Author: ontheoutside

Saving the Country

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This note grows out of a comment made during the election night coverage of the midterms.  Analysts were breaking down the vote in various categories, and one of them remarked that if you just look at white voters, this seems like a completely different country:  Republican voters outnumbered Democrats 3 to 2.  They were all-in for the Trump program.

It’s worth paying attention to what that means.  Diversity is not a matter of tolerance; it’s a matter of national success.

Immigrants and their families are assets by any statistical measure.  They need to work harder to succeed, and they do it.   As the various waves of immigration entered this country, they have adapted and prospered, and the country as a whole has benefited.  It’s no accident that the most prominent players in our new economy—Google and Apple—were founded by an immigrant and the son of an immigrant.

But there is another aspect to this as well.   Outsiders (and not just immigrants) are not so easily tempted by images of an idealized past paradise.  Those siren-song images are not from their past, so they can keep focused on reality and the future.

Despite the many similarities between the Trump regime and the early stages of the “illiberal democracies” of Poland and Hungary, our diversity provides perhaps a degree of protection.  White voters have not called all the shots in the midterm election.  And it’s possible to believe that we’ve taken a first step back from the brink.

The problems of the Trump regime affect everyone.  First and foremost, we are squandering our strongest economic advantages out of ignorance and arrogance.  And we are at each other’s throats by conscious choice.  Dictatorships are not just bad for outside groups, they are historically bad for everyone.

So we should give credit where it’s due.  Three cheers for diversity in all of its shapes and colors—the saviors of the country!

 

A Logical Trap

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This note is occasioned by Elizabeth Warren’s recent proposal on corporate governance—to add labor representation on corporate boards and expand the scope of corporate responsibility.  Regardless of what happens to her bill, she has done an important service by calling attention to a fundamental problem.

In recent decades American business has been taken over by the so-called Milton Friedman view of corporations.   That view has a simple prescription for how companies should operate: the world is best-served when businesses focus exclusively on business.  I.e. the role of a corporation should be to generate the maximum possible return to its investors.  Any other concerns (the workforce, community responsibility, etc.) are a perversion of the engine that makes capitalism great.

There are lots of reasons why that is suspect.  Clearly in this world labor has little to say, and in fact even a business’ own interests are not necessarily well-served—investors can walk away if the business gets pillaged for their benefit.  The percentage of business profits returned to investors has gone up dramatically with this philosophy, to the disadvantage of both labor and capital investment in the companies themselves.

The point we want to emphasize here is how damaging the Milton Friedman view is in the environment of today.   We have just passed a massive tax cut that has taken so much out of the federal budget that there is (particularly with the deficits) essentially nothing left for the other problems of the society.  As justification we’re told that private enterprise is the engine that makes everything great.

That is of course a logical trap.   Businesses in this world have no responsibility for the well-being of the country—and the government doesn’t either, because the private sector is always the answer!

As a consequence we’re not investing in our people, we don’t have to think about their welfare, and we’re not preparing for the future, because there is no one on the hook to do it.  Even Adam Smith had no illusions about the private sector’s ability to police itself or prepare the population for personal and national success.

Everyone should recognize the true symbolism of the following chart:

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The one significant result of the tax cuts is the huge surge in stock buybacks, essentially returning taxpayer money to corporate investors.  We set a record in Q1, and then almost doubled it in Q2!

Capital investment, by contrast, was relatively flat—little touched by all that money:

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In other words the tax cuts have siphoned off the resources of the country, so that there is nothing left for issues like education, infrastructure, the opioid crisis, climate change—and has delivered that money to corporations who have in turn just passed it through to their wealthy investors via buybacks.

So we’ve become like one big predatory private equity investment, being sucked dry for the benefit of the happy few who are running the show.

Tesla as Example

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However distasteful Elon Musk seems to be, the nuttiness of Tesla’s treatment nonetheless deserves comment.

Tesla was the first (as far as I know) to figure out that current battery technology is practical to power a car.  They have also been the best thus far at figuring out how such a car can be made uniquely attractive.

