That person is Robert Hockett, Edward Cornell Professor of Law and a Professor of Public Policy at Cornell among other things.* He also was a visiting scholar with the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Professor Hockett has been the source of the most creative, practical ways of dealing with the most essential challenges we face, including inflation, digital currency, mortgage debt and the financial crisis. His recent column in Forbes is Dylanomics: or Why Economies ‘Not Busy Being Born’ Are ‘Busy Dying.’
I. The Hollowing out of the Middle Class and the Pandemic
The Pandemic dramatically revealed the need for a national strategy to meet our country’s need to be self-sufficient — not dependent on international supply chains and outsourced manufacturing. The trend toward the latter made us vulnerable in the short term to those disruptions (the primary cause of recent inflation) and the long term, the hollowing out of our middle class through decline of manufacturing, grotesque inequality and the rise of racist, fascist movements in reaction.
II. The Need for Public-Private Synergy
Fixing this requires a public-private partnership for the development of infrastructure because neither sector can “do it all,” as Prof. Hockett notes:
As I’ve written previously, an electronic vehicle (EV) industry, by way of one salient example, can’t grow absent a battery industry and regional networks of charging stations. And yet private sector industries can no more push one another profitably to move first or zone for charging stations than can public sector actors efficiently produce EVs or batteries. All sectors and industries must work together, in coordinated and facilitated, not merely chaotic or dictated, fashion.
III. Actual Bipartisanship?
Include me as a skeptic as to Beltway yearnings for “bipartisanship” when one of the parties has, as I wrote yesterday, no problem with cruel stunts using vulnerable humans. But Professor Hockett’s efforts have yielded the Black Swan of actual and substantive (i.e., non-post office-naming) bipartisanship, by bringing together Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat, and Senator Marco Rubio, a conservative Republican, to jointly introduce bills in each house to revitalize development strategy in this country through public/private coordination. Hockett describes this as:
recently proposed bipartisan, bicameral legislation that I helped to draft, which erects the first two of four pillars I put in a draft bill I first floated in 2020 – a permanent Cabinet-level National Development Council (NDC) like our National Security Council (NSC) charged with developing and regularly updating a National Development Strategy, and a repurposed Federal Financing Bank (FFB) within Treasury to finance the execution of that Strategy.
Like most here, I’m not a huge Marco fan, to say the least (see my August 2020 diary Rubio admits it: It's just the Olds, so it's not so bad), but believe it or not, he is forward-thinking on this issue, and like it or not he was just re-elected to another six year term so we have to live with him.
IV. So where does Bobby Dylan come in?
In 1965, Bob Dylan, a/k/a/ Robert Zimmerman a/k/a not the guy who lost to serial liar George Santos, wrote “It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding,” which contains the line ‘he not busy being born is busy dying,’ which Prof. Hockett advocates as a mantra for all economists.
Why?
Because:
Development is forever. It’s never finished, never a done deal. Development, like life, is perpetual. It’s a continuous process of inventing, then producing and seamlessly disseminating, new techniques and technologies economy-wide. And this requires as much in the way of carefully coordinated collective agency – continuously exercised such agency – as does ‘takeoff’ itself.
The mistake of ‘60s and ‘70s generation of economists is that “development” is something only “underdeveloped” nations need to do, assuming because we are already “developed,” we don’t need to do much more. We can outsource or rely on trade — a false belief leading to many of our short term (Pandemic) and long-term (Inequality) problems. The Khanna/Rubio bills are a way out of this — a way to be “born again” in the best, Dylanesque sense.
There are not many visionaries in public life these days.
Read and listen to Professor Hockett.
And of course, Dylan.
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You know who’s with us on this issue?
Young people.
And they can help get rid of sociopaths is office once and for all. Support these or other groups working for young voter activism:
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*Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, a socially responsible investment bank in midtown Manhattan, a socially responsible investment bank in midtown Manhattan, and a Fellow of The Century Foundation, a think tank near Battery Park in lower Manhattan.