"The question is not only why the American working class family unraveled—even closer to the bone is why it took so long for anyone in the expert class to even notice."
Because the experts know that if they ask those questions, they may not like the answers they get.
So what happens is you get a Paul Krugman glibly explaining that inflation isn't really a problem, and producing very nice, very experty charts to demonstrate this quite convincingly, simply by taking out food, energy, housing and used cars (I mean, who uses any of those?) from the analysis, and voila! inflation isn't so bad!
Anyway, it is rich in Schadenfreude to watch liberals and democrats blame everyone and everything, everyone and everything but themselves and their policies.
Well written and interesting! Yes, the United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
However, a return to *real* political representation, in such a vast and inherently variable space as the as the USA, by decision, would 1) trigger a political and economic re-decentralization (which would be good!) and 2) would re-distribute influence and decision making, both of those things pose potential existential career/status threats to much of the elements that make up the *real* composition of the current party. So I would expect them to support it any time soon.
Also, while I broadly agree with your historical narrative, I would add four caveats that I thin are not just nuances but rather have substantial meaning:
1) the post war era may have been under Keynesian Macroeconomic management in some senses, but it was not in the way that European countries such as the UK were, this is because while the USA was on the the path towards centralization, during the 1950s, it nonetheless remained politically and economically decentralized, including in a great deal of, collectively very important, economic and scientific decision making
2) the Whiz Kids did clean up what were then, in some senses, relatively new organizations (DOD was created in 47) , but how much actual talent or skill did that require, because they had the backing to do it. But they also introduced a massive leveling up increase in structural corruption and opened up the door to the condition werre in today, also, there Vietnam debacle wasnt just a gamblers style doubling downs, they also repeatedly just did poor planning and dumb ideas ("the smartest guys in the room'. LMAO)
3) In my opinion, the inflation of the 1970s was primarily driven by supply constraints, including oil and metal shortages, increased demand from newly industrializing nations, and geopolitical factors such as resource withholding by developing countries. The inflation began trailing supply constraints and subsided once new supplies entered the market.
4) Has the central bank really done what we're told its done through skill? Or has it really been done by a broader system through domestic economic extraction in the form of suppressed wages, surpassed opportunity, suppressed investment, suppressed competition/economic activity, etc., coupled with a planetary economic empire that enables large perpetual budgets deficits, large perpetual trade deficits, and high liquidity all without inflation?
Thanks again for the interesting writing! Have a nice weekend. --Mike
"The working class doesn't want redistributive center-left polities, they want populist predistributive ones."
So? What if that's true ... But also, what if the center-left avoids those kinds of policies because they have a terrible history and know they create more problems than they solve?
People's attempts to try to have sympathy for the despairing working class and understand their struggles might be causing those same people to overlook the possibility that what the working class wants might very well make their situations even worse. I don't believe democrats should make it a habit of adopting bad policies just because they're popular among the working class. If the working class wants populist predistributive policies, let them get it from the republicans. If that means democrats have to be in the minority for a while, then so be it. Let the republicans enact those policies for a while, and then after, as history has proven, they make things even worse, the republicans and their populist predistributive policies will get the blame and the democrats who avoided those policies can say, "Told ya."
Am I crazy or does this (fascinating and important) essay tell us that the era of smoke filled rooms and back room deals actually gave us more democratic governance?
If so, thanks. I have often thought this, albeit with much less justification. However, I think the billionaires would have bought those rooms and had their policy wonks running the show. No hope.
"The question is not only why the American working class family unraveled—even closer to the bone is why it took so long for anyone in the expert class to even notice."
Because the experts know that if they ask those questions, they may not like the answers they get.
So what happens is you get a Paul Krugman glibly explaining that inflation isn't really a problem, and producing very nice, very experty charts to demonstrate this quite convincingly, simply by taking out food, energy, housing and used cars (I mean, who uses any of those?) from the analysis, and voila! inflation isn't so bad!
Anyway, it is rich in Schadenfreude to watch liberals and democrats blame everyone and everything, everyone and everything but themselves and their policies.
"... for the same reason it took Case and Deaton 15 years to even notice that working-class Americans were killing themselves in despair."
Ditto the time it took Autor, Dorn, and Hanson to "discover"** the China shock: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906
**discover translates as "make palatable to economists whose training is mainly math plus unspoken/unspeakable ideological premises"
Well written and interesting! Yes, the United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
However, a return to *real* political representation, in such a vast and inherently variable space as the as the USA, by decision, would 1) trigger a political and economic re-decentralization (which would be good!) and 2) would re-distribute influence and decision making, both of those things pose potential existential career/status threats to much of the elements that make up the *real* composition of the current party. So I would expect them to support it any time soon.
Also, while I broadly agree with your historical narrative, I would add four caveats that I thin are not just nuances but rather have substantial meaning:
1) the post war era may have been under Keynesian Macroeconomic management in some senses, but it was not in the way that European countries such as the UK were, this is because while the USA was on the the path towards centralization, during the 1950s, it nonetheless remained politically and economically decentralized, including in a great deal of, collectively very important, economic and scientific decision making
2) the Whiz Kids did clean up what were then, in some senses, relatively new organizations (DOD was created in 47) , but how much actual talent or skill did that require, because they had the backing to do it. But they also introduced a massive leveling up increase in structural corruption and opened up the door to the condition werre in today, also, there Vietnam debacle wasnt just a gamblers style doubling downs, they also repeatedly just did poor planning and dumb ideas ("the smartest guys in the room'. LMAO)
3) In my opinion, the inflation of the 1970s was primarily driven by supply constraints, including oil and metal shortages, increased demand from newly industrializing nations, and geopolitical factors such as resource withholding by developing countries. The inflation began trailing supply constraints and subsided once new supplies entered the market.
4) Has the central bank really done what we're told its done through skill? Or has it really been done by a broader system through domestic economic extraction in the form of suppressed wages, surpassed opportunity, suppressed investment, suppressed competition/economic activity, etc., coupled with a planetary economic empire that enables large perpetual budgets deficits, large perpetual trade deficits, and high liquidity all without inflation?
Thanks again for the interesting writing! Have a nice weekend. --Mike
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-deaths-of-despair-narrative-is?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7y2rb
"The working class doesn't want redistributive center-left polities, they want populist predistributive ones."
So? What if that's true ... But also, what if the center-left avoids those kinds of policies because they have a terrible history and know they create more problems than they solve?
People's attempts to try to have sympathy for the despairing working class and understand their struggles might be causing those same people to overlook the possibility that what the working class wants might very well make their situations even worse. I don't believe democrats should make it a habit of adopting bad policies just because they're popular among the working class. If the working class wants populist predistributive policies, let them get it from the republicans. If that means democrats have to be in the minority for a while, then so be it. Let the republicans enact those policies for a while, and then after, as history has proven, they make things even worse, the republicans and their populist predistributive policies will get the blame and the democrats who avoided those policies can say, "Told ya."
Am I crazy or does this (fascinating and important) essay tell us that the era of smoke filled rooms and back room deals actually gave us more democratic governance?
If so, thanks. I have often thought this, albeit with much less justification. However, I think the billionaires would have bought those rooms and had their policy wonks running the show. No hope.
Feature, not bug