Our Interrelated Crises
David Brooks seems to think that Barack Obama is trying to do too much at once. Steve Benen retorts that “The notion that multiple problems — healthcare, energy, education, infrastructure, economic growth — may be inter-connected seems to elude Brooks entirely.”
Obviously, people who want to do a lot of stuff like to make those kind of interconnection arguments. So it’s worth trying to think clearly and explicitly about the relationships. The starting point, I would say, is growth. There are a lot of factors behind growth including, of course, old fashioned human ingenuity at coming up with new products to offer and new ways to offer old products. But perhaps the most important things policy can do to impact the capacity for sustainable growth—i.e., growth that’s not based on asset price bubbles—is to increase the availability of high-quality human capital and the availability and quality of public sector physical capital. Which is to say education and infrastructure. Energy is related to this in two ways. First, the power grid on which our electricity flows is part of the infrastructure. And second, a lot of energy is used in transportation, and the quantity of energy used in this way is impacted by the nature of the available transportation infrastructure. The goal of curbing carbon emissions probably isn’t vital to our growth prospects except in the sense that over the long run an increasingly deadly and inhospitable environment will be disastrous for all human endeavors. But though avoiding ecological catastrophe is something of a freestanding goal, our growth prospects require new investments in infrastructure, so it makes sense to try to make sure this new infrastructure is suited to our environmental goals. Last, health care. These kind of investments we’re talking about will cost money. Some of that money can and should come from taxes. And some of that money can and should come from short-term borrowing. But to make the investments sustainable we need to put the budget on a sustainable basis. And that requires tackling the health care system in a systematic way.
And so—ta da—it’s all connected. I think there’s plenty of room for disagreement as to exactly what needs to be done on those fronts. But I really don’t think it’s credible to say that we ought to just slow-walk things. What it is fair to say is that it’s too bad the previous administration spent eight years doing nothing whatsoever on the infrastructure, health care, and energy pieces of the puzzle. They tackled education, the smallest of these segments, early on and made some progress but then didn’t seem very interested in following-through.
22 Responses to “Our Interrelated Crises”
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March 3rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
One important point Matt overlooked:
It’s not just the availability of qualified people widgets we can slot into job positions; it’s also the number of people willing to take entrepreneurial risks in starting up businesses that determines economic growth (along with other factors, obviously).
When healthcare is decoupled from employment, a non-trivial number of people will shift from employment to entrepreneurship. And it will be easier for them to hire employees.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Sorry, but this analysis presumes good faith on the part of David Brooks.
Brooks doesn’t want Obama to accomplish anything. Brooks wants to be able to say “I told you so.”
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
You’re just including health care as a budget issue? Why not a human capital issue? You don’t want people locked into jobs because they fear losing health care if they move, and you want people, where you’ve invested all that education money, to be healthy through things like preventive care instead of ER visits.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Chris S. is correct. A hack propagandist like David Brooks isn’t making some ‘mistake’ in making noise about too much change at once; they’re simply trying another tactic in trying to block reforms and changes they don’t like.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Trying to change everything at once increases the amount of uncertainity in the private sector. That uncertainity increases risk and discourages private investment.
At example would be that the Obama Administration wants to lower carbon emissions but has decided to effective killed the 26 new reactor applications currently at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by cancelling the Yucca Mountain High level waste respository. And they did all this to keep Senator Reid happy. Now companies that were planning of spending billions on carbon free emissions face too much uncertainity and will stop their investments.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
When you’re on top, you don’t want change. When you’re on the bottom, you do.
I would like to see less of Brooks citations and more of Kevin Phillips, James Galbraith, etc.
Lets move the debate to the left.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
“It’s all connected”? Why is there no reference in this post to The Wire?
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Man, I felt so bad for David Brooks reading that column. Can’t you see that he’s just so moderate! And earnest! And moderate! And his moderation is being threatened by the non-moderate liberals in the moderate moderate something moderate.
Fuck this guy. The world’s smallest violin plays for thee, fake-moderate David Brooks.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
It’s worth pointing out that there is less than an infinite amount of oil in the ground. Oil is what we currently use to run our economy and most of our transportations system. If we do not break our habit of dependence on oil at some point, the oil will run out and our economy will fail spectacularly. Drastically changing our long-term energy policy therefore seems key to our economic health.
Obama hasn’t made this particular argument, but it sure seems like an important point to bear in mind.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:02 pm
@vorkosigan1
YES! I’ve been wondering for years why democrats aren’t hammering this. Republicans are always going on about small businesses but the biggest barrier to people starting them is they are afraid of losing their health coverage.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Oh yeah.
David Brooks was the guy in the 1930s who argued we should resolve the race problem in the South before dealing with the Great Depression. Then in the 1940s he complained that we had too much on our plates to participate in WWII.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Also, sooner or later the global market for green energy (or whatever you want to call it) will be huge, and it would be kind of nice if we were ahead of the curve on that front. And Green tech is at the perfect point for a government boost–advanced enough that we can be pretty sure something will come of it, but new enough that a little help can go a long way.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:35 pm
David Brooks is an elitist fuckhead.
.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Brooks is just repeating what he overheard at some suburban officepark last week, at Applebees on Friday night, at a kids soccer game on Saturday and at a back yard bbq at Patio Man’s on Sunday.
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
It’s not self-evident that the best political tactic is concentration. In war, if you have a general superiority of force but no great technological advantage, multiple attacks on a broad front are a better idea than staking everything on a narrow breakthrough: see Foch 1918, Eisenhower and Red Army 1944. The parallel political tactic of multiple initiatives, keeping the opposition off balance and unable to choose a single target, has been successfully used by FDR and Nicolas Sarkozy. Would the GOP really be better off fighting major bills on energy and on health simultaneously? I’d just keep hitting them with stuff, as the Obama administration has done so far.
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
But perhaps the most important things policy can do to impact the capacity for sustainable growth…
There’s an important distinction to make here between growth and development. Inventing a better widget, one that is more efficient, for instance, constitutes “sustainable growth” (setting aside Jevon’s paradox for the moment) and is better thought of as development. Growth that constitutes a greater physical throughput of energy and matter (i.e. more widgets) through the human economy, given it’s current scale relative to the energetic and ecological dynamics of the planet, is absolutely unsustainable; it is simply a transfer of wealth from the future to the present.
Just another little thing the DFH’s are right about but that nobody wants to talk about…
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
What DMonteith said. Sustainable growth is an illusion.
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Matt — It’s not “in the long run.” See the new normal of drought and wildein Texas, California, Oklahoma, Australia, the new normal of extreme floods in the Midwest and Europe, etc.
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm
That’s “wildfire in”, not “wildein.”
March 4th, 2009 at 12:08 am
People want to slow walk things because they then become easier to defeat. There needs to be time and space to demagogue the particulars of each issue. Conversely, to the extent liberals can link various major reforms into one recovery and reinvestment effort, the justification for that is much more plain to see, especially in tough times. The opposition is terrified at the thought of such arguments taking hold (all the major planks of the progressive agenda could be law by 2010 that way); Democrats should be terrified to allow the issues to be disentangled, as that would mean the once-in-a-generation opportunity has slipped away.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:26 am
Brooks professes to have great skepticism about humans’ ability to use rationality to solve problems. Thus, spending on social programs is futile, according to this new meme tailored to the Democratic age.
One could cite Social Security and Medicare as solutions to the poverty in the aged, environmental legislation to clean up the environment as examples to show just how full of shit he is.