Colorado has several comparative advantages that position us to combine a commitment to the preservation of our natural endowment; a commitment to the preservation, refinement, and expansion of the pleasant lifestyle that many enjoy in our beautiful state; a commitment to contributing to the development of the New Energy Economy (an inevitable component of future global economic development); and a commitment to fostering the most robust, sustainable, and equitable state economy, and most proactive, efficient, and effective state government possible.
Our natural endowment, particularly our spectacular mountains, are an economic asset both directly, in the tourism industry, and indirectly, as an attractor for investment capital by those who want to locate small start-ups, particularly in high-value-added information-intensive economic sectors, in the most attractive locations possible (since such sectors have no geographic constraints). And, of course, many Coloradans treasure our natural beauty for its inherent, aesthetic and recreational value, considering it to be one of our greatest assets, even independently of economic considerations.
For these reasons, we need to place a very high emphasis on the preservation of this endowment, carefully regulating other industries and practices (such as mineral extraction) that pose a threat both to the environment, and to public health and safety. Fortunately, despite erroneous ideological assertions to the contrary, mineral extraction, as an economic enterprise, is not highly sensitive to regulations or severance taxes, since there is very little flexibility in where minerals can be extracted (they must be extracted where they are found). Furthermore, since extracted minerals are sold in national and international markets, the increased costs of state regulations and taxes have only a marginal effect on market prices. In other words, the benefits occur within the state while the costs are distributed all over the world. For these reasons, sound policy requires that mineral extraction be a well-regulated and taxed enterprise.
Not only is Colorado rich in minerals, but it is also rich in sun and wind and the researchers and institutions doing the most to tap the energy contained in them. The future can rarely be predicted with confidense, but one thing that is virtually certain is that clean, renewable energy technologies are a growth industry, and will be enormous economic engines in the not too distant future. Foresight pays off in the long run. Investing in the New Energy Economy today, despite the modest size of that economc sector at present, and regardless of short term ups and downs in the market for “green energy”, is sound economic policy, and a smart move for the state of Colorado.
Our natural endowment is part of our pleasant lifestyle, with hiking trails, ski runs, rocks to climb and mountain rivers to float down, and spectacular vistas to appeal to all who enjoy nature’s wonders. But the Colorado lifestyle extends into our cities and suburbs as well, with excellent cycling opportunities, beautiful pedestrian malls, open spaces, and an increasing investment in the combination of excellent public transportation and sustainable, localized, aesthetically pleasing urban development. Continuing in this direction not only provides Coloradans with the benefits of all of these public goods, but also attracts the entrepreneurial capital of precisely those kinds of small start-ups that can create the most robust state economy possible. We live in a world in which the most information-intensive industries (e.g., computer software, and cutting edge technologies) create the greatest number of high-paying jobs, and contribute the most to the local and global economy. And such start-ups in such industries locate in places that provide the combination of natural beauty, pleasant life-style, and infrastructural investment that Colorado can provide, if we pursue wise policies.
But to attract such investment capital, and the young professionals and their families that bring it, we need to provide, competitively, what they are looking for: A well-developed human and material infrastructure on which they can depend, and the assurance of the availability of excellent and affordable public and higher education institutions for their children. We are currently, disgracefully, near the bottom of the country in investment in both public and higher education, and that is a very powerful disincentive to small information-intensive start-ups to locate here. More importantly, it is a moral failure on the part of the people of Colorado. As much of a cliche as it may be, our children are indeed our future, and failing to invest in them, to provide them with the best education possible, simply because an alliance of popular economic platitudes and well-funded corporate interests have displaced economic analyses, is a choice that can end up crippling and impoverishing this state, when nature has endowed us with such soaring opportunity.
There is a clear path forward for Colorado, a coherent strategy that preserves our natural endowment, fuels our economy, and secures a high quality of life for our residents. We need now to make sure that we elect the people, and cultivate the public commitment, to realize this vision, and create a more prosperous, sustainable, and opportunity-rich future for all Coloradans.
