World Monitor Magazine April 2017 | Page 107

books and Policy . Our thesis , and theirs , is that up until 1980 it was taken for granted in the United States that the public and private sectors were partners in a project of equitable growth . It was never the case that the government needed to take control . And it was never the case that what the U . S . needed was to drown government in the bathtub and let laissez-faire rip . Rather , the government needed to do its proper job of clear- ing the ground , opening up the space , setting up the playing field and keeping it level , building the institutions , and providing whatever support it could that would greatly add value to private enterprise . While government does the block- ing , private enterprise takes the ball and carries it forward at great speed . This is how the U . S . developed from a group of poor , disconnected , agrarian colonies into a powerful , industrialized , integrated nation .
But Hacker and Pierson , political scientists at Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley , respectively , argue that the U . S . fell prey to a fit of amnesia . Our political system forgot how things worked — and how they are supposed to work . And the authors pin the blame , to a large degree , on the political right . Sometime around 1980 , American conservatism stopped seeing government as primarily a partner to private enterprise and began seeing it ex- clusively as an enemy . The conventional wisdom came to hold that the smaller the government , featuring low taxes and fewer regulations , the faster the economic growth . This was , moreover , not a practical judgment but an ideological imperative . The deregulated low-tax laissez-faire market could not fail : It could only be failed . Policies that failed to deliver results could do so only because the policies were not extreme enough .
Hacker and Pierson tell a compelling story of the descent of first American conservatism and then the Republican Party from pragmatic engagement to ideological echo chamber . The story that struck me as most worrisome was the last one they told , which concerned the response to the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak . The U . S . government began to organize what seemed to all special- ists and all those knowledgeable about infectious disease to be prudent and effective but not alarmist infection-control policies . And yet , the authors note , many influential commentators from various points of the center-right spec- trum rushed to conclude that the response couldn ’ t be trusted and would fail — simply because it was being conducted by the government . “ What scares me is the fact that we can ’ t trust the institutions that deal with such threats , and we can ’ t trust the people who run them ,” said Ron Fournier , avowed

In Turner ’ s view , debt no longer has a productive role to play .... It ’ s time to treat debt as a form of economic pollution and tax it .

centrist columnist at the National Journal . Talk-show host Glenn Beck said he believed the Obama administration had somehow targeted Dallas for infection because the city leaned Republican .
I do , however , think that Hacker and Pierson miss an important sociologi- cal cause and concomitant of the shift . They miss the Republican Party ’ s trans- formation from a group of forward-looking enterprisers who think they can take advantage of the creative destruction that change and economic growth will bring to a group of backward-looking owners who believe that they are as rich as they will ever be , and who are under threat from the creative destruction that change and economic growth will bring .
These three books together paint a picture of the business , economic , and political future that is much more pessimistic than the one we were looking for- ward to only one short decade ago . Business in an age of slowed growth and greater headwinds , as Robert Gordon projects , must proceed more cautiously than business plunging into a third industrial revolution led by information and biotechnology . Yet , as Adair Turner convincingly argues , seeking to avoid risk and pull in one ’ s horns is unlikely to produce wealth in an era in which debt is transforming from a means of mobilizing resources into a form of economic pollution . The ideologically fettered political economy Hacker and Pierson warn against is unlikely to enact and implement the proper policies to cushion the blows and take advantage of whatever opportunities remain .
That may not be the most uplifting possible set of messages to start us off in this postcrisis era . But , as Walter Cronkite used to say : That ’ s the way it is .
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