I have been feeling a little blue since the midterm
election, or, more accurately, a little black and blue, so I decided to give
myself a break from staring at screens for almost anything political. I pulled on my running clothes, and, instead
of heading to Central Park, I jogged down to Strand.
I had a mission—find an in-stock copy of the economist
Edmund Phelps’ Mass Flourishing and otherwise
poke around in that absurdly appealing dog-pile of dusty obscure books.
I located the Phelps, in a “review copy, not for resale” version
(which heightened its outlaw appeal) and devoured it. It’s not a perfect book, not always cleanly
laid out, but Phelps is a polymath, and Mass
Flourishing isn’t just about economics, it’s also a bit of a ramble about
human achievement and drive and artistic expression, about music, and trading
routes, and painting, and philosophy. It
led me all over the place, some times with false starts, sometimes down
alleyways that I found unconvincing, but I found it had an inner drive that
pulled me along. When I finished it, I had this odd hunger for conversation,
but it being a weekend, the apartment emptied out, I turned instead to the NPR
website, where you can hear the whispery narration merely by reading the text. I deliberately skipped over the “Cromnibus”
swamp, to a little story, “Congress Says Goodbye to its Last WWII Vets”.
When this 113th Congress finally, and blessedly,
calls it a wrap, it will note the retirements of Democrat John Dingell of
Michigan, and Republican Ralph Hall of Texas.
These two were the last—in Dingell’s words, “the last leaves
on the tree.” Literally hundreds came
before them. The incoming class of 1946
had 70 vets, including JFK and Nixon.
Their tenure (it reached its peak from the late 40’s to the 1970’s) was
marked by a lot of good old push and shove (these weren’t shrinking violets)
and a surprising amount of bipartisanship. They did a lot together.
Not everyone mourns their passing—in fact, many think this
is a good thing, because our connection to their shared experience and sense of
community has been fraying for some time. In many cultures, the old are
venerated for their wisdom. Not ours. We
don’t think they have anything of value—rather they represent a drain on
us—spending our inheritances, taking up booths in the diners as they nurse
their coffees, causing the bus to kneel and wait when we have to get someplace. We go through the motions of honoring them,
but really, they annoy us and, in moments of quiet reflection, they scare us—they
represent a future we fear we cannot escape.
But the Greatest Generation is different, regardless of what lens you choose to look through. Not merely because they fought and won the
war against Germany and Japan, but also because they are the last of the
Depression generation—the last group to have first-hand memories of a sustained
failure of capitalism, and its slow, but powerful recovery.
Imagine 25% unemployment.
Imagine a stock market where the Dow Jones Industrial Average went from
381.17 to 41.22—89 cent loss on the dollar.
Imagine going to the bank where you had painstakingly put together your
savings and finding it out of cash, or with its doors closed.
That was reality for many who later served in Congress. It
was reality for my parents. My maternal
grandfather had a tailor shop, and no customers for nice suits and coats. My mother remembered not being able to go to
the 1939 World’s Fair, because the carfare (round trip subway tokens for four)
was too much. My father’s Dad had a candy
store on the Upper West Side and lived above it in a small room six days a
week, then went home to the Bronx on the seventh day.
It marked my parents, just as it marked many of their
generation. They ran a drugstore for
more than thirty years—my Mom did the billing, and when some of their customers
got in a bit of trouble, like the loss of a job, and fell behind, she’d ask my
Dad, who, more often then not, would screw up his face, wave his hand, and
mutter something that translated it to “don’t send it, not the right thing to
do.” My parents were exceptionally generous
people, but they were not the exception for their time or their community. Everyone helped out a little. And, also like many of their generation, they
were planners. You always kept a little money in the house. And in a jacket pocket. And the linen drawer. And, maybe in a brown night deposit bag. And in the lower left drawer of the desk. Because, you never know when you are going to
need a few dollars.
This type of thinking, a peculiar combination of self-reliance,
a sense of a social obligation, and a willingness to work hard, helped shaped their
generation and gave it vitality and drive. If you made it through the
Depression, if you came back from the war in one piece, you knew—just knew,
that if you stuck to it, you could make a place for yourself in America.
What people learned were two things that to contemporary
ears seem contradictory, but made perfect sense then. The first was that some big problems (Hitler,
Tojo, Dust Bowl, rural electrification) needed top-down directed mass efforts
to solve. The second was that individual
effort led to creativity, innovation, and rewards—the very essence of
Calvinist-inspired capitalism. In short,
there was a feeling that success was both achievable and scalable—I might build a better mousetrap and
make a million, and we could put a
man on the moon.
I found some of this optimism in Phelps’ book, along with
deep concern that the growing corporatism that marks both our economic and
political lives is stifling the ability and even the urge to be a risk-taker,
to be creative, to find meaningful work.
Phelps believes in the individual: both the monumental thinkers and
achievers like Einstein or Henry Ford, and the ordinary people like the plumber
who designs a new wrench and the small businessman who throws every bit of money
and energy he has into his bodega. Their work becomes meaningful, and from it comes
a sense of personal pride, a place in the community earned and not just given,
and perhaps, a chance to be a pair of shoulders for others to stand on to
achieve even more. It is
quintessentially American.
Unfortunately, this dynamism, which lasted from the 1830s to
the 1960s, has begun to ebb with growth of the super-state. Phelps points to the thicket of rules and
regulations, of safety nets that shield people and big business from the worst
of it, and of legislatively enacted barriers to entry, whether they be monopoly
control of an industry, or unionized labor’s control of the bargaining process.
In his view, these all have created a rent-seeker class of politicians and technocrats
who understand neither economics nor business, but have a keen sense of how to
market access and favorable treatment.
Where to lay blame? Well, Phelps is clearly a low-regulation
free market kind of guy who holds socialism and corporatism in rather low
esteem. But he also inspires you, just a bit, with two somewhat unexpected
traits. The first is, he’s not an
ideologue—he approaches the data with integrity and reaches his conclusions
without a political agenda. The second is his generosity of spirit. He really is searching for an answer to
benefit the maximum number of people.
That’s what Mass
Flourishing is about: an effort to “revive the modern values that stirred
people to go boldly forth toward lives of richness.”
Lives of richness.
Flourishing instead of perishing.
Professor Phelps turned 81 this last summer, but that sounds like a
pretty young idea to me.
December 18, 2014
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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