16 colliding forces that create our moment

Posted on March 18, 2025 by Peter

Not one major phenomenon is driving US and global politics today. Several powerful and somewhat contradictory currents must be navigated together. I list the following trends in no particular order. The references in square brackets link to previous posts on the same themes.

Costs of neoliberalism: The global market economy harms people in wealthy countries [1]. It also has benefits, and the net impact is debatable. (For instance, US workers are reporting the highest mean levels of job satisfaction yet recorded.) But even if a minority of workers hold insecure, regimented, automated, underpaid, and demeaning jobs, their concerns are real. Meanwhile, AI looms as a potential destroyer of decent livelihoods.

Class inversion: In many countries, right-wing parties draw their main support from less-educated and less affluent constituencies, while the main center-left parties depend on voters of the highest socio-economic status. As a result, right-wing parties cannot compete by offering limited government, but instead promise versions of ethno-nationalism. And left parties provide mostly symbolic policies on social issues while blocking more ambitious economic reforms that would cost their own voters [2, 3, 29, etc.].

Right-wing populist authoritarianism: From the Philippines and India to Hungary and El Salvador and the United States, successful charismatic male politicians disparage outsiders or minority groups and repress dissent, purporting to speak–without inhibitions–on behalf of the authentic “people” of their respective countries. This formula wins elections [4].

Effective state repression: From ca. 1980-2000, authoritarian states–whether left, right, or technocratic–tended to falter when challenged by mass popular movements. One reason was that the authoritarians clung to old-fashioned methods, such as cancelling elections and imprisoning dissidents, which failed in the face of sophisticated nonviolent social movements that borrowed and extended the repertoire of the US Civil Rights Movement. But then authoritarian states innovated, developing more effective methods for control. Meanwhile, social movements mainly reprised the toolkit of the 1960s, with some modifications for digital media. The rate of success of nonviolent social movements fell [28].

Oligarchy: Small numbers of billionaires wield enormous power in the politics and media of many countries. This is a different problem from class struggle or economic inequality. In fact, some of the billionaire oligarchs are at odds with the highest income strata of their own societies. Often (as in the cases of Trump and Musk) they owe much of their fortunes to the public purse. They are literally corrupt [11].

Elite capture: The same institutions and towns or neighborhoods where political opinions are most progressive–and sometimes intolerantly so–are also designed to preserve the economic advantages of their own people. I write this post at Stanford University, which students describe as a “liberal bubble” and which operates at the very heart of global capitalism. Students who may be hyper-liberal also expect to work in tech or finance. They got here (and to institutions like my own) thanks to K12 schools and college admissions that relentlessly favored the most advantaged families; professors who held scarce, tenured jobs; contingent workers who cooked and cleaned for them; and even zoning rules that inflated the value of their families’ homes. From an outsider’s perspective, all of this looks rigged and hypocritical [5, 13, 14].

Regulatory capture: Progressive politicians prefer to require behavior by companies, nonprofits, and public institutions instead of providing services. The costs of regulation do not appear on governments’ balance sheets and can be played down. Unfortunately, regulations rarely produce the intended results because they are implemented by organizations that have interests of their own. From the perspective of an employee or a consumer, a government regulation whose original rationale was to protect the public good often looks like just another self-serving directive handed down by the company’s HR department [21].

Racial backlash: From the 1960s to the 2000s, national Democratic and Republican politicians talked about race in ways that were similar enough that voters who weren’t political specialists couldn’t tell the difference. Indeed, each party was inconsistent enough about racial issues that their real differences were ambiguous. I think the Democrats’ nomination of Barack Obama and then the party’s partial receptiveness to Black Lives Matter alerted voters to the fact that people of color, particularly Black Americans, held real influence in that party but not in the GOP. A significant number of white voters then shifted to the Republicans as a form of racial backlash [6, 7]

Affective polarization: Citizens in the USA and many similar countries are affectively polarized, increasingly using party labels to decide whether other citizens are friends or enemies. In the US, this trend is symmetrical for Democrats and Republicans. Many people also receive news and opinion that is ideologically tilted. We marinate in ideologically convenient clichés and avoid wrestling with tradeoffs and complexities. (This is true of sophisticated liberals as well as other people) [9, 10].

Loneliness: Americans have become much less likely to participate in self-governing voluntary associations. Yet such participation supports other forms of political engagement and correlates with tolerant and democratic values. The opposite of social capital is loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions. Among the organizations that have shrunk are unions, which declined to their lowest level (one in ten workers) during Joe Biden’s friendly administration. Another category is religion. For many Americans today, being Christian is an identity label rather than a demanding, collective practice that teaches self-sacrifice and common action [12, 15].