This is an intensely competitive business, and they have been trying to maintain first-mover advantages in features, battery technology, and the manufacturing process.  That is a very tall order, and it involves enough risk-taking that there is no surprise that it is tough to keep commitments.  Until they reach some sort of stable state vis-à-vis their auto competitors, Tesla has to be regarded as still in a kind of startup phase.  That applies both to risks and rewards.  No one expected iPhone penetration to grow as fast as it did (I can still remember articles talking about mobile phones as a mature, saturated market), and the same kind of thing could happen with electric cars.

Unless you’re a deliberate non-believer in climate change (and these days you have to try hard), the role of electric cars can hardly be overestimated.    Transportation accounts for 28% of carbon dioxide production, and there is no one proposing to put carbon dioxide scrubbers in every car.  Tesla is trying to become the Apple of transportation, with perhaps an even bigger impact on the US economy.

How are we helping Tesla in that undertaking?  Well, we haven’t cut out the electric vehicle subsidy entirely (as the House Republicans proposed to do), but there’s no evidence we’re trying very hard either. The administration is just not interested in anything that raises even the suspicion of climate change.  A carbon tax for example.  We are minimizing Tesla’s value in its home market, while the rest of the world catches up.

As for the business community, everyone seems eager to predict the Tesla’s demise.  Certainly the traditional auto companies would like that, and Musk’s antics make it exciting for the press to think about a deserved fall of arrogance.

However as an indication of what that might mean, people should recognize that all of the core technology in the Chevy Bolt comes from South Korea.  And that story can hold for the rest of the multi-trillion-dollar investment that will be needed to combat climate change.

Tesla and Ice

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This is a short note on a couple of issues related only in that they say something relevant about the future we should be planning for.

The first relates to Tesla and its production difficulties with the new, lower-priced model 3.  The highly-automated production of the model 3 is well-behind schedule, to the point where it is a big hit to the cash flow of the company.  We mention it here, though, because the delay is an indication that mass production of electric cars is something fundamentally new.

An electric car is a much simpler machine than an ordinary, gas-powered vehicle.  In principle the construction should be both cheaper and easier to automate.  Current production of Teslas is intrinsically a low-volume operation.  The model 3 will be the first indication of what newly-imagined electric car production is like.

I don’t know if we’re in for a shock or not (this is after all a first go at it), but this could be another big change to conventional middle-class employment.  And there will be follow-on effects for gas stations, and especially maintenance and repair.  This is another of many indications that broad, technology-based disruption of jobs is going to happen.

 

The other story is about the commissioning of a new class of Russian icebreaker—targeted at clearing northern ship lanes freed up by the retreat of polar ice with global warming.  The phenomenon is already clear, although the amount of traffic is still small.  The Russians are preparing for the opportunity with multiple classes of new machines planned for release up to 2025.  The Chinese have announced cooperation with the objective of reducing shipping times to Europe by a third.

The US is of course uninterested in consequences of climate change.  The only Coast Guard ice breaker is 40 years old, and they have a hard time getting authorization to get a new one.  The Bering strait, however, could be a shipping lane.

This is a very small example, but climate change affects many things, and as a country we’re trying to avoid finding out about them.

 

The current federal budget is put together for a world where the private sector will take care of everything.  That has always been a fantasy—the efficiency of the private sector comes in large part from its ability to ignore everything not relevant to immediate financial success.  It is particularly false for a world undergoing fundamental change.  We either recognize it and help people through it, or we fall behind and revert to the nightmares of the nineteenth century.

Figure Skating and Math Textbooks

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This odd coupling of topics links two separate frustrations which seem to come from the same core problem.

For figure skating the problem is one particular feature of the new scoring system—the extra points given to jumps in the second half of a program.  There’s no question that those are harder to do—anything is harder to do when you’re dead tired.  The question is why that extra stamina should be rewarded as an achievement!  In the last Olympics, those extra points were primarily an opportunity to game the system.  What was missing in artistic achievement could be made up in pure stamina.  The winner of the woman’s gold medal had all of her jumps in the second half of the program.

