What Whites With Broken Hearts Can Learn From the Crow Indians

(Updated with new links through February 2, 2017.)

I’m looking at the old white woman with a “Make America Great Again” hat looking into the newspaper photographer’s camera.

She doesn’t smile at the camera.

She looks like she could work in a diner or a supermarket. She looks tired, but also proud.

She is one of millions of white people – mostly older men who never finished high school – men who have found an outlet for their long simmering anger and frustration in the media savvy real estate merchant Donald Trump.

This is probably the first time she has been to a political meeting. It’s also likely that this is the first time she has seen a candidate live who is not a politician; a man who speaks her language, who speaks plainly and is not afraid of telling it like it is. At least that’s how she feels about it.

Her hat says that the world she thought she knew it is gone. Everything is changing and it is getting worse. She has a job, but her husband lost his when his company moved to Mexico. And her brother drank himself to death after he lost his job. It was just recently that she began to pay attention to politics. It was not the Tea Party and it was not the white furor over the fact that America elected a black president and then re-elected him.

No, it was Donald Trump that woke her up from her political slumber. He came right out and said it the way it was. It was the Mexicans and the Muslims and the Blacks. It was them. Trump gave her hope. He was rich, but he spoke to her and didn’t sound one bit like a politician.

In her mind, white folks like her are hard working, church going and know their place. But there are too many people who don’t and that is something she doesn’t like. It is as if nobody fears God anymore.

On January 31, 2016, Bill Clinton spoke in Des Moines, Iowa. He referred to an article in The New York Times about middle-aged white Americans. They were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug overdoses. In another article, the newspaper reported that the number of young white adults who die from drug abuse is exploding, while death rates for young blacks and Hispanics are falling.

“The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall. The analysis shows that the rise in white mortality extends well beyond the 45- to 54-year-old age group documented by a pair of Princeton economists in a research paper that startled policy makers and politicians two months ago.” (Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites, New York Times, January 17, 2016)

Worst affected are young whites without a high school education. Their death rate rose by 23 percent for the five years leading up to 2014 compared to 4 percent for those with at least college education. 

"The drug overdose numbers were stark. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35- to 44-year-old whites tripled during that period. The numbers cover both illegal and prescription drugs.” 

Why?

“No one has a clear answer, but researchers repeatedly speculate that the nation is seeing a cohort of whites who are isolated and left out of the economy and society and who have gotten ready access to cheap heroin and to prescription narcotic drugs.
‘There are large numbers of people who never get established in the economy, who live outside family relationships and are on the edge of poverty,’ Dr. Hayward said. Many end up taking prescription narcotics, he added.
‘Poverty and stress, for example, are risk factors for misuse of prescription narcotics,’ Dr. Hayward said.
Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, said the causes of death in these younger people were largely social — ‘violence and drinking and taking drugs.’ Her research shows that social problems are concentrated in the lower education group.
‘For too many, and especially for too many women,’ she said, ‘they are not in stable relationships, they don’t have jobs, they have children they can’t feed and clothe, and they have no support network.’
‘It’s not medical care, it’s life,’ she said. ‘There are people whose lives are so hard they break.’”

These are conditions one would normally associate with Indian reservations and inner city slums, but the newspaper is talking about white people, people who according to Bill Clinton are dying of “broken hearts”. He didn’t compare with the fate of the Native Americans, but it seems obvious that whites with broken hearts suffer feelings similar to those the American Indians felt when their world was destroyed and the things they held closest to their hearts lost their meaning.

Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago describes this process in his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006) The book tells the story of how the Crow Indians faced and dealt with the existential loss under pressure from rival tribes like the Sioux, cholera and smallpox, the white man who killed the buffaloes, then their horses, stole most of their land, only to force them into reservations where traditional life became impossible.

Lear learned much of how the Crow Indians felt and responded to their crisis from the interviews that the Crow Nation’s greatest chief, Plenty Coups, gave his friend Frank B. Linderman a short time before he died. However, the story ended when the Crow people were forced to live on a reservation:

Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. “I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,” he said, when urged to go on. “I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides, “he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.” (Frank B. Linderman, Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, p 311 quoted from Lear, p 2.) 