COVID hangover: Several of the previously mentioned trends, notably loneliness and racial backlash, rose rapidly during and since the global pandemic. Although I sympathize with leaders who had to make decisions about matters like masks and vaccine mandates, I believe that these issues became polarized by party and social class; and liberal elites far overstated the case for restrictions. For example, as I noted during the pandemic, the scientific evidence for masks was weak, yet wearing a mask became politically correct. (Not to mention the genuine coverup of the Wuhan lab leak.) Since those who favored pandemic restrictions also tend to want more regulation in general, they helped to discredit government [16, 17].

Legislative incapacity: So far in this century, Congress has yet to pass any landmark legislation. Perhaps the strongest candidate for that label would be the massive spending bills that Joe Biden signed, but even those were mainly time-limited budgetary changes rather than new institutions. The federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. No Child Left Behind was a set of amendments (and a short-lived new title) for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Obamacare was likewise a set of tweaks on the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Congress appears incapable of passing major new laws, liberal or conservative [18, 19].

Executive aggrandizement: As the legislature has waned, the presidency and the executive branch have waxed. But the presidency is much more dangerous because it is the branch with guns, files, prison cells, and a charismatic leader. According to Juan Linz, constitutionally powerful presidents are almost guaranteed to become dictators unless a party-system creates effective checks, which has ceased to be the case in the United States [20].

The attention economy: The public sphere runs on advertising. Outrage draws attention and thereby drives profits. Not only do these incentives worsen affective partisanship and loneliness among citizens, but they reward politicians who can attract attention on cable news or social media instead of developing legislation [22, 23].

Climate change: The earth’s climate is warming in ways that are already harming, frightening, and dislocating people. Yet the public’s explicit support for addressing this problem is so weak that Democrats hid their own climate legislation under the misleading title of the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and even the Sierra Club’s president avoided climate in favor of abortion when he endorsed Kamala Harris. It is probably correct that Democrats would poll better if they were less identified with climate reform, but the issue needs more, not less, attention [24, 25].

Anxiety about American “exceptionalism”: For all MAGA’s rhetoric about the unique excellence of the United States, the same movement also paints a picture of decline and weakness in the face of overseas rivals. It is easy to psychoanalyze this combination of emotions as a neurosis. But I would not overlook that fact that the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. In other words, the neurosis results from trauma. The trauma could be described as self-inflicted, but it was inflicted by US political elites on everyone else [26, 27].

These 16 trends do share one root cause. (Some would point to capitalism, but I do not find that analysis useful [28].) However, all of these trends relate to the same larger problem: the degradation of democracy. Each phenomenon reflects and/or worsens the declining power of regular people to discuss, learn, and control their environment in large numbers.

Solutions:

Better political leadership would help.

An authentic conservative movement could play a valuable role in countering populism, executive aggrandizement, regulatory capture, and some other items on this list. (Genuine conservatism is deeply antithetical to Trumpian populism).

I would favor significant changes to our constitution and can imagine that we will see serious efforts to curtail the presidency and the Supreme Court and to restructure elections after Trump’s term.

Voluntary groups with mostly middle-class members can address loneliness, anxiety, and perhaps even racial backlash if they were bigger and more influential.

But nothing is as important as building powerful parties, unions, and other organizations that are accountable to diverse working-class members. Such organizations can counter all the trends on my list above.

Right now, much attention is focused on the Democratic Party, because its favorability has reached an all-time low for either party, even while it represents the official opposition to a catastrophic president. I would welcome new Democratic leaders and policies, but deeper reform must be structural: shifting resources to active local party committees, especially in working-class districts, and making candidates accountable to them. Meanwhile, we also need associations that stand somewhat apart from any party.

radical change needs institutional innovation

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Peter

In The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx interprets the Paris Commune as “essentially a working class government.” The bourgeoisie and capitalism had been overthrown; the workers ruled. For Marx, the deep structure of a society was its class structure, and therefore everything about the Commune must be fundamentally new. It would be a mistake to interpret any of its offices, bodies, or laws that might seem familiar as if they replicated those of the previous regime. “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”

A counterpoint–not to this passage, but to major interpretations of Marx–comes from the radical Brazilian theorist and activist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To paraphrase loosely, Unger might say that once the workers own the government and major enterprises, it becomes possible for people to distribute both the fruits of their labor and the rewarding productive activities more fairly and to collaborative more than compete. However, a revolution does not automatically resolve problems of organization and management. It remains challenging to coordinate individuals’ behavior, to identify and reward diligence, to apply expertise without letting the experts dominate, and so on. Thus the revolution should be judged on whether it yields new forms of self-government, which is not inevitable but depends on the participants.

