Matt Yglesias

Against Utopia

Earlier this week, Dave Weigel wrote “Do libertarians promise utopia? Sure. So do the socialists who came up with the ideas that motivate Democratic politicians.” Today he followed up on his meaning, arguing “it’s a dead end to accuse ideologues of promising rainbows if their ideas are adopted.”

It is and it isn’t. I have a utopian bent, personally, and have been known to muse to my girlfriend about how at Taiwan’s level of population density we could fit 500 million people into 10 percent of the land area of the United States and turn the rest into yawning wilderness. But I think it’s really a pretty serious mistake to think about politics in these terms. It’s not that people should be “politically realistic” in their aspirations, it’s that it’s really important to think about concrete, specific policy changes and the specific consequences likely to in fact flow from them. Absent that kind of practicality you get things like loosening regulations on the banking sector followed by a financial crisis followed by complaints that “the real problem is Fannie and Freddie and bailouts,” followed by deciding it’s actually best to leave Fannie and Freddie in place after all then when someone does propose reforming Fannie and Freddie someone else shouts back that the real problem is deregulation.

The underlying issue is that if you’re committed to any form of reasonably liberal politics, which almost everyone in America is, then you’re committed to a world of endless ideological disagreement and interest-group pluralism. Too often, people think about politics by starting from the assumption that there will be post-political utopia in which everything is frozen into place, then reasoning backwards from how that utopia looks.

Fred Upton, Shifting Ever-Rightward

The really distressing political trend of our time is that not only did the 111th Senate fail to pass a meaningful bill to reduce carbon emissions, but the overall political context has shifted enormously away from good sense and in favor of special interests. For example, read my colleague Brad Johnson on the shifting thoughts of Rep Fred Upton (R-MI) on climate change:

Upton once considered a “moderate on environmental issues,” but has worked hard to refashion himself as a hard-right defender of pollution in recent months. Some Tea Party groups tried to block Upton from taking the gavel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, attacking his past support for energy-efficient light bulbs. Upton previously claimed that “climate change is a serious problem” and that “the world will be better off” if we reduced carbon emissions. However, in the course of the past two years — as he received $20,000 from Koch Industries — Upton has shifted to oppose not only cap-and-trade legislation but any form of limits on climate pollution whatsoever, instead supporting investigations against climate scientists and lawsuits against the EPA and its supposed “unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs”.

I know it hurts the feelings of a lot of my right-of-center friends when people suggest that pollution money from the Kochs has some impact on their movement. Indeed, they quite enjoy making sport of the assertion that the Koch family’s pollution-fueled cash has any impact on anything. And yet I think that if you examine the classic liberal canon you’ll find not a single iota of support anywhere in it—not in Smith not in Mill not in Bastiat not in Hayek not in Friedman not anywhere—for the assertion that it’s an important free market principle that the Koch brothers should be allowed to put pollution into the air without compensating the billions of people around the world who are impacted by this activity. And yet an absolute consensus has developed around this idea in right-of-center American circles, including among people like Rep Upton who knew better in the very recent past.

Police Reform in Mexico

Here’s a very bad case of regulatory capture:

Efforts to clean up local police have met bloody resistance from the cartels. The new mayor of Santiago, an upscale colonial town near Monterrey, was kidnapped, tortured and executed by members of his own police this summer after he had pledged to clean up local police.

This is why hand-waving in the direction of “small government” is such an inadequate response to the very real problem of making public sector institutions perform well. Rigid public choice theory implies that even the nightwatchman state is impossible to implement. The least-controversial spheres of government activity are the most dangerous ones—the ones with the guns and helicopters and dungeons and aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles—and unless we can make these public institutions more-or-less serve the public interest, we’re doomed. Effective public institutions are difficult to create, but not impossible, and they’re extremely valuable.

The Coherence of Conventional Ideological Categories

I liked Chris Beam’s NY Mag article on libertarians, but I want to quibble with this:

Yet libertarianism is more internally consistent than the Democratic or Republican platforms. There’s no inherent reason that free-marketers and social conservatives should be allied under the Republican umbrella, except that it makes for a powerful coalition.

