Originally Written on October 16, 2013
One of my co-workers (a supervisor more specifically) has a pronouncedly strong interest in politics. More specifically, he is heavily focused on what he calls political economics. Yesterday, he claimed that political economics isn’t taught anywhere, and he’s been trying to find a course on the subject for over twenty years. With due respect, I wonder if a separate course on political economics is necessary, given that the subject itself is so broad that it’s often covered in a variety courses in both policy and economics. That’s just a minor issue I have with his proposal.
UPDATE: I checked with my local university, and they do offer a 1310-level course in political economics, so I’ve no idea where he gathered the notion that the subject isn’t be taught or embraced in academia.
What I find especially concerning, but not alarming necessarily, is his persistent belief that our nation’s problems can be explained by a trend against business and toward excessive government regulation. His own concern falls on the heels of the recent government shutdown, the debate on raising the debt ceiling, and the long-term financial repercussions of implementing the Affordable Healthcare Act. I don’t want to go into too many details about the points and particulars of our discussion (or rather his soapbox monologue with me as his somewhat grudgingly silent audience who has conceded to being nearly constantly interrupted), but it stands to be said that his theories, like mine and everyone else’s, hinge on faith more often than we’d like to admit.
When we discuss economic ideologies such as capitalism, socialism, democratic socialism, federalism and mercantilism, we often attribute the long-term success of these models on scientifically imprecise concepts such as the will of the people or the moral integrity of the ideology’s adherents. What does a socialist say? “If we work together and maintain an infrastructure of community development, we can not only survive but thrive.” What does the capitalist say? “If we shun government oversight and let the markets roam freely, we will have stronger, more diverse enterprise and thus promote individual integrity and viability in society.”
My co-worker keeps saying that we need to develop a pro-business, capitalist model that uplifts individual citizens and recognizes their talents, but what does that really mean? It probably makes sense in his head, but it’s difficult to get him to specify because he’s so excited to tell me how wonderful the theory is without striking at the heart of the theory. What does “uplift” mean? Get people off welfare? Reduce government spending in order to promote a mindset of economic self-worth? Incentivize foreign investors to reestablish capital with the US instead of its competitors? I think this is what John means, but the “how” still isn’t specific enough. I just don’t want him, myself or anyone else getting seduced by their own words because it just sounds so wonderful when you muse about it or discuss it with your co-workers after staying up late at night reading The Economist, Bloomberg, or TV Tropes. If you don’t believe me, try writing a novel. You’ll fall in love with your characters, setting and plot, and when you write and read by yourself, you will engage in self-congratulatory masturbation at least once. This is why credible peer evaluation is an important part of the creative process, indeed any process that presumes to promote positive development while mitigating negative development.
We keep hearing this rhetoric that capitalism and socialism are both so wonderful, and they would just work so well if people just applied some abstract social concept to it and police themselves. Do you see the problem with both models? They both rely on particular virtues or agreed upon human tendencies such as autonomy, good will, fraternity, individual expression and altruism. Capitalism isn’t any better than socialism on paper and vice versa, but we seem to have tricked ourselves into believing that these systems are objectively good or bad without taking into consideration the greater social, cultural, religious, racial and geopolitical idiosyncrasies that give rise to national desires. Look at recent efforts to democratize the sixteen ethnic groups and dozens of tribal theocratic patriarchies of Afghanistan and you’ll get a pretty good picture of my argument in practice.
The concept of a nation is built around a consensus of ideas, and a national identity is also born from that consensus. Thus, the USSR developed its identity because there was an agreed upon (either by force or through persuasion) identity to use – to commoditize and render socially and economically feasible. The same is true of the United States. The American Dream persists so long as we have faith in it, and the Eastern European models persist as long as people believe in it.
I’ve talked to my girlfriend about this. Several times, actually. Her academic background is in art history and religious studies, so I refer to her often when researching matters of faith-based thinking and how it affects social psychology. Economics, politics and religion have a lot in common, and what’s scary is that we have great difficulty in distinguishing the characteristics of one area of thought from the others. For example, the tax-exempt status churches receive in the US falls in line with the notion that reduced prayer in schools and other public places correlates with the downturn of the economy. There are many people who seriously believe that our economic woes are directly tied to a shift away from explicit Judeo-Christian values in the White House. Better yet, look at speculative economics and the kind of impact it has on the stock market and the bonds market. Look at how market speculation leads to economic phenomena such as liquidity traps and hyper-inflationary spending. Many economists, noticeably those adhering to the Austrian school, aren’t really financial advisors so much as they are oracles or priests. They foretell doom or prosperity because the numbers look good or bad on a given day, however arbitrary those numbers may be.
Remember all of the news articles talking about “ten ways to recession-proof your house” and “fifteen ways to stay ahead of the curb during the recession”? There’s a reason why those articles became less populous as of recent. People realized that it was bullshit, or to put it more cleanly, many people realized that the eight-ball style of economic predictive analytics is not feasible for long-term macroeconomic planning. Well, at least some people realized it. But with the government shutdown and the resultant cries of panic, apathy and rage among the American public (yes, all three emotions are happening simultaneously), we are experiencing a sharp return in the faith of the economists, the journalists and the social commentators. We listen to these people because they at least sound like they have the explanations and solutions to our catastrophe. And let’s be real here. It is a catastrophe.
