I have tried before to climb far enough out of my winter
doldrums to write here again, and in fact I’ve written a dozen or so comments
that I never posted. For some reason I
think I want inspiration---so I wanted, for example, to respond to a fairly
recent trend from Brad DeLong claiming, possibly to be controversial, that our
national debt is too small for the
twenty-first century. I like the idea of
being contrary on this issue, but my response got very abstract, and so I never
posted it. I think now that what I need
to do is go back to the real stimulus that prompted most of my prior posts: not
vaulting intellect, but plain old-fashioned irritation.
So I guess I’ll respond to something that irritated me from
yesterday’s (Saturday’s) Washington Post op-ed page. Michael Gerson, probably my favorite
Republican columnist, was talking about the two parties’ attitudes toward economic
mobility and equality of opportunity.
And in the process I think he managed to trivialize both sides of the
debate: his point was that the emergence of economic mobility as a campaign
issue is a compromise, of sorts, and that Democrats in general would rather
talk about inequality (of final outcome), while Republicans would rather talk
about growth. As he says it:
“When Democrats refer
to stalled mobility, they are generally still talking about inequality. When
Republicans embrace mobility, they often mean cutting taxes and reducing
regulations.”
And he claims that to Democrats,
“the job of helping
the poor is inseparable from cutting the 1 percent down to size.”
I’d actually reverse the causality in the first quote, and
flatly deny the second. Because I think
this is one of the areas where thinking conservatives and thinking liberals
have the same very basic goal, and only differ in how to achieve it.
I think that when Republicans talk about growth they are
really hoping that growth alone will create more opportunity, and more economic
mobility. And if growth is widely distributed, rather
than hoarded by the top 10%, they might be right. (I don’t agree with their belief that the
best path to growth is through cutting taxes and reducing regulations, but
that’s a different topic…)
And I think that when Democrats complain about inequality,
they are most concerned that extreme inequality of wealth and income interferes
with mobility and opportunity, which are the ultimate goals.
I can’t speak for all progressives, but for myself I can say
that I really have no big emotional response to the lifestyles of the
0.1%. To me they are like Lectroids
from Planet 10: they inhabiting a separate universe in a parallel
dimension, and are unlikely to ever interact much with the rest of us. I care that most of the income growth of the
last 35 years seems to have gravitated toward the top 10% of the population not
because of any envy that they have it---why should I care what they have?---but
because it leaves the rest of the population with stagnant incomes and
declining opportunity.
And that is the whole of it.
This isn’t something I just made up in response to Mr.
Gerson’s column. Here’s what I said in this post
from over a year ago:
“the path to a more
equal distribution of opportunity and
more equal reward for work and talent
may run through a more equal distribution of income, and … no amount of effort
to provide opportunity can compensate for the disadvantage of being born into a
poor family in a culture with extreme income inequality.”
Because
“opportunity is
neither free nor distributed equally across the population. Those who begin with high family incomes can
buy more of it, for themselves and for their children, than those who do not.”
What I didn’t say in that post is that the marginal value of
money spent on opportunity declines pretty rapidly after a certain level is
reached: once you have the opportunity to eat and sleep, to go to school and
study in relative security, and attend college without crippling the rest of
your life under the Kryptonite boulder of student loans, you’ve achieved a very
great deal of what money spent on opportunity can buy. Yes, if your parents are 0.1-percenters, or
even 1-percenters, you may be able to buy your way into elite schools and elite
jobs, but those are the special opportunities on Planet 10, available only in a
distant, alien dimension in the Hamptons. Let’s start with a wider distribution of just
the basic opportunities back here on earth.
Gerson’s advice to Republicans is, at least at the start,
exactly right, and it’s his ability to recognize things like this that makes
him my favorite Republican columnist. He
says that
“The entry-level
commitment for Republicans in this debate is a recognition that equality of
opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social and political achievement.”
Yes. It is a social,
political and economic achievement that requires eternal vigilance, and that disappears
when it is left unguarded. It takes a
good deal of commitment, and (in this progressive’s view) strong government
determined to maintain real opportunity, to achieve what Gerson says is
“America’s most
urgent domestic priority: resisting the development of a class-based society in
which birth equals destiny.”
But if the entry level commitment for Republicans is the
admission that universal opportunity is something that the culture, and the
country, must provide through effort, what is the conversation’s entry-level
commitment for Democrats?
I’d suggest that it is the open recognition that the purpose
of all of this discussion of income inequality is not to harm the rich, or
resent the rich: it is to enable those below the top 10%, particularly the poor;
it is to provide everyone with a real opportunity to pursue their own future
with hope, and to make sure that everyone has what Elizabeth Warren has been
calling a “fighting chance”.
Of course, even if each side can agree to start at their
entry-level commitment, and we can agree that we all have a common goal of
widespread opportunity, we still can’t hope for political
agreement or policy progress. Because
progressives don’t believe for a minute that tax cuts and deregulation, the
policies of choice for the last 40 years under both Republicans and Democrats,
will get us there; in fact, I would say that if there is a general agreement on
anything about economic policy among progressives, it’s that the constant habits
of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for businesses are actively harming economic opportunity for the
poor by diverting all economic reward upward (and harming economic growth by
starving investment in infrastructure, research and education, and much else).
