On the subject of poverty, he offers a two-by-two matrix to classify viewpoints.
On one axis, you can think that the capitalist system is basically competitive or basically cooperative. The former view is that it creates winners and losers. The latter view is that it is a rising tide that lifts all boats.
On the other axis, you can be optimistic or pessimistic. If you are optimistic, you think that a bit of social change can take care of poverty. If you are pessimistic, then if you think of the system as competitive you want revolution. If you think of the system as cooperative, you end up like this:
we’re all in this together, but that helping the poor is really hard. . .capitalism is more the solution than the problem, and that we should think of this in terms of complicated impersonal social and educational factors preventing poor people from fitting into the economy. . .worry school lunches won’t be enough. Maybe even hiring great teachers, giving everybody free health care, ending racism, and giving generous vocational training to people in need wouldn’t be enough. If we held a communist revolution, it wouldn’t do a thing: you can’t hold a revolution against skill mismatch. This is a very gloomy quadrant, and I don’t blame people for not wanting to be in it. But it’s where I spend most of my time.
Me, too. Except note that over the past two hundred years the tide has lifted more and more boats, quite dramatically. It is still lifting more and more boats, but those boats are more likely to be in China, India, or Africa than in the rural United States. And places like St. Louis.
What marks the top right camp isn’t optimism so much as *glibness*. Here’s the dictionary definition.
1) said or done too easily or carelessly : showing little preparation or thought
2) speaking in a smooth, easy way that is not sincere
Shallow and insincere seems to be the hallmark of this quadrant. These people aren’t optimists believing in a solution, they are shallow thinkers hoping well wishing can be a substitute for putting in the work of understanding society and making hard choices.
School lunches aren’t about believing you can make the world a better place, but about how you can buy off not dealing with what you don’t want to deal with. It helps too if the school lunch program itself happens to be pouring money into your startup, but its not necessary to the outlook.
The bottom quadrant can easily lead to Charles Murray curmudgeon-ism, but part of that is that he shares many of the problems with the top quadrant. He doesn’t want to give up his idealogical sacred cows or commit to anything really demanding of him (isn’t the sum total of his economic/social program that UMC professionals will start telling white working class men that they are worthless trash, and that this shaming will somehow change them).
Murray-ism solves some of the shallowness of thought problem (though not all), but retains the insincerity as far as really caring what happens to the white working class.
Part of why people point to the third world is as a substitute for being able to hold their own society together. Sure, we fucked up big and things are getting worse, but in some vague way I can’t quite explain its okay because we are somehow responsible for China not being communist anymore.
I don’t really buy the link. A few countries in Asia with high IQ populations and a history of communism are getting richer lately, and probably would regardless of what anyone in America does. This is a onetime boost with a very low TFR follow through.
Even optimistic projections of third world fertility and global economic growth show that NAMs will breed about as fast as Chinese can climb out of poverty. So much so I think the *best* case is that in 2100 we have about as much poverty in the world as we have now. Tyler Cowen already laid this out in “barrios and beans”.
So you can take the Cowen/Murray pessimist view that barrios and beans is inevitable/a moral good in an of itself. Or you can say maybe we can do better then that. I think we could…if we wanted to. It wouldn’t be easy though. And it would take a lot more then either optimistic or pessimistic glibness.
“. . . the capitalist **system** is basically competitive or basically cooperative.”
Perhaps better understood NOT as a “system,” but as a resulting condition; a condition resulting from particular relationships in specific circumstances.
The condition results from cooperation amongst individuals seeking individually determined ends by individually determined means.
The condition results from the competitions for the “best” uses of limited resources (human & material) by individually determined means.
Those two forms of relationships and circumstances do not necessarily conflict unless and until there is intrusive intermediation in the relationships and/or disruption and interference with the circumstances.
those boats are more likely to be in China, India, or Africa than in the rural United States.
The one item I have noticed with Trump’s popularity is the increase concern on white working class and little on the minority working class that did support HRC. Why is it the white working class seems so much worse and angrier?
I’m not happy with that matrix and I can’t quite put my finger on what I don’t like about it. I think it contains a flawed premise when I think about where Deirdre McCloskey would fit on the grid.
She’s obviously an optimist about capitalism, but I’m not so sure she’d be so pessimistic about whether or not anything could be done about it. However, her solution would not involve anything top-down like free lunches.