Jonathan Rowe – Page 27

A Misguided Quest for ‘Productivity’

A nation measures what it values, and the way it measures goes far to determine where it goes. We need to pause often, therefore, and consider the litany of economic statistics the government and media parade before our eyes. These just might hold hidden agendas and paths that, if articulated, we might choose to avoid.

An example came a month or so ago with the release of the latest “productivity” statistics from Washington. It seems the nation’s productivity fell by a whole tenth of a percent (although it was revised later). The news prompted hand-wringing and dark prognostication over impending economic decline. “Productivity drop alarms analysts,” the headline in my local paper declared.

Turning Kids into Capitalists

The campaign to abolish the estate tax shows the strange priorities in Washington these days.

Some 20 percent of American children live in poverty. Roughly 40 percent of all families have no financial assets to speak of, which means little for their children’s education. Yet Washington is obsessing over the relative handful of kids who must endure the estate tax. The place has become a virtual Wailing Wall of concern for trust-fund babies.

Reassigning Tim Russert

Those who offer suggestions to the Washington media need not worry that their advice will be taken. The mental grooves here are worn too deep, and self-importance serves to set them in concrete. The only cause for hope is that time still passes. In journalism, as in physics, bad ideas generally don’t concede; they succumb to a new generation. As the current Washington guard inches towards its golden years, there is at least a possibility that something new will push through the concrete. We might be wary of high tech “cures” for aging. Do we really want another 200 years of John MacLaughlin and George Will?

So for the record, as it were, here are nine suggestions the media will ignore.

Every Baby a Trust Fund Baby

Estate taxes are a problem that most Americans would like to have. Not many do. To qualify, one has to have a nice piece of change–at least $1.3 million for a married couple and, taking loopholes into account, more like $5 million. At present fewer than 2 percent of Americans achieve that kind of affluence. Some 40 percent die with no assets at all to leave behind for the kids and grandkids.

That’s the problem today: too little wealth at the bottom and in the middle, and not too much burden on the wealth at the very top. The fortunes of the Rockefellers and Fords have survived through generations, despite the estate tax. New fortunes are arising at a staggering pace even though the estate tax looms. But the wealth of most Americans has not increased in a corresponding manner. On the contrary, for the lower 40 percent, net assets have declined by some 75 percent over the past two decades.

Reach out and Annoy Someone

In the latter 1990s, in the midst of the high tech boom, I spent alot of time in a coffee shop in the theater district in San Francisco. It was near Union Square, the tourist and I observed a scene play out there time and time again. Mom is nursing her mocha. The kids are picking at their muffins, feet dangling from their chairs. And there’s Dad, pulled back slightly from the table, talking into his cell phone.

I would watch the kids’ faces, vacant and a little forlorn, and wonder what happens to kids whose parents aren’t there even when they are. How can we expect kids to pay attention if we are too busy to payattention to them? Peter Breggin, the psychiatrist, says much “attention deficit disorder” is really “dad deficit disorder.” Maybe he’s right.

Clueless in Seattle

The cover of Newsweek seemed dredged from the archives of 1968. Anguished protestors manhandled by police in riot gear – one almost expected pictures of Black Panthers and LBJ inside. The scene of course was Seattle, and the protests at the World Trade Organization meeting there. But the visual reference to the 1960s was deliberate. Newsweek, like most of the major media, wanted to portray the protests as violent, threatening, irrational, and just a little deranged.

We could write this off to the corporate media’s congenital instinct for gore, or to aging baby boom editors who are mentally frozen in the political psychodramas of their youth. Yet the very next week, the cover of another news weekly suggested that more was involved. Time magazine’s person of the year was not someone who had labored for the well-being of humanity. It was Jeffrey Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, who is seeking to put your local bookstore out of business and whose mission in life is to sell a lot of stuff.

The Growth Consensus Unravels

Economics has been called the dismal science, but beneath its gray exterior is a system of belief worthy of Pollyanna.

Yes, economists manage to see a dark cloud in every silver lining. Downturn follows uptick, and inflation rears its ugly head. But there’s a story within that story—a gauzy romance, a lyric ode to Stuff. It’s built into the language. A thing produced is called a “good,” for example, no questions asked. The word is more than just a term of art. It suggests the automatic benediction which economics bestows upon commodities of any kind.

Down Among the Economists

Of the organized belief systems in America today, economics is surely among the strangest – and economists themselves are even stranger. How such agile and ambitious minds could drift so far out of touch with daily reality, is a question which merits the attentions of our most astute psychologists. The profession is like a cult of the highly IQd, and I’ve always wondered about the strange rites and rituals that could enable their beliefs to persist.

So last winter, when I heard that the American Economic Association was holding its annual meeting around the corner from my office, I felt a little like an anthropologist who finds an encampment of aborigines in his back yard. Would anyone raise questions about basic premises, as opposed to the arcane mathematics of hypothetical markets and pecuniary gain? Would they talk about the actual experience of ordinary Americans, or only abstractions like “productivity” and “growth?” I never imagined they’d be talking about me. Several months before, the Atlantic Monthly had published an article by myself and two colleagues, Cliff Cobb and Ted Halstead, called “If the economy is up, why is America down?” The article explored the paradox that had befuddled the nation’s policy establishment during the 1992 Congressional campaigns. The economy was doing well, by the conventional reckonings – the GDP was up: people were supposed to be happy and fulfilled.

The Free Market is Less Conservative Than You Think

Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy by Edward Luttwak
Book Review

The notion of a conservative critique of the market can jar the contemporary mind, a little like a left-wing critique of the state. But that suggests the tenacity of Cold War stereo-types and a media that is conceptually inert. Suspicion of the market is conservative in the most fundamental sense. It can arise from a desire for true economy, as opposed to the wastrel and debt-driven tendencies of the consumer culture. It can express a desire to protect that which is of great value, whether in the social structure or the natural environment, against the machinations of pecuniary gain.

As it sprang from Adam Smith’s mind, the concept of the market was deliberately disruptive–a radical force. It served to rout the residues of feudalism–the traditional bonds of locality and community–and clear the way for the industrial age, with its mathematical logic of production and gain. This was not a conservative undertaking. But soon enough it acquired the respectability of money; and this forced true conservatives into the role of radicals, for opposing the radicalism of money which was now the status quo.

A Civic Economy

There was a coffee shop near my apartment on the West Side of Manhattan that served as a refuge for the troubled souls in the neighborhood. Older men sat for hours mumbling into their coffee. The owner, a kind Greek lady, would greet them when they arrived and wish them well when they departed. The waitresses were spunky pencil-behind-the-ear types who kept up a good-natured banter. It might have been the only warm human contact these men experienced in the course of their bleak days.

Late in the afternoon, I’d see some of these same men a few blocks up 8th Avenue, nursing more coffee in a McDonalds and looking forlorn in the plastic, bolted-down seats. Kids would tease them; the manager would wipe their tables in an attempt to shoo them away. In the family business they had been part of a community; here they were impediments to a target return per square foot.