Some more headbanging around ownership, and I still wasn’t connecting with the words I was putting on the page. I finally realized: the problem I’m struggling with isn’t the words, it’s what is the problem I’m trying to solve?

At a high level, I know what question I’m trying to answer:
if the market isn’t natural and inevitable, then what’s the alternative?
But then when I tried to go deeper and figure out in a more detailed way what problem I’m trying to solve, I kept getting stuck.

But really, I’m not getting stuck on defining the problem. I’m getting stuck because even though I think of myself was trying to write to a wide audience, in my heart I am aiming at fellow lefties.

And then it hit me. Sure, I’m failing – but so are most lefties and other progressives. They haven’t been able to convince enough folks
a) that their lefty ideas aren’t crazy & completely unrealistic
b) to build a movement

What I need to do is stop worrying about talking to my fellow lefties – at least for now – and instead focus on trying to talk to most folks who think the world is screwed up but don’t know what to do or if they can do anything about it.

It’s going to take some time to wrap my head around this new approach. More on it in a few weeks.

As part of figuring out where to go next, I’ve been rereading two of my favorite liberal economists: Joseph Stiglitz and Ha-Joon Chang. It hasn’t help me move any further, but it has cheered me up. Because they aren’t doing much better against the Wall than I am.

In Econ 101land, markets are the most efficient way to organize the economy. In the last decade or so, the assumptions propping up this belief have been ripped to shreds. As Stiglitz recently summed it up:

economies are not necessarily efficient, stable or self-correcting.

In Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Cambridge University economist Ha Joon Chang’s delightful 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the authors take the complex economic arguments and evidence that’ve shredded these assumptions and spoon them out in bite sized chunks that go down easy.

Both books do a great job of kicking Exon101′s butt. But if Econ101 is about as accurate as Apple’s maps when they first came out, Stiglitz and Chang don’t do much better. Sure, they’ve got their list of places we should visit. It’s the same list — Top 10 Spots for Revitalizing and Renewing Economies on the Rocks — you’ve seen on most liberal blogs. But what are the rules that explain why visit these destinations and not others? How do we get there, and what do we do if the path to them is blocked or we get lost? S&C don’t have an app for that.

Neither do I. At least now I know I’m in good company.

After banging & banging my head against a wall, I’ve finally figured something out: the problem isn’t my will, the problem is the wall. Trying to frame my theory around our power to intervene in the economy vs. the limits to our power isn’t going to work.

I don’t know what will work. But figuring out that this approach won’t work is a step in the right direction.

I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks. Partly that’s because work has been crazy. But part of it is that I’m still banging my head against the theory wall – and the wall is winning. Here’s where I am at.

I’ve got the start – I can pretty fluently explain how the way we think about the economy hides/obscures how much we intervene.

I’ve got the part about power and justice – if our society is intervening so much, who gets to decide how we intervene & who benefits?

Where I’m still stuck: taking ownership of the power we have and dealing with the limits to our power (i.e., We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are). I know it’s important, and when other theories don’t include it it feels to me like something’s missing. But I don’t know why it’s interesting and nonobvious.

So the question I need to answer is:
Why is it crucial that when we think about how & who gets to shape the economy, we think about:
– Taking ownership
– Dealing with the limits of what we can do

For example:
– what if you don’t include it? What problems does that cause?
– Why does it bother me when it isn’t included in other folks’ theories/arguments?

Stay tuned…

I may have figured out where I’m getting stuck. Here’s how I’ve been framing the question I’m trying to answer:

Since the economy is not natural or inevitable,
since it is deeply and profoundly shaped by the decisions our society makes,
how do we try to give everyone a real say in how we shape our economy
while embracing/coming to terms with the fact that we can’t ultimately control the economy, that We’re Not As Smart as We Think We Are?

Although the language is a little raggedy, the first part of the question basically feels right. But the second part? The “while embracing/coming to terms with”? It’s not passing the “so what?” test. I think there is an answer to “so what” lurking somewhere below the surface, but I don’t know what it is.

After banging my head on it for a bit, one thing’s become clear: I’m not going to have an answer – or at least answer I think is strong enough to take on the road – anytime soon. It may be because this is a hard question to answer. Or it may be because I haven’t gotten to the real question yet. But at least I’ve found this major stuck point, so that’s progress.

(Time for a little more “stumbling towards”)

So far, my revised argument goes like this:

Q: if the economy isn’t natural or inevitable, if it’s massively shaped – both in ways we don’t and do like – by big corporations, the wealthy, and occasionally the rest of us, what’s the alternative?

A: if we’re inevitably going to massively intervene in the economy, big corporations and the wealthy shouldn’t get to make most of the decisions about how & why we intervene. Everyone should have a real say – a.k.a. “Power to the People.”

Q: but if “Power to the People” isn’t enough, if it can have unintended consequences that can be quite terrible and produces visions of a more just economy that are little more than they handwaving or wildly extrapolating from a few examples – “blueprints” of an economy that wouldn’t pass inspection – what else do we need?

A: balance it out with We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are.

 

To make this work, I need to figure out what We’re Not As Smart is really about, and that requires fleshing out the details. But I want to make sure I don’t lose myself in the details (as I’ve done on previous trips down this path). So where will it take us?