In False Necessity (2004), Unger writes:

The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations) it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy. But this conception has never been and probably never can be worked into detailed institutional arrangements capable of solving the practical problems of and administrative and economic management in large countries, torn by internal divisions, beleaguered by foreign enemies, and excited by rising expectations. Thus, the conciliar model of popular organization has quickly given way to forms of despotic governnment that seem the sole feasible alternatives to the overthrown bourgeois regimes (pp. 24-5).

Unger is making an empirical claim that may be overstated. It has been 150+ years since the Paris Commune, and there have been many experiments under state socialism (of various types) and in capitalist economies–from mini-communes to, for instance, Mondragon, which has 75,000 employees/owners today. But I do think his theoretical insight is valid: the fundamental task is to redesign specific institutions.

Source: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False necessity: anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy: from Politics, a work in constructive social theory. London: Verso, 2004. See also: the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and needed: pragmatists for utopian experiments

The Road to Wigan Pier revisited

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Peter

George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) explores the thesis that poor people would support progressive policies except that they don’t like the people who argue for progressive ideas. I am not sure he was right or that the same diagnosis applies today, but it’s worth considering.

Part I of the book is journalism: Orwell embeds himself in Northern English working-class homes, visits coal mines, and documents the degradation and suffering of poor British people during the Depression.

In Part II, Orwell tells how he came to do this kind of reporting as a child of the “lower-upper-middle-class” who had done a stint on the British colonial police in Burma. He identifies as a socialist but in a very vague and broad-church way. At one point (p. 154), he defines socialism as the premise that “The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody.” That leads to the conclusion “that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions.” Later (p. 200), he writes that “The real Socialist is one who wishes–not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes–to see tyranny overthrown.” These sentiments may be compatible with US-style liberalism as well as social democracy, especially since Orwell is more of an anti-authoritarian than an egalitarian throughout the book.

The question he sets himself is why “Socialism has failed in its appeal.” He perceives the left as rapidly losing support to fascism, particularly among the poor.

Orwell observes that many people who could vote for the left think, “I don’t object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists.” He writes, “Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents” (p. 156.)

So what did working-class voters have against the socialists of 1937? One part of Orwell’s diagnosis involves technology. He observes that advocates of socialism tend to be enthusiastic about machines, predicting that technology will liberate us from drudgery so that we can devote our lives to art and nature. They extoll the scientific progress of the USSR: tractors, rural electrification, and the Dnieper Dam. Orwell’s own view is that technological progress is inevitable but problematic, since the valuable parts of life involve work, which is being replaced by tools. “The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug–that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming” (p. 184).

This all seems sensible and relevant in our time, but the ideological polarity has switched. Today, the most blatant enthusiasts of machines are right-wing tech bros, and much of the skepticism comes from the left. This means that working-class hostility to progressives probably doesn’t involve attitudes toward technology.

Another part of Orwell’s diagnosis involves the cultural choices of self-appointed advocates for socialism. “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ’Socialism’ and ’Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ’Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England” (p. 157).

I think he has two concerns. One is that socialists are preachy and quick to dismiss the everyday pleasures of workers. Presumably, it’s fine to drink fruit juice if you want, but Orwell is worried about the kind of person who preaches its advantages over a pint at the pub–“that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of ’progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat” (p. 165).

A person might even acknowledge that we will all drink fruit juice instead of beer some day, because that will be better for us; but this fate “must be staved off as long as possible” by voting against socialists.

Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. ’Socialism’ is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight (p. 165)

His other concern is that left-wing intellectuals’ choices are simply unusual. Orwell says, “I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ’whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people” (p. 157).

I think it’s good to be a vegetarian (and obligatory to accommodate vegetarians), but their number has grown a great deal since 1937. Besides, Orwell assumes that vegetarians are motivated by health alone, “for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase” (pp. 157-8). In other words, in 1937, eating plants and drinking juice was not about saving the planet or animals but extending one’s own life, and that came across as sanctimonious as well as questionable on the merits.

The enduring challenge is that people who are critical of the existing social order (as Orwell is) appropriately adopt views that are currently unpopular. Orwell, for example, mentions “feminism,” and, although I am not sure how he would define that word, thoughtful and critical people should gravitate to what I would call feminist ideas even if those ideas are not broadly popular. However, there is a risk that progressivism writ large will become identified with unpopular causes. This danger is worse when progressive leaders adopt a tone of disrespect for most people’s folkways, and worse still if these leaders rarely come from working-class communities.