The fundamental problem is that from within a system, people are tempted to put a value on anything hard, regardless of whether or not it means something to the outside world.  People who have spent their careers doing and teaching figure skating have a tendency to think that any hard jumps are achievements.

Having just had reason to work my way through a high school algebra textbook, I have to say (based on an admittedly small sample) that the textbook publishers have that problem in spades.  The book was filled with minutia that need to be memorized for exam questions.  Getting through all of that is certainly hard, but it’s not the stuff that will make kids confident and successful in mathematics.  And that certainly won’t make them like it or remember it.  (One more reason it’s tough to be a teacher!)

It seems to me that high school math has a pretty good story to tell.  Core algebra is based on a really brilliant idea, that an answer you are looking for can be handled just like a number.   That lets you create a simple kind of manual computer.  If you can write down the problem, then the manual computer can solve it.  Sort of like doing your taxes with turbo-tax.  The core ideas are simple and don’t need to become a challenge.  From there it’s straightforward to do linear systems, which are part of the vocabulary in science, engineering, finance, or just about anything else.  “Vocabulary” is actually the right word.  For most students, mathematics is a language in which they need to gain confidence and fluency.

Then with quadratic equations you hit a wall.  All the techniques you just learned fail.  But you’re saved by another really good idea you would (probably) never have come up with yourself.  You do a few exercises with that idea, working toward an answer that is basically all you need to know—the quadratic formula.  Any further messing around with higher-order polynomials and rational functions is only supplementary, examples of what you can do with other kinds of problems you might run into.  No more rules to learn.

Going beyond that you have topics with really exciting applications.  Conic sections are geometrically interesting and tied to the whole story of the Copernican revolution, Kepler’s laws (“equal areas swept out in equal time”), and Newton’s gravitation.  (You don’t need calculus to tell the story.)  Sequences and series cover ideas behind every financial analysis students will see.  Permutations and combinations are important for probability and statistics and introduce the first non-trivial example of a group.  Modular arithmetic is a useful feature of every programming language.   Trigonometry is important but can become unnecessarily confusing.   Sine and cosine functions are important parts of the vocabulary, but you can get lost forever in trigonometric identities and formulas.

Mathematics shouldn’t be a drag.  There are few core principles and very little actually to memorize.  You get to see some remarkable solutions to tough problems.  One famous mathematician said that mathematics should be “like floating down a river on your back.”  My father-in-law put it differently: “Mathematics is for people too lazy to do real work.”

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

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There haven’t been any book reviews on this site before, but Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is something of a special case.  This is a political book with a message that doesn’t quite fit into the current political environment, and it includes a large body of relevant history.  Not surprisingly, Pinker finds Trump antithetical to the Enlightenment precepts he is defending.  But he also finds plenty of guilt to go around.

To start with, the book seems to have two competing objectives:

  1. Validating the fact of human progress and documenting how it has been achieved. This is really a call to action based on humanistic goals.
  2. Providing reasons for optimism about the future. This is different—good things that are going to happen for reasons such as demographics, outside the scope of specific human actors.

On the face of it, a reader expects the first subject to be primary, if only because (at this point in time) you expect any political book to end up with recommendations for what to do.  But that’s not quite where Pinker is going.  He’s trying to view history not just as a demonstration of what works, but also as a way to understand where things are going longer term.  Since the two objectives are different, it helps to treat them one-by-one.

On the first subject, Pinker does a remarkable job of demonstrating the successes that humanity has achieved—In the longer term, in the last century, and in the past few decades. This involves health, security, standard of living, and many other quantitative measures of human welfare.   Much of this is unfamiliar because, as he says, this kind of thing just doesn’t make news.  The book is worth reading for this part alone.  Pinker does a good job of demonstrating progress and what is responsible for that progress:  science, rationality, and a broad-based desire to create a better world for everyone.  It is hard to argue with the historical fact that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

In passing Pinker tries to dispose of past arguments against enlightenment humanism.  As examples:  Humans are inherently irrational (except when they want to make a point).  Humanism is a white racist production (its advocates were on the anti-imperialist side).   Science ignores human values (just plain not true).

