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| A homeless encampment in Minneapolis. Used without permission. Source |
Gene Sperling, in a recent article puts forward the idea that "economic dignity" should be the moral lodestar to which we orient our economic policies of the future.
I like the message that the focus of policy should be on trying to achieve a goal, and I agree that goal should be economic dignity. I haven't finished this article yet, so maybe I'll get to some part of it that I strongly disagree with, but I agree with the stated point of the article. We live in times of great change, and we live in a time when we can see the failures of economic theories and dogmas of all stripes.
I, for one, am sick and tired of economic theory true-believers. I feel like the refuge of every true believer to whom you point out that earlier efforts at strictly applying economic theories (be they Marxism, laissez faire capitalism, or others) have uniformly failed, is the claim that "it just wasn't done right." But the faith is held fast by true believers that if their pet theory is just done perfectly this time, that it will work. Even though all of history tells us that no one has ever gotten it just right. If there was a political/economic system that actually worked perfectly to balance employment/unemployment, income distribution, production/labor, human dignity, inflation, etc. then everyone would use that system. Such a system does not exist.
And even if such a system had existed in the past we are facing rapidly changing technological, demographic, ecological, and economic realities. There are no established economic theories that deal with the human aspects of the vast majority of current employment being replaced by robots. Just like we continue to provide disability primarily for physical handicaps even though most jobs no longer require a strong back, because our moral and economic ideas have failed to even catch up to the last half of the 20th century, much less 21st century realities and beyond.
The 20th century was marked by the struggle between economic and political systems (free-market capitalism, communism, fascism) that all sought to grapple with the changes brought by the industrial revolution. The 20th century struggle ended with communism and fascism apparently down and free-market capitalism facing accelerating economic stratification. The 21st century has laid the failures of prior systems bare with runaway economic stratification, a global environment facing literal meltdown (of the ice caps), and the failure of free-markets to provide for the needs and dignity of people at home and abroad has led to a resurgence in Marxism and fascism.
When I was a teenager it seemed clear that capitalism had won and other economic/political systems were inferior. Today it seems equally clear that all systems fail to accommodate human reality when ever ideological purity is pursued. And even though the far-left and the far-right are resurgent, and ideologies that once seemed vanquished are resurrected as ideological revenants bent on shattering the modern world order, and theological regimes are gaining power in much of the developing world as rejections of the very idea of modernity, the truth remains that all of the political, philosophical, and economic ideologies were developed for a world very different from the unsettled times we face.
All of our current systems either arose before industrialization or in response to the industrial revolution. It is vital that we realize that all of those systems also failed to adequately respond to the industrial revolution. And even more important to realize that we are at the dawn of a very different era now. Industrialization relied on the human worker to maximize production. AI and automation are now poised to eliminate the need for most human labor. We don't have any systems that can deal with that reality.
I think it is time to let go of theoretical orthodoxies and time to start focusing on trying to achieve outcomes that allow humans to live in dignity.
