In his interview with the Wonk Room, [American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist] Felmy recognized that the [Center for American Progress] report concluded that you would get four times as many clean energy jobs as oil jobs from the same investment, because “green technology is more labor-intensive and less capital-intensive.” He admitted that if you invest money in clean energy instead of oil and gas:

“I have no doubts you can get a lot more jobs.”

In other words, tax hikes improve the economy.

But it turns out that Grove is not your average CEO.

the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late—unless you’re counting Asia, where American tech companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs…

Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

The underlying problem: the rules are stacked in favor of off shoring manufacturing jobs.

Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate…

We got to our current state as a consequence of many of us taking actions focused on our own companies’ next milestones. An example: Five years ago a friend joined a large VC firm as a partner. His responsibility was to make sure that all the startups they funded had a “China strategy,” meaning a plan to move what jobs they could to China.

How do we get out of this mess? Not by big corporate tax cuts but by rebuilding “our industrial commons.”

We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability—and stability—we may have taken for granted.

Grove’s strategy doesn’t address how we could at the same time ensure our brothers and sisters in China also get good jobs . But it’s still a pretty amazing statement from the head of one of the most successful US manufacturing companies in the last 25 years.

In 1985, at a time when the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, the portion of American families that would be counted as economically insecure by the terms of this new index was 12 percent. Professor Hacker explained that the percentage would naturally tend to rise or fall with improvements or a deterioration in the economy.

But what has happened over the past few decades is that the percentage of insecure Americans relative to any given level of the economy has tended to steadily rise. So in 2002, coming out of a mild recession, there was a 5.8 percent unemployment rate, but the percentage of economically insecure families had jumped to 17 percent.

All of the data for 2009 are not yet in, but the research team projects, conservatively, that more than 20 percent of Americans experienced a 25 percent or greater loss of household income (without a financial cushion) over the prior year — the highest in at least a quarter of a century.

A decrease of this magnitude in available income is a heavy blow. As the study points out, “The typical individual who experiences a decline of at least 25 percent in household income requires between six and eight years for income to return to its previous level.”

“What we’re seeing, basically, is what we’re calling ‘the new normal,’ ” said Mr. Hacker. “We’re slowly ratcheting up this level of economic insecurity.”

If you’ve been wondering what I mean when I say that we’re using the values of big corporations and the rich to shape the economy, this is Exhibit A.

Mrs. Merkel, who heads a new coalition of conservatives and the business-friendly Free Democrats, said the global financial crisis would result in a fundamental reshuffling as competition increased for market share, raw materials and human capital….

“Without growth, no investment; without growth, no jobs; without growth, no money for education; without growth, no support for the weak,” Mrs. Merkel said….

Unemployment, now at 8.3 percent, “will rise further,” she said, and added that the government’s subsidy plan known as Kurzarbeit would be extended.

The Kurzarbeit program encourages companies to reduce the amount of hours their employees work rather than laying them off. Under the plan, companies only pay for the hours their employees work and the government compensates those whose hours are cut with an allowance covering some of the lost wages.

“Without Kurzarbeit, more jobs would have been lost,” Mrs. Merkel said.

The program has already saved 400,000 jobs, according to IAB Research Institute, which is affiliated with the Federal Labor Agency. At least 1.4 million employees are working shorter hours, according to the labor agency…

Wow.

1. Create more sustainable and resilient communities
2. Green the local economy
3. Engage the community in the climate change planning process
4. Approach climate change planning on a regional level
5. Address transportation through transit-oriented development and complete streets
6. Promote density through infill development and brownfield redevelopment
7. Adopt green building policies
8. Preserve and create green space
9. Plan for climate adaptation

One of the more interesting case studies was of Sarasota County, Florida, which has adopted the Architecture 2030 Challenge,

which is built around the goal of achieving carbon neutrality for county operations by 2030…

As staff members began examining what it would take to succeed on that challenge, they quickly realized that land use and community design were every bit as critical to carbon neutrality as energy use in public buildings. In just one example of how that realization translated into a different way of thinking about policy, county staff members looked at the amount of driving that residents were doing and saw that it was largely predetermined by the pattern of development. The task of reducing VMT became not just an issue of housing demand but also a matter of housing need: where does the county need to locate housing and what form does the housing need to take?