Predicting the future is harder, and overall I’d say that Pinker is not well-served by his desire to make things look positive.  He tries to say that nuclear war is improbable, but we know that just one outlier is bad enough.  He treats the climate change movement as a kind of hysteria, because science will just take care of it in time (based on mostly anecdotal evidence).  He views the populist phenomenon as a brief episode of backsliding until more liberal generations take over from the ones now on the verge of dying out.

So in the end it seems a shame that the future predictions tend to dominate discussions of the book, when it’s the first part—the defense of progress—that is its greatest contribution.

And then there is the question of the call to action.  What Pinker espouses is humanism—the broad-based, rational process that has delivered progress.  The problem is that humanism doesn’t have a political party.

Pinker points out that much of the political process just doesn’t work:  Issue-based movements systematically deny progress for fear of losing momentum (even though that means they frequently get caught in the bind of asking for more money to continue going nowhere).  Discussion of issues is based on faulty statistics and dishonest patterns of argument.  Democracy as a whole is not as rational or responsive as we would like to think (the chapter on that subject is well worth reading).  He gives plenty of examples of bad behavior on both the left and the right.  Both sides contributed to the grim view of reality that was instrumental in producing Trump.

So where do we go from here?  Individuals can learn to be more rational in their behavior and in their evaluation of what they see and read.  They can work with the flawed organizations that are fighting bad actors such as Trump.  They can involve themselves with specific issues and help to push them along.  All told—incremental change but no miracle solution.

That’s actually the optimism of the book.   There’s no silver bullet, but the process has worked thus far.  And hopefully we will keep it going.

Update on Climate Change

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This note is an update to the climate change article from last year.  The story hasn’t gotten any better, but there is enough that’s new to warrant a revisit.

The most fundamental piece of bad news is the opening figure, which comes from the Global Carbon Project.  After three years of seeming stability, the world production of carbon dioxide increased significantly in 2017.  (The figure says “projection” just to indicate that the final computations are in process.)  Without too much evidence we might as well call that the Trump bump.  As we noted last time, worldwide unanimity on climate change is important precisely because the advantages of cheating are so obvious.  We—with probably the most to gain from the Paris Agreement process—are the cheaters in chief.  So it’s not surprising others will have fewer second thoughts as well.

We have to put this change into perspective.  Even a stable value of CO2 emission means things are getting worse, because it is the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that drives temperature change, and it all adds up.  The stable value was attractive, because it seemed to indicate that CO2 had finally peaked and might start to decline.  And the decline might mean the total CO2 could be bounded.  We’re now back to worrying about the peak, with no idea how bad things will get.

Two more new slides from the Global Carbon Project show what we stand to gain from Paris Agreement unanimity.  The first shows the current per capita production of carbon dioxide.

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As has been true for many years US per capita usage sits way above everyone else, more than twice both Europe and China.  That is a direct expression of our carbon-powered standard of living.

The second slide shows who is going to have to make changes to protect that US standard of living from the effects of climate change.

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This shows that the major growth in carbon dioxide production is not from the biggest economies (note that even China has stabilized), it’s from the have-nots trying to achieve some fraction of our standard of living.   We are asking them to ignore not only our past exploitation of fossil fuel resources but even our current high per capita use and to delay their own immediate hopes for a better life in order to make the world a safer place for everyone.  So much for the question of who benefits from the Paris Agreement process!

That introduces the next topic—public attitudes to climate change.  There were enough strange weather events in the past year to give people pause, so we’re getting close to—but still not over—the hump.  The latest poll numbers have both good news and bad.  First the good news:

Overall, 45 percent of those surveyed said global warming would pose a serious threat in their lifetimes, the highest overall percentage recorded since Gallup first asked the question in 1997. Despite partisan divisions, majorities of Americans as a whole continue to believe by wide margins that most scientists think global warming is taking place, that it is caused by human activities and that its effects have begun.

