Everybody agrees society is in a bad way, but what exactly is the main cause of the badness?
Some people emphasize economic issues’
People like me emphasize cultural issues. If you have 60 years of radical individualism and ruthless meritocracy, you’re going to end up with a society that is atomized, distrustful and divided.
Patrick Deneen .. new book, “Why Liberalism Failed,”
.. democracy has betrayed its promises.
- It was supposed to foster equality, but it has led to great inequality and a new aristocracy.
- It was supposed to give average people control over government, but average people feel alienated from government.
- It was supposed to foster liberty, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slave to their appetites.
.. “Because we view humanity — and thus its institutions — as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.”
.. Greek and medieval philosophies valued liberty, but they understood that before a person could help govern society, he had to be able to govern himself.
People had to be habituated in virtue by institutions they didn’t choose — family, religion, community, social norms.
.. Machiavelli and Locke, the men who founded our system made two fateful errors.
- First, they came to reject the classical and religious idea that people are political and relational creatures. Instead, they placed the autonomous, choosing individual at the center of their view of human nature.
- Furthermore, they decided you couldn’t base a system of government on something as unreliable as virtue. But you could base it on something low and steady like selfishness. You could pit interest against interest and create a stable machine. You didn’t have to worry about creating noble citizens; you could get by with rationally self-interested ones.
.. Liberalism claims to be neutral but it’s really anti-culture. It detaches people from nature, community, tradition and place. It detaches people from time. “Gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification.”
.. Once family and local community erode and social norms dissolve, individuals are left naked and unprotected. They seek solace in the state. They toggle between impersonal systems: globalized capitalism and the distant state. As the social order decays, people grasp for the security of authoritarianism.
“A signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that it arose and came to power through the discontents of people’s isolation and loneliness,” he observes. He urges people to dedicate themselves instead to local community — a sort of Wendell Berry agrarianism.
.. Every time Deneen writes about virtue it tastes like castor oil — self-denial and joylessness.
.. Yes, liberalism sometimes sits in tension with faith, tradition, family and community, which Deneen rightly cherishes. But liberalism is not their murderer.
A Hedge-Fund Titan Puts Away the Punch Bowl
Ray Dalio of Bridgewater sees Americans’ debt as a coming drag on growth and markets
.. While he doesn’t see another crisis in the offing, he does see the same underlying stresses at work: Americans have accumulated far more debt than they have assets and income to support.
.. Not only will this drag on growth and markets, it will leave the economy acutely vulnerable to higher interest rates. The relevant parallel, he says, is not the early 1930s, when the economy imploded, but the late 1930s when the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy and inadvertently extended the Great Depression. Today, the central bank must balance the short-term need for higher interest rates to contain inflation against the long-term need for low rates to work off the debt overhang and sustain high asset prices.
.. “It may not be a problem in the next year or two, but the risk of not getting it right increases with time.”
.. “We ‘finance people’ see the world very differently from the way economists do,”
.. The views of finance people tend to be shaped more by trading experience than by formal economics. They assign much more weight to financial factors such as debt, asset prices and cash flow than do economists who emphasize “real economy” factors such as employment and investment
.. Finance people are wary of how macroeconomic data obscures crucial details of individual companies and households. Some economists do think like finance people, such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, but they are in the minority.
.. since the 1970s, inflation-adjusted interest rates have steadily declined while investors have accepted ever lower compensation for risks such as bankruptcy, recession and volatility (i.e. the “risk premium” has declined). This directly raises asset values and indirectly lifts growth by spurring borrowing.
.. His team estimates this has contributed three percentage points a year to stock returns since the 1970s while boosting private and government debt to 325% of gross domestic product.
.. In 2007, Mr. Dalio’s team concluded that the cost of servicing Americans’ debts was growing faster than their cash flows, creating the conditions for a crisis.
.. By slashing short-term interest rates to zero and buying bonds to push down long-term rates, it engineered the right combination of economic growth, debt write-offs and low interest rates necessary to start the painful process of “deleveraging,” or working off all that debt.
.. it can’t raise them much either, or debt servicingwould swamp cash flow and asset prices would sink. Thus Mr. Dalio foresees years of low interest rates, and while he thinks stocks are appropriately valued, he thinks returns to a typical stock-bond portfolio over the next decade will be around zero after inflation and taxes.
.. his biggest worry is that lower corporate taxes and higher stock prices do nothing for the bottom 60% of households who own almost no assets and whose stagnant wages are the mirror image of expanding profit margins, feeding resentment and political polarization. Says Mr. Dalio: “If we do have an economic downturn, I worry we will be at each other’s throats.”
Why economists need Tolstoy
Economists can tell you that sanctioning a market for kidneys would raise the supply — maybe save lives — but someone else has to weigh the moral implications of auctioning body parts to the highest bidder.