People, especially people who are libertarians, say this all the time. But we should consider the possibility that the market in political ideas works is that there’s a reason you typically find conservative and progressive political coalitions aligned in this particular way. And if you look at American history, you see that in 1964 when we had a libertarian presidential candidate the main constituency for his views turned out to be white supremacists in the deep south. Libertarian principles, as Rand Paul had occasion to remind us during the 2010 midterm campaign, prohibit the Civil Rights Act as an infringement on the liberty of racist business proprietors. Similarly, libertarians and social conservatives are united in opposition to an Employment Non-Discrimination Act for gays and lesbians and to measures like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that seek to curb discrimination against women.

And this is generally how politics goes in most countries. You have a dominant socio-cultural group allied with the bulk of the business community, and you have a more diffuse “left” coalition of reformers associated with labor unions and minority groups. There’s nothing “inconsistent” about organizing politics this way.

Third Parties

After reading Matt Bai on Michael Bloomberg’s prospects as a third party presidential candidate along with various recent commentary about the idea of a from-the-left challenger to Barack Obama, I’m coming to the view that too much of this kind of talk focuses on the actual viability (or lack thereof) of possible third party runs. What’s more interesting to me is all the ways that non-viable candidates can make a difference.

After all, it’s reasonably common in recent years for an incumbent or quasi-incumbent center-left party leader to succeed in capturing the median voter and nonetheless lose power in the face of many people voting for further-left candidates. That’s how Al Gore lost, that’s how Paul Martin lost power in Canada, that’s how Gerhard Schöder lost power in Germany, and it’s arguably the reason Lionel Jospin couldn’t beat Jacques Chirac for the Presidency of France. In all these cases, I think the Nader/NDP/Linke/Trotskyite voters were being short-sighted and counterproductive. But the point is that these things happen. A lot of people all around the developed world are basically pacifists and fundamentally don’t accept the neoliberal economic consensus. And there’s basically no way for a center-left movement to win without getting the votes of that constituency, even though few mainstream center-left political leaders (and certainly not Barack Obama) actually espouse those views.

The resulting problem of coalition management is both big and quite difficult. It’s something worth paying attention to even though the idea of a third party candidate winning the presidency or of a primary opponent beating Obama is silly.

Constructive Advice for The Left

(cc photo by Infrogmation)

Duncan Black complains:

One thing that’s been true since I’ve been paying attention is that everything The Left does is wrong. By The Left I mean everyone to the left of the basic governing power. Third Parties are bad, sitting out elections are bad, putting pressure on elected reps is bad, protesting is bad, primary campaigns are bad, media criticism might hurt their feefees and is bad, saying mean things about Rush Limbaugh is bad, actually discussing your views honestly is bad, etc. Obviously the failure of The Left to take control and run the country does suggest that it is doing something wrong, but no one ever really offers much constructive advice other than…please STFU.

I sympathize with this, but I also think the post is very typical of what’s wrong with “The Left” in this sense. What’s needed is less whining and more doing. Doing what? Doing politics, of course. That means that every time there’s an election you’re eligible to vote in—be it a primary election or a general election—you look at which are the two candidates most likely to win and you vote for the better one. And you encourage your friends and coworkers to do the same. You should donate money to the PACs of politicians who you like. You should volunteer in person to do election work near where you live. And you should donate money to organizations that you like. When there are issues being debated, you should write to your elected representatives. You should consider running for local office, and you should urge good people you might know to consider running. If you have local elected officials who you like, you should encourage them to run for higher office.

At any rate, this is getting to be a long and boring list so I’ll stop. It’s dull because it’s obvious and it’s dull because participating constructively in politics is dull. As Max Weber said it’s like “the strong and slow boring of hard boards.” One strategy that works well for wealthy interest groups to is to spend money hiring other people to do a lot of the boring legwork. If you’re not a wealthy interest group, this is going to be hard to execute and you’re stuck with just doing a bunch of boring stuff yourself.

The alternative, I guess, is that you could try a civil rights movement redux strategy. But that’s not “protests” it’s open defiance of the legal order, complete with subjecting yourself to massive violence by the state and by formal and informal terrorist organizations.

Trust in Government

Matt Bai muses:

In this way, the “Don’t touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.

That broad-based skepticism of government is, of course, why the Obama Era has also witnessed a broad-based public backlash against unrestrained government surveillance powers, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, public demands that Obama cut Medicare benefits more sharply. That’s why a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana passed easily in California, and public momentum is growing to get Big Government off our southern borders and let people travel back and forth more easily.

