The problem with Occupy Wall Street

As regular readers will know, I worry that the American left is preoccupied with culture at the expense of economics, more concerned with identity politics than it is with combating inequality. As someone who leans left primarily because of economic issues, that’s made me feel a bit homeless, politically.

So, as a critique, from the left, of our economic malaise, Occupy Wall Street interests me. But I am frustrated by the way the critique is framed. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Soul-Searching On Inequality

In the early months of the financial crisis, I wrote up a post that attempted to look at the relationship between income inequality and economic catastrophes, arguing that as the U.S. economy has opened to the rest of the world, the correlation between economic growth and income growth has eroded. As a result, it’s now perfectly possible to see incomes fall even as the economy is growing. There are two problems with this: first, the kind of debt bubbles created by the gap between growth (ie consumption) and income, and secondly, the ease with which a person paying attention to that top-line growth can MISS the signs of an oncoming bubble burst if they aren’t paying attention to the income gap.

At the time, this was a bit of a crazy argument to be making, but since then I have seen versions of it pop up elsewhere. It was posed as a question–and left hanging–by Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. It was the underlying assumption of a series on the causes of inequality that Tim Noah wrote up for Slate. And it has been bandied about by senior economists at Harvard, Princeton, and U. Chicago.

Here’s what’s interesting about this trend. Most of the people making the argument against income inequality are folks who were in favor of greater redistribution before the crisis, folks who see a moral argument for greater equity irrespective of the economics, and for whom the economics is just a new arrow in the quiver. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanksgiving Book Recommendation

I’m surfacing briefly from my food coma induced nap to type out this post, and then I’ll be climbing right back into bed. Those of you who read this blog regularly (all five of you, that is) will know that I’m preoccupied–some might say obsessed–with the conflict between the communitarian and individualist strains in liberal politics. And I keep returning to the subject in large part because I feel I’m doing a lousy job of articulating what I think–or indeed, understanding myself well enough to be articulate. Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom, is helping me work through it, and for that, I recommend it to you.

The best analysis of the novel I’ve read is over at Apostrophe, a lit blog by a former schoolmate of mine, Amelia Atlas. Here’s what she says,

There is a totality to what he writes that extends beyond its visible horizons, a moral universe as well as a visual one.  Whether or not one believes in the fundamental enterprise of realism—a conversation for another time—there are few equal practitioners of it working in America today.

… the entirety of Freedom could be taken as one long performance of everything that Mill, in his utilitarian idealism, got wrong.

…In On Liberty, Mill outlines a vision of freedom wherein the only constraints on the actions of any one person are those which entail harm unto others.  He is not so naïve as to believe in an automatic consensus of what constitutes harm, but he does believe that it’s possible for untempered individuality to exist alongside a sense of the common good

…I make no claim that Freedom is by any stretch a kind of one-to-one test of Mill’s harm principle.  What Franzen does do, however, is capture the difference between a conceptual and an experiential politics.  Like his nineteenth-century progenitors, he checks our moral compass against its reality on the ground (this, not simply mimesis, is the heart of the realist tradition).

Really, there’s not much to do except issue a huge +1 to the above.

What spoke to me most about the book is that it solves a problem I have had in explaining my preference for communitarian over individualist liberalism to friends, colleagues etc. What I find is that EVEN when I can make a legitimate case for why the communitarian approach produces a better policy outcome in some area of public life, I face a lot of skepticism for why anyone, personally, should be drawn to it. It always seems to my listener that I’m asking them to trade IN themselves for the community, when in fact the core of communitarianism is the notion that the self is MOST fulfilled when grounded in relationships to others. Very few people seem to buy that notion of positive freedom anymore. Franzen does a pretty good job of making the case in reverse, by showing not only what hollow social doctrines Millian individualism produces, but also–and more importantly–how soul-crushing it is FOR the individuals who participate in it. It is a book about people who believe that they are acting in the general interest by fulfilling themselves personally, and it is a book about the personal tragedy that comes from this delusion.

This makes for tough reading. The characters are unpleasant people, and get worse as the book–and their individualist experiment–progresses. There are no good guys and no light moments of relief from the ugliness the book sets out to expose. It will upset you. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea. One of my former colleagues thought it could have been a better novel if it gave us more lovable faces. But my favorite thing about it was its unrelenting tone, an urgency and desperation, as if Franzen were the last sane man in the asylum screaming to be heard before the individualist madness engulfs him too. The fact is, I’ve not read anything that felt so completely of–and in response to–its moment than this book in about ten years.

Read it. And Happy Thanksgiving!