This is my first diary on Daily Kos; it's not my first written, I have one about the wildcat strikes in Britain that took place in early 2009 in my drafts, but I'm nowhere near happy about that. I'm not American; I'm from Britain, a Scot, but American politics has always intrigued me, especially the elections since I'm a giant elections geek, and I've been a pretty long-time lurker at this site, which has simply become more and more awesome for an elections geek what with the frequent polling and the nifty elections widget. But this is by the by; what's interesting me today is employment statistics. Hooray!
...what, you're not excited?
Specifically, what's made me write was this mildly condescending post detailing the Clinton economic boom, as part of a whole minor blowup between Nate and David Sirota over the "two progressivisms". Now, I love Nate Silver as much as the next guy (elections geekery makes it easy to develop a mancrush), and I'm not saying Nate is arguing in bad faith here, but I think there is a problem with the analysis in his post, which seems to take several leaps of faith.
Nate assumes that what is important in establishing how better off people are is simply an analysis of the growth (or lack thereof) of household income. This is superficially appealing, since after all, having more money, especially if you're poor, is generally a good thing, and households are usually the basic unit around which people earn and spend their money for. But the underlying assumption is that nothing, therefore, has changed for the worse; there has been growth, it is good, nothing bad must have happened, there can have been no trade-offs. Indeed, Nate chides some of us "radical progressives" (I would certainly be included in this frame) for thinking the economy is a "zero-sum" game, that for every winner there must be a loser (or, more pertinently, for every big winner there must be lots of little losers). To be honest, this is the bit that I find mildly condescending, because it's very much a strawman. I certainly don't think the economy is a zero-sum game, and I don't think the idea that it is, is very much more than a minority, fringe view. But simply because the economy is not a zero-sum game does not mean that there are no trade-offs, simply because growth is occurring on all levels does not mean some people are not making sacrifices, or that there is not a wider picture to be looked at.
So Nate is assuming that household incomes grew because of a rosy economic picture, which can only be good for poorer income percentiles and the middle class. I don't think that is necessarily the case. What if growth in household incomes is not because of, say, rising wages or more generous benefits, but because people are working more? If people are working more hours or people who would previously have stayed at home are entering the workforce, whilst wages stayed stagnant or even declined, we would see a growth in household income. But this picture looks less rosy than the uncritical one Nate Silver paints, and raises the question, is everyone really better off? A decrease in leisure time could have various bad effects, from the stress of overwork, to the inability to spend time with one's loved ones, to the use of processed, "fast" foods to keep you and your family going, since cooking takes up an appreciable amount of time, contributing to rising levels of obesity.
From what I've googled, although I am open to being proved wrong, more Americans are working longer, for fairly stagnant wages. (for not particularly appreciable gains in productivity as well, one might add) (Updated: see comments). This suggests that Nate's focus merely on household income is somewhat blinkered. Whilst having to work more, or having both parents work, might not be exactly extreme poverty in the Dustbowl, it is an appreciable loss from American middle-class life, for the aforementioned reasons, simply to keep pace with the kind of consumption considered necessary.
At the end of his post, Nate goes into his "working assumptions" on the economy, which I find it hard not to critique:
- Growth is good. A rising economic tide tends to lift all boats. We should generally not pass up opportunities to create growth, such as through freer trade, because we are concerned about its redistributive effects. Instead, grow first and then redistribute through tax policy and/or improved safety nets.
- However, extreme wealth disparities may inhibit growth.
- To the extent we evaluate the welfare of poorer Americans, we should tend to look at their income in an absolute sense, rather than relative to that of wealthier Americans.
- Don't mistake the welfare of particular businesses or economic sectors for the welfare of the economy as a whole.
- Identifying optimum oversight and regulatory schemes is likely to have significant nonzerosum benefits, possibly including to the regulated businesses themselves.
Points 4 and 5 are fairly good working rules of thumb, but points 1, 2, and 3 are hopelessly confused and mutually contradictory.
Growth may be good, as point 1 notes, (though I will note that the negative ecological effects of certain types of growth, something Nate has been usually very good at acknowledging, are conspicuous by their abscense in this case), but what if the growth is created by policies, such as that in the Reagan/Bush era, that not only create appreciable inequality, but may be unsustainable in the long run because of this inequality, as point 2 notes? Surely we then have to evaluate the impact of policies on inequality, rather than "grow first and redistribute later", since this growth may lead to unstability in the long run and is thus antithetical to Nate's previous assumption that growth is inherently good? And thus we must look at relavtive rates of income to prevent massive inequalities in wealth caused by these kinds of policies? Thus Nate undermines his own argument; point 2 suggests that there are points, from a "growth is good" perspective, when focusing explicitly on inequality is not just a bleeding-heart lefty sop, but a matter of economic importance.
I think Nate's position is more nuanced than he is suggesting here; noting how bad the previous posts on the subject of the "two progressivisms" were, all but calling David Sirota a Marxist-Leninist, he's toned down the rhetoric quite a bit, but it's still pretty obvious he's quite defensive on this issue, perhaps causing him to be less nuanced than he usually would be. I'll come back to the subject of the "two progressivisms" again, since I think it needs a detailed and in-depth treatment, but for now I'll just note that on one matter, Nate is exactly right. There are two different traditions working together in modern American liberalism, and they do exist in a kind of creative tension with one another, occasionally bleeding into all-out civil war (in the political sense, at least). In this blog-spat, the tension is pretty obvious, and I think more obvious that it won't go away, if ever. But for now, the two have more or less the same goals, and more or less the same ways of going about it. Calling allies on numerous issues - the issues Nate Silver thinks are important - crazy, wild-eyed Marxist radicals is the worst possible way to work. Even if you don't like David Sirota's bombast, Nate, he's a far cry from launching an assault on the Winter Palace.