It may be hard to understand the meaning of his statement about the buffalo – “after this nothing happened” – but maybe not if we allow it to sink in. The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor reviewed Lear’s book nine years ago for the New York Review of Books and compared the fate of the Crow Indians to that of people left behind by the market system today:

“On the contrary, we make a virtue of the kind of ‘flexibility’ that enables people to change jobs, professions, skills. The development of the modern capitalist economy has long been imposing less drastic versions of this kind of culture death on mining villages in Wales and West Virginia, on formerly large and stable workforces of companies that manufacture objects that become obsolete or can be made more cheaply elsewhere, and on many communities in the developing world. The message to younger people today is: don’t become totally invested in one set of skills, you’re bound to have to change your line of work, perhaps many times in the course of your career.” (A Different Kind of Courage, New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007, p 4) 

When the Crow elders discussed what to do, they reached back and interpreted two dreams that Plenty Coups had had at age 9 and 10. These dreams offered an alternative to Sitting Bull’s – the great Sioux chief – brave, but ultimately futile attempt to fight off the white intruders. Sitting Bull would later scorn Plenty Coups as a collaborator and a loser, but Plenty Coups would lead his people through the devastation and allow them to survive by modifying their culture, sacrificing key signifiers of pride, while leveraging traditions such as the belief in the wisdom of the Chickadee bird to show a path that involved acquiring the white man’s learning as a way to move forward. Sitting Bull on the other hand could not find a path forward and grasped for mysticism and dreams of a new messiah while dancing the Ghost Dance, which many Indians believed would bring the buffalo back and restore the world they had known and lost to the white man. Lear writes that “…Sitting Bull used a dream-vision to short-circuit reality rather than engage with it.” (Lear, 2006, p 150.)

It didn’t work, and on December 15, 1890, the great Sioux warrior was killed by the police, who were trying to suppress the Ghost Dance movement.

Life would never be the same for the Crow Nation or any other Indian Nation faced by the destruction brought on by the European immigrants and invaders. But Plenty Coups found a way forward where a Crow could still be a proud Crow, even while working in the new and strange world wrought by the white man.

Today millions of white working class men and women are pinning their hope to a White Knight while dancing a 21st Century version of the Ghost Dance. It is easy to feel their pain, but their mystic-laden and nostalgic dreams and the hope they are investing in this new and odd Messiah will never “Make America Great Again.” They would do better by learning from Plenty Coups and to listen to the Chickadee bird, who probably would tell them to start taking classes at the nearest community college.

Read more:

Jonathan Lear: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006)

Charles M. Blow: White America's 'Broken Heart' (New York Times, Feb 4, 2016)

Thomas B. Edsall: Donald Trump's Appeal (NYT, Dec 2, 2015)
                                Boom or Gloom? (NYT, Jan 27, 2016)
                                Why Trump Now? (NYT, Mar 2, 2016)
                                Who Are the Angriest Republicans? (NYT, Mar 30, 2016)
                                How the Other Fifth Lives (NYT, Apr 27, 2016)
                                The Great Trump Reshuffle (NYT, May 4, 2016)
                                The Peculiar Populism of Donald Trump (NYT, Feb 2, 2017)

Jean Kim:  Violence stalks the American Dream like a badass cowboy (Aeon, Feb 15, 2016)

David Brooks: A Little Reality on Immigration (New York Times, Feb 19. 2016)

Poorest Areas Have Missed Out on Boons of Recovery, Study Finds (New York Times, Feb 25, 2016)

Peter Wehner: What Wouldn't Jesus Do? (New York Times, Mar 1, 2016)

Jonathan Weiler: Authoritarianism at the Heart of the GOP Is Driving Trump's Support (Huffington Post Blog, Dec 8, 2015)

J.D. Vance: Why Trump’s Antiwar Message Resonates with White America (New York Times, Apr 4, 2016)

