Obama's First-Chapter Problem

Ezra Klein and Jared Bernstein both go at a fundamental issue (to indulge a bit of Newt-speak during his 15 mins), using Obama's sicklied o'er TR impersonation at Osawatomie, Kan. last week as a way of noting that the policy prescriptions for our problems tend to be far meeker than the