How the Screw Has Turned

I was raised in the rich ethos of there-will-always-be-a-better-tomorrow but am condemned to live out the tail end of my life in the Right Wing dream state of begger-your-neighbor in a war of all-against-all fighting over the scraps of the economic pie. What a cruel fate. I envy the kids of today. They are raised to expect nothing but misery, but will probably spend the better part of their adult lives in a near utopia of a growing economy with a wholesome State willing to improve their lives, their environment, and to endow them and their children with a future. Oh well...

One of my fondest memories of youth was a calculus teacher in high school wringing his hands at the golden future that the Sixties generation was inheriting. He would put on a "woe is me" expression and walk us through his youth in the Great Depression and how he struggled up his whole life. He, of course, expected us to continue the rocket trajectory higher and higher. The truth was that at just the time he was wringing his hands, the economic and social and political underpinnings that powered that trajectory flamed out and the Sixties generation headed into a perilous future. So... life turns in its great ambit. And I play the counter role. Looking back over a failed generation. But I refuse to do what that calculus teacher did -- project my own situation onto the future. Instead, I firmly believe the wheel has turned and the next generation will inherit a better world. The present is terrible. The Right has been rampant for nearly 40 years. But that is exactly why I think things will turn.

Here is an interesting blog by Ian Ayres, a lawyer and economist at Yale. He presents an interesting picture of how Paul Samuelson, the great Keynsian economist, wrote an excellent text that was torn down by William F. Buckley Jr. (and subsequently by the rise of the the Right with the Shock Doctrine "free" economics of the Milton Friedman school). Here is what Ayres thinks was its most dangerous idea:

If there is a single snippet that provoked Buckley to write God and Man at Yale, I’m guessing this was it. For Buckley, sensible, modern men could still embrace the minimalist state. Samuelson, in contrast, was willing to consider the contingent usefulness of government intervention:

[T]he remarkable fact is not how much the government does to control economic activity … but how much it does not do. (Buckley on Page 80 quoting Samuelson on Page 35)

This was a dangerous message that needed to be removed from our core curriculum.

The Ayres blog entry is well worth reading as well as this entry that points to a free version of Chapter One of the early edition of Samuelson's classic text. Reading that text is refreshing because it comes from a different era when hope and possibility still reigned.