If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to
cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a
producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial
self-restraint, large and small.
It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the
righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that
their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the
larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand
for low taxes and high spending.
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the
current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that
are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what
the country actually needs.
In fact, if you were to look back in this blog at many of my posts on the economy, you would find me complaining about all the debt and fiscal irresponsibility that brought on the current crisis.
However....
It seems to me that Brooks' analysis is very shallow and incomplete. He cites four symptoms of 'erosion' in our financial values: state lotteries, large executive pay packages, large restaurant servings, and high debt to GDP ratio. Give me a break.
Of these, two are relevant (not lotteries and McDonald's french fries!). Large executive pay is one part of a much larger problem: the increasingly maldistribution of wealth and growing income and wealth inequality. My take on this is that it had many causes: the decline of manufacturing and increase in outsourcing, the rise of the financial sector, the decline and fall of labor unions, the hidden inflation which ate away at our standard of living, tax law changes favoring the wealthy, the pushing of credit/debt onto the public via the financial sector, and so on. All of this has been the result of conservative ideology being put into policy via the Reagan revolution, as well as the rise of neo-liberalism and globalization in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has moved to the far right, while the Democratic Party left behind its New Deal/Great Society roots and also moved to the right. And all of this moved us away from the egalitarian ethos of the New Deal toward the inequalities of the Gilded Age.
Another part of this big puzzle is that we were the only major industrial country that didn't suffer from severe damage and disruption during World War II. In terms of industrial and economic party, we had the whole party to ourselves for a couple of decades after the war. Then as the countries of Europe and Asia recovered, and then India and China began to modernize, our portion of the pie began to shrink. This is not often recognized by the major parties to the debate on this issue, that it would be hard for us to stay ahead of the rest of the world under any circumstances.
A third major factor is our continuing reliance on expensive foreign oil, which has driven up our trade deficit to simply astronomical levels, weakening our economy and the dollar.
Now, as far as I can tell, almost none of these things will really be resolved by a 'revival of economic morality', at least as Brooks describes it (lotteries, supersizing it, etc.). It will take a turning away from the economic ideology and policies of the last 30 years. Which might (or might not) be happening right now, depending on how you perceive the changes Obama is making.
In any case, it is not a new Puritan ethics that will solve this problem, not that I'm against Puritan ethics. Actually, the Methodist John Wesley, decidedly not Calvinist, put it just as well: make all you can, save all you can, give all you can. Now, that will preach!
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