I think that current working-class objections to the left–not only in the USA but in most wealthy democracies–have many explanations. We should consider, among other factors, the actual limitations of leftish proposals for addressing economic distress, the erosion of organizations like unions and genuine parties, and the impact of media. Among these causes, the lifestyles of self-appointed progressive advocates may not be particularly important. Nevertheless, Orwell’s method is worth considering. As he says,

[It] is no use writing off the current distaste for Socialism as the product of stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove that distaste you have got to understand it, which means getting inside the mind of the ordinary objector to Socialism, or at least regarding his viewpoint sympathetically. No case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing. Therefore, rather paradoxically, in order to defend Socialism it is necessary to start by attacking it (p. 155).

social class and the youth vote in 2024

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Peter

My colleagues at CIRCLE (The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) have already produced an incredible body of analysis of the 2024 youth vote. Overall, they find that youth turnout was higher than in past decades but lower than in 2020, and young adults supported the Democrats, but much more narrowly than previously.

I recommend all their work, but I’d like to discuss one pattern. It appears that being working-class predicted support for Donald Trump when holding race and gender constant, with the exception that young women of color supported Harris by the same amount, regardless of their social class. These trends are stronger for older Americans but still evident among the 18-29s.

(I interpret education as an indicator of social class. Especially for younger people, income is much less revealing. An MBA student might earn less current personal income than a mechanic of the same age.)

Young adults who have not attended college favored Trump by two-to-one, whereas those with postgraduate educations preferred Harris by 14 points. Nearly half (42%) of young Latinos without college experience chose Trump. Thirty-four percent of all young Black men favored him, a pretty remarkable increase that may also be related to social class.

I would be reluctant to explain this pattern by citing any specific policies of the Biden Administration or proposals of the Harris-Walz campaign, nor by criticizing the candidates or their rhetoric. This is because the same pattern–working-class voters supporting the right–has been evident recently in France, Germany, and the UK–the other democracies that I’ve studied–and was already strongly present in the USA in 2022.

My pet theory is that liberal or progressive parties prefer to regulate, because they can shift the costs to private entities and local governments. The regulated organizations then pass mandates on to workers and consumers, and the rules that originate in legislation are mixed together with all the things that companies require or prohibit for their own profit. The same department that tells workers not to use polluting chemicals also warns them not to take unauthorized work breaks. As a result, regulation that has social benefits looks like corporate monitoring, and progressives sound like the nation’s HR department or legal office. It doesn’t help that almost all Democratic elected officials are, in fact, lawyers or former managers.

My preferred alternative would be to spend public money to benefit workers, because that is a more direct and transparent way to achieve public purposes. However, the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats did authorize $1.9 trillion of new spending on green manufacturing (and microconductors) and reaped no apparent political gain.

Perhaps contingent factors interfered, such as the pandemic and the end of pandemic-related benefits, global inflation, and Joe Biden’s inability to make the case when it mattered. But the failure of nearly $2 trillion to move working-class opinion requires reflection. Unless something changes fast, the formative experiences of our rising generation will not incline them to progressive values.

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why “liberal” can sound like “upper-class”

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Peter

In an article reporting The New York Times‘ recent battleground state polls, Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik quote Jonathan Ball, a Michigan floor-installer:

[He] said he believed Mr. Trump would do more to help working Americans than Ms. Harris. “I think she’s more liberal. I just don’t think she’s all for the middle class,” said Mr. Ball, 46, who plans to support Mr. Trump for a third time this fall. “I just see her one-sided. You know, for the rich.”

I don’t know how many people associate being liberal with being from (or for) the rich. I would like to see survey data specifically on that question, which would allow us to measure the prevalence of this view in various parts of the electorate. But we know that Mr. Ball’s view is not unique. In her book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, Farah Stockman discusses an Indiana industrial worker who divides the world between workers (such as himself) and capitalists, urges his union to fight the company, and votes for Trump. His wife is more favorable to management. On that basis, he categorizes her as a “liberal.” I’ve heard real people say the same kind of thing myself.

I grew up believing the opposite: that liberals were more favorable to workers than conservatives were. I acknowledge that this assumption is debatable. Libertarians argue that liberal policies are especially costly to working people. Socialists may distinguish bourgeois liberalism from more radical reform and sometimes see liberals as the main obstacles to social justice. But I doubt either framework is driving these workers’ interpretation of liberalism as favorable to the upper class.