That insight, and the fact that folks in Sarasota care about “protecting the area’s natural systems, the county developed a 2050 plan that

proposes the development of “2050 Villages”–compact developments designed to preserve open space and reduce driving–as well as an initiative emphasizing strong transit connections and TOD.

to get a sense of what kind of carbon emission savings Smart Growth can offer, a few steps from the report:

Transportation accounts for one-third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, more than any other single end-use sector. Between 1990 and 2006, GHG emissions from the transportation sector accounted for 47 percent of the increase in overall U.S. GHG emissions…

SMARTRAQ [Strategies for the Metro Atlanta Region’s Transportation and Air Quality] found that people living in neighborhoods that were rated as the least walkable drove about 30 percent more—and produced about 20 percent more GHG emissions—than those living in the areas rated most walkable….

The greater location efficiency offered by redeveloped brownfields can reduce VMT by 33 to 58 percent over greenfield developments….

Residential buildings account for 21 percent of all CO2 emissions. A detached single-family home uses 54 percent more energy for heating and 26 percent more for cooling than a multifamily home. Homes in compact developments use, on average, 20 percent less energy than homes in sprawling development.

Will all of this stop the climate crisis? No, because right now the efforts are too scattered and diffuse. But what if the environment movement and folks like Obama were doing everything they could to encourage and provide resources for these local experiments? We could make a hell of a lot more progress much more quickly than we can with all the energy being spent on a probably doomed effort to pass cap and trade.

Come to think of it, if Obama, the enviros, and Obama’s amazing social network of folks who organize to get him elected were focused on these kinds of climate crisis fights at the local level, it might create serious increase the odds of getting something serious done at the national level — corporations might decide he was worth cutting a serious national deal if only to slow down local efforts. These are the kinds of options we lose when we follow Krugman and other economists’ market-based framework.

“Too often, particularly I think in an American context, everybody says, ‘We want policies that reflect our values,’ but nobody says what those values are,” Stiglitz told me. The opportunity to choose a new set of indicators, he added, is tantamount to saying that we should not only have a conversation about recasting G.D.P. We should also, in the aftermath of an extraordinary economic collapse, talk about what the goals of a society really are.

For example:

Do we want government to help us increase our sense of satisfaction? Or do we want it to help us get through our days without feeling misery? The two questions lead toward two very different policy options. Is national progress a matter of making an increasing number of people very rich? Or is it about getting as many people as possible into the middle class?

A better way of measuring how we’re doing might also change how we think about the past.

In [Stiglitz's] view, Americans would have had a much clearer picture of our progress over the past decade if we had focused on median income rather than G.D.P. per capita, which is distorted by top earners and corporate profits. “When you have increasing inequality, median and average behave differently,” Stiglitz said. Real median household income has actually dipped since 2000. But G.D.P. per capita, he noted, has gone up. A president could go on the podium, Stiglitz said, and point to G.D.P. as proof that Americans are doing very well. But if you looked instead at median income, he said, “you could say, a) it’s not sustainable; and b) most people are actually worse off.” We need to focus on those median figures, he insisted.

The same is true for comparing us with the rest of the world.

It has long been the case, for example, that the G.D.P. of the United States outpaces that of European countries with higher taxes and greater government spending; it has thus seemed reasonable to view our economic growth as a vindication of a national emphasis on free markets and entrepreneurship. But things look different if you see the measure itself as flawed or inadequate. We take shorter vacations than Europeans, for instance, which is one reason their G.D.P. is lower than ours — but that could change if our indicators start putting a value on leisure time. Some of the disparity, meanwhile, between the U.S. and various European countries, Stiglitz argued, is a statistical bias resulting from the way G.D.P. formulas account for public-sector benefits. In other words, the services received from the government in a country like Sweden — in public education, health care and child care, among other things — are likely undervalued. Rejiggering the measures of prosperity would almost certainly challenge our self-perceptions, Stiglitz said, perhaps so much so that in the U.S. we might begin to ask, Is our system working as well for most people as we think it has been?