Mike McPhate: Joseph Medicine Crow, Tribal War Chief and Historian, Dies at 102 ((New York Times, Apr 4, 2016)

Roger Cohen: The Politics of Backlash (New York Times, Apr 4, 2016)

Elizabeth Williamson: Why Trump Supporters Are Angry — and Loyal (New York Times, Apr 6, 2016)

Joel Achenbach & Dan Keating: A New Divide in American Death (Washington Post, Apr 11, 2016)

Matt Ferner: Donald Trump Is Winning Because White America Is Dying (Noam Chomsky), (Huffington Post, Feb 26, 2016)

Tammy Luhby: The men America has left behind (CNN Money, May 4, 2016)

Declan Walsh: Alienated and Angry, Coal Miners See Donald Trump as Their Only Choice (New York Times, Aug 19, 2016)

Andrew J. Cherlin: The Downwardly Mobile for Trump (New York Times, Aug, 25, 2016)

Brad Plumber: What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump's America (Vox Sep 6, 2016)

Susan B. Glasser & Glenn Thrush: What’s Going on With America’s White People? (Politico Magazine, September/October 2016)

J.D. Vance: When It Comes to Baskets, We’re All Deplorable (New York Times, Sep 22, 2016)

Headlines that ask questions about the future

Too many people for the future job market...

Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’

Too few people for diverse reasons... 

As China and Europe Age, Path to More Children Lie Beyond Bedroom

Or maybe it's a matter of how the spoils of progress are divided...

Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots

Are we heading towards a new 1968?

The very fabric of society is tearing.

Ferguson. This is just the beginning. What exactly happened during those 90 seconds when a white police officer killed a young unarmed black boy while fighting his inner demons may never be clear, but what is clear is that America's poor and especially its young and people of color are losing whatever faith they had left in the legal and political system.

We may be entering another 1968 -- the year when young people across the world took to the streets protesting wars and injustice. The governments had failed to deliver on hope and justice, peace and prosperity, focusing all their effort on protecting the rich and waging wars that were often ill-conceived and ill-executed.

The Great Recession (which began in 2007 and exploded in the autumn of 2008) robbed the American middle class of its security, pulled the rug under the Black and Latino population at the same time as it allowed the obscenely rich tenth of a percent to multiply their undeserved wealth.

Charles Dickens would have said that it was the best of times and the worst of times. It all depended on if you belonged to the top quintile or the bottom four quintiles. Inequality has exploded in America and the rest of the world and the "losers" -- as Mitt Romney and many conservatives -- like to call ordinary people, have lost their patience. The result is deep anger, frustration, social unrest and in some cases extreme political movements.

The very fabric of society is tearing and the economic, political and legal system is unable to address its deepest and most serious problems.

The Democratic Party is a party without ideas and only a few steps behind the Republican Party as far as corruption goes. The Republican Party is equally void of ideas (unless we call the Tea Party's hatred of the United States's first black president a set of ideas rather than an ignorant mix of populism and racism), but at least twice as corrupt as its rival.

We've had a Democratic president for six years, and although he led the country out of the recession George W. Bush and his Republicans let lose, he failed to stand up to Wall Street, and compromised away much of the support he had on the left and center-left. The Republican strategy has rested on two legs, political obstruction even when it undermined the country's economy and national security and voter suppression. They know that they the demographic changes in the U.S. work against them, so they have been working hard, and the Supreme Court have enabled them, at disenfranchising the majority of America's population.

Today they have a lock on the economic and political power. All that is left is the Presidency. But as we have seen over the past six years, they can pretty much run the country without controlling the Presidency.

Hence the disillusionment among the poor, a large part of the middle class and the minorities (despite the fact that they will soon become a majority of eligible voters.)

       

*

Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, is similarly critical of the “upscale capture” of the Democratic Party. In an email, he wrote that in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008,

the country is desperate for economic relief, but as time goes on it becomes clear that the administration’s economic policy is to take care of the financial sector, where hundreds of people are clearly guilty of fraud in any layman’s view. The result is building disappointment, resentment, and rage in the public, which results in the 2010 debacle.