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The three 2010 Nobel Prize Winners in Economics won on the basis of work that shows friction in labor markets which leads to increased job vacancies do not necessarily lead to decreased unemployment (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101011/ap_on_bi_ge/nobel_economics). Two things to note: 1) Their work was directly applied to a British program called “A New Deal for Young People”, getting people between 18 and 24 employed after long periods of unemployment, and 2) Obama had appointed one (Peter Diamond, a former professor of Ben Bernacke) to the Federal Reserve board, but republicans have dragged their feet on confirmation, arguing that Diamond doesn’t have enough experience for them. These two observations illustrate that: 1) the government has a vital role to play in greasing the gears of the economic engine (mostly by reducing transaction costs), and 2) the Republicans are increasingly obstinately wedded to ignorance, eschewing the implementation of good ideas and the utilization of those who have them in favor of the rabid promotion of their own blind ideological false certainties. The Republican rejection of one of the creators of the current model of how markets work is an eloquent testimony to the nature of the ideological contest we are in: Those who want to apply the best analyses to address the challenges we face, against those who want to cling to shallow platitudes that serve their own interests and the interests of those they identify with.
Nelson Mandela had given a team of archivists with the job of distilling from the plethora of notes, letters, and recorded conversations he had produced over the course of his lifetime, charging them not to consult him or protect his reputation in doing so (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101011/ap_on_en_ot/af_south_africa_mandela_book; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/07/60minutes/main6936384.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel). An amazing man thus leaves two amazing legacies, a political one, and a biographical one.
Computer algorithm driven “High Frequency Trading” now may account for as much as 70% of current trading on the New York Stock Exchange (most of which no longer occurs atthe New York Stock Exchange). These high-speed computers deploy programs that are designed to sort through and analyze virtually all quantifiable data regarding virtually all corporations trading on the NYSE, making split-second decisions to buy and sell in order to make fraction-of-a-penny gains millions of times a day. This creates a combination of benefits, problems, and dangers for the market. The primary benefit is increased liquidity: Their massive, rapid buying-and-selling function means that other traders always have a seller to buy from and a buyer to sell to.
The primary problem is market-distortion: These massive, high velocity trades, dominating the market, have nothing to do with the long-term value of the stocks, or the long-term prospects of the enterprises. Thus, they confuse the market signals being sent by flooding them with information that is only of split-second relevance. A secondary problem is the loss of transparency: No one knows, and few understand, the algorithms being utilized, and what impact they have on the fairness and functionality of trading. And yet another problem is a sort of de facto inside trading, obtaining, processing, and utilizing information before all others not engaged in high frequency trading, an advantage so sensitive to even split second differences that proximity to the server from which such information is obtained creates an advantage.
And the primary danger is that the algorithms they implement can sometimes go awry, which was exactly what happened in the case of the sudden 600 point market freefall several months ago, that shook market confidence and cost traders billions of dollars. The lesson of High Frequency Trading is that in a complex, high tech modern economy, we need to have a government regulatory structure that can keep up with it. I’ve often referred to “information asymmetries” as one of the primary reasons why the elaborate and expensive federal regulatory regime we’ve created is an absolute necessity, and, in fact, probably still too small for the task it must meet. High Frequency Trading is a perfect, almost archetypical, example of what is meant by “information asymmetries”: Those who are more centrally located to the flow and processing of relevant information have the opportunity to manipulate markets to their advantage, and to the public detriment.
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Everybody knows that we are in the midst of a slow recovery from a major economic crisis. Everyone knows that growth (or lack thereof) in employment is a source of major political and economic concern. And, believe it or not, the politicians are listening, and worrying. But that may well end up being a part of the problem.
Economic and associated political desperation lead to a contracting global economy by leading to increasing protectionism, a race to the bottom in currency devaluation (competing to make one’s own products cheaper abroad than those of other nations), and an increasing need to come up with short-term fixes at the expense of long-and-medium-term economic growth. Some would argue that ARRA was a prime example of this error; I don’t agree (in fact, one of ARRA’s greatest defects as a recovery mechanism was its degree of investment in human infrastructure, which only really pays off in the long-run). But the delusion that we live in a national rather than global economy, which persists on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, is a dangerous fantasy, and one we need to strive to avoid indulging in.