Where many folks who’ve been wrestling with an alternative to the GDP end up is arguing that a single stat just won’t do.

Suppose you’re driving, Stiglitz told me. You would like to know how the vehicle is functioning, but when you check the dashboard there is only one gauge. (It’s a peculiar car.) That single dial conveys one piece of important information: how fast you’re moving. It’s not a bad comparison to the current G.D.P., but it doesn’t tell you many other things: How much fuel do you have left? How far can you go? How many miles have you gone already? So what you want is a car, or a country, with a big dashboard — but not so big that you can’t take in all of its information.

Incorporating a broader range of indicators also gives you at least a little help with tackling difficult if not impossible issues such as trying to measure/incorporate happiness.

while our current economic measures can’t capture the larger effects of unemployment or chronic depression, providing policy makers with that information may influence their actions. “You might say, If we have unemployment, don’t worry, we’ll just compensate the person,” Stiglitz told me. “But that doesn’t fully compensate them.” Stiglitz pointed to the work of the Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who served on the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission, which suggests that losing a job can have repercussions that affect a person’s social connections (one main driver of human happiness, regardless of country) for many years afterward.

As a result, some of the more promising efforts such as the State of the USA have ended up creating a very large list of indicators — up to 300 — that people can mix-and-match to suit a particular purpose.

The size of the indicators panel is not a stumbling block; if anything, he argued, it’s an asset for an information-based society. The G.D.P. and other indexes, Hoenig said, are “an artifact of a world before the Web.” For his part, Stiglitz sees the State of the USA as a complement to any future dashboard system. A small dashboard of indicators could be useful for some purposes, a large panel for others. “When you go to a good doctor today, they don’t just look at one or two vital signs,” he said. “They look at a hundred statistics.” State of the USA, he told me, could be a “rich diagnostic tool” for evaluating the health of the country.

Last week, I argued that a values-based framework has two big advantages over a market-based framework in setting the agenda. We’re more likely to debate what really matters to us. And we’re more likely to debate who should get to decide — and in turn, that makes it harder for the wealthy and big corporations to hide what they’re fighting for.

In the next few posts, I’m going to try to show that a values-based framework is also better at actually delivering the goods. To understand why, first we need to be clear why smart folks like Krugman favor a market-based framework. Or as Krugman put it,

Textbook economics and real-world experience tell us that we should have policies to discourage activities that generate negative externalities and that it is generally best to rely on a market-based approach.

That said, Krugman isn’t arguing markets are the only game in town. Sometimes banning behavior outright make more sense.

When it comes to direct action, you can make the case that economists love markets not wisely but too well, that they are too ready to assume that changing people’s financial incentives fixes every problem. In particular, you can’t put a price on something unless you can measure it accurately, and that can be both difficult and expensive. So sometimes it’s better simply to lay down some basic rules about what people can and cannot do.

Consider auto emissions, for example. Could we or should we charge each car owner a fee proportional to the emissions from his or her tailpipe? Surely not. You would have to install expensive monitoring equipment on every car, and you would also have to worry about fraud. It’s almost certainly better to do what we actually do, which is impose emissions standards on all cars.

So why rely on markets wherever possible? First, he argues,

A market-based system would create decentralized incentives to do the right thing

And decentralized incentives are critical when you are dealing with an insanely complicated problem like greenhouse gases.

greenhouse gases are a direct or indirect byproduct of almost everything produced in a modern economy, from the houses we live in to the cars we drive. Reducing emissions of those gases will require getting people to change their behavior in many different ways, some of them impossible to identify until we have a much better grasp of green technology. So can we really make meaningful progress by telling people specifically what will or will not be permitted? Econ 101 tells us — probably correctly — that the only way to get people to change their behavior appropriately is to put a price on emissions so this cost in turn gets incorporated into everything else in a way that reflects ultimate environmental impacts.