Here is an alternative theory. If you are a worker and a consumer, you are always being notified of rules and policies that constrain and modify your behavior. Some of these rules result from governmental policies that I would code as “liberal.” For instance, the state might pass a law that results in your HR department warning you against sexual harassment. Some of the rules come from government but are not especially liberal, e.g., Don’t use marijuana. And many are not due to the government at all. For example, the same HR department that warns you not to sexually harass your colleagues also warns you not to take unauthorized breaks and not to use the company’s equipment for private purposes.

The tone, format, and consequences of all these rules are similar. The same people deliver and enforce them. These people are managers: white-collar workers with college degrees, sometimes from the corporate HQ in a big coastal city.

They talk and act rather like the most prominent advocates of liberal policies. First of all, politicians in general come from the same professions that set and enforce rules in the workplace. Nicholas Carnes notes that 75% of members of Congress were lawyers or business owners before they ran for office, compared to less than 2% who “came [directly] from working class occupations. … Even districts where working-class people make up disproportionate shares of voters seldom elect working-class politicians” (Carnes 2011). And, among politicians, Democrats are perhaps especially likely to sound like upper management. For instance, Democrats now represent the 17 richest congressional districts.

You’d have to be very politically sophisticated to separate the directives that result from liberal (or progressive, or leftist) governmental policies from those that are meant to profit the company. They all sound like the wishes of highly-educated and well-paid people at corporate headquarters. And the national leaders who advocate for the policies that are liberal sound just the same as your corporate managers.

Regulations can be beneficial and even necessary, but they are not very transparent. It is hard for the recipients to understand who is responsible for a given regulation; and legislators can’t be sure who will be affected, or how. Laws must go through regulatory agencies, courts, and private offices (like a corporation’s HR department) before they reach the people who are regulated, by which time the legislators who voted for them may not recognize the results. And workers and consumers receive a constant stream of directives that reflect companies’ wishes rather than legal mandates.

I am more enthusiastic about taxing and spending as tools of public policy. And I prefer direct, transparent taxes, especially taxes on personal income, rather than sales taxes, tariffs, or corporate income taxes, which have opaque and unpredictable costs for various people. We should be able to say: We compelled these people to pay this proportion of their incomes to buy these goods, which include new jobs for working people.

As long as we deputize private actors to regulate behavior, we must try to mitigate the resulting confusions. Small steps may be worth taking, like nominating Tim Walz instead of yet another big-city lawyer to be a face of the Democratic Party. But the problem may be endemic to the administrative state, in which case it requires more than cosmetic changes.

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UK election results by social class

Posted on July 5, 2024 by Peter

One of my obsessions is the social-class inversion that has been visible in several countries in the 21st century, in which parties of the left draw their strongest support from highly educated, “professional” voters and those on the right appeal best to the working class. Under those circumstances, left parties will block bold economic initiatives (which would cost their voters), and right parties may offer ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism, since libertarian economic policies have little relevance to workers. This is potentially a road to fascism.

The full exit polls from yesterday's UK election do not seem to be available yet (I assume they are still embargoed for the media companies that subscribe to Ipsos' service), so I have used Ipsos' final pre-election survey as a rough substitute. The interactive graphic above lets you see each party's support by social class.

The image above this post simplifies matters by grouping the Tories and Reform as "all right," and Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists as "all left."

You can see evidence here of a class inversion, but it is not as dramatic as in some 21st century elections. The Reform and Green parties illustrate the pattern best, drawing their support (respectively) from the bottom and the top of the social class structure. The Conservatives perform best at the bottom, but only by a bit. In all, the right does considerably better among semi-skilled and unskilled workers than among managers and professionals, but Labour holds its own across all categories, blurring the pattern.

I would argue that Labour must pursue policies that benefit the lowest social class category, not only for social justice but also to reverse the class inversion that threatens democracy itself.

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an abundance agenda

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Peter

Not for the clashing of sabres,
   For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
   With more abundant life.

-- from Songs for the People by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

To become a more just and sustainable society, we must produce a lot. For instance, to improve affordability and address homelessness, we need much more housing. One estimate claims that we need 7.3 million additional lower-cost rental units. But the graph above this post shows a long-term decline in new housing starts per capita.

We also need windmills and solar panels, more and better transmission lines, batteries, electric vehicles, commuter railway lines and intermodal transit points, heat pumps, and urban trees.

All this production will weigh on the environment, but I don’t see any path to a sustainable economy that doesn’t involve first making a lot of new things that replace the machines we depend on now.

The graph below shows rising production of renewables along with steady production of oil and coal. We need the former to accelerate, which should also push the latter down:

Trends in oil and gas production and renewable energy production, from St Louis Fed.

Regulation is important for health, safety, and other values, but it doesn’t produce stuff. Regulation can be a barrier to production, although the severity of that problem is open to debate. Certainly, regulations must be smart, efficient, and mutually consistent.

