The Hypocrisy and Failure of Ideology

I have been fascinated by the 1920s and 1930s for as long as I can remember.  This was the period of the ‘modern age’ in which scientists like Einstein were cultural icons. U.S. presidents included the two Roosevelts, who spent much of their time trying to rein in the excesses of too much power in the hands of too few people.  There was a very good reason that the big huge corporate CEOS of their day were called robber barons.

It was a culturally rich period also.  Cultural and religious conservatives who tried to put alcohol consumption in a lock box actually ushered in a period of backlash that brought us jazz, the rights of women, and advances in art and architecture. The oppression of the many by the uptight actually brought on a cultural renaissance from the ranks of the fed up.  My grandparents’ generation were probably the first of American’s youth who decided that the game was rigged against them.

It seems like we would be ripe for similar changes today.  We have both the robber barons and the nastiness of culture/religionist warriors.  What we don’t have is a healthy respect for science, discovery, data, and the geology of our country and a leadership class that has a significant number of people that aren’t completely wound up in either baseless ideology and/or religious narrowness.  You may have read that Einstein was a popular figure back in the day.  Can you imagine any scientist or professor reaching pop status in this day and age–let alone a theoretical physicist?  The only person that may have rivaled him in popularity at the time was Charlie Chaplin. Both were immigrants.  Both escaped an oppressive class system and in Einstein’s case, violent, hateful anti-antisemitism.  Our country is supposed to not have a ruling class and it’s supposed to respect all religions as part of its heritage.  All that seems lost on today’s ideologues.

Let’s just say my heroes have never been reactionaries but visionaries.

It makes no sense to me to continue to support and push failed hypotheses. However, the folks who have taken over the Republican Party–as well as some Democrats these days–do just that.  They have no respect for science, professionals in most fields, researchers, data, or modernity. They just keep spinning yarns and making villans out of the US intelligentsia. Frankly I find it quite scary.  Many of our modern immigrants–like Albert Einstein–came here from fascist states or states that persecuted minorities and would not let them pursue research agendas that flew in the face of fascist governments or oppressive religious institutions.  Because of our openness to rational thought and constitutional protection of minority opinions, researchers in the United States made important discoveries.  Just think how the sequencing of the human genome has validated the theory of evolution beyond anything we thought possible as well as opened the door to new therapies for old diseases.  Yet, we have a series of cretins in charge or running for office who consider those brilliant discoveries on the same level as a creation myth.  We have made many discoveries in climate science, and yet full scale denial of reality is a going business.  Fomenting hate and ignorance is an industry in this country right now.

The same is the case with my field of economics.  We continue to see the rise of thoroughly wrong concepts because denying reality serves the the interests of a few rich and powerful but ignorant people.  The arguments never turn on the research. Like religion, they turn on what people want to believe is true. Easy answers do not necessarily represent the truth.  We  badly need a Renaissance of scientific thought in this country. We will never capture any more “firsts” in anything until we reach for the stars and stop grabbing at easy, unsupported answers.  Many of our politicians should be placed in the category of flat earthers.

The NYT had an interesting commentary up today by economist Tyler Cowen that both raises the flag on the reliance of “conservatives” and “libertarians” on failed memes rather than evidence, yet paradoxically pushes its own set of really stupid canards.  Even the title is disturbing.  “Whatever Happened to Discipline and Hard Work?”  implies that the kids in the Occupy movement and disgruntled others in this country are lazy basement dwellers who hate wealthy people.  Cowen wants to turn the conversation away from wealth to values. This is an extremely slippery slope that rests on some really bad assumptions. He also has a rather limited definition of “values”.

Right wingers seem to think that  the Occupy movement hates people because they are rich or wealthy. I even saw some one on MSNBC ask why OccupyLA doesn’t focus on the richies in the movie industry.  Aren’t Hollywood stars worthy of contempt also? ( I do admit to disliking Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, but it is because they waste perfectly good screen time and take up roles that could go to talented actors.  It isn’t because of their money.)  This is the false identification of the movement as ‘class war.’

The Occupy movement does not hate the wealthy or have it in for anyone who makes money in a creative or legitimate way.  Ben Roethlisberger may be a perfectly loathsome human being, but he got his money by developing a talent that’s in high demand.  No one hates him for his money. The Occupy movement is against people that get wealthy through ‘crony capitalism,’ which means they set up a system through buying political influence that allows them to draw wealth away from others.  One of Cowen’s first paragraphs absolutely made me cringe.  Does he really think that all CEOs are Hank Reardon?  (Yes, I read that corny book in high school.)

