3 posts tagged “t”
All this has a moral for our tale and provides a proper ending to it. In much of the West, and especially in our country, government is today much criticized and denounced. There is often good reason for the antipathy: governments can be – and perhaps always are – bureaucratic, slow-moving, inefficient, and irritating. They are not repositories of unsullied virtue, exemplary foresight, stirring vision.
What they are however, is the only means by which a body of people can provide itself with what it cannot obtain elsewhere: foreign policy and defense, law and order, the provision of public capital, and – crucial for our purpose – a counterforce against the unwanted effects that emerge from the private sector. That counterforce may not always be effective – there are plenty of unsolved problems in capitalism – but it is the only such capacity that exists.
In a word, no complex society can exist without government. That is why the public sector is as much a part of a capitalist order as is the private sector, which could not longer exist if government were somewhere to disappear. We should not forget, moreover, that he functions of government under capitalism are not only to provide defense and public capital and law and justice, but also to act as a kind of gyroscope or a steering mechanism when the nation needs a balancing counterweight or a hand on the steering wheel. (Where is the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith? Ed. comments) There will assuredly be such situations in the years ahead, as globalization and then global warming become even more insistent problems that require powerful guiding and containing forces.
Here, as so often, economic analysis goes just so far. In the end, large-scale changes require not just an adaptive revolutionary capitalism, but the elusive contribution of things that lie outside that framework, such as collective temper of peoples and the wisdom or folly of their leaders. Hence it seems proper to end this book with the admonition that we must come to understand our subject, not to achieve a Good Society, but to prepare ourselves for the really difficult problems that we will still face after economics is understood.
Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow in Economics Explained, 1982/1998
As we head into the 1980s, it is well to remember that there is really only one important question in political economy. If elected, whose income do you and your party plan to cut in the process of solving the economic problems facing us? Our economy and the solutions to its problem have a substantial zero-sum element. Our economic life would be easier if this were not true, but we are going to have to learn to play a zero-sun game. If we cannot learn, or prefer to pretend that the zero-sum problem does not exist, we are simply going to fail.
Lester C Thurow in The Zero-Sum Society, 1980
There are then notes of optimism and pessimism in the current situation. We are in a curious position where competitive interactions force a level of investment, and a declining marginal return, that may ultimately lead to collapse except that the competitor who collapses first will simply be dominated or absorbed by the survivor. A respite from the threat of collapse might be granted thereby, although we may find that we will not like to bear its costs. If collapse is not in the immediate future, that is not to say that the industrial standard of living is also reprieved. As marginal returns decline (a process ongoing even now), up to the point where a new energy subsidy is in place, the standard of living that industrial societies have enjoyed will not grow so rapidly, and for some groups and nations may remain static or decline. The political conflicts that will cause, coupled with the increasingly easy availability of nuclear weapons, will create a dangerous world situation in the foreseeable future.
Joseph A Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988