Then the bad—the improvement is only partisan:

Gallup asked whether people agreed that most scientists believe global warming is occurring, and 42 percent of Republicans said yes, down from 53 percent a year earlier and back to a level last seen in 2014. Just 35 percent of Republicans said that they believe global warming is caused by human activities, down from 40 percent.

This seems like another proof of a much-discussed feature of human nature—when people are confronted with proof that their beliefs are wrong, they double down on defending those beliefs.   Unfortunately those are the people running the show.

How can that turn around?  A recent Steven Pinker book made an interesting point.  Much of the rhetoric around climate change focuses on conservation and a new world view of collective responsibility.  But conservation actually isn’t the main point—since we’re not repealing the industrial revolution, the main point has to be new energy sources.  We’re not creating a new world where no one drives Chevy Suburbans anymore, we’re just changing the power source.  Conservation, however important, is about buying time until we can get there.  Perhaps that’s one way to get climate change out of the culture wars (as it should be).

In any case the focus has to be on the reality of climate change, and everything else is tactics. With tactics it’s easier to be bipartisan.   One indication is that Congress, over Trump’s objection, passed a bill continuing tax breaks for solar, nuclear, geothermal, and carbon-capture projects.  This effort united left-wing and right-wing approaches to climate change largely under the radar.  However, it must be recognized that even with such efforts the US is now lagging far behind in support for the technology of climate change.

Carbon capture (separating out CO2 and storing it underground or elsewhere) deserves some special mention, because it has become a bigger topic in the past year.  On one hand this is an idea that has been around for decades without going very far, and what’s more the coal industry supports it as a lifeline.  On the other hand the technology seems to be improving, the Obama administration supported it as a transitional technology, and even the IPCC climate studies assume some form of it will be used.  It currently exists as an expensive add-on for power plants, and some still-speculative variants have been proposed to pull carbon dioxide straight out of the air.  Both the power plant and out-of-the-air applications have a common need for CO2 storage technology, of which there are many variants.

The biggest issue with carbon capture is that it can be (and is being) used to delay doing anything about climate change—why worry about carbon getting into the atmosphere if we’ll pull it all out later.  The problem is that the technology still has such big questions about cost and scaling, that “later” could be very late or never (and some effects, such as melting glaciers, are irreversible).  Even the cheapest estimates say it will cost continuing trillions.  What you have to say is that the technology investment is necessary and at worst it at least gets the climate dialog past the hoax stage.  And if we could just get the Kochs interested in that business (which is largely oil industry technology), it would settle the Republican perception of climate change once and for all!

Returning to reality, we have to conclude the past year seems like a pause for progress.  After Trump took the US out of the Paris Agreement, many wanted to talk about all that could be done to maintain momentum nonetheless.  The chart at the beginning shows the limits of that point of view.  There are other indicators as well:

– The auto industry’s step back from future fuel efficiency standards

– Exxon’s declaration that climate change is no risk to their profits

– Business as usual in the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook:

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– Even the new preoccupation with carbon capture has to be viewed as a vote of no-confidence in the progress of conservation.   If prevention isn’t going to happen, then repair is all we’ve got.

What’s more than there has even been a preoccupation with a more drastic step, so-called geo-engineering.  This means injecting chemicals or particles into the atmosphere so as to dim the sun and cool the earth despite the increasing CO2 concentration.  There are many risks:  continuing ocean acidification, reduced photosynthesis and food supply, and weaponization of the technology.  Since CO2 would continue to accumulate, any loss of protection would have disastrous effects.  These are desperate measures.

As to what we should be doing, the picture is not too different from last year, but we can be perhaps more explicit.