The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. Furthermore, the best approach for fighting poverty is often precisely not to make fighting poverty the highest priority. Instead, it’s better to stress achievement and the pursuit of excellence, like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. These are still at least the ideals of many conservatives and libertarians.

The egalitarian ideals of the left, which were manifest in a wide variety of 20th-century movements, have been wonderful for driving social and civil rights advances, and in these areas liberals have often made much greater contributions than conservatives have. Still, the left-wing vision does not sufficiently appreciate the power — both as reality and useful mythology — of the meritocratic, virtuous production of wealth through business. Rather, academics on the left, like the Columbia University economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey D. Sachs among many others, seem more comfortable focusing on the very real offenses of plutocrats and selfish elites.

Yes, the United States still has a regard for the rags to riches story. However, Bernie Maddoff and Raj Rajaratnam are more typical these days of the kinds of wealth amassed in this country than that amassed by a Thomas Edison.  Back in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there was just as much outcry against the slash and burn capitalism practiced by John D Rockefellar and J.P Morgan as there is today in the multigenerational Occupy movement.  It is one thing to gain wealth by inventing something worthwhile and bringing it to market,  it is completely another to use practices that lead to monopoly power.  Sachs and Stiglitz do not begrudge Warren Buffet his success.  They rightly point out how trust fund babies like the Koch brothers use their funds to produce bad science and fund flat earth politicians simply to get more rich and more powerful.  No one hates the wealthy.  Americans hate crooks and there are plenty of them in the finance industry these days.  They should be put in jail just like any one who steals.

So, then Cowen comes down to some brass tacks that recognize that Hank Reardon is a fictional character that came from the mind of one woman with a challenging personal history that made her do and write some really odd things.  He makes the argument that I have; nevertheless, he still believes that those of us that eschew his labels are doing anything other than attacking the wealthy.  For some reason, he’s the only one able to see the subtleties.

The first problem is that higher status for the wealthy can easily lead to crony capitalism. In public discourse social status judgments are often crude. Critical differences are lost, like the distinction between earning money through production for consumers, as Apple has done, and earning money through the manipulation of government, which heavily subsidized agribusinesses have done. The relevant question, in my view, is not about how much you have earned but about how you have earned it. To further confuse matters, many right-wing Republican politicians supported corporate bailouts and corporate welfare far beyond what was necessary to stabilize the economy, in doing so further muddying the difference between productive and predatory capitalism.

If you want to talk values, then you have to talk about the number of businesses that have been able to buy political power and create laws that allow them to extract benefits that are not available to anyone else.  In contrast, you’ve got a ton of kids in Occupy that have student loans, degrees, and no jobs.  This doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of lazy, hippie basement dweller that the right loves to push on Fox News.  Oh, and we even have Republican Congress Critterz saying that it’s some lack of moral fiber to not hold three jobs down while going to get a degree.  I’ll hold my own personal experience up here.  I put myself through two degrees working full time, selling my football tickets, and not taking student loans in the 70s and 80s with my then husband who had a four year scholarship for a perfect SAT score.  I could not do that now. My kids both worked to pay their overhead nearly full time with their tuition paid by us.  If we hadn’t saved for that back in the day, they’d have student loans too.  Actually, Doctor Daughter now has huge student loans.  We just saved for normal degrees, not the cost of med school.   My expenses just have increased more than my salary has the last 10 years.  So, I worked full time to get all of my degrees.  I still could not swing the last ones without student loans.  Then there’s the fact that the unemployment rate is so bad, you’re lucky if you can even get a job in a restaurant in most college towns.  Some of these memes just don’t stand up to hard, cold reality.  That, however, does not count for the spinmeisters of the right.  It’s still some personal shortcoming to get any kind of help from some one else.

There is another meme mentioned here that I totally hate.  The idea that there’s this bunch of people that are “tax weary” out there when we have some of the lowest taxes on the books in modern history.   Thank goodness Cowen at least mentioned that all those tax cuts we’ve had recently have not done a damn thing to create jobs or “spur” the economy.  They’ve just created a deficit debacle that’s put the country’s public goods and assets in jeopardy.

Conservatives’ own culture, and the sheer desire to validate wealth, discipline and reward through law and the tax code, may have convinced them that the tax cuts have been beneficial. Measuring the actual effects of a tax cut isn’t always their main concern, even if they sometimes cite such numbers for rhetorical purposes. They feel in their bones that antagonism toward the rich is a dead end and so don’t favor highly progressive taxes.

That rhetorical line appeals to tax-weary voters, and seems part of a core conservative vision, but it is treading on dangerous ground because it moves away from testable theory: those tax cuts have already been in place for many years, yet it remains to be seen when or if they will spur the economy.

