2022-05-17 Tu: Coffee with the incredibly learned and witty Bob Reich, who says—about my book <https://www.amazon.com/Economic-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0465019595/>: "Brilliant, important. A tour de force, DeLong grabs political-economic history and wrestles it to the ground. You may disagree (I don’t buy all of it) but you won’t be able to let go…" He also says, wisely, that, for my book, I need an elevator pitch that directly hooks into the societal-scale problems potential book-buyers will be worrying about come September, and that would resonate with Terry Gross (not that I am that likely to actually get on “Fresh Air”).
But social democracy failed its sustainability test: society may not know what "social justice" is, but it knows that it manifestly does not consist of giving benefits to and making life easy for those it calls "undeserving."
Agree that there was no one single problem, but neo-Liberal me has to think we did not try hard enough to make sure everyone WAS deserving. Lots of our ways of redistributing wealth -- unions, employer health insurance, wage tax for social insurance -- drive a wedge between marginal product and the wage which mean that the redistribution can only go "down" so far. And those left out look "undeserving."
Exacerbating factor is slower growth meaning that further redistribution downward would be closer to requiring some absolute losses from someone and it wasn't going to be those on top. An important aspect is how much of the growth slowdown was purely technological, we ceased deploying new technologies fast enough and how much was policy like higher deficits?
One factor not mentioned in the total history is if we have (suddenly?) reached the point becasue of externalities) where markets are no longer able even to maximize growth which makes a politics based on trading along a growth - redistribution indifference curve no longer relevant?
"I can’t see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it. Can you?…"
It depends on the form the non-"letting" takes.
But social democracy failed its sustainability test: society may not know what "social justice" is, but it knows that it manifestly does not consist of giving benefits to and making life easy for those it calls "undeserving."
Agree that there was no one single problem, but neo-Liberal me has to think we did not try hard enough to make sure everyone WAS deserving. Lots of our ways of redistributing wealth -- unions, employer health insurance, wage tax for social insurance -- drive a wedge between marginal product and the wage which mean that the redistribution can only go "down" so far. And those left out look "undeserving."
Exacerbating factor is slower growth meaning that further redistribution downward would be closer to requiring some absolute losses from someone and it wasn't going to be those on top. An important aspect is how much of the growth slowdown was purely technological, we ceased deploying new technologies fast enough and how much was policy like higher deficits?
One factor not mentioned in the total history is if we have (suddenly?) reached the point becasue of externalities) where markets are no longer able even to maximize growth which makes a politics based on trading along a growth - redistribution indifference curve no longer relevant?