And that's true whether you're talking about economic policy, foreign policy, energy policy, education policy, or any other kind. You're not going to craft a cure-all for some aspect of modern life if you leave the spiritual, moral, aesthetic and civic premise for it unaddressed.
That's the aspect of this conversation between economist Jerry Bowyer and PayPal founder and Zero to One author Peter Thiel I found most interesting. The whole exchange is worth your time; they touch on the nature of bubbles (dot-com, housing, etc.) and the question of the pace of technological innovation (they concur that it has slowed over the past few decades, which, once again, has its roots in cultural causes).
I liked the way Bowyer couched the mindset of the gung-ho entrepreneur who doesn't have much regard for the context in which he acts:
Because you're in a Silicon Valley-type environment where it's not just technophilia, it's almost a Utopian technological ideology, what I would call ‘The Church of TED Talks': "Here, we've got a solution and this will fix everything and everything is just going to be great [and] it's going to be great really soon."Along with the tendency of some tech wizards to hang their hat on a big discovery that's going to let human kind off the hook for its foibles, there is a type of super-wonky free-market champion who claims that if we just lower the corporate tax rate and restore King Dollar to its stature as the world's predominant currency, all will be ducky.
And I'm glad that, when their conversation turned to that kind of economic cheerleader, they used Larry Kudlow as their example:
Jerry:"Alright. So, libertarians [or] free market economists in general have this long-running argument with Malthusians, on the left largely (although there are Malthusians on the right as well, but socialist-Malthusians), starting really in the 1970s where they gained real sort of cultural influence in elite institutions."
Peter:"The Club of Rome, the Paul Ehrlich Population Bomb, that whole line of thinking."
Jerry:"Precisely. Right. And Julian Simon argued the other side of that debate and we can debate about who won it and the bet that they made, but I think what happened is at some point the free market libertarian supply-side movement (that's where I'm coming from) got stuck on that idea, got stuck on that debate, and therefore it sees any form of pessimism or even a lack of optimism as treason in the Ehrlich vs. Julian Simon debate. I see this in the thought of Larry Kudlow; optimism and free market economics sort of got welded together so that anybody who's free market but not particularly optimistic at the moment is seen as committing some kind of treason against the ideology."
Peter:"And what's of course always very odd about it is that when you get these same people to talk about politics in the U.S., they are often despondent: "The country's becoming socialist," they think of Obama as a terrible president. And so there is this extraordinary disconnect where they are unreflexively optimistic about economic trends, they are deeply pessimistic about political trends, and it's as though these two things are happening in separate worlds. It's a little bit unfair to debate Kudlow since he's not here, but it's always like this question of, "Does the politics matter at all or will all these problems just solve themselves or is the politics toxic?" And so I find there to be a lot of confusion about this topic."
Jerry: "Yeah, there's a complete compartmentalization of the economic scenario from the political scenario. I mean if Obama is as bad as all that, then why are we all held to the cult of optimism?"I've long found myself shaking my head at Kudlow's there's-a-pony-in-here-somewhere faith in economic growth as a cure-all for civilization's basic ills. I recall a column he wrote in the spring of 2010 called "The Coming V-Shaped Boom," which was, as we have had confirmed, about as off the mark as is possible.
Kudlow is not a number-crunching robot. He's a recovering cocaine addict and devout Catholic who says he takes Jesus with him wherever he goes. Still, I think he gets overly excited about positive signs in the various indicators - housing starts, manufacturing output, exports, employment - and loses sight of the main reason we haven't had 1950s and 60s-level sustained vitality since - well, the 1960s.
Something awful has happened to the American spirit in the last 50 years, and examining that takes a kind of reflection that no graph or chart can provide.
Certainly, free-market economic solutions are the only real solutions to anything specifically economic. But, as Bowyer and Thiel understand, that realm of activity is inextricably part of a larger setting that reflects whether we, as individuals and participants in society, give a flip about how we're doing as human beings.
Only converts to Catholicism talk about bringing Jesus with them everywhere.
ReplyDeleteAs for what happened to the American spirit since '64, well, a general sense of despair overcame us following the assassination of JFK, in an instant we grew old and grey. The problems that haunted us then, still haunt us now. And that is, well, dispiriting. Nam is in there somewhere. Books about Nam, poverty, race, economic decline fill libraries, You say politics follows culture. Optimism follows economic prosperity and the proletariat class has really taken it hard. The rise of the MBA hasnt helped. We let it all hang out and that has left us like the obvious elitist Kuddles was once, in despair. The drug war just criminilized addiction and split us further apart. Now we pee in bottles to get a shit job. Its pretty much been the Eve of Destruction or Late in the Day as you call it, since '64. We can still let the good times roll but, man the headaches are killing us in the morning. A couple major market bust has not helped. I guess a lot of us feel lied to and unappreciated. Gated communities are cool too. They isolate behind the gate. Lots of other reasons, like I say, the commentators love to commentate, and the beat goes on, ladi daddi da...
All you need to know about America is still to be found in country music. But jazz is way more intelligent.
ReplyDeleteWell, you've covered the peripheral developments of the last 50 years. Now let's look at the important ones: The solidification of the welfare state, from food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children Medicaid, Medicare, and Head Start through the "Affordable" Care Act, the erosion of America's understanding of its exceptionalism, the legitimization of the idea that some vague notion of "peace" is a good unto itself, the lack of a will to stop the amassing of an insurmountable level of national debt, the rise of identity politics, from such realms as race and gender to the current destruction of the basic notion of a human family structure, the marginalization of Christianity, the morphing of inquiry into atmospheric science into a fantasy-based cult that drives much government spending and even international relations, the rot of the culture as manifested in such realms as education, fashion, literature, drama, music and visual art.
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