Concerns about the devaluation war are starting to rumble through that sphere of the collective consciousness which pays attention to such things (http://www.economist.com/node/17202341?story_id=17202341; http://www.economist.com/economist-asks/should_america_place_punitive_tariffs_china_if_it_continues_maintain_artificially_wea; )http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16299595). As the first Economist article explains, it’s a strategy that has, paradoxically, boosted stock, bond, and gold markets simultaneously, but not because of the strength it imparts on our long-term economic prospects. As The Denver Post article points out, “the concern is that such efforts could trigger the trade wars that contributed to The Great Depression of the 1930s as country after country raises protectionist barriers to imported goods.”
There is perhaps no economically more volatile and dangerous combination than a suffering population demanding immediate results, and a set of policies which provide immediate results at long-term peril. This is a time when a higher degree of self-restraint and long-term responsibility is required than populist-driven democracies are wont to provide. It’s a time when both elected officials and those who elected them have to recover a stronger sense of how important leadership is in a crisis. We need elected officials who are courageous enough to piss us off in order to do the right thing, rather than give us what we want at our own long-term expense.
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There is a major movement in our country based on isolating individual issues, considering them in a vacuum, eschewing the products of academic research and careful analysis as “elitist,” insisting that arbitrary certainties are far more responsible and deserving of respect, struggling to disintegrate our social bonds to our mutual detriment, and fueling adherents’ angry opposition to applying our minds and hearts to the challenges and opportunities we face as a a people with fabricated absurdities and oversimplistic platitudes. One of the false certainties of this movement is that public spending at levels at or near what they currently are, and taxation at almost anything above an impossibly low level, is an act of violence against future generations, by bequeathing to them a ballooning debt and a crippled economy. But deficits come in many forms, and economies are more certainly crippled by turning any one legitimate consideration into an idol at whose alter reason and knowledge are sacrificed.
First, it’s important to note that this popular conservative vision of how economies work is cartoonishly oversimplistic. Even conservative economists almost universally agree (I haven’t heard one contradict this yet) that the continuation of tax cuts to the very wealthy is fiscally and economically indefensible. Most economists, even conservative ones, recognize the need for a complex regulatory structure to address information asymmetries in our complex modern economy. And most economists recognize the importance of investing in our human and material infrastructure. We will not reduce our national debt, nor reinvigorate our national economy, by starving our human and material infrastructure of the funds necessary to make them functional and competitive.
America, not long ago, led the world in college graduates. We are now far behind many other countries. Our leadership as innovators and an economic powerhouse will deteriorate as a result of our deteriorating commitment to this foundational demand upon us as a people. Jobs and capital will continue to gush from this country like oil from a blown well, and our attempts to cap the leak will be just as desperate. Eventual success, even if such is achieved, will leave just as much irreparable devastation in its wake.
American college tuitions are skyrocketing (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16273813), in large measure due to the anti-tax, anti-spend mania of overzealous libertarians. In revenue-starved Colorado, the problem is far greater than it is in less ideologically fanatical states. As a result, not only will America become increasingly less attractive to foreign capital, and not only will American employers be increasingly forced to seek more and more of their high-salaried, highly educated employees from countries like India, where well-educated labor is available at bargain prices; but Colorado will become increasingly less attractive even in comparison to other regions of the country. Entrepreneurs looking for a beautiful place with a pleasant life-style to locate their information-intensive start-ups, will think twice about choosing Colorado (which would otherwise, under smarter policies, be a front-runner), knowing that the state will not be able to provide enough of the human capital necessary, can’t be counted on to maintain the material infrastructure necessary, and won’t provide their children with the kind of education necessary, to attract and hold them.
The most critical deficit we are facing as a country, and more dramatically as a state, is the deficit in our investment in the minds of our children and young adults (the most vital of all naturally resources, tragically squandered); in the state-of-the-art infrastructure that a robust, world-class economy requires; in our hopes and dreams; and in our future. And that’s the deficit that is most urgent for us to get under control.