Not being able to find an easy answer and not being able to find a consistently reliable and bullet-proof ideology terrifies us largely because we have been seduced and insulated by a dangerous thought that the system, when plugged into reality, will fix reality without needing to be tweaked to reflect the culture. Well, clearly capitalism is the solution, right? No, it’s gotta be socialism. Well, it’s Obama’s fault. Just impeach him and things will get better. Well, what can you expect from Obama when Bush left so much debt? No, no. Krugman argues that debt isn’t bad, and that the national deficit is a red herring. No, no, it’s the housing market crash. We need people to buy more houses by loosening regulatory spending. No, that’s wrong, we need to reduce cap and trade. Too much environmental regulation is stunting industrial growth. Actually, it’s because of corporate fascism. The top six private businesses have too much power. Well, it’s actually because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s your problem. Hold on, it’s because of socialized medicine. We can’t afford it, and it’s going to make things worse because Pundit Such And Such made a bullshit pie chart proving it.
I don’t want to be hypocritical, but here’s my thought: it is human nature at work, as it always has been. I’m not an economist. I’m a recovering literary scholar. One thing I can tell you from studying poetry is that it demonstrates how human nature is the source of many problems that are marketed as anything but human-nature-derived.
We are trying to establish a model that perfectly answers our questions, that perfectly solves our problems. We don’t have that model. We have blueprints that act as a guiding mechanism, but the spirit and attitude of the American way of life says more about our current situation than the numbers on the NYSE. My co-worker checks the stocks every day, and he tells me “hey, the numbers look good today, so today will be good!” I know he’s halfway joking and being friendly, but that sounds and looks an awful lot like someone going to their preacher with a cash donation in hand or making an animal sacrifice and expecting good or bad things to happen as a result of this interaction with a mysterious supernatural force. Capitalism’s real-world success, if we take morality into account, is dependent on free markets behaving honestly when left to their own devices. Socialism’s success depends on collective honesty and willing efficiency from a centralized authority. You can readily see the problem with both systems – both systems are, in reality, hijacked and managed by selfish individuals who, often despite their best efforts, will lose sight of their spirit of charity. Despite being left-leaning, I’d be a fool to not at least entertain the valid concerns being made by conservatives when they argue against centralized federal banks and remedial market elasticity managed artificially by government taxes.
Something else I really want to get at is this idea of cultural idiosyncrasy – an ethos. I notice that many people, especially baby boomers like my co-worker who grew up during the Cold War, point to fundamental flaws in communism when they decry the inefficiency of the Soviet Union. The USSR was not a communist state but instead a failed attempt at communism. Additionally, you have to consider the particular cultural identities of Eastern Europe that made the USSR what it was along with how they attached that cultural identity to an ideology. The United States of America likewise has its own cultural take – its own flavor – on democratic capitalism. For me personally, the problem with American capitalism is not the mere fact that we are a capitalist state, but that we have mismanaged the blueprint in order to build a system that betrays the wellbeing of the people. If we were founded on values more in line with Marxist thinking, I believe the result would be the same because that American thinking would influence how the ideology is applied. It’s a lot like customers who come into the store and claim that their part didn’t work due to a manufacturer defect. Often it’s because they requested the wrong part for their vehicle or they didn’t install it properly. It’s easier to blame the device, not the method of application.
Of course, you want to take the fundamental qualities of the ideology into account when discussing the makeup of a nation, but a Labrador with a behavior problem is not the same as a Labrador who is well-trained. We have an unruly Lab of a nation, and I don’t think the solution to the problem is to blame the dog for being a Lab. Labradors have specific characteristics that make them different from a Collie, a Husky, a German Shepherd and a Doberman, but that dog has been selectively bred to achieve a desired result, and when you don’t achieve that desired result, you need to look at your training and implementation methods, not just the breeding methods. Some dogs are dumb as bricks, but that stupidity makes them loyal and easy to control. Smart dogs can be great, but if they are adopted by a family that doesn’t cater to their intelligence, they can become unruly because they are trying to find more complex outlets for their mental development.
Metaphors aside, you can see both cases being made for capitalist ideology and socialist ideology and how, where and when they are applied. Economically successful nations tend to be geographically small, ethnically homogeneous and with specialized markets. Economically successful capitalist nations tend to be diverse and geographically large, enabling a variety of competing markets. To get back to the subject of faith-based economics, this also means we need to stop assuming that the dog will train itself just because it was bred for a particular task. You can’t just call yourself a democratic republic. You need to act like one. If you want your capitalism so badly, then do it right. Don’t just do it any old way. Take your cultural values into account when you do so.
I will end this post with a favorite quote of mine from the DVD commentary on the movie adaptation of Children of Men.
“When people fall in love with what seems to be a perfect theory, a set of rules . . . they love those rules more than they love people or places. In fact, they start to see the messy reality of life as interfering with the beauty, the imaginative beauty, that exists only within their texts, only in their sacred texts, whether it be economic texts, or religious texts or some dream of racial purity. I think we need to fear people who love systems more than people because the flipside [of] that love is the hatred, or anything or anyone that interferes with the realization of that system. This is the other thing about dangerous utopias. They can’t coexist with other ideas. They need the whole stage.”
– Naomi Klein
Dog House Writing 