“Today,” Fiorina writes,

We have a situation where voters can choose between a party that openly admits to being a lap dog of Wall Street and a party that by its actions clearly is a lap dog but denies it. At least vote for the honest one.

*

Thomas B. Edsall: Who Will Save the Democratic Party From Itself? (New York Times, November 25, 2014)

The Social Impact of the Great Recession

Could a Radical Surge Pull the Democrats Away from Centrism?

The political writer Michael Tomasky discusses the future of radical politics in an essay for the New York Review of Books that is nominally a review of Lane Kenworthy's book Social Democratic America (Oxford University Press), but really a discussion of the balance between centrist and radicals in the Democratic Party.

"There exists these days, among Washington policy intellectuals and advocates who tilt toward the left end of the accepted political spectrum, a certain measured optimism. It’s not about Obama, or any feeling that he might somehow, with his sagging poll numbers, be able to persuade congressional Republicans to fund, say, an infrastructure investment bank. Confidence is appropriately near zero on matters like that. Rather, it’s about the widely held perception that the Democratic Party, after years of, in the argot, “moving to the right,” is finally soft-shoeing its way leftward, away from economic centrism and toward a populism that the party as a whole has not embraced for years or even decades."

Will this leftward pressure make Hillary Clinton run as a populist (if she decides to run), rather than cozy up to her and her husband's Wall Street friends? Will she do a reverse Romney and cater to the left in the primaries to fight off Elizabeth Warren, only to turn rightwards once nominated?

Lane Kenworthy's key argument is that the move towards a more welfare oriented - social democratic if we use a more European term - society is a necessity, and he thinks that the Republican party eventually will come to there senses - somewhat. But Tomasky points out that if the Republican party nominates a more moderate candidate and he/she loses, then the extreme candidates may have a chance again.

A Pragmatic Vision for a Social Democratic Future in the U.S.

Lane Kenworthy, a professor of sociology and political science in Arizona, has written a long and intriguing essay about USA's social democratic future in the upcoming January 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs. For most people, and this includes academic and political observers, the Nordic model with extensive social security and high taxes are written off as somehow un-American, but Kenworthy challenges this prejudice and he does it in Foreign Affairs, claiming that America will change and that the Republican party too, will embrace an expanded welfare state. Intriguing indeed! But the essay is well argued and not an ideological riff. It lays out the way ahead and offers a new vision that could replace the impotent blur that has led the Democrats since Clinton's days in office.

America's Social Democratic Future - The Arc of Policy Is Long But Bends Toward Justice

Here is a long quote of his setup:

"As pioneered by the Nordic countries, modern social democracy means a commitment to the extensive use of government policy to promote economic security, expand opportunity, and ensure rising living standards for all. But it aims to do so while also safeguarding economic freedom, economic flexibility, and market dynamism, all of which have long been hallmarks of the U.S. economy. The Nordic countries’ experience demonstrates that a government can successfully combine economic flexibility with economic security and foster social justice without stymieing competition. Modern social democracy offers the best of both worlds.

Still, the notion that the United States is likely to further increase the size and scope of its welfare state might seem blind to the reality of contemporary American politics. But step back and consider the long run. The lesson of the past hundred years is that as the United States grows wealthier, Americans become more willing to spend more to insure against risk and enhance fairness. Advances in social policy come only intermittently, but they do come. And when they come, they usually last.

That trend is likely to continue. U.S. policymakers will recognize the benefits of a larger government role in pursuing economic security, equal opportunity, and rising living standards and will attempt to move the country in that direction. Often, they will fail. But sometimes, they will succeed. Progress will be incremental, coming in fits and starts, as it has in the past. New programs and expansions of existing ones will tend to persist, because programs that work well become popular and because the U.S. policymaking process makes it difficult for opponents of social programs to remove them. Small steps and the occasional big leap, coupled with limited backsliding, will have the cumulative effect of significantly increasing the breadth and generosity of government social programs.