Redistribution is necessary to address inequities, but it is not the way to create abundance. To be sure, when disadvantaged people receive support, they are able to buy things, but that may not boost the total supply of the things we need. Besides, once we produce more, we can choose to distribute more.

Governments can boost supply by buying things. The massive Biden investments in green technologies and microchip manufacturing are at least well intentioned and may turn out to be crucial. However, the private sector is going to produce most of what we need, even if governments are important customers or investors. The question is how to expand the private production of good things, such as affordable housing and renewable power.

Steve Teles and Ron Saldin discuss an abundance agenda in political terms, presenting it as a response to certain tendencies on both right and left. They argue that abundance may create a new alignment and counter partisan polarization, which is rooted in zero-sum competition. They compare an abundance agenda to the Progressive Movement, which formed strong factions within both major parties. In the 1912 general election, three presidential candidates competed to be the best progressive, offering different but comparable interpretations of what progressivism meant.

Progressivism wasn’t about abundance, but their analogy is political. An abundance agenda could scramble the political spectrum today, as progressivism did from 1900-1924. Teles and Saldin argue that only the Democratic Party is really hospitable to abundance right now, for Trump has a “hold on the GOP.” But they envision a somewhat longer timeframe.

I find their political analysis interesting, and I am open to the argument that abundance could counter hyper-partisanship. However, I would separate political arguments from substantive policy issues. For the good of people and the planet, we must produce a lot more good things very soon, and that goal should determine our political strategies. In other words, we shouldn’t produce more to reduce polarization, but scrambling the political spectrum might help us to produce more of what we need.

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calling youth to government service

Posted on January 4, 2024 by Peter

According to the 2020 American National Election Study, 63% of people under 30 thought that the government should be doing “more things,” versus just 37% who thought it should “do less.” Yet few young Americans even consider working in the civil service.

At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where “Ask what you can do for your country” is engraved on the wall, 44% of the graduating class of 2022 took jobs in the private sector, 22% for nonprofits, and 28% for any government. From my beloved Tufts University, where students tend to be very idealistic, 6% of the undergraduate class of 2022 will work for “Government, Law, Public Policy, [or a] Think Tank.” I suspect public sector employment represents a small proportion of that 6%.

The role of the federal government expanded substantially in 2021-2 with the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act, and the $280+ billion CHIPS Act. Yet young people have not heard a call to go to Washington to make these new programs work.

Some colleges and universities produce large numbers of public employees, especially teachers and law enforcement personnel. I am grateful to them and believe that a degree of class bias explains why such jobs are less popular at institutions like Tufts and Harvard. Still, the civil service is a different category than regular public sector employment. At several points in our history, government service has attracted people who have advantages and cultural capital. Not so today.

Some reasons are on the demand side. The Partnership for Public Service says that the federal “hiring process is long and complicated,” the “pay system is antiquated,” and “opportunities for young people are hidden and scarce.” The Partnership and others–including some civil servants–are working on those problems. It’s easy for me to criticize without helping with the solutions. But these challenges need attention.

The supply side is also important (and more related to my work). Recent college graduates are not just avoiding public sector careers because of clunky hiring processes and antiquated pay grades. Many of them are against it.

From one direction, there are lots of left-wing students who might (or might not) vote for Bernie Sanders and his promise to expand government, yet who deeply distrust the national government of the USA. For them, the word “state” often comes with adjectives like “carceral,” “neoliberal” or “colonial.” Why work for that kind of organization?

From the opposite direction, I think many people have absorbed the lessons of public choice theory, which is presumptively skeptical about government.

Antony Downs offers a classic statement (Downs 1957). He writes that no economist would “advise monopoly corporations to increase social welfare by cutting prices.” We assume that a corporation is self-serving, and we consider changing its incentives by boosting competition or regulating it. Nevertheless, Downs says, people routinely call on government to maximize the public good without considering the motives of the people who actually operate the government (p. 283). This is naive.

Downs acknowledges that some individuals act altruistically, but he makes the simplifying assumption that people generally direct their own behavior “toward selfish ends” (p. 27). That premise leads him to the following assumptions about government: politicians and parties try to gain and retain office, bureaucrats strive to expand their budgets and personnel allotments, and citizens collect political information and vote only insofar as that will benefit them personally. “They treat policies purely as means to the attainment of private ends” (p. 28).

There is then little point in advising a government to do better. The only strategies that can work are to alter the incentives of public employees or to reduce the size of the state.