Here’s where, I think:
If we pay attention to what We’re Not As Smart is telling us, it’ll take us right back to Power to the People – only with a deeper, richer understanding of it.

 

(There also might be an interesting pattern in We’re Not As Smart that mimics/learns from the best of how “the market” is supposed to work – that in effect it’s a way of fulfilling some of what we like about “the market” fairytale. But it’s making me very nervous – which is usually either a sign that it’s spot on or completely missing the mark.)

Okay, that’s about as much Big Think as my brain can take for now.

If the economy isn’t natural or inevitable, if it’s massively shaped by the government, then the first step to an economy that works for everyone is to ask, why should big corporations and the wealthy get to call the shots? Why shouldn’t everyone have a real say?

That’s the story most progressives tell: Power to the People! Some also add, Small is Beautiful.

I don’t think that can be the end of the story.

First, the track record of Power to the People isn’t very encouraging. Stalin, Mao – somewhere along the way beautiful visions of people power got twisted into grotesque totalitarian horrors. Mind you, there are plenty of lefties who have pretty convincing explanations as to how these nightmares happened and how to prevent them. And of course there are a variety of flavors of anarchists who argue examples like these demonstrate why we shouldn’t create any concentrations of power – a vision which I’d argue helped both create Occupy Wall Street and drove it into the ground in a matter of months. Now this is no argument against Power to the People. But to me it suggests we need a deeper form of skepticism than an awful lot of lefties can tolerate.

Second, and even more importantly, when you look at most (although not all) progressive/lefty visions of what an alternative economy would look like, I think you see the limits of Power to the People + Small is Beautiful. Most of these “blueprints” consist of a laundry list of high-level points plus an awful lot of handwaving – or wildly extrapolating from a handful of examples. If the economy was a house, these blueprints wouldn’t pass inspection.

The problem isn’t that these folks aren’t serious or smart enough. The problem is that it’s really, really freakin’ hard to come up with a good blueprint. And that’s why I think Power to the People isn’t enough.

So what’s the alternative? I think it’s balancing Power to the People with We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are – once, of course, I flesh out We’re Not As Smart a little more.

I freely admit, this piece isn’t entirely fair. There are plenty of progressives/lefties whose version of Power to the People is a lot more subtle than I’m giving credit for here. Part of it is that I’m having trouble laying down my snark – some of these folks are good souls who drive me absolutely batshit. I’m having trouble untangling my anger at the degree to which our side shoots itself in the foot from what I think is an important point about confronting our limits head-on. And I think part of that difficulty in untangling & letting go of my anger is that I’m still not clear enough on what I’m arguing.

But hey – that’s why I gave my blog the “stumbling towards” tagline.

Extreme conservatives have done a pretty good job of capturing the word freedom. In fact, they’ve done such a good job that a lot of liberal and progressive folks shy away from it. I think this is a mistake. I don’t think we want to claim just the “justice” part of “liberty and justice for all.”

Part of the reason why I think they shy away from the word freedom is that they’re afraid it leads us down a path of individualism. It can, but only if we forget how social so much of freedom is.

A lot of freedom takes place in shared spaces. The Tea Partiers out in Louden County who say the government is taking away their freedom? They’re the same folks who are driven nuts by the yuppie bicyclists in spandex who take full advantage of their freedom by clogging up smaller roads. At some point, we sometimes get down to a trade-off between whose freedom is going to prevail. And if you truly believe in freedom, then at some point this is a choice we have to make together.

Same thing for the owner of a small auto shop. If you ask them, odds are they’ll complain about the crazy quilt of regulations they have to live with. A conservative guy I used to work with said it was these regulations that drove his dad’s business into the ground.

But what would happen to the freedoms of other people if we didn’t have those regulations? If the owner of that small auto shop has the freedom to dispose of the toxic liquids his folks work with any way he wants, he can end up poisoning other people’s drinking water, or killing off the fish that other folks depend on for their livelihood.

These days you also don’t have the freedom to slaughter a pig inside your house and then throw the remains out the window into the street. Ditto with dirty baby diapers. Why? Because, as public health officials discovered in the 19th century, throwing your crap into the gutters is like throwing a block party for cholera – and the tens of thousands of people in the US who died from cholera epidemics didn’t have a whole lot of freedom left over.

At the same time, that conservative guy had a point. It’s easy to go from regulations that are absolutely essential to a bureaucracy that creates regulations because it can. Or regulations that are designed only with huge corporations in mind that don’t take into account the world of smaller businesses. There has to be a balance. And that balancing of competing freedoms is something that ultimately we can only do together.

And then there are all whole range of issues where freedom depends on your circumstances. If you’re really sick and you can’t afford good quality medical care, that doesn’t sound like freedom to me. Or having to own a car because no decent paying jobs are near mass transit or close enough to walk or bike to. Ditto for having to move into a nursing home and leave the home you’ve lived in for 30 years because you can’t afford the modest amount of assistance you would need to stay in your home.

Conservatives like to harp on the idea that raising taxes means the government decides what to do with your money, not you. But the fact is that many decisions we make that expand our freedom are decisions we have to make together.

In short, some of the most profound decisions we make about our personal freedom are not ones we can make by ourselves. As Ben Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “we must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”