This is not a prediction about the timing or conditions under which specific policy advances will occur. It’s a hypothesis about a probabilistic process. Over the long run, new programs will occasionally be created and existing ones will occasionally be expanded, and these additions and expansions are unlikely to be reversed."

It's radical, but it is also pragmatic, and it is a much needed evolution.



Also check out Kenworthy's three Youtube lectures on the same theme:

America's Big Government Future: A lecture by Dr. Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona, December 15, 2011. Presented by the Democrats of the Red Rocks, Sedona, AZ

Bill de Blasio on "Up Late With Alec Baldwin"

Bill de Blasio a couple of years back when he was running
for Public Advocate. Photo: Hans Sandberg

MSNBC launched Alec Baldwin's new show, which featured Bill de Blasio. Both men impressed. Alec for doing an extremely smart interview, which is part Charlie Rose and part Oprah Winfrey. Brain and emotion intertwined in a relaxed and charming embrace. And Bill de Blasio is a master communicator. He comes out as an extremely sensitive, intelligent and honest man, radical, but not extreme. I only met de Blasio once, but he made a very strong impression. He is a truly good person. And he is about to become mayor of the Big Apple. A good thought in these dark days when morons like Ted Cruz has been allowed to bring the world to the brink of economic collapse.

More on New York's Next Mayor

Bill de Blasio Rules .... Soon.

Elites Shiver, But Progressives Are Elated at Bill de Blasio's Primary Win

New Yorker columnist on Bill de Blasio: “Let’s give him a shot.”

Nervous Elites Await the Arrival of the Anti-Bloomberg

Does Bill de Blasio's Rise Foreshadow a Progressive Turn in U.S. Politics?

Before Bill de Blasio Was the Hottest Democrat in New York - At a 2009 Fund Raiser

How the Rich and the Powerful Took It All and Left the Rest Of Us Behind

Bill Moyers interviews Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on Engineered Inequality in his weekly show Moyers & Company. (From March 1, 2012).

 

Does the Republican implosion leave big business out in the cold?

Thomas B. Edsall has an interesting blog post in the New York Times.

The Obama Coalition vs. Corporate America

He writes: 

"The slow implosion of the Republican Party — along with the growing strength of a Democratic coalition dominated by low-to-middle-income voters — threatens the power of the corporate establishment and will force big business to find new ways to reassert control of the policy-making process."
 (...)
“Economists on both the right and left, from Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University to the Times columnist Paul Krugman, are increasingly talking about the detrimental consequences of high concentrations of economic and political power – concentrations that threaten the innovation that is supposed to be what makes unequal outcomes worth the price.
Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T., who wrote the highly regarded book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” with James A. Robinson of Harvard, argues that concentrations of wealth and market power allow “the already well off and already well organized” to exercise excessive leverage through “lobbying, campaign contributions and otherwise” that distort market processes."

It's Not the Deficit, Stupid!

"New data from the European Union, released on Monday and analyzed in The Times by Landon Thomas Jr. and David Jolly, show that countries that have most ruthlessly cut their budgets — Greece, especially — have seen their overall debt loads increase as a share of the economy.

The data provide objective support for what has been clear to just about everyone except pro-austerity German officials and deficit-crazed Republican politicians. Namely, deep government budget cuts at a time of economic weakness are counterproductive, complicating, if not ruining, the chances for economic growth."

New York Times' editorial on October 24, 2012: The Austerity Trap

It concludes:

"Mr. Obama is better positioned than Mr. Romney to deliver that agenda. Mr. Obama could make his jobs plan, introduced last September but blocked by Congressional Republicans, part of the budget package to be negotiated after the election, when politicians must agree on tax increases and spending cuts to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

Mr. Romney’s agenda is missing a direct focus on jobs, foolishly relying instead on high-end tax cuts and deregulation to help the recovery. And he and his party continue to insist on premature deficit reduction that, in a fragile economy, is the real road to Greece."

Is the Growth Story Over for America? (No It Is Not About Obama Vs. Romney)

On his NYT blog, Thomas B. Edsall summarizes a National Bureau of Economic Research paper written by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Here is the opening salvo in a very interesting blog essay:

The American economy is running on empty. That’s the hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Let’s assume for a moment that he’s right. The political consequences would be enormous.

