Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00: Key Insights: Hexapodia! Periodically, America has had “the frontier has closed, now scarcity rules!” panics—& they have been bad, but so far they have all been false alarms. The “new frontier” to alleviate scarcity in America is intensive growth, right here, but more: economic poldering.
The core, inescapable, implacable political question of our time is "how are we doing to construct security?"
If you're a post-Reagan mammonite oligarch, security is constructed by having all the money. Any attempt by anyone else to have any money is a direct threat to your security; you might make common cause with a subset of your fellow oligarchs, because the public sphere is a bigger threat than any one other oligarch, but you still want all the money. Internal cohesion in this faction is _only_ about the illegitimacy of public constructions of security. (that is, they won't pay taxes to anything for any reason.)
If you're specifically the kind of mammonite oligarch who derives your wealth directly from fossil carbon (or secondarily, other direct resource) extraction, you're particularly concerned not with taxation but regulation; unlike other necessity-of-life maximal money extraction efforts (health, housing, transport...) regulation isn't a tool for extracting more money; regulation can actually cost you. If it became sane, it would shut you down.
Then you've got the people whose emotional construction of security -- they're not doing any quantified analysis -- depends on participating in a supremacy agreement, AND the folks whose existence depends on not being subject to the supremacy agreement; that's an intractable conflict and it can be foregrounded to avoid looking at the more fundamental conflict about whether security gets constructed publically -- collectively, generally, by group action, and with the authority and power to tax -- or by having all the money. (This is where the continuous amnesia in public reporting on the supremacy conflict comes from; the supremacy conflict can never be resolved, because it's the essential distraction from the "hey, wait..." possibility of doing something collectively about the mammonism.)
So, sure, an economy could be set up that didn't grind the great majority of the population into the greasy dust of recent history; there's no technical bar. But the minimum ante for that is reducing all the billionaires, all the oil companies -- in effect, several entire nations -- and all the supremacists to a condition of obedience where they pay their taxes and acknowledge that they're bound by the law.
It's gotten late enough that it's easy to argue that the total human suffering is reduced by _not_ doing this; more people die sooner after less privation if we hit the climate cliff hard, rather than having it slowly crumble out from under.
Creating artificial scarcity is what businesses try to do. The offset should be some net benefit ("cute shops in a more crowded neighborhood" as Brad puts it. ). But the current idea is that we have reached a far more predatory form of capitalism which is clearly zero-sum. All those robocalls with various scams are not benefitting the buyer and we know there is a net cost. Predatory landlords are on the rise, which hurts anyone paying rents. So I don't think it is so much some sort of zeitgeist choice the country has so much as "rogue" elements increasing their banditry on the populace.
What might be the Rx to reverse this? Clearly there could be a lot done to reduce scams and robocalls if there was actually political will that wasn't corrupted. Same with predatory payday loan sharking. Then actually dealing with the wealthy who have created scarcity, like illegally "privatising" public beaches in California, or buying up Hawaiian islands. There are now global scarcities that have been created like fish stocks due to overfishing. This is also artificial in that more enforcement of governance could reduce this problem dramatically. In this case it is greed and stupidity that are to blame, not just the difficulties of international rule making.
The core, inescapable, implacable political question of our time is "how are we doing to construct security?"
If you're a post-Reagan mammonite oligarch, security is constructed by having all the money. Any attempt by anyone else to have any money is a direct threat to your security; you might make common cause with a subset of your fellow oligarchs, because the public sphere is a bigger threat than any one other oligarch, but you still want all the money. Internal cohesion in this faction is _only_ about the illegitimacy of public constructions of security. (that is, they won't pay taxes to anything for any reason.)
If you're specifically the kind of mammonite oligarch who derives your wealth directly from fossil carbon (or secondarily, other direct resource) extraction, you're particularly concerned not with taxation but regulation; unlike other necessity-of-life maximal money extraction efforts (health, housing, transport...) regulation isn't a tool for extracting more money; regulation can actually cost you. If it became sane, it would shut you down.
Then you've got the people whose emotional construction of security -- they're not doing any quantified analysis -- depends on participating in a supremacy agreement, AND the folks whose existence depends on not being subject to the supremacy agreement; that's an intractable conflict and it can be foregrounded to avoid looking at the more fundamental conflict about whether security gets constructed publically -- collectively, generally, by group action, and with the authority and power to tax -- or by having all the money. (This is where the continuous amnesia in public reporting on the supremacy conflict comes from; the supremacy conflict can never be resolved, because it's the essential distraction from the "hey, wait..." possibility of doing something collectively about the mammonism.)
So, sure, an economy could be set up that didn't grind the great majority of the population into the greasy dust of recent history; there's no technical bar. But the minimum ante for that is reducing all the billionaires, all the oil companies -- in effect, several entire nations -- and all the supremacists to a condition of obedience where they pay their taxes and acknowledge that they're bound by the law.
It's gotten late enough that it's easy to argue that the total human suffering is reduced by _not_ doing this; more people die sooner after less privation if we hit the climate cliff hard, rather than having it slowly crumble out from under.
Creating artificial scarcity is what businesses try to do. The offset should be some net benefit ("cute shops in a more crowded neighborhood" as Brad puts it. ). But the current idea is that we have reached a far more predatory form of capitalism which is clearly zero-sum. All those robocalls with various scams are not benefitting the buyer and we know there is a net cost. Predatory landlords are on the rise, which hurts anyone paying rents. So I don't think it is so much some sort of zeitgeist choice the country has so much as "rogue" elements increasing their banditry on the populace.
What might be the Rx to reverse this? Clearly there could be a lot done to reduce scams and robocalls if there was actually political will that wasn't corrupted. Same with predatory payday loan sharking. Then actually dealing with the wealthy who have created scarcity, like illegally "privatising" public beaches in California, or buying up Hawaiian islands. There are now global scarcities that have been created like fish stocks due to overfishing. This is also artificial in that more enforcement of governance could reduce this problem dramatically. In this case it is greed and stupidity that are to blame, not just the difficulties of international rule making.