The second reason to use markets:

But while the direct regulation of activities that cause pollution makes sense in some cases, it is seriously defective in others, because it does not offer any scope for flexibility and creativity

In short, a market-based framework allow for decentralized, flexible, creative solutions, “as opposed to a ‘command and control’ fix that issues specific instructions in the form of regulations.”

Up next: market-based theory meets European Union Cap and Trade reality

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

If you’re in that top 1%, life is grand….

They back up this statement with 15 charts with titles like

The last two decades were great… except for American workers

Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years

Poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class

Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap

None of this is new, but it’s still pretty entertaining to see a business magazine laying it out in stark, nicely designed graphs. Maybe something to e-mail to your cranky Republican uncle?

1. Strives for full democratic participation.

2. Builds capacity for a truly sustainable infrastructure and green economy.

3. Creates and share “green” wealth.

The rest of the report shows how groups around the country are fighting for this vision.

Take Harlan County, Kentucky. You probably know about the environmental devastation caused by strip top mining. At the same time, most folks in Harlan County are in a no-win situation.

There are few employment alternatives to coal-related jobs, even as coal employment in Kentucky is a third of what it was 30 years ago, largely due to the increased mechanization of the industry. Large absentee landlords and local land-owners are unaccountable to new forms of economic development. The local elite maintain tight control over politics, commerce, and public life in this region.

But folks are fighting back, in part through a statewide organization called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC).

In Benham, a coalition made up of KFTC and the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) is exploring a range of “green,” renewable energy sources. In addition to wind power, potential exists for micro-hydro power, utilizing the creeks that run through the towns, and small-scale solar energy. The coalition’s efforts are informed by two reports from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: one on models for developing locally owned wind power and a second on viable strategies for local renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements. As the mines “write people off,” with job elimination that trigger growing desperation and anxiety, Harlan County KFTC leader, Carl Shoupe, a retired, disabled third generation miner, realizes that this moment is a “critical time” to take action.

In San Diego, the Environmental Health Coalition is also fighting to create a just, green economy for all. Last year, it

successfully blocked the expansion of a fossil fuel power plant in Chula Vista, California, where over 80% of residents are people of color and 16% of all residents fall below the poverty line. This proposed plant expansion would have more than doubled the size of the existing plant…. It would have been sited 1,300 feet from a local elementary school and only 350 feet from the nearest home in that community.

In fighting against the plant expansion, which blatantly violated the town’s general plan that EHC spent two years working to pass, EHC didn’t just argue against the plant. They won in part because they proposed an alternative vision of the future.

They drafted a detailed energy plan that described the rationale and benefits for alternatives such as solar arrays on rooftops and parking lots, repair of transmission lines, and improvement of residential energy efficiency. EHC also provided expert testimony and analysis showing that these options were not only feasible and cost effective, but could provide three to four times the energy that the proposed plant would provide.

Similarly, in New York City, WE ACT has been fighting for years to take on pollution in their neighborhood.

Five out of six public transit bus depots on Manhattan are located in the brown and black, low-income communities of Northern Manhattan. For the most part, these bus depots are situated close to apartments, schools, playgrounds, and senior centers. Inundated by toxic diesel pollution, residents suffer some of the highest rates of childhood asthma hospitalizations in the nation, and disproportionately high levels of other respiratory illnesses and heart disease. Northern Manhattan’s cancer and child-asthma rates exceed area, state, and national averages….

Years of advocacy by WE ACT for Environmental Justice (WE ACT)2 and other partners have certainly helped lessen the toxic burden of these transit depots. Their coalition work has resulted, for example, in the conversions of 400 diesel buses into compressed natural gas buses, and another 900 into hybrid electric buses. But WE ACT’s environmental justice efforts go well beyond these near term mitigations.