So, we get a short bit on how that entire canard doesn’t stand up to testing, data, or scientific inquiry.  However, when Cowen switches to beating up on the poor, we have paragraph after paragraph of data free statements.  How can you go on and on about personal responsibility when right now our issue is the lack of jobs and the loss of real income by the majority of the public?  Are those stylized facts lost to him?  Why is it that being down and out always has something to do with personal shortcomings and not something like incredibly high hospital bills or a mortgage that you got based on a rigged game?

Conservatives often believe that much of the poverty in the United States is an issue of insufficient discipline and conscientiousness. In this view, not all children grow up inculcated with a strong enough devotion to education and career. Yet how can such a culture of discipline be spread? At least as far back as John Bright, a classical liberal in Victorian England, it has been argued that society should grant respect to business creators and to stern parents who instill discipline. And today, conservatives often say that supportive economic policy, including lighter taxation and greater freedom from regulation, will support this vision.

BUT are such moves, when carried out, actually shifting popular culture in a properly disciplined and conscientious direction? Not really. In fact, in the United States, the red states, where conservatives are more powerful, tend to have higher divorce rates and weaker educational systems than do blue states. Many Americans have not been personally persuaded by all the talk about pro-wealth and pro-discipline norms, least of all in the geographic strongholds of conservatism.

The counterintuitive tragedy is this: modern conservative thought is relying increasingly on social engineering through economic policy, by hoping that a weaker social welfare state will somehow promote individual responsibility. Maybe it won’t.

So what’s the real problem according to this economist?

It seems it’s divorce and lax child rearing.  Again, with the cultural crap and not with the fact that for about 30 years our country has passed laws that go out of their way to promote the interests of the wealthiest at the expense of the weak.  It’s not explicitly stated in the op ed, but I have these visions of of Cowen thinking everything would be easily solved if women would just be forced to stay slaves in a marriage, stay home and forget work, and beat their children into submission.  Is this really the best way to tackle income inequality or lack of jobs for the jobless? Dr. Cowen seems to believe in libertarianism in certain circumstances.  He’s just okee dokee about having government tell us what’s culturally or morally correct by shoving his old time religion–with its designed slavery paradigm–down our throats.

What about the “values” of paying a living wage for a hard day’s work?  What about the “values” of not stealing from people? What about the “values” of not lying to people about what low taxes have actually done to our government and to our economy?  And, if you’re such a great Christian, what about all those values listed in the Beatitudes in the new testament?  You know the ones about being your brother’s keeper, and practicing charity, and helping the poor?  That’s the one thing I’ve really noticed about all these  folks espousing “values”.  They want to deny abortions to poor women and everyone else, but they’ll be the first ones to the clinic with their daughters should they become pregnant.  (That’s a true story, btw, told to me by one of the abortion providers in Omaha.  Big anti-choice activist had him do an abortion on her daughter on an early Sunday morning and was back on the picket line by Monday.)

Here’s Cowen’s ending.

Nonetheless, higher income inequality will increase the appeal of traditional mores — of discipline and hard work — because they bolster one’s chances of advancing economically. That means more people and especially more parents will yearn for a tough, pro-discipline and pro-wealth cultural revolution. And so they should.

What this man needs to do is get off his high horse and spent more time looking at the job market numbers. If he truly believes in rational thought, then he should be able to do better than give a sermon in the NYT.

Just for an added thought, here’s what Mark Thoma had to say:

I am not a sure as he is that as inequality continues to increase, people will adopt conservative values rather than wondering why the playing field needed for those conservative values to express themselves has become increasingly unfair. And if they do conclude it’s unfairness rather than values that is at the root of the growth in inequality, their reaction may be different.

(Also, my view of what is behind society’s problems is also quite different from Tyler’s. I suppose this makes me one of the “academics on the left” who “seem more comfortable focusing on the very real offenses of plutocrats and selfish elites,” but I’ll note that Tyler seems quite comfortable focusing on the problems posed by “today’s elites” himself, i.e. the impediment they pose to the cultural values he’d like to see take hold. The comments on wealth and crony capitalism are also not far from complaints about plutocracy. We on the left have values that we believe in every bit as much as conservatives, but those values differ from those held by conservatives in important ways and that will naturally lead us to focus on different aspects of these problems. The fact that we talk about issues such as crony capitalism and powerful elites does not mean we have abandoned those values any more than it means Tyler has abandoned his values when he raises these issues himself. All it says is that the path to reach these values differs from the path preferred by conservatives.)

Sorry, this ran on so long; but I think, therefore, I occasionally have to rant.