I would say the main story of the Obama years has to do with people’s trust in other people. Most Americans are white, most Americans have health insurance, most Americans are native-born citizens, most Americans aren’t Muslims, and over the course of the Great Recession most Americans have become more suspicious that they live in a zero-sum world where any effort to improve the condition of other people will come at their expense.

Liberalism

Jon Chait had a good post this morning about how there’s no contradiction between Barack Obama praising the liberalization of the Indian economy and also being a liberal in the US political context. Indeed, one hint might be that the letter-string “l-i-b-e-r-a-l” occurs in both terms.

There’s a commonly held view that modern day American liberals aren’t “really” liberals and that the “real” heirs of the classical liberal tradition of Hume, Smith, and Mill are conservatives or libertarians. I think that’s honestly nonsense. There’s just nothing in the liberal tradition to suggest that there’s anything wrong with the welfare state, social insurance, redistributive taxation, or environmental regulation. There’s plenty in the liberal tradition to suggest that peace and social tolerance are important. And there’s no systematic difference between the left and right in America about things like taxi medallions or yacht broker licensing. All major political figures in the contemporary United States are pretty liberal in the scheme of things, but I’d say that mainstream liberals like Barack Obama are, indeed, the most liberal of the bunch.

The weird thing, as Chait says, is the fanatical extremism of the contemporary American right. If comprehensive economic planning is bad, then firms should have an unlimited right to engage in air pollution? Why would that be?

Actually Existing Internet Communism

Henry Farrell finds Steven Johnson running away form the somewhat radical anti-capitalist implications of his work on innovation, something that I think is a fairly widespread problem.

The issue is that most people don’t have a great vocabulary for talking about valuable activity that’s neither organized by the government nor undertaken for commercial reasons. And yet there’s lots of activity along those lines in everyone’s life. Importantly, this has always been the case. People have always had hobbies. The number of people who play sports on an amateur basis has always exceeded the number of people who do it professionally. And most significantly, people—especially women—have always done intensely valuable work in the household sector and related to raising and educating children.

But rapid improvements in communications and information technology have drastically expanded the scope and importance of non-commercial activities. It’s also created a (virtual) space where commercial, hobbyist, non-profit, and government undertakings interact, compete, and collaborate in novel ways. This nexus of undertakings has created several billionaires and “hot” innovative businesses of the sort that those inclined to valorize the work of entrepreneurs can and do valorize. But it’s also created a much larger set of amateur or quasi-amateur producers who are impacting the lives of people all around the world. In its 1875 Gotha Program, the German Social Democratic Party “demand[ed] the establishment of socialistic productive associations with the support of the state and under the democratic control of the working people.”

It turns out that finding a feasible way to do that for industrial age enterprises was fairly problematic. And yet their arguments that such associations would be beneficial remain compelling. Meanwhile, the Internet makes it much easier for individuals to form socialistic productive associations without a ton of explicit support of the state. This means, however, that the extent to which the state is implicitly supporting or hindering the work of said associations deserves to be on the table politically. And that discussion needs to consider not just the GDP impacts of peer production (which are often quite small) but the giant quantities of consumer (and producer) surplus welfare that are involved.

My Application for Peter Thiel

Via Twitter, I see that one of the questions Peter Thiel asks applicants to his fellowship program (which unlike some of his philanthropic endeavors sounds to me like a totally good idea) is “Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true.”

Since I’m not eligible for a fellowship for people under the age of twenty, I’ll offer my honest answer which is that guys like Peter Thiel are much more commonly reckless gamblers who got lucky making bad bets than they are brilliant visionaries who can peer into the future and see the best ideas.

In other words, if a thousand guys walk into a casino and all put $1 million down on different numbers on the roulette wheel, then the guys who win all make a second bet, someone will probably walk out of the casino with a billion dollars and an air of smug self-satisfaction. He’ll rapidly be surrounded by flatterers and possibly spend the rest of his life talking about how seasteading is humanity’s only hope to achieve real freedom.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that the recognition that successful capitalists mostly succeed thanks to good luck and willingness to run unwise risks is actually integral to the case for capitalism as an economic system. If it were otherwise, then we could just recruit Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Pete Peterson, Charles & David Koch, and George Soros to run the Central Planning Committee. After all, those guys are smarter than the rest of us so it makes sense to put them in charge of allocating almost all the capital in the country and not just the puny share they’re able to obtain personally. In the real world, that’d be a disaster. There are a bunch of reasons for that, but that fact that a healthy fraction of the super-rich aren’t nearly as smart as their flatterers think they are is on the list.