For example, after many years of community pressure, NYC’s MTA decided they would rebuild a Lower Manhattan bus depot that handles 120 buses a day. WE ACT trained folks in the community “in the principles of green building and the science of sustainability,” and now they are working with the MTA to create a truly green depot, including features such as “a green roof, air pollution controls, energy efficiency, and gray water reclamation.”

The report also highlights how some groups who began by fighting for economic justice have broadened their vision to for a just, sustainable economy. In Miami, in 2001 “the Miami Workers Center (MWC) sought to prevent the demolition of low-income housing developments in Liberty City,” eventually forcing developers to build units that were affordable for everyone who lived in the development. As part of their experience in that fight, now one of their main goals is “to deepen community involvement in the redevelopment and green design process.”

In early 2008, MWC collaborated with US Green Builders to host a community design competition, called a charette, of the Scott-Carver site. These charettes have served as a popular education piece for residents, and MWC members and have helped the wider community understand the connection between environmental and racial justice….

Poinciana Industrial Park, a mostly vacant industrial site that for three decades was supposed to have brought economic development and opportunities to the black community. MWC is helping policy makers and developers understand the value of turning that Park into a “green enterprise zone” that will host small to medium scale green businesses. In its attempt to reframe conventional “green” discourse, MWC uses the term “Community Driven Green Industry” to describe the public, non-profit, and private sector ventures that create environmentally friendly products and services that also generate long-term living-wage jobs at all skill levels. As Benford explained, MWC “really need[s] to drive consciousness of what kind of development we need to be focused on,” given Miami’s track record of pursuing “shallow” development versus wealth-generating development.

And in LA, home of the highway car chase, last year the Labor/Community Strategy Center helped create Transit Riders for Public Transportation, a network of 11 groups across the country fighting to “bring environmental justice and civil rights priorities to the upcoming federal surface ransportation act—whose budget is estimated to be at least $500 billion.” Eric Mann, the Labor/Community Strategy Center’s Director, argues that

a strong investment in public transportation can create real green jobs (defined as jobs that reduce fuel emissions, and provide sustainable, long term employment with promotions potential for minority populations).

The Labor/Community Strategy Center estimates, for instance, that 7,000 green jobs could be created for every 1,000 buses built. For every 100 buses, they estimate that 300 drivers could be hired to enable buses to run round the clock. Jobs in clerical work, cleaning and maintenance, bus mechanics, and bus construction would also be created…

“a mass transit system that prioritizes the needs of the most transit-dependent communities can serve the needs of all. The process of getting people out of their cars can begin now, not after manufacturing 200 million electric cars or after constructing a multi-billion or trillion dollar new rail project, or after transitioning to a clean electricity grid 20 years from now.”

You can read more about these organization’s struggles and their vision of a better future for all in the Environmental Justice and the Green Economy report. If you or your organization wants to endorse their Vision Statement, check out http://ejstimulus.wordpress.com/selected-list-of-endorsers/

The problem, according to Topos, isn’t that most folks are ideologically opposed to “government ‘interference’ in the economy.”

Rather, the more fundamental problem is that they find it difficult to even see that policy shapes the economy. Many default to thinking of the economy as either “natural” (a “free” market that will “turn around”) or shaped by the decisions of multiple individual actors (greedy business executives who offshore jobs, irresponsible consumers who buy more than they should, hard-working small employers who treat employees well, unskilled workers who aren’t prepared for certain jobs, etc.). In neither case is intentional, collective action to shape the economy relevant to the public’s considerations. After all, you can’t legislate away the irresponsibility of consumers who borrow more than they should, or create policies to cause executives to stop making decisions based on personal greed.

To tackle these views, Topos says we should use 2 key ideas that test well. The first idea:

The Intentional Middle Class: A strong middle class, which is the engine driving our economy, doesn’t arise by accident, but is the result of deliberate and proactive choices.

