JOSEPH STIGLITZ ARGUES FOR A PROGRESSIVE ECONOMY
Here’s a depressingly fun game: What would Americansociety resemble if Republicans won 40 years’ worth of elections? What about 40 straight years of victories for the Democrats?
When I play this game with friends, they inevitably envision the horrors enacted by the other party. The average progressive, in my experience, usually responds that, under four decades of Republican leadership, schools would be forced to combat the elimination of state funding by running for-profit prisons out of empty libraries. Gay marriage would be criminalized. When it comes to abortion, see Leni Zumas’ novel “Red Clocks.”
The Republican answers are simpler: If Democrats ran things for 40 years, the market would be in the toilet.
Joseph E. Stiglitz wages a convincing counter-argument that continuous Republican leadership would be far worse for the long-term economy. In his new book “People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent,” he argues that wealth creation — not wealth extraction — is central to any nation’s economic future, and the tricky part for Republicans is that wealth creation is driven by science and innovation.
Seeing as multiple factions of the Republican Party have significant financial and social incentives to discredit science, Mr. Stiglitz suggests that a Republican economy is inevitably toilet-bound. “If the Republicans who support these perspectives continue in power,” he writes, “it is hard to see how America’s wealth-creation machine, resting as it does on the foundation of science, can be kept going.”
Mr. Stiglitz’s goal is not just to keep the economy “going” but to improve how it creates and distributes wealth. There’s been “too little investment in people, infrastructure, and technology,” he notes, and “too much faith in the ability of markets to solve all of our problems.” The result is that “too many Americans feel powerless against their health insurance company, their internet provider, the airlines they travel on, their telephone company, their bank.”
In general, Mr. Stiglitz is a brilliant, Nobel-Prizewinning economic tour guide. He chaired President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and was chief economist of the World Bank, and at times, “People, Power, and Profits” reads like a progressive’s apology for Clintonian shortcomings. On the subject of globalization, Mr. Stiglitz writes that “We should have done something to help those who were losing their jobs and whose skills were not up to the new technologies …. We are now paying the price for these failures.”
About all that “we.” I imagine that receiving a Nobel Prize compels one to speak with more authority. That’s a generous interpretation of why Mr. Stiglitz writes with more royal “we” than four sections of my introductory writing courses combined. Often times, this rhetorical move is harmless: “We have an economy marked simultaneously by empty homes and homeless people.” Other times, the royal “we” seems to signal multiple authors: “We’ve explained why collective action is needed.”
It brings me no joy to report that some of the royal “we” here is more than a tad presumptuous. When it comes to racial, ethnic and gender discrimination, Mr. Stiglitz writes that “We are just waking up to its pervasiveness and its persistence, shown most recently in the graphic evidence of police brutality and the statistics on mass incarceration.” The individuals who compose such statistics are not waking up to the reality of discrimination in America. They, along with their families, have been living it.
This “we” business might strike the average reader as fussy grammar policing. And it’s perhaps too common for a nonamer like myself to nitpick a prize-winner with more rigor than I might a debut writer. Points taken.
Here’s mine: The predominantly white male writers of these “How to Fix Our Trumped-Up America” books are incredibly bothered by Mr. Trump’s degradation of language yet so often blind to their own missteps. Mr. Stiglitz’s economic and statistical analysis is remarkably clear-eyed, but the confidence with which he deploys the majestic plural — combined with the somewhat shocking lack of attention devoted to unions, this in a book with “people” and “power” in the title — is an approach that invites criticism.
An in-depth look at union organizing, however, is probably an unfair expectation for this rather brisk, informative book. Mr. Stiglitz, like an accomplished architect, has got stunning blueprints for how the house should’ve looked during globalization. He’s got great drawings of how the house can be rebuilt now that it’s been visited by such chaos.
But if you want to actually build? Well, I hear Elizabeth Warren is a great contractor who always shows up on time.