Downs assumes bounded rationality and limited cognitive capacity, but he emphasizes people’s selfishness. In An Economic Theory of Democracy, he never cites his contemporary, Friedrich Hayek, for whom cognitive limitations were more important than bad motivations. For Hayek, the main problem with government is that it cannot know how to allocate resources, because understanding a whole society is just too hard. In contrast, markets generate reliable signals in the form of prices.

My view is that both left-wing anti-institutionalism and public choice theory offer genuine insights. They both conflict with social democratic theories, which are similar to the ideals of the New Deal and Great Society and Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda.

In that case, one might ask which theory is right, but that’s not how I would proceed. I acknowledge that there are truly bad ideologies–based on immoral premises–that are very unlikely to yield beneficial results. Leaving those ideologies aside, I see grand social theories less as hypotheses that can be proven true or false (or right or wrong) than as forces that motivate and orient people.

A social democratic ideal can draw people to work for (or alongside) a national government and to build excellent public programs. A critique of government can inspire people to build private-sector alternatives that also do good. Although it’s worth thinking critically about these contrasting assumptions and predictions, much more depends on who responds to each ideal and what they do together.

The example I give in What Should We Do? (2022) is public schooling. Movements for universal public education arose in countries like Prussia and the USA during the 1800s. It was never true–nor was it false–that mandatory, public funded schools are good for children or a society. Some are good, some are not. The public education movement, however, had inspiring ideals, and it launched the professions of teaching, educational research, educational administration, and teacher education.

Since then, people in those professions and their allies have tried to make public schools work. At times–being human–they have failed or have even failed to try. Reform movements have arisen that offer various prescriptions, such as progressive pedagogy, choice and competition, or measurement and accountability. Again, I doubt that any of these prescriptions is right or wrong, but each has created a new field of practice and new organizations that have done some degree of good (and harm).

By the same token, the competence, fairness, and responsiveness of government are variables, not constants. Some bureaucracies behave worse than in Downs’ model, because he explicitly assumes (p. 30) that officials will follow laws, which is often not the case. But some public agencies perform much better than he would anticipate, because they attract talent and develop impressive professional cultures. Downs’ assumption of selfishness is a priori, not empirical. Real people go into public service for a variety of complex reasons, some quite impressive. (By the way, if they were strictly motivated by economic self-interest, they wouldn’t serve at all.)

Allocating enough money matters, and the Biden spending bills are helping with that. But as long as Congress is a poor deliberative body, and as long as federal agencies are sclerotic and distant, the money will not be spent very well. Cash alone will not maximize social or environmental outcomes, and it definitely will not raise public support for government. Nothing alienates more than an unresponsive bureaucracy, even it sends you a check.

What we need now is a large, energetic, youthful, and diverse movement that wants to transform government to be more effective, wise, and responsive. That movement would not negate the insights of leftwing anti-institutionalism or of public choice theory, but it would treat those ideas as diagnoses and would look for cures.

Source: Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (Addison Wesley 1957). See also the Green New Deal and civic renewal; using federal spending to strengthen democracy; putting the civic back in civil service; on the Deep State, the administrative state, and the civil service.

1984 all over again? The Reagan/Biden analogy

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Peter

The Biden team is preparing for a Reagan-style victory lap in the event that the economy looks healthy in 2024. I hope they are also prepping for more difficult circumstances, since the economic forecast is highly uncertain. However, for what it’s worth, Morgan Stanley “now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year.”

These are my prior assumptions:

A president has limited and ambiguous impact on macroeconomic trends. Too many other factors matter, from the Federal Reserve and Congress to the business cycle, and from wars and technological developments to the budgets of 50 states.
Although many people vote on other grounds, enough marginal voters are influenced by recent changes in the economy that those trends predict the results of presidential elections.
People cite the economic and electoral fortunes of each presidential administration to support their ideological positions. For instance, the apparent successes of FDR and Reagan were used to vindicate New Deal liberalism and neoliberalism, respectively.
Economic trends influence public opinion, but they do not determine the outcome of the debate about ideology. Eisenhower, Clinton, and Obama are examples of presidents who saw healthy net economic growth and were reelected, yet their administrations did not move public opinion as FDR’s and Reagan’s did. The big shifts in opinion seem to reflect changes in the Zeitgeist, not just electoral and economic developments.

Applying #1 means that Biden’s policies will not affect the economy much in 2024, even though Morgan Stanley believes that he is responsible for the upturn. According to #2, Biden will win pretty easily if growth is robust but could lose to Trump or another Republican if it stalls.

Per #3, if the economy grows and Biden wins, the President and many Democrats will argue that the reason was his industrial policy, which is aggressive, green, and pro-equity. I favor the policy, so I will be hoping that this argument sticks, even though I believe that macroeconomic trends are out of his hands.