For example, this statement tested well:

A middle class does not happen by accident—it takes long-term planning and particular kinds of policies like an affordable college education, home mortgage deductions to encourage homeownership, and tax and investment policies that allow people to build more savings. In this country we’ve worked hard to grow and strengthen the middle class, with policies like these. Some societies don’t take significant steps to build a middle class and those societies have a large class divide.

Why focus on the middle class?

It helps people focus on broad-based prosperity and collective stakes, as opposed to individual outcomes. Since the vast majority of Americans see themselves as “middle class” or aspiring to be middle class, steps to grow and strengthen the middle class are steps that are in our collective interest. It puts the focus on what government should (try to) achieve, and avoids the question of whether government can achieve economic results…. Americans usually think of the middle class as “most Americans”—it is natural to believe that government efforts should benefit most Americans. …

“Middle class” means “all of us,” so steps to help and strengthen the middle class are steps that build broad-based prosperity and are in our collective interest.

The second idea: “public structures.”

Public Structures as Economic Foundation: The “public structures” created and maintained by government are foundational to prosperity and economic stability, as well as the strength of the middle class.

Topos argues there are 2 useful ways to talk about how public structures help create a good economy. The first: by “paving the way” for new innovations and industries. For example, this statement tested well:

One of the things that has always boosted the economy most is new products, new ideas, new industries. And these major innovations have almost always depended on government “paving the way” for businesses, rather than just “getting out of the way.” For example:

Government-supported researchers develop a new idea and companies make it profitable (Internet, various medicines).

Government creates a regulation, and companies compete to find better ways of doing things (more efficient light bulbs).

Company invents something, and government purchases enough to get the industry launched (microchips).

Economists say government paving the way has always been one of the keys to the US’s economic success and leadership.

The other idea: talking about policies as plumbing, directing the flow of resources.

Experts say American voters really need to focus more attention on the complex set of laws and policies that together act like a giant plumbing system directing money to different parts of our society. Two examples of how this important system works: Laws that make it harder to declare bankruptcy end up directing money towards credit card companies, and policies that offer student loan guarantees channel money towards families. In fact, this network of policy “pipes” is how we create the kind of economy and society we want. For example, if we want to encourage certain kinds of businesses, or make families stronger, or cut down on pollution, one of the key ways we do that is by adjusting the system of policies that direct the flow of money.

Topos’ research shows that the ideas of public structure and the intentional middle class also work well when combined together. For example:

One way economists define the middle class is people who make heavy use of so-called “public structures.” On average, it is middle class people who benefit most from both physical structures like highways and levees, and other public structures from the school system to air traffic control, FDIC insurance, Medicare, the court system, etc. Economists say that countries with a thriving middle class have invested significantly in these public structures. Third-world countries, by contrast, have limited public structures and no real middle class.

There’s a lot to like in Topos’ approach. There are also parts that think need some work. In the next two weeks, I’ll explore what I think does and doesn’t work and what implications it might have for the RTE framework.

Other interesting findings from the report:

On the GDP Versus the “Lived” Economy:

From the perspective of those who desire more action by government to effect economic outcomes, one promising finding is that Americans’ bottom-line criteria for evaluating the economy are often closer to what advocates frequently focus on—such as unemployment rates, wages, expendable income and job security— than to what economists and economic reporters often focus on—such as stock prices or the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). People tend to judge the economy based on their perceptions of how they and people like them are doing; as this quote from a research respondent illustrates:

Money spent on Wall Street is fine, but it’s still not putting cash in the everyday person’s pocket. If we don’t have money to spend or deposit, it’s not really helping in the long run.
(34 year-old moderate woman, Tennessee)

And in fact, for average people the phrase “the economy” usually means the economic circumstances on the ground—as opposed to the much more complex and structural picture that insiders associate with that term.

On the Problem of Blaming “Elites”

It is easy for average Americans, particularly in tough economic times, to feel that elites (Individual Actors) are “rigging” the game in their own favor, one way or another. Intervention in the economy—by government, big business or both—must be working against average people. This view obviously implies both a passive and defeatist stance.