In his widely discussed National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” Gordon predicts a dark future of “epochal decline in growth from the U.S. record of the last 150 years.” The greatest innovations, Gordon argues, are behind us, with little prospect for transformative change along the lines of the three previous industrial revolutions:

IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. 

(...)

"Taken in full, Gordon’s controversial N.B.E.R. paper challenges our belief that innovation and invention will continue to drive sustained expansion in the United States."

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste

In Getting Away with It, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells discuss three books about President Barack Obama, the Democrats, the Republicans and the global economic crisis.

It's not an uplifting story, but it is a necessary one.

"But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935.

These changes in America’s political parties explain both why there has been no second New Deal and why the policy response to the prolonged economic slump has been so inadequate."

          ...

"Obama’s innate centrism led him to adopt the preoccupation with the budget deficit of Geithner and Peter Orszag (his head of the Office of Management and Budget and another Rubin protégé) in opposition to vocal protests from both Summers and Romer that now was not the time to worry about deficits. As a result, Obama would never acknowledge that the original stimulus was not big enough, a position that left him boxed in when it became clear—as it already had by summer of 2010, if not earlier—that it had indeed been far too small."

The Rich Are Different... They Have More Palaces

New York Times' Real Estate section calls it the Big Deal

The $100 Million Question

I call it an outrage, and I call for taxing the rich to the max. I know that they are to few for it to solve the big problems the country and the world is facing, but it would surely be a moral boost and make other changes possible that taken together could get us out of the rut. You can't ask people for shared sacrifices when the Marie Antoinette of today toys with her Hollywood Versailles.

Dithering On the Brink Of Disaster

The tepid stimulus package got us out of the hole that Bush-Cheney dug, but we have since been dithering on the bring of disaster thanks to protracted Republican intransigency and Presidential naïveté.

The Bush-Obama unemployment story so far

Taxation Is A Good Thing Says Sweden's Conservative Finance Minister

Sweden's house of finance is in order, despite the recession and economic troubles in Europe and the world. Anders Borg, the conservative Minister of Finance, said in an interview for Swedish TV that Sweden needs the taxes it levies on the population ant that it is a good thing.
"It is my belief that it is basically a good thing that we collect tax revenues in Sweden. It is a good thing that we have our welfare system, social security, foreign aid, education and healthcare. In order to have that, we need taxes," Borg told SVT.

Democracy, Dictatorship and Economic Growth

It's a popular notion that dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, and that it is China's political system that explains it's fast growth since 1978. Professor Yasheng Huang from MIT Sloan School of Management challenges that notion, by a series of very interesting comparisons.

Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth?

If you found Yasheng's speech interesting, you may also want to listen to Joseph Nye's speech, which places China's economic and political power in a soft power perspective. 

Nouriel Roubini On the Economic Crisis

Krugman: It's Time To Get Serius



Paul Krugman at Princeton on the day that it was

announced that he would receive the Noble Prize

in Economics. Photo: Hans Sandberg

Paul Krugman writes in today's column for The New York Times:

"In case you had any doubts, Thursday’s more than 500-point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average and the drop in interest rates to near-record lows confirmed it: The economy isn’t recovering, and Washington has been worrying about the wrong things.       

It’s not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery. (...)

And why should we be surprised at this catastrophe? Where was growth supposed to come from? Consumers, still burdened by the debt that they ran up during the housing bubble, aren’t ready to spend. Businesses see no reason to expand given the lack of consumer demand. And thanks to that deficit obsession, government, which could and should be supporting the economy in its time of need, has been pulling back."

The Verdict On the Tea Party Solution Is In

Markets plunge on economic turmoil; fears of another recession

“If this economy were a bicycle, it would be about to topple over,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and formerly the top economic advisor to Vice President Biden. “We need to put pressure on those pedals, but the political system is pushing us in the other direction. The economy is crying out for help and the political system is deaf to those cries.”