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As I was reading today’s Denver Post article (http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana/ci_16239152) on the journey of Medical Marijuana legalization in California, Colorado, and elsewhere, and the journey of Proposition 19, to outright legalize and tax small quantities of marijuana possession or growth, on this year’s ballot in California, I was struck by one surprising parallel: That between the current illegal growers, and the 18th century American colonial tea smugglers who were major catalysts of the original “tea parties” in major cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard. You see, many illegal growers (particularly those in Humbolt County in the north, long a major haven of illegal pot cultivation) oppose Proposition 19, because, though it serves everyone’s interests but their own, it promises to cut into their profits and alter their familiar and preferred way of life. And that’s exactly what motivated the smugglers (closely intertwined with the original “pirates of the Caribbean”), who happily smuggled Dutch East India Tea Company (“Dutch”) tea to the colonies, in order to avoid the taxes and mark-ups that accumulated on British East India Tea Company (“British”) tea on its journey from India to London, and from London to America, passing through various brokers’ hands. It was when the British cut out the London middlemen, and lowered (not raised) the taxes on British tea (which the colonists had always been legally obligated to buy), that the smugglers helped stir up the more idealistic rebels (like Sam Adams), and whip the coastal elites, with which the smugglers had close ties, into a frenzy.
I doubt that the Humboldt County growers will have quite the same impact, but the similarities are striking.
That’s not the only thing I noticed about the article. I also noticed another example of the ecology of human social institutional change (see “The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia”). You see, once medical marijuana became legalized, it became big business, creating “money and friends,” as the Post article put it. And once it became big business, it meant jobs, creating union friends. And the promise of profits and jobs while still mired in “the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression” means hope, political hay, and a lot of others saying “what the hey.” On top of that, the NAACP got on board, reasonably enough seeing the unnecessary and destructive incarceration of (often African American) youths for a crime that shouldn’t be a crime as an afront to civil rights and the creation rather than deprivation of opportunity. With a “budding” industry promising profits and jobs, a growing familiarity with legal marijuana in more and more communities, and a potentially robust economic activity and public revenue generator, what seemed very distant in the mid-90’s became close-at-hand at the end of the 00’s. Such is the nature of realignments; dominoes falling in branching succession, as more and more people find change to be in their own interests.
But such ecosystems of mutual reinforcing interests aren’t without predators and prey, and other conflicting interests in competition. And so we come back to our Humboldt County growers, who are concerned that legalization will put them out of business, or at the very least depress prices and reduce profits. Like the real interests behind those face-painted Sons of Liberty before them, their fortunes lie with the illegal and untaxed T, not with the legal and taxed variety.
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This is a very specific, almost arbitrary, example of the systemic nature of the reality in which we live, and an illustration of the coherence of systems across levels and disciplines. The relevance, for me (other than exercising the sense of wonder that I believe should be driving us), is to draw attention once again to the ways in which we can better understand the context within which we live, both “human” and “natural” (it’s all natural, really), and, by doing so, can be better equipped to interact with that context wisely and productively. It stands in opposition to the movement advocating self-governance by shallow platitude, and in support of the movement that insists we are conscious entities, forever summoned to cope with the challenges and opportunities of a complex and subtle world.
The October 11 issue of Time Magazine has an article in it about Blockbuster’s “failure at failing” (i.e., its failure to manage its demise in shareholders’ best interests), which made me think of what an excellent example audio-visual entertainment is of the parallels between economics and evolutionary ecology, with the distinction (among others) of far more cross-over synthesis involved in the flow of innovations (like “breeding” of genetically dissimilar species to produce dramatically different ones). It is a story of dominant successors displacing eclipsed predecessors, combining with other dominant successors from other distinct lines of evolutionary descendance
Like a whole new species emerging from the combination of photographs (flipped in rapid succession) and, eventually, phonographs, first silent movies and then talkies spread like Eucalyptus trees in California. Movies shown at movie theaters became a dominant form of entertainment. Breaking this down a little, silent movies were the Neanderthals to the Homo Sapiens Sapiens of talkies, a dominant sub-species either displacing or interbreeding with the “inferior” one, driving it into extinction.
Then, by improving and adapting the technology of broadcasting signals encoded with sound (radio) to this form of entertainment, incorporating moving images as well, a new ecological niche was formed, one that would prove to be immensely robust: Television, in one’s own home (again, television being the dominant successor to radio, with the synthesis of audio-visual entertainment with broadcast technology being its genesis). The various species (audio recordings, radio, movies, and television) have found different ecological niches ever since, sometimes competing at one another’s expense, sometimes contributing to one another’s reproductive success. Silent movies were the only species from these various braided lines of development to go (virtually) completely extinct.
