appear in this New York Times piece which is an exchange between Daniel Mendelsohn and Mohsin Hamid on the role and importance of books in France, where they are considered an essential good, and the US, where they are not, and thus their trade is not so heavily regulated by the government (hence Amazon). All of that is worth the read. But it is not why I am posting this.
Hamid makes the following observations about the American past:
The America that boomed in the mid-20th century was a place where the state demanded that male citizens surrender years of their lives to national service, where the top income tax rate hovered between 70 and 94 percent, and where commercial banks were prohibited from investment banking. It was a veritable socialist paradise compared to the America of today.
Maybe we can learn something from that America. No, not to go fight in Vietnam or celebrate Jim Crow or enforce sodomy laws or criminalize abortion. But to value producing as much as we do consuming. To do that, we’ll need to think of ourselves as workers again. And (sotto voce) unite. At least a little. And not just with other writers.
I'd like to consider those words, below the fold, if you would be so kind as to follow me there.
As some here know, this year I am teaching Advanced Placement (college level) Economics, both Micro and Macro in a combined course. In fact we have just done a exploration of taxation, and our textbook, written by Greg Mankiw, introduces students to the notion of the Laffer Curve, which older folks will remember as underlying the approach on taxation by the Reagan administration.
The current top rate on income of 39.6%, which is an increase from what it was in more recent years, is a pittance compared to the taxes collected during the time America built its middle class. Hamid describes those times as "a veritable socialist paradise compared to the America of today" and it is those words that provoked me to post his comments and offer this post.
Although I teach economics, and would like to think I am at least competent in the subject, although prior to preparing for this course I had not formally studied the subject for almost half a century, I do not claim to be an economist. I am an active citizen, and further, for much of my adult life I have been a public employee - now in my 19th year of teaching after a previous period of around a decade of working for my local government in computers. Perhaps that gives me a bias in favor of the public sector, which I acknowledge, but to me there are essential services that should not be primarily driven by the profit motivation. Economic "efficiency" when it is uncontrolled inevitably leads to severe economic inequity, and in the long term a nation cannot sustain itself as a functioning and meaningful democracy when economic inequity is unbridled: the power of the wealthy will inevitably overwhelm the numbers of those not wealthy and the government will cease to function as an instrument of "we the people."
I wonder what correlations we might find between economic inequality as seen in things such as the GINI index and the progressiveness of the tax structure? And here I think not merely of the nominal progressiveness such as that seen in our regular income tax rates, not when income from those things covered by capital gains rates result in a lower effective total federal tax burden for many wealthy than the total (including payroll taxes) does for many middle class families.
There is another key point in the article with which I started. Allow me to quote some of the words from Mendelsohn:
The fact is that a unique glamour, a cachet for which no other country has an equivalent, has attached to intellectual activity in France for nearly a millennium — from the 12th century, when the city’s newly founded university began attracting fervently opinionated scholars, into the 20th, when the City of Light drew its famous literary expatriates: Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett. This may be because, whereas Anglo-Saxons prefer to segregate the life of the mind from that of other organs, French intellectual passion has often overflowed into, and become indistinguishable from, other kinds of passion.
Here I might quibble a bit, perhaps because I grew up around New York City, living in the city itself for a number of years early in my adulthood, at a time when intellectual - and artistic - endeavors as much defined the metropolis as did that it was the financial center of the world, that the garment industry was centered there at least for a while, and that communications corporations based there dominated the nation - the three TV networks, publications like the NY Times and Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek, and - yes - most of the major book publishers in the US. It was the artistic center - theater, music, ballet. Even the Tonight Show was long based there.
And yet, even in that time, there was a hostility to the intellect. I can remember in the 50s Stevenson being belittled as an "egghead." There was a perceived conflict between life in what we now call flyover country and life as experienced in a place like New York, even though so many of those in literature and in communication came from less intensely urban environments. I think of novelists whose works were dominant when I was growing up, and Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner all came from and wrote about other places. Major figures dominating our airwaves were from places like Montana (Chet Huntley) and North Carolina (David Brinkley) and Texas (Dan Rather). Heck, in those days and even until the 70s places like Montana and Idaho (think Frank Church and Cecil Andrus) were centers of populism whose primary complaint against New York was on economic, not so much intellectual grounds.
Perhaps it is because I am still a child of books. My rededication to teaching has limited how many I can read, because preparation for my responsibilities to my students is so time and energy consuming. I probably read less than 50 books a year now, down from when I used to read at least two new books a week. If in fact I do retire again from teaching at the end of this year it is because there are so many books I want to read, and now I can only justify taking the time for those that I can apply to my teaching - about government, politics, human rights, economics - and a few of great importance to myself personally. I do not have time to immerse myself in novels, to ponder philosophy, to illuminate myself with the insights of poets.
Although I cannot describe or analyze it, I believe there are connections between our government policies including those on taxation that have increased our inequity, our declining interest in the life of the mind (which potentially could threaten the dominance of the oligarchic class, whether of inherited wealth like the Koch Brothers or self-made like the fortunes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the latter ironically making money for himself on books while he deprives authors and publishers of the books he sells of their just reward for creating and packaging the works from which he profits). I certainly see it in the the thrust of education "reform" that is limiting the development of independent and creative thinking in the name of creating a more "productive" work force while at the same time not providing increased compensation commensurate with the increased productivity, and ignore that productivity for its own sake can and often does has the unfortunate impact of reducing the economic and social well-being of large masses of people who are no longer considered as an essential part of the economic endeavor. From there it is a very short step to considering them not an essential part of our political process, especially if their combined voting power might threaten the economic and thus political dominance of the wealthy, who to keep control of both see nothing inherently wrong in moving to restrict the franchise of those who might vote in ways antithetical to the interests of the entrenched at the top of the economic ladder and those who aspire to be part of that group.
Perhaps my observations seem unfocused, rambling.
Perhaps some here, at a political website, might argue that all that matters is focusing on how we win back control.
I teach government and politics as well as economics.
The purpose of politics is to win elections in order to be able to make or help define policy.
Is not one question we should consider what policies, and why?
How are the commitments we make going to benefit those whose support we will need to win elections?
Can we think beyond merely the next contested primary or general election?
Can we see how too narrowly focusing on elections without considering the larger purposes leads to disillusioning many who drop out of the electoral process, and thus deprive us of the very political support we need in order to win elections?
Can we finally as a society value the life of the mind as part of being a healthy human being, even as we recognize that books, while essential as a possible means of expanding one's universe, are only part of the issue?
I value books. Our house has thousands of them. More come in every month.
I value music. One benefit of a 45+ mile commute each way is the time it gives me to listen to music.
I also value the life of service - I teach, I volunteer, I view much of what I write as trying to be of service to others.
I consider history broadly, hoping to learn from it.
I recognize that correlation is not causation, but I grew up in a time of hope, when I and most of my cohort believed our lives would be better than those of our parents. Few of the adolescents I teach hold similar hopes. In that I believe we are failing them.
Too much of what occurs in our schools deprives them of the opportunity to dream.
Our economic and political structure is now retrenching, and they rightly see it as depriving them of the possibilities of their future.
Perhaps we should recognize that capitalism is in fact the God that has failed, not merely the American people but all of humanity.
There is nothing wrong with a profit motive, properly controlled.
There is something incredibly inhuman about the profit motive overriding everything else, including the life of the mind.
Just some thoughts that arise in my mind as a I read, as I observe, as I teach, as I reflect.
Make of them what you will.
Peace?