Bloomberg columnist and former econ prof Noah Smith takes us through his analysis of why racism is fundamental to understanding the applications of economics in the US: A nation-state is a machine that facilitates human wellbeing by maintaining functional institutions, distributing wealth, and creating public goods. To do those things it needs the citizenry to have some sense of national cohesion.
And that means citizens have to act like citizens. They have to have a sense of shared responsibility, and shared respect. And in the US, we’re not moving in the right direction. The wealthy regard themselves as above the law, and think they shouldn’t have to pay taxes or interact with the common people. Think about all those supercars registered in Montana, all those private jets and private schools and first-class lounges and dinners in Davos.
And of course there’s the racism. As Paul Krugman comments:
The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites.
If economists don’t take this into account, and citizens don’t regard each other as fundamentally on the same team, then their mathematical models of the economy are going to fail. They can design an ideal tax or infrastructure or other economic policy, but if they don’t take into account that some citizens will oppose anything that helps anyone brown, they’re not going to be able to make useful policy recommendations.
For Noah Smith and the other pundits, professors, and advisors, this is a reminder that they need to address racism as well as math in their economic models.
For the electorate at large, this is a warning: If the US is going to continue to be a functional nation-state, we need to do more to overcome racism and keep the top 1% from running away from the rest of us. We need to foster inter-racial and inter-class cohesion. Instead, we’re re-segregating our public schools and supporting segregated private schools. We’re cutting the safety net and giving breaks to the rich. We’re building wildly regressive policies and stoking racial resentment.
This is … bad.
What now? I quoted a warning from Brad DeLong the other day:
To be blunt: a social democratic middle-class society is much better society in which to have a large stock of entrepreneurial, inherited, or rent-derived wealth than is a communist society. But it is also a much friendlier society to the wealthy than is a fascist society. And social democracy and fascism—hard or, if you are lucky, soft—are the only options the future will allow: tertium non datur.
Smith provides a rather less stark series of options. We might develop a social democracy. Or we might just sort of muddle along through a series of crises in which coalitions collapse as soon as the immediate Trumpist threat abates. He hopes for a durable coalition.
Each time America has successfully come through a major crisis – the Civil War, the Depression/WW2 – it was because leaders created a vision to unite a disparate collection of American out-groups into an enduring coalition that became the in-group.
Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 1, 2018
A commenter whose provenance I cannot determine has a pretty good point that we’re going to have to make some ugly compromises:
It’s worth remembering those outgroups included Catholic and Free Mason baiting paranoid conspiracy theorists for Lincoln and corrupt, unreconstructed Southern racists for FDR. We are doomed if we pretend this is going to be pretty or wholly edifying.
Robert George (@RobertCinci) January 1, 2018
Gritty reboots
Fresh off the success of his darkly thoughtful Flintstones reboot comics (Fred has PTSD, the appliance-animals are an oppressed proletariat plotting revolution, etc), Mark Russell is issuing a gritty new reboot of the Snagglepuss character from 1970s-era Hannah Barbera. The panther is now a closeted playwright under investigation by HUAC. Sort of if Tennessee Williams were a pink panther. People have some issues with the portrayal, in that they’re fine with bestiality but grossed out by gay bestiality. But come on. Snagglepuss was always gay.
Reading
I just finished reading Sing, Unburied, Sing yesterday. If you haven’t read it, you should. Although I spent most of the day after I put it down in a tear-stained funk.
I don’t want to give away the whole plot, but if conventional ghost mythology holds that ghosts are the souls of those who die bad deaths and leave unfinished business behind, then it stands to reason that America is littered with the ghosts of centuries of Black people who died in terrible ways. Although it’s not a ghost story per se — it’s about a family struggling to get by in bayou Mississippi — Ward still makes the phrase “haunted by the wrongs of the past” terrifyingly literal.
My wife says she finds the ending, in which the two youngest children and their grandfather confront and commune with their spiritual legacy, uplifting. I cannot see anything but the accumulation of wrong upon wrong upon wrong, bayou trees haunted with the ghosts of the unhappy dead keening at us to fix what cannot be made whole.
Cultivating joy
2018 goals: be as chill as this cat.
Secretly Ironic 