The Limits of Ideological Self-Identification

William Galston has an excellent post about the shifting ideological self-identification of the electorate:

This shift is part of a broader trend: Over the past two decades, moderates have trended down as share of the total electorate while conservatives have gone up. In 1992, moderates were 43 percent of the total; in 2006, 38 percent; today, only 35 percent. For conservatives, the comparable numbers are 36 percent, 37 percent, and 42 percent, respectively. So the 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

But of course that leaves us with the question of what implications this carries. To my mind, like most analysis of ideological self-identification it indicates that ideological self-identification is a pretty murky subject. Ask yourself on what subject has the public become more conservative?

Consider gay rights. To shift to the right relative to the 1992 status quo, we would need for every state in which gay marriage is legal to repeal that. We would also need to eliminate civil union laws. And rather than repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and allowing gay and lesbian servicemembers to serve openly, we’d need to revert to a policy of explicitly authorized inquisitions and purges. Does anyone think that would be popular?

Or health care. To shift to the right relative to the 1992 status quo, we would need (of course) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Fine. But do you hear Republicans talking about repealing the 2009 SCHIP expansion? I don’t. How about the creation in 2003 of a Medicare prescription drug benefit? How about the 1997 creation of SCHIP? Or the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act? Or the Family and Medical Leave Act? I don’t hear anyone talking about any of that. Nor do I hear anyone talking about undoing Bush-era increases in federal K-12 spending.

What’s happened on these subjects is that the stance one needs to take in order to be a conservative in good standing has become less extreme. In the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that to be a conservative in good standing you had to regard the Civil Rights Act as an intolerable regulation of private enterprise. Today, only Rand Paul thinks that and he’s too embarrassed to admit it squarely.

There are probably issues on which the public has actually become more conservative. There’s clearly much more support for the idea that torture is a legitimate tool of governance than there used to be. More interest in immigration restriction, perhaps. Maybe less interest in defense cuts? Obviously I don’t think it would have occurred to anyone in 1992 that the government should prohibit the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan.

FA Hayek, Statist

(cc photo by Salim Virji)

Karl Smith observes that, somewhat amusingly, in The Road to Serfdom Hayek ends up committing himself to a view of environmental regulations that’s well tot he left of where today’s center-left politicians are:

Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.

Of course the correct free market riposte to this proposal is that we can create a price mechanism. So instead of having the guys in the EPA building try to tinker with everyone’s factories, we could establish a legislative ceiling on the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions we’re willing to tolerate and then allocate permits to do it. That way the price mechanism—à la “the use of knowledge in society”—will be able to uncover the most economically efficient way of undertaking the reductions. But I guess Big Government Hayek doesn’t think that will work.

At any rate, I do think this is the issue that’s been underplayed in a lot of recent discussions of the institutional right’s funding sources. We’ve reached a point in the history of the world when the regulation of air pollution has become a first-tier political issues. And it’s naturally a controversial one since a lot of money is at stake. But there’s simply no support anywhere in the classical liberal tradition for the idea that an unrestricted right to pollute the air is part of “free markets” or any coherent conception of liberty or property rights. And yet opposition to carbon pricing and emissions regulations has become an article of faith across the American right. Some of that is political opportunism, some of it is ignorance, but a lot of it is the impact of corporate cash, especially from the extractive industries.

Psychological Foundations of Political Belief

(cc photo by moira)

The political science literature about what drives election outcomes is kind of at odds with the conventional wisdom among campaign operatives and reporters. But the emerging research on the psychological foundations of individual political belief is downright weird. Peter Liberman and David Pizarro, for example, have a good piece in the NYT about the link between disgust and conservatism:

Subtle cues about disgust and cleanliness can affect social and political judgments as well. In an experiment conducted recently by Erik Helzer, a Cornell Ph.D. student, and one of us (David Pizarro), merely standing near a hand-sanitizing dispenser led people to report more conservative political beliefs. Participants who were randomly positioned in front of a hand sanitizer gave more conservative responses to a survey about their moral, social and fiscal attitudes than those individuals assigned to complete the questionnaire at the other end of the hallway.

In another experiment one of us (Dr. Pizarro) was involved in, a foul ambient smell — emitted, unbeknownst to test subjects, by a novelty spray — caused people answering a questionnaire to report more negative attitudes toward gay men than did people who responded in the absence of the stench. Apparently, the slightest signal that germs might be present is enough to shift political attitudes toward the right.