Within the television industry, various micro-ecologies evolved, with three major networks in the United States swallowing up and revitalizing local stations, forming a very robust symbiosis. Different content formats were tried and evolved: Talk shows, variety shows, news broadcasts (all off-spring of radio predecessors in form). Sit-coms, courtroom dramas, cop shows, and other archetypical forms, emerged and evolved, and occasionally blended into new forms (Ally McBeal and Boston Legal each blending comedy and courtroom drama, for instance).
Meanwhile, movies evolved as well, with special effects, and various genres, and various motifs developing and cross-breeding and displacing predecessors in a variety of ways. And some cross-breeding occurred between movies and television (and novels), with mini-series briefly enjoying a heyday (though short-lived due to the expense of production, a species-killer, at least in television, at least thus-far).
Enter video cassettes, a technology cross-pollinator of movies and TV. Now movies produced for cinemas could be watched at home on television sets. This seemed to threaten the survival of the movie industry for awhile, reducing box office revenues dramatically, until the movie industry adapted, and found that home rentals and sales could be every bit as lucrative.
Then the separate evolutionary thread that produced the computer revolution cross-fertilized with these, as with virtually all other evolutionary threads, producing compact disks, and, eventually, streaming video (as well as downloadable songs and i-pods, and downloadable movies).
Blockbuster was an innovative business piggybacking on the invention of video cassettes, which made more sense to rent than to buy. It was a niche waiting to be filled. But like ostentatious displays such as huge antlers on elk or bright plumage on peacocks, signalling to potential mates a surplus of male prowess, few qualities contribute more to reproductive success of products sold in the modern market than increased convenience. So, with the invention of the compact disk (and more manageable postage rates associated with smaller size), Netflix swept in to occupy that niche, ultimately spelling doom for the far larger and richer Blockbuster.
Netflix itself had to adapt to streaming or downloaded video via computer, or it would have been displaced by dominant successors just as it had displaced Blockbuster (which failed to adapt in time, though it might now). In fact, Netflix faces stiff competition from others eager to fill the streaming and downloadable video niche, including Amazon and Apple. And a separate niche exists for supermarket and store based CD rental vending machines, in which Redbox enjoys an early dominance.
I’ve traced above just one set of strands of a far vaster and more complicated net, with, for instance, the evolution of audio recording devices (phonographs to reel-to-reel tape to cassettes to digital, with the various forms of vinyl recordings evolving alongside of magnetic tapes); different filming and projecting technologies and types (as well as production styles); television sets (from small black-and-white to slightly larger, then color, then much larger, then projection, then plasma screen); different television signal delivery technologies (local over-air broadcast, cable, satellite, digital, which catalyzed a proliferation of channels and networks); and, of course, evolving computer hardware and software intertwined with all the others.
Any aspect of the “anthrosphere” (human social institutions, technologies, products and constructions, and cultural motifs) can similarly be zeroed in on as one aspect of the evolutionary process discussed in “The Politics of Consciousness ,” and “Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future.” We can trace building construction, or aviation, or land transportation, or clothing, or medicine, or money, or markets, or warfare, or farming, or mining, or law, or political forms, or religion, or any other aspect of the human-produced sphere of our existence, in exactly the same way as audio-visual entertainment, and then trace the linkages and cross-fertilization’s among them. By understanding the anthrosphere in these terms, and contextualizing those human systems within the similar biological evolutionary ecological systems (the “biosphere”) that they mimic and echo, all within the framework of other natural systems (e.g., the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere), we have a single, coherent paradigm within which to understand the entire global system, applying complex dynamical systems analysis adapted to the particular forms of analysis evolved to address various subsystems, focusing on different aspects in different ways, zooming in more tightly or panning out more broadly, but not arbitrarily divorcing any one branch from the others with which it is ultimately interconnected.
(see also Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, The Fractal Geometry of Law (and Government), and The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix for more on this general theme).
