely bureaucratic step, upping the limit on our debt should have been a formality. Instead we were pressed into brinkmanship and amateur hour antics of near disastrous and epic proportions. We gained nothing. We lost our reservoir of respect. The reverberations continue: today we hear of a potential funding crisis for Fannie Mae because foreign banks and sovereign funds, which had been a steady and reliable source of investment into America, are withdrawing their cash. Why? Our political gridlock. And, in particular, the debt ceiling lunacy.

Of course, the debt ceiling mess was simply a tactic to drive a stake into the heart of the Federal budget. This is another fragment that shines in my memory. Instead of engendering an open debate about the consequences of cutting government spending, those who criticize its current level openly lie about them. We are told that there is a crisis – now – in our various government programs and that they thus need cutting. We have suddenly become so impoverished that we can no longer afford them. Exhibit A in this attack is the budget deficit. A few moments of thought reveals this as all nonsense. The immediate causes of our deficit are twofold: the Bush tax cuts, which is the largest cause by far, and drastic drop in tax intake associated with the recession. Do we get this message? Only in the distant edges of the media. By and large the mainstream media has repeated the doom laden message that we need to attack entitlement spending now. We don’t. Getting growth back on track will get rid of the recession part of the problem. The Bush tax cuts would then be exposed as the problem they are.

There are those out there who argue that entitlements are a problem even absenting a budget crisis. They are the libertarian utopians who are pressing us into their Randian nirvana of messy democracy. By messy they mean one in which they can flourish unimpeded by the wishes of the larger majority, and in which the mighty dominate the weak. Might is right is a tired cliche, but is the supposedly fresh face of the right. I realize I am jaundiced, but in my view, might is right remains a tired and vicious cliche no matter how much fancy Austrian sourced varnish you paint on it.

This leads to another fragment: the notion that society is simply the sum of its parts. The notion on the right is individual justice, property rights and so on, are all we need. Add up all the individuals and we get society. There are no collective phenomena. Just the pieces. This is the oddball idea that possessed Thatcher in the UK, who famously concluded that there was no society. Thus society cannot act. So government action is an dangerous illusion. It is based on the deception that a collective will exists. But in my mind collective will does exist. Its called democracy. We come together to solve mutual problems that cannot be solved by even the most rugged of rugged individuals. We build roads we all use. We pay for schools even when we have no children. We buy insurance even if we make no claim. Some of play on teams in sport. We cooperate in all sorts of large and small ways. Indeed a strong case can be made that individualism is the minor part of our armory and that social action is the human norm. But none of us would realize that looking back at the narrative being offered up by the utopian libertarians. They are protecting something that exists only in the philosophy books, and which was conceived as an antidote to the autocratic whim of long gone monarchies. My libertarian friends seem to be arguing against George III. I feel an urge to let them into a secret: he’s dead. Has been for a while.

Then there’s the fragment representing the stark reversal in roles. Our discourse is dominated by an inversion of conservatism and reformist arguments. It is the conservatives who are attempting radical reform. And the reformists who are desperately trying to conserve. Thus the conservative right wants to get rid of the post-war system of safety net institutions and toss us back to the older, and presumably better, world that pre-dated them. The reformists who won the argument back in the 1930’s and then again in the 1960’s are clinging on to those institutions for dear life.

This is all is if America never decided anything. The conservatives are still smarting from their epic defeat. Especially that of the 1960’s. They blame our demise – a demise in their minds at least – on the unwashed mob of the 1960’s. Just think of the horrific happenings that came from those awful days: equal rights, civil rights, Medicare, and environmental protection. Each and all a source of decline. At least for a white patriarchal society. It is the backlash against the 1960’s that has resulted in the fury of the modern right in our politics. Most of the Tea Party agenda, and that of contemporary Republicans generally, finds its genesis in opposition to a reform made in the 1960’s. Layer in the Depression era reforms to complete the set, and we surface the conservative movement’s goal. They want us to re-live the late 1800’s. They imagine it to have been an era worth fighting for. Despite its poverty and the lack of opportunity most of America back then.

The price we pay for overlooking parts of history, or of looking at only through Disney tinted glasses, is that we misread it. For much of its history America was a nasty, unequal, and decidedly unfree place. It put the privilege of property at the center of its politics. A long and hard struggle was fought to bring a semblance of democracy and justice to all its people, not just those with property. And here we are a mere few decades later fighting to preserve those gains. The struggle continues. Perhaps it always will.

And then there’s economics. Need I elaborate?

Its defines fragmentation. It defines head in the sand. It avoids its culpability for disaster. Its practitioners want to be left alone. Its academic wing wants to preserve it as a field of study and deny they are part of a profession with social responsibility. To them argument is part of development. That the argument is now at least seventy years old and unresolved is not an issue. That the public has a right in economics, or at least a stake in the outcome of economic deliberations, somehow is missed by swathes of economists. The notion that economics can stumble on as an incoherent set of mutually exclusive ideas and theories, steeped in antagonisms dated from the late 1800’s or 1930’s, and somehow avoid responsibility for economic policy even when that policy is advocated by prominent academics, both amuses and infuriates me. It is a juvenile position to take. But one that is befitting, and mirrors, our general state of discourse.

Economics needs to be modernized. Instead it continues to fight the last war repeatedly. The lack of progress is startling. One of the books I bought over the summer was a copy of Samuelson’s 1948 textbook. From what I can tell it remains perfectly adequate. It is vastly more interesting and varied than more modern offerings. It has the great advantage of having been written in close proximity to the calamity of the Great Depression, so it is untainted by the decades of hubris and self regarding introspection that most of subsequent economics amounts to. Indeed a good case can be made that subsequent efforts have obscured rather than illuminated economic theory. I can accept the fragmentation of contemporary economics as long as it is presented that way. And as long as it is taught that way. At least it would be honest to teach that we have as many solutions as economists to every problem, and that students ought to be careful as they learn because what they learn may actually contribute to, rather than mitigate, whatever problem they are trying to resolve.

Or we could just start over.

That’s like my approach to this past summer. I wish I could just start over and then discover all that confusion, division, and fragmentation was my imagination.

But I can’t.

The fragments are real. The stagnation that results is even more real. Shame on us all.