I think it remains to be seen how these kind of dynamics play into macro-scale political phenomena, but suffice it to say that people aren’t making up their minds about political issues based purely on judicious consideration of the evidence.

Map of Coming Climate Doom

Via Paul Kedrosky, the British risk analysis firm Maplecroft tries to assess relative vulnerability to climate shocks. More northerly ones and also richer ones are viewed as less exposed, and the assumption here seems to be that the Dutch have the resources and engineering chops to build as many seawalls as necessary to keep their towns from drowning:

In light of continuing discussion over the Koch Brothers’ allegedly selfless devotion to the principle that fossil fuel companies should be allowed to wreck the planet without regulation in the name of free markets, it’s worth pondering this. Presumably “I should be allowed to murder this Bangladeshi man and steal his money for profit” is not a free market position. Presumably “I should be allowed to steal this Bangladeshi man’s land and sell it for profit” is not a free market position. Nor is “I should be allowed to have my cattle eat this Bangladeshi man’s grass and then sell it for profit” a free market position. I don’t think “I should be allowed to cut costs by dumping the toxic waste byproducts from my family on this Bangladeshi man’s agricultural land” makes a ton of sense as a free market position.

Which is just to say the fact that current “free market” orthodoxy holds that in a properly functioning market business executives have an untrammeled right to pollute the world’s commonly owned air supply without paying any compensation is a reflection of the political and intellectual influence of pollution interests’ money. A world in which the financiers of rightwing politics were abstractly interested in property rights and classical liberalism would be one in which the right was demanding carbon taxes.

The Kochs’ Paranoid Style

I think it’s often assumed that a lot of this “OMG socialism Obama is the end of liberty!” stuff is just for yahoos being manipulated by sophisticated moneymen who know better. But one of the more interesting threads to emerge from Kate Zernicke’s article about a Koch-convened conclave of rightwing billionaires is that the culture of wildly overstated rhetoric seems to be part and parcel of the internal narrative of the conservative super-elite:

With a personalized letter signed by Charles Koch, the invitation to the four-day Rancho Mirage meeting opens with a grand call to action: “If not us, who? If not now, when?” The Koch network meets twice a year to plan and expand its efforts — as the letter says, “to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it.” [...]

The participants in Aspen dined under the stars at the top of the gondola run on Aspen Mountain, and listened to Glenn Beck of Fox News in a session titled, “Is America on the Road to Serfdom?” (The title refers to a classic of Austrian economic thought that informs libertarian ideology, popularized by Mr. Beck on his show.)The participants included some of the nation’s wealthiest families and biggest names in finance: private equity and hedge fund executives like John Childs, Cliff Asness, Steve Schwarzman and Ken Griffin; Phil Anschutz, the entertainment and media mogul ranked by Forbes as the 34th-richest person in the country; Rich DeVos, the co-founder of Amway; Steve Bechtel of the giant construction firm; and Kenneth Langone of Home Depot.

I suppose I don’t begrudge rich businessmen the opportunity to hang out with one another throwing a weird pity party about how overtaxed they are. But it strikes me as almost self-refuting for a bunch of billionaires to be chilling at a lavish resort talking about how Barack Obama has somehow done away with American liberty. At the end of the day the Kochs’ biggest policy priority is that they want to continue to get away with profiting from un-taxed air pollution externalities. It’s what any rich businessman in a polluting line of work would want, but it’s hardly a question that goes to the core of human freedom.

Loyalty Oath

While I’ve been running around the past few days, the talk of the Israeli left has been the new loyalty oath bill approved by the Israeli cabinet that would require non-Jews seeking Israeli citizenship to swear loyalty to the concept of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The concrete impact here is to make it more difficult for non-citizen Arab spouses of Arabs with Israeli citizenship to obtain citizenship. In practice, of course, anyone genuinely committed to some kind of stealth jihad strategy here is simply free to lie—such an oath inherently lacks credibility—and the real impact here is a symbolic gesture of illiberalism and formalized discrimination against Israeli Arabs. Part of the background to this is not just policy, but intra-coalition political machinations spearheaded initially by far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman who is, as Jeffrey Goldberg says, “doing everything in his power to alienate Israel’s friends, and to make Israel appear to be a country run by idiots.”