  1. Because burning carbon is now recognized to have definite costs (i.e. whatever is necessary to counteract the CO2 increase), we need some kind of carbon tax so that the free market economy can react correctly. Since that cost is not currently captured, our economy is incurring a significant distortion that needs to be fixed.
  2. We need to get back into the Paris Agreement process to return focus to the goal. To repeat the obvious, the Paris process was always intended to be iterative—with countries readjusting their goals to eventually reach the target. We’re only at step one, so we had better help the world get back on-track.
  3. We have to recognize that at this stage we’re in no position to judge winners and losers among contributing technologies. So the solution has to be all of the above: nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, carbon capture, even substituting gas for coal as a temporary measure.  The IPCC gave us what they called a carbon dioxide budget—the amount of CO2 we can add and still stay below a global temperature rise of 2 ⁰ C.  In 2014 (the year of the report) it was 800 giga-tons.  It is now below 700.
  4. People have to recognize that despite confusing news reports, we are all in this together. Some people will be hit by sea-level rise, some by drought, some by sheer temperature, some by storms, some by an effect we haven’t seen yet. Some may even be a little later.  But ultimately there’s nowhere to hide, and even “later” comes fast.
  5. There is no excuse for not funding research in all the contributing technologies and also research to understand the climate effects we are going to live with for however many years it takes to get past fossil fuels.
  6. Ideally all elements of society should be involved in planning such major changes. The carbon tax will help make that happen, but it’s not the whole story. We can’t keep fighting about this.

This administration likes to talk about itself as bringing business practices to government.   The evidence for climate change is such that any reasonable business would be doing its best to quantify the risk, so as to take appropriate action.   Businesses that choose to ignore disruptive new technologies or entrants are the ones that disappear—along with their disparaging comments on how the new stuff will never amount to anything.

Unless we choose to wake up—that’s us.  We’ll act now or pay far more dearly later.

 

Private Sector Fantasies

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This note is about a subject with perhaps more deliberately-sown confusion than any other:  the role of government in a market economy.

We start with the saint of free markets Adam Smith.   Adam Smith had no delusions that the free market system would somehow manage itself.   He saw three roles for government in a market economy:  defense, justice, and education.  Further he understood that the private sector and the free market were not the same thing—one of the roles of justice was to prevent the private sector from creating monopolies and thus perverting the free market.  In other words even as an ideal, the free market was neither self -policing (it needed to be protected against its own tendency to create abuses) nor self-sustaining (it needed government to create the population of educated workers).

With that as introduction, we want to talk more about the relations of business and government.  There are three sections.  The first two expand on policing and sustaining of the free market, as just discussed.  The third talks about scope—what objectives for society are in or out of scope for the free market. The Trump administration has positioned itself as the defender of free markets against government.  Instead they are defenders of something rather different, with real dangers as a result.

 

Policing the free market

Monopolies are bad.  they raise prices and stifle progress.  They are also by many measures growing in power.  But they are not the only area where the free market needs to be protected from itself.   For example, lack of business transparency perverts the capital markets, so the SEC plays a crucial role.

A more complicated but equally crucial role is regulation of the boom and bust cycles (with bank failures and human misery) that used to be endemic to capitalism.  Government has two responsibilities for controlling those cycles:

  1. It needs to act “countercyclically”. Despite the jargon term, this is so basic as to be biblical—save in good times to prepare for bad. In a recession the government is the only party able to stop the spiral of low sales -> layoffs -> even lower sales-> even more layoffs.  It does that by injecting money into the economy to stabilize sales.  But in a recession, tax revenues are down, and the money has to come from somewhere–preferably savings but if necessary debt.  In 2008 George W. Bush had just fought an off-budget 3 trillion-dollar war, so the cupboard was bare.  Republicans screamed about increasing the deficit, even proposing constitutional amendments for balanced budgets.  Their line “real people tighten their belts when they have to” was a deliberate misrepresentation.  Real people save for bad times; otherwise they have to borrow to put food on the table.
  2. Government needs to recognize and control the excesses that can creep in to cause havoc in the business cycle. While many factors contributed to the 2008 crash, the most spectacularly deadly was the perversion of the banking system caused by mortgage-backed securities. In the giddiness of deregulation no one was looking.  The aftermath produced the Dodd-Frank legislation as an antidote.

Finally, as a last example, there are categories of risk where you can’t count on the business decision-making process to do the job.  Low-probability/high costs events (plane crashes, oil rig blow-outs) should in theory be prevented by rational decision-making, but in practice it’s hard to refrain from increasing profits by ignoring something that “really isn’t going to happen”.  So there is a role for government there too—protecting both the public and the businesses.