.. why practice economics if not to try to improve people’s lives?
.. Many of the questions that economists study, such as why birthrates are higher in some places, or why some countries developed earlier, or why some high school students do not apply to the best college they could get into, could be better understood through a cultural lens.
.. They skewer Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winner, for postulating that all human behavior is “maximizing” — that is, the product of a rational, self-interested calculation. And that, therefore, economics is “a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior,” including whom to marry and divorce, whether to have kids, whom to befriend.
.. Literature develops a feeling for how people will behave in ways that economic models cannot.
.. You don’t need a narrative to explain the orbit of Mars (Newton’s laws will do just fine), whereas to assert that a shortage of bread caused the French Revolution, you do.
.. At Stanford, about 45 percent of the main undergraduate faculty are in humanities, but only 15 percent of the students.
.. Then why read Shakespeare? If the reason (as the academy espouses) is simply to deconstruct the authorial “message,” why not just teach the message? Thus, “Les Miserables” could be reduced to “Help the Unfortunate.” And “Hamlet”: Stop moping and do something! No, the reason we read novels is for the experience that the words inspire.
.. History sadly mimics economics in an attempt to systemize, to discover immutable laws. Explanations must be scientific and universal. Contingency or chance — a famine, the timely arrival of a genius or madman, a scientific discovery — are presumed irrelevant. Humanities, ideally, should wrestle with uncertainty. It is a discipline of contingent truths,
Trump’s top economist makes his pitch for corporate tax cuts
Ryssdal: Without getting into a “he said, he said” argument over the economics of this, because you would win, there are studies that show the opposite of what you say. And let me just give you the anecdotal question here: I’ve talked to some CEOs in the last 10 days and they say ‘Yeah no, I mean, we’re not going to give people a $4,000 raise, what is that?”
Hassett: First, I disagree that there are people that show the opposite of what I say, in the sense that that — you know, as a practical matter that means that you would take my answer and multiply it by negative one, right?
Ryssdal: Well—
Hassett: What’s really happening is that there’s a continuum of results between “workers bear none of the corporate tax” to workers bear, actually there’s some papers that say more than 100 percent.
Ryssdal: Right. Right. But let’s—
Hassett: I’m kind of in the middle there, but there are some people that are below me.
Ryssdal: Without getting into a “he said, he said” argument over the economics of this, because you would win, there are studies that show the opposite of what you say. And let me just give you the anecdotal question here: I’ve talked to some CEOs in the last 10 days and they say ‘Yeah no, I mean, we’re not going to give people a $4,000 raise, what is that?”
Hassett: First, I disagree that there are people that show the opposite of what I say, in the sense that that — you know, as a practical matter that means that you would take my answer and multiply it by negative one, right?
Ryssdal: Well—
Hassett: What’s really happening is that there’s a continuum of results between “workers bear none of the corporate tax” to workers bear, actually there’s some papers that say more than 100 percent.
Ryssdal: Right. Right. But let’s—
Hassett: I’m kind of in the middle there, but there are some people that are below me.
Ryssdal: Let’s take the question in the spirit with which it’s intended, right? I mean there are people who disagree with you, but anecdotally I’m telling you…
Hassett: No, but I’m just characterizing — Can I respond please?
Ryssdal: Of course.
Hassett: I’m characterizing the disagreement, though, as being different from the opposite of what I say. So the people who believe the low end of the literature say that folks will get about $1,000, a $900 pay hike because of this bill. I think that a conservative estimate is $4,000. There are other papers of literature that say it’s a lot more than that. But the range is all positive, and $1,000 is a heck of a lot of money to ordinary people. So even if you take the low end, then I think that you should vote for this bill.
Let’s take the question in the spirit with which it’s intended, right? I mean there are people who disagree with you, but anecdotally I’m telling you…
Hassett: No, but I’m just characterizing — Can I respond please?
Ryssdal: Of course.
Hassett: I’m characterizing the disagreement, though, as being different from the opposite of what I say. So the people who believe the low end of the literature say that folks will get about $1,000, a $900 pay hike because of this bill. I think that a conservative estimate is $4,000. There are other papers of literature that say it’s a lot more than that. But the range is all positive, and $1,000 is a heck of a lot of money to ordinary people. So even if you take the low end, then I think that you should vote for this bill.
Ryssdal: Even though there are corporate CEOs out there who are telling me “Yeah, no, we’re gonna — we have other things we need to do with that money.”
Hassett: Well, what’s going to happen to the CEO who thinks that nothing is going to happen is that a plant is going to locate here that was about to locate in Ireland, and that competitor is going to try to hire a bunch of workers, and then the employer that’s not doing anything is going to have to pay his workers more or lose them to the competition. You know the best way to get a pay raise is to get an outside offer, and this tax policy will give us a whole bunch of new outside offers. That’s where the wage effect’s coming from.