I spoke to a leftwing Israeli who attended the rally in Tel Aviv against the bill earlier today and he said it had the atmosphere of a funeral for liberal Zionism.

To try to offer some added-value from the ground I’ll note that relations between Arab Israelis and the Israeli state are not exactly the lovefest that was described to me in Hebrew school ‘lo those many years ago. A leader of an Arab Israeli human rights organization told us several days ago that he found the Knesset debate over the loyalty oath to be bizarre. After all, Israel’s nature as a Jewish state is entrenched in the country’s basic law and its symbols of national identity. And why shouldn’t immigrants be made to swear fealty to the de facto constitution? The reason given is that it’s an insult to the Arab Israelis. But if Jewish Israelis deem it unfair to Arab Israelis to make them swear allegiance to the constitutional definition of Israel as a Jewish state then why isn’t it also unfair to Arab Israelis to have the definition there in the constitution in the first place?

Arab Israeli kids in Ajami, Jaffa (my photo, available under cc license)

Long story short, there are many countries in the world faced with tensions between liberalism, nationalism, and democracy and Israel’s had an unusually severe case of the disease for a while now and at the moment liberalism is losing out quite badly.

Fairness, Opportunity, and Redistribution

Jon Chait’s review of Arthur Brooks’ The Battle is focused elsewhere, but contains an interesting digression into the question of equality of opportunity:

In opposition to the punitive leveling agenda of the 30 percent coalition, Brooks puts forward what he calls the “moral case” for free enterprise. This case rests upon “equality of opportunity.” Brooks is unequivocal about the centrality of equality of opportunity to his argument. “As long as everyone has the same opportunities,” he argues, “the free enterprise movement should have no qualms about trumpeting our values as deeply American and profoundly fair.”

As Chait observes, if you take the idea of equality of opportunity really seriously you end up with an incredibly radical agenda:

Equality of opportunity is an extremely radical, even utopian proposition. The Battle betrays no signs whatsoever of having considered what equality of opportunity would mean. It is, alas, a nearly impossible ideal to fulfill, since one of the most valued ways for parents to spend their wealth is to impart greater opportunity to their children. Affluent parents can pass on money or assets to their children. They can finance private education; subsidize internships, travel, or other valuable opportunities; raise their children in safe communities that help impart middle-class values; or simply offer them stable two-parent families. All these things create massive inequality of opportunity.

Indeed, it’s been generally acknowledged by everyone from Robert Nozick to John Rawls that achieving this kind of robust form of equality of opportunity would be incompatible with any kind of recognizable form of liberty. By contrast, I think Plato seriously entertained the idea of abolishing the family and raising children in giant collective houses, a notion that I believe also blossomed a bit in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In other words, this is a goofy kind of intellectual trap that less-thoughtful rightwingers fall into. In an attempt to block the legitimacy of redistributive tax-and-transfer schemes they end up authorizing massively more intrusive government.

For whatever it’s worth, my view is that the best argument for redistribution and the best argument for free enterprise are both grounded in basic utilitarian thinking. If there’s a guy on the sidewalk dying of Anaphylactic shock and you’re standing next to him with an epi pen talking about your right to hang onto it, then the right thing for me to do is punch you in the face, take the pen, and save the guy’s life. That’s a welfare-enhancing transfer of resources from someone who doesn’t really need it to someone who needs it much more. Redistribution!

But in general more welfare-enhancing resources exist if we have a system of well-defined property rights and free market exchange. So we have a basically capitalist system full of private businesses and private property not because of the metaphysics of “fairness” but because it works well. And then you also have a certain amount of regulation of externalities, provision of public goods, and welfare-enhancing redistribution. All because the system works better with that stuff, too. And people argument about how much of that stuff we need and how it should be organized. Of course not everyone agrees with me. Indeed, probably most people would disagree if you asked them. But this is the direction the world is heading in and we’re better off for it.

The Global Rich List

James Fallows reminds me of a site I’d seen before and forgotten about—Global Rich List. What you do is you plug your income in and it tells you where you fall on the international distribution of income.

This is pretty much impossible to do in a really methodologically rigorous way. But the broad message it sends is clear enough. Pretty much everyone in the United States of America is doing pretty damn well by international standards. An income of $50,000 per year, for example, puts you in the top one percent internationally.

