I often fall asleep with KQED telling bedtime stories. This morning, I re-awakened to hear the end of a Cambridge Forum program with “Crunch” author Jared Bernstein. After a minute or two of listening, either Berenstein or an audience questioner said something along the lines, “nothing anywhere in communism is even remotely so radical as what we’ve already done” intervening in the U.S. economy. “No kidding,” I thought, remembering all the naysaying grief I caught all summer for voicing with urgency the need to re-architect, re-think, re-boot, our imminently failing economic OS.
I looked for the archive of this program to get the precise quotation:
Crunch: Feeling Squeezed in Today’s Economy (Part II) — Jared Bernstein, of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC, decodes the workings of the economy. Translating the jargon of Wall Street into the language of Main Street, Bernstein argues that economics should be more than a tool for the nation’s elite. In the wake of the financial crisis on Wall Street, how can we use economics to organize American society to provide for Main Street’s needs as well as Wall Street’s? (Which appears to be a rebroadcast of Decoding the Economy: Main Street to Wall Street original broadcast from WGBH).
Bottom line: the archives aren’t online yet. So, awake anyway, I checked in with the New York Times, only to find today’s Krugman OpEd:
Franklin Delano Obama? Which inspired me to comment:
what do you call a potentially WW3-preventing global ‘works’ project that rejects the fear, denial, and ignorance that ignite war as the only ‘justification’ for massive sustained stimulus? while we’ve been ruminating about the potential for paths toward various 22nd century post-scarcity scenarios for capitalism++, a basic income http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ and http://www.usbig.net/ could well be the best start.@silverton, palo alto, california
(so far, based upon my time stamp of 6:47EST and later posted comments all the way to 7:45EST, it appears NYT has censoring that comment. do you see anything offensive there? i don’t. also, others are signing with twitter or other handles, such as andygra111, New Mexico; so that shouldn’t be a violation either, right? WTF? it’s On Topic of public ‘works’ programs, it’s polite, it’s in my TimesPeople RSS, so where’s the violation? why the censorship?)
Nevertheless, bitten again by the Krugman bug, I found this reality check for what we’ve been referring to, in layman’s terms, as Capitalism 3.0, or Capitalism++: “Challenges to economic orthodoxy are a dime a dozen. At least once a month I receive a new book that purports to overthrow conventional economic wisdom. The vast majority of these books’ authors, however, don’t understand enough about existing economic theory to mount a credible challenge.” Of course, that is Nobel Prize Laureate Krugman speaking, so there’s a very high probability that we can assume that he’s right. He’s also likely right when he says what we’ve reflected both here and on Facebook this year, “Yes, we are Japan.”
When I first brought up the general concept of Capitalism 3.0 or Capitalism++ on Facebook late last year and early in 2008, I thought we might have sufficient time to avert such disasters; however, given a series of smack downs I received from my most trusted expert colleagues at that time, and factoring in baseline Human Behaviorial Inertia, it could be best that 2008′s lack of collective institutional wisdom has now only been dwarfed by the utter lack of meaningful action aforethought. In other words, if somewhat sadly, perhaps this is the only way they were ever going to be convinced of the need for change.
Similarly, perhaps my own tone in the past months has also come to cross purposes with my own underlying affirmations for Capitalism++. Perhaps it is more appropriate therefore; more authentic, more accurate, to sound a vastly more optimistic tone; a tone of Success, Achievement; of Fulfillment; to sound the Declaration of a centuries old promise of Productivity Dividends finally to be returned to Shareholder Investors — we, the citizen-wealth creators in this 240 year experiment.
Rather than hand-wringing, agonizing gloom and remorse for this requisite clarion ‘catastrophe’ that has instead mercifully jolted us from our collective slumber, perhaps the proper tone is to rejoice, for our day has come. By taking that approach in the present moment, we might become liberated to participate in the process of speeding up the just, reasonable, and immediate implementations of what we’ve been amateurishly referring to as Capitalism++.
Rather than facing the daunting tasks of communicating our precognition, philosophical imperative, and moral persuasion that otherwise faced us a year ago, we can rather expedite the upgrade to our economic OS by necessity of the pragmatic responses now REQUIRED to address the happy situation that has now clearly overtaken our best, if naive, earlier motives.
If this is the case, then rather the urgency of dialog that can help to speed the dissemination of this understanding is heightened; the urgency for accurate and rapid Capitalism++ resource flows (sustained programmatic stimulus) increases; and certainly the urgency for clueful operational leadership increases.
Maybe, just maybe, Chance is today in the very process of Favoring The Prepared, and we are merely right now in the midst of one variety of ideal, if unexpected, conditions by which we can translate that which last year was articulated as a desired outcome to the coming year’s actual course of action. Maybe.
As is often the case, we cannot know today whether or not a new found optimism is justified; we will only learn that if, within the next several months, we hear the Affirmative Chorus for Basic Income As Highest Achievement of Capitalism — rather than as an occasion for failure and remorse — rise from relative obscurity to global prominence. Then and only then will we be able to look across the the abyss and says, “es bien, con mi alma.”
P.S. If you still don’t think these ideas are justified, then odds are it just hasn’t hit YOU, yet. But don’t worry, it will. And remember, if what Goldman is willing to tell us is this; and we know that the actual rate is closer twice that, due to so-called discouraged workers, etc; just imagine what the actual full extent is more likely to become on the labor end of the equation. Markets will rally from time to time, just as certainly as employment will continue to prove that Job Supply will eventually, permanently cross under Demand. That’s what a post-scarcity economy looks like and we have nothing preventing progress but the J.O.B. Trance itself. I wish I had the luxury of being wrong about the depth of the challenges yet to come, but so far this year, that just hasn’t been the case.
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