Current status:

– The administration’s anti-trust position remains to be seen.  Trump campaigned against mergers, but appointed an industry-representing trust lawyer to head the anti-trust division.

– There seems to be no recognition of business cycle issues.  Trump’s tax plan runs a big deficit to stimulate an economy close to full employment.  This runs the risk of repeating 2008 with an even worse debt position to fight it.  He also wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and says he won’t enforce it now.

– The general rule is that any regulation opposed by any business is bad.

=>  There is no serious recognition that the financial system needs policing.  Trump runs the show based on what he has wanted to see for his own businesses.  This is a blind dash into another 2008 or worse.

 

Sustaining the free market

Adam Smith pointed out the need for government to supply a suitably-trained workforce.   In the eighteenth century that meant simply literacy.   The definition of suitably-trained has changed over time.  By 1940 a then astounding 50% of American students finished high school.  In that era no other country approached that level of broad education support.   Then the GI bill made college possible for veterans, and public colleges expanded widely throughout the 1960’s and 70’s.  This coincided with unquestioned American economic dominance.  An educated workforce (at all levels) remains a critical national requirement.

You can take that one step farther.  Equality of opportunity is usually discussed in terms of social effects, but there is a corresponding benefit to the free market.   Business and the market benefit when all persons are able to achieve up to their capabilities.  The United States used to lead the world in upward mobility, but with rising inequality it now ranks behind most developed countries.

There is one more government role that fits here as well, namely research.  Government support of research produces people to be hired by cutting-edge businesses, and also supports the creation of new businesses to exploit the progress of science and technology.

Current status:

– For college, the student debt crisis speaks for itself.  A whole generation of students can’t imagine when they will be able to get out of debt.  This is compounded by De Vos’ support of shady lenders and weakening of controls on fraudulent educational institutions.

– For K- 12 education, states have retreated in funding, and De Vos is proposing a voucher system that will abandon the broader population.  Vouchers will be fixed in dollar value, to be augmented by surcharges at the now-privatized schools.   If you want a good education you pay for it; if you can’t, there is no guarantee of what you get.  This is institutionalized separate and unequal.

– Trump’s budget essentially abandons the government’s role in research, and his appointees have attempted to minimize the role of science.

=> There is surprisingly little recognition that government has an important role here at all–except to privatize it!

 

Scope of the free market

Adam Smith felt that the private sector could not be trusted even to defend free markets.  So it is not surprising that there are other aspects of society that need defending as well.

We give a few examples:

– Well-being of workers.   Smith describes effects of supply and demand on workers, and he even points out that adequately-paid workers may be more productive, but he makes no claim of utopia from the free market.   In fact in Smith’s description, workers’ welfare depends on a market for labor in which individuals have little bargaining power.

– Resources and the environment

Enterprises will use the environment for their own benefit, unless there are rules to the contrary.

– Infrastructure

Public resources such as roads, bridge, airports, internet, etc. should be built and maintained as needed by everyone.

Current status:

– Trump has pushed to limit OSHA workrules, opposes unions, and has no plans to raise the minimum wage.

– The EPA is being severely cut and redirected to helping businesses.

– The stated approach to infrastructure is via private investment, which will go where the money is.

=> There is no recognition that areas such as these can be out of scope for the private sector.  Instead there is a blind belief that growth solves everything.

 

From this summary it should be clear how far we are from free market economics.

The current national policy is that the private sector just needs to be encouraged to go do its thing.   We don’t have to care about policing its risk, we can let it take care of education and research, and nothing other than its success is needed to solve every other problem in society.  Just make sure it’s flush with cash and let it go.

That was the history of the nineteenth century, and for vast part of the population it was no picnic.  And it is worth remembering that 1929 really did happen.

Even thinking of the more recent past there’s an eerie familiarity about our situation.  We have a supremely confident lunatic fringe with the power to run amok.  The last lunatic fringe to take control of our government (remember the neocons?) gave us the Iraq war—which destabilized the Middle East and bankrupted the country—and the crash of 2008.

This time it could well be worse.