Now, again, there are a lot of obvious flaws and limits to this calculation. But I do think it’s one useful way of trying to get people to think a little more globally and a little less myopically about what really matters on the planet. In particular, once I started trying to think more globally on a personal basis it really changed my attitude toward American politics. You start to see that the most important thing isn’t who wins what in the midterms, or how many of the Bush tax cuts we extend. The key issue is how can we push the public and the political system to take a broader view of what matters and whose interests count over the long-term. Right now the interests of foreigners are basically absent from our political debates, even over issues like trade, climate, migration, and war where the relevance is obvious. It’s also obvious why that might be. But few people are prepared to explicitly defend the proposition that foreigners’ interests don’t count. And that gives me hope that better thinking can emerge over time.

New Labour and Inequality

I’m always blown away by the level of righteous indignation that British lefties are able to muster about the economic record of the Blair/Brown “New Labour” governments. Here’s Christ Bertram:

Blair, Mandelson, Milburn and the rest of the gang not only failed to achieve Labour’s goals concerning inequality and social justice, they abandoned them, an abandonment summed up in Mandelson’s notorious statement that he was “intensely relaxed” about people at the top becoming “fithy rich”. New Labour, taking their cue from the Clinton Democrats, abandoned the distributive objectives of the left on the basis that the rising prosperity engendered by growth, markets and globalisation would benefit everyone. Well it hasn’t. Personally I think it was never going to, for “spirit-level” type reasons, among others. But anyway, that model ran into the wall of the banking crisis and we’ll shortly see the absolute standard of living of the poorest falling as the deficit gets clawed back at their expense.

By contrast, here’s Lane Kenworthy’s chart of income growth by decile under the Tories versus Labour:

You see here that New Labour had these (presumably finance-driven) gains at the tippy-top but also major progress for the bottom half of the income distribution. Meanwhile, it’s quite true that Cameron/Clegg austerity is likely to lead to bad outcomes for the poor, but it’s odd to say that New Labour cardinal sin was that it could “only” stay in power for 12 years. If anything that point strengthens the case that voting Labour—even New Labour—is crucial to the interests of the British working class. It looks to me like if anyone has just cause to complain about the New Labour record it’s educated professionals up there in the 70th to 90th percentiles who did better under Thatcher even as they’ve had to watch their classmates move on to riches in finance.

Loosely relatedly, I’d recommend my colleagues Matt Brown, John Halpin, and Ruy Teixeira’s FP op-ed about the future of the European left though again with the caveat that I think they’re a bit too dismissive of the “Third Way” project across the board.

The Progressive Liberal Synthesis

Gideon Rachmann pushes back a bit on Lula hagiography, but then ends up with a pretty positive assessment:

Yet, for all the inevitable qualifications, Lula will deserve much of the hoopla and praise that surrounds his retirement. He will go down as the president who oversaw two historic transitions.

The first was the completion of Brazil’s embrace of capitalism and globalisation. In his early campaigns for the presidency, Lula had denounced “neoliberalism”. In office, he tackled inflation, paid back debt and fostered the conditions for Brazilian business to thrive internationally. As he noted wryly in a recent FT article: “There is no little irony in the fact that the union leader who once shouted ‘IMF out’ in the streets has become the president who paid off Brazil’s debts to the same institution – and ended up lending it $14bn.”

I would put this point a bit differently. What you see around the world is that policies of economic “neoliberalism”—fiscal discipline, controlled inflation, private ownership of businesses, openness to trade and investment—succeed in producing growth. In principle, this growth can make everyone better off. But what leaders like Lula, or the post-Pinochet leftwing governments of Chile, or Bill Clinton, or the Blair and Brown governments in the UK bring to the table is to actually deliver on that promise through tax and welfare policies that ensure growth is broadly shared. Then on the other side you have things like the center-right governments in Sweden and Denmark (and perhaps the Cameron/Clegg government in the UK) who are succeeding by persuading people that some budget cutting needn’t presage a wholesale gutting of the welfare state.

Either way it’s global movement toward a model in which the government intervenes in the economy primarily through tax-and-transfer functions rather than through planning. Nothing’s perfect in life, but this trend has served the world pretty well and I think both sides of the equation are very much necessary. This progressive liberal synthesis is taking over pretty much everywhere in the democratic world except the United States, where the GOP remains ideologically unreconciled to the welfare state and I keep coming across odd columns urging us to try to emulate the alleged successes of Chinese central planning.