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There’s a new column on Denverpost.com on philanthropy (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_15846877). The up-side of this column and its focus and purpose is that it, hopefully, will help to cultivate an awareness of the human suffering we are not addressing but can, of others who are stepping up and contributing to solutions, and of the amount of money increasingly put into circulation to do so. The down-side is that it continues to reinforce a vision of addressing our deep structural problems through a slight diversion of the surplus produced by the status quo, accompanied by a continued failure to consider how to alter the status quo in systemic ways to more substantially address those deep structural problems.
The author discusses three myths that motivate our current widespread lack of investment in positive social change through philanthropy: That there’s not enough money to go around, that more money makes one better, and that the injustices and suffering in the world is just the way it is. Similar myths, on a deeper level, motivate our widespread lack of commitment to fomenting positive systemic social change: Our political economic system cannot be fundamentally improved upon in ways that won’t hurt those who are currently faring well; the current distribution of wealth and welfare in the world is fair because those who have it deserve it and those who don’t don’t; and making significant headway on solving the world’s problems is an unrealistic Utopian dream.
It’s been said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, and can as well be said that those who don’t understand history are doomed to be blind to its implications. We have a social movement in America that reveres a mythologized Constitution as a sacred document, that considers the country as it was established to be the perfection of political form. Yet those who understand history recognize these events as moments on a continuum, sequential developments built on previous ones. It is a lesson in the reality of progress, and a strong suggestion that there is further progress yet to be achieved, not only in terms of what is done within the political context we have created, but also what is done to refine and build upon the political context we have created.
The same holds true in economics: The development of “capitalism,” of our complex modern market economy, is a marvel of diffuse, evolutionary human genius. But it has been developing from time immemorial, and continues to develop today, and those developments are affected by conscious choices with conscious goals in mind. The notion that we can’t take this engine of wealth production and continue to refine it so that it becomes both more sustainable and more equitable is another variation of the ahistorical belief that what is is what must forever be, or that some marvelous product of history can’t be improved upon, when, in fact, what is has never remained what would be in the future, and every marvelous product of history that has preceded us has indeed been improved upon, and was itself the product of earlier improvements of earlier forms.
As I’ve written in several other posts (The Politics of Consciousness; Information and Energy), human history is an evolutionary process, an accumulation of innovations that create accelerating progressions in our social institutional, technological, and cognitive landscapes. The notion that this dynamical systemic logic somehow does not apply to the improvement of our world on the dimensions of humanity and sustainability is arbitrary and absurd. Just as we do not live in Oliver Twist’s Victorian England, future generations can and will live in circumstances different from, and hopefully better than, ours. The form and degree of those differences depend on our commitment to ushering them in, just as our transcendence of past deficiencies depended on the efforts of past visionaries.
Yes, we need more philanthropy and philanthropic spirit. But we also need more optimism, more compassion, more commitment to doing better as a society. And we need to believe that we can do far more than merely toss the peasants a coin from time to time.
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No sooner do I write and post an essay on the literally evolutionary nature of modern information technologies (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=577), then I come across an article in The Economist zeroing in on one aspect of exactly what I’m talking about (http://www.economist.com/node/17091709?story_id=17091709).
In my novel (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=126), a wizard ruminates that “the genius of the many is a captive giant, whose freedom is the ends and the means of all other things.” Wikinomics is about another large step in the liberation of that captive giant, by reducing the transaction costs involved in massive decentralized network communications. Ronald Coase famously said that in the absence of transaction costs, we would bargain our way to maximum utility. Some have interpreted Coase’s Theorem to be more about the formidable obstacle posed by transaction costs than the efficacy of bargaining our way to paradise. But, in either case, the internet has dramatically reduced the size of that obstacle.
The Denver Post reported today on the revamped Mile High Marketplace in Commerce City (formerly the Mile High Flea Market) (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16169374). It’s not just a flea market anymore (though it still includes one), nor is it a modern mall or strip mall, or traditional commercial area. It is, it seems, an agora, a vibrant, diverse, entertaining place of convergence, where people can find exotic (as well as mundane) wares, fresh produce, roving entertainers, chance encounters, and other attractions.