(Washington Post, August 4)

Stocks Down Over 4% in Global Sell-Off

Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, said investors were selling risky assets like stocks “globally prompted by concerns about the weakening economic outlook, spreading contagion in Europe and insufficient policy responses.”

(New York Times, August 4)

Tea Party’s War on America

Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.

(Joe Nocera, New York Times)

The Lesser Depression

Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets. We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse. (...)

For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great. But, if the negotiations succeed, we will be set to replay the great mistake of 1937: the premature turn to fiscal contraction that derailed economic recovery and ensured that the Depression would last until World War II finally provided the boost the economy needed.

Did I mention that the European Central Bank — although not, thankfully, the Federal Reserve — seems determined to make things even worse by raising interest rates?

(Paul Krugman, New York Times, July 21)

The President Surrenders

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

(Paul Krugman, New York Times, July 31)

Wasn't the Debt-Ceiling Deal Supposed to Avert a 512-Point Dow Collapse?

If Obama does not reject the failed fantasies of the past and start promoting a jobs agenda that is based on federal government investment in infrastructure, education and the stabilizing of state and local governments so that they can continue to deliver needed services, the Tea Partisans will continue to control the discourse.

Obama must take the lead—with an absolute rejection of the extreme right's extremely wrong agenda—if he hopes to rally the popular support that is needed to define the debate and, ultimately, to start winning the fights that will determine the future of the US economy.

Obama has to climb into the bully pulpit and take charge. If he does not, the circumstance will just get worse.

Compromises do not build confidence.

Cuts do not inspire.

Tax breaks for the rich do not does not jumpstart a stalled economy.

Austerity does not create jobs.

And if Barack Obama continues to surrender to the peddlers of the austerity fantasy, if he continues to refuse to use the full strength of the federal government to advance a job-creation agenda, he will have a lot more to worry about than whether John Boehner will still go golfing with him.

(John Nichols, The Nation, August 4)

The Republican’s Double-Dip, and What Must Be Done

It was never a debt crisis. The debt crisis was manufactured. It’s been a jobs, wages, and growth crisis all along. And that reality has finally caught up with us.

Now that we’re slouching toward a double-dip recession, the only hope is voters will tell their members of Congress – who are now on recess back home – to stop obsessing about future budget deficits and get to work on the real crisis of unemployment, falling wages, and no growth.

We need a bold jobs bill to restart the economy. Eliminate payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income for two years. Recreate the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The federal government should lend money to cash-strapped states and local governments. Give employers tax credits for net new jobs. Amend the bankruptcy laws to allow distressed homeowners to declare bankruptcy on their primary residence. Extend unemployment insurance. Provide partial unemployment benefits to people who have lost part-time jobs. Start an infrastructure bank.

And more.

The jobs bill should be number one on the nation’s agenda. It should have been all along.

(Robert Reich on his blog. August 4) 

A Huge Problem with an Obvious Solution

Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables

A great expose by Mark Bittman. It is a life and death issue, and addressing it could lower the deficit.

Subsidized. Photo: Hans Sandberg

Not subsidized.

"WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)....changing it /our diet/ could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives..... and... save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods.... Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.
Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we should turn the tables and tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available."

It's so obvious and makes so much sense and would save so much money that one wonders if it ever could be done. It's almost like if we were to get people to stop smoking.... oh, we actually did that, and it worked. And we do regulate and tax tobacco. Why isn't the Tea Party huffing and puffing about that?

Hans Sandberg

The President's Speech: Did Barack Obama Draw A Line In the Sand?

Obama's speech about the long-term budget crisis was strong and effective. He came out as the national leader setting the agenda, and wiping off the irresponsible and immoral proposal Paul Ryan presented a couple of weeks ago.

The Republicans threw a hissy fit, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan faked outrage and Rush Limbaugh emerged from the relative obscurity where he has been found himself due to the oversupply of nutty conservatives.

Now, lets hope that hos words will be match with deeds, and not backtracking ahead of the battle.

Hans Sandberg

PS. Here is New York Times comment on the speech:

President Obama, Reinvigorated