If the case for Bidenomics does persuade, it will be thanks to the Zeitgeist. To make that explanation a little less mystical, I would focus on two factors.

First, the previously dominant neoliberal view really is fading now, much as late-Victorian laissez-faire was faltering by 1932 and New Deal liberalism had run its course by 1980. By a certain point, established theories don’t offer plausible solutions to the problems of the day, but alternatives do. By the time FDR took office, his home state of New York and several others had already moved in the direction of the New Deal; Roosevelt took the opportunity to bring their ideas to Washington. Likewise for Reagan in 1980–and for Biden in 2020. Indeed, Trump is no neoliberal, and there will probably be no national candidate who runs on cutting taxes and spending.

Second, the demographic basis of politics has shifted. I avoid crude materialistic and class-based predictions, yet the people who have the most to gain from low taxes and light regulation are business owners and investors. They are now outweighed in the GOP (which they once controlled) by working-class voters. They are represented in the Democratic Party, but outweighed there, too, by diverse lower-income voters, public sector workers, and salaried professionals.

The tectonic plates are shifting, and it’s at such moments that presidential administrations become examples or even metaphors for fundamental change. We had a “new deal for America” and then saw “morning in America” once the actual New Deal state faltered. The opportunity to make another such shift is a good reason to run a celebratory campaign in 2024–if (but only if) the economy holds up.

federal spending for both climate and democracy

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Peter

Two huge problems may have the same solution. If this is true, it makes a powerful case for the main strategies of the Biden Administration.

The first problem is climate change, disastrous for both natural ecosystems and human lives and welfare. Underlying that problem is the fact that many constituencies around the globe benefit from burning carbon: not only authoritarian governments and powerful corporations (although they deserve the most criticism), but also regular communities and the parties and unions that represent them. As long as people who benefit in the short run from burning carbon have preponderant political weight, it is hard to pass truly satisfactory policy solutions.

The second problem is the marked tendency of poorer people to vote for the right, not only in the USA but in many other countries—in an eerie echo of the 1930s. Parties of the right that have lower-income constituencies cannot offer their voters tax cuts or deregulation. Instead they typically promise to strengthen the state to the exclusion of–or even against–minority groups or foreign populations. Unlike libertarianism, this form of politics has no natural limits; state power can keep ratcheting up until it reaches genuine fascism. Meanwhile, the center-left parties that are left with relatively upscale voters may try to defend individual rights, but they won’t address deep social inequities.

Federal finding authorized by Congress in Biden’s first two years addresses both problems. It tilts toward poorer districts (including those that are predominantly white and nowadays Republican) and green industries. The “theory of change” might be: 1) use federal funds to 2) “leverage” private investments in new industry that 3) mitigate climate change while 4) providing good jobs, thereby 5) building constituencies for green policies.

I am all for also using other strategies simultaneously, such as regulating or taxing carbon and divesting. I just think the Biden theory of change may be a necessary complement.

The map with this post (from the White House website) shows the locations of private investments in clean energy, batteries, and biomanufacturing that have been leveraged by new federal spending in the Biden years. Many observers have noted that a majority of this money–perhaps two-thirds–goes to districts represented by Republicans, who generally voted against the bills. I would draw attention to the concentration of projects along the Appalachian spine and in the heart of the Rust Belt. These are poor regions that happen, today, to be dominated by Republican representatives.

The effects are not yet evident in polling. In Pew’s June survey, 62% of all Americans disapprove of Biden, 41% very strongly. He receives net approval from college graduates but the disapproval of 66% of people with high school diplomas or less. He performs best among those who classify themselves as upper income and faces 2-1 disapproval among everyone else. Fifty-six percent of whites without college strongly disapprove of him, as do 57% of rural people.

This political strategy will take several years to work. People will have to see clear and sustained benefits from state action that is both equitable and green. The argument must begin now, but it will take time to change minds.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and some of her cabinet colleagues are visiting the locations of major new investments, most of which are in Republican districts. If Granholm were trying to affect the 2024 election, this trip would probably be a waste of her effort, since many of these districts are very safe for the GOP. For instance, she recently visited the district of Rep. Patrick McHenry, who won his last reelection by 45 points. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is going to Kentucky’s fifth district, which GOP Rep. Hal Rogers won by 65 points last time and which has been Republican since 1962. These trips may generate some social media calling out Republicans’ hypocrisy, but that won’t change minds. However, I do think actual jobs can shift people’s fundamental beliefs about both government and climate. For that purpose, both the federal spending and visits by Democratic leaders to tout it can be seen as highly promising.

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