As a world traveler and avid student of ancient history, I find such agoras particularly attractive artifacts of the human spirit. The famous Covered Bazaar in Istanbul (and it’s uncovered sprawl of shops and stalls that surround it) is a marvel to behold. The vendors lining the narrow, corridor-like lanes of the Old City of Jerusalem and other ancient towns and cities, hawking their wares, bargaining with customers, is a wonderful slice of life that has been tragically scrubbed from our modern existence.
The agora in ancient Greece, as in many lands, was more than a marketplace for vendors’ wares; it was also a social meeting place and a marketplace of ideas, where people came to discuss the issues of their day. In our own aesthetically sterilized culture, few things are more welcome than some remnant of those less dehumanized times and locales finding its way back into our lives. Let’s stop by and listen to a roving minstrel, or admire an artisan’s painstakingly crafted offerings, while we enjoy a delicacy made for such occasions.
Let’s all meet at the agora again, where we can exchange the products of our labor and of our minds, and create greater shared wealth by doing so.
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The none-too-liberal Denver Post reported today that “even conservative-leaning budget and policy analysts said the Republican blueprint, as drafted, would lead to bigger, not smaller, deficits and that it did not contain the concrete, politically difficult steps needed to alter the nation’s fiscal trajectory.” (http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_16159864). You know you’re in trouble when your pseudo-economic mantra to shrink government, lower taxes, and reduce regulation is rejected even by that minority of professional economists who are ideologically inclined in your favor.
Alan Greenspan, no mamsy pamsy nanny statist by any stretch, had already publicly said that the continuation of the Bush tax cuts to the super-wealthy is counterproductive and economically indefensible at this juncture. Not even Republican shills (at least those with an iota of integrity) can support the economically irresponsible, politically pandering and cynical attempt by the Republicans to wrest political power from those who, you know, are actually trying to govern the country.
Even by the narrow measure of short-and-medium-term economic efficiency and robustness, the Republican policy fails. Add in its complete indifference to long-term economic sustainability (by, for instance, mitigating global warming), distributional justice (by, for instance, ever-more insistently advocating policies which continue to concentrate ever-more wealth in ever fewer hands), and human welfare in general (by, for instance…, well, everything they stand for), and you have failure on an epic proportion, failure that will reduce our children and their children to suffering victims of a dumb ideology successfully imposed on a complacent and complicit society.
As I’ve said before on this blog (The Economic Debate We’re Not Having: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=247), there are legitimate and necessary debates to be had over how much and what kind of public spending, under what conditions, serves our long-term interests, and how much and what kinds harm our long-term interests, all things considered. And certainly, one of the principal things to consider is the effect it has on the robustness of the economy. I’ve linked to an op-ed piece by a Harvard economist and public policy expert who argued, in a remarkably balanced and level-headed analysis, that there’s little or nothing government can do to stimulate job creation (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=325); to an academic paper by another professor of economics at our own University of Colorado who argued that those public investments in public goods that are supplementary to private goods have the largest (non-keynesian) multiplier (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=247&cpage=1#comment-14); and to an op-ed piece by the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics, who railed against Republican Mitch McConnell for resorting to political extortion to hold much-needed middle-class tax relief hostage to clearly fiscally irrational tax breaks for the super-wealthy (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=415).
I’ve argued myself that few argue that The Great Depression wasn’t definitively ended by the most robust, public debt-creating public spending project in human history: America’s participation in World War II, as the arsenal of the free world. I’ve yet to hear anyone explain how public spending can be so inefficacious, when it was so resoundingly effective in that case.
Be that as it may, that’s the kind of debate responsible leadership should be having, rather than this economically, socially, and politically destructive sloganeering, spreading false certainties like a plague through the land, such that sweet old grannies are now spewing them today just as some sweet old grannies spewed racist epithets in generations past.
Even the free-market advocate Economist magazine noted in this weeks issue that the Tea Party “constitutional idolatry” which is paraded out as the political philosophical justification for this mantra, is “infantile” (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=525). When the most highly respected market oriented magazine in the world calls the ideological underpinnings of a movement that claims to be the defenders of liberty “infantile,” in a chorus accompanied by conservative economic and policy analysts stating that the GOP plain actually increases rather than reduces our deficit, you know that reason is in decreasing supply at that end of the ideological spectrum.
It’s time to grow-up, folks; or move aside, and let the grown-ups do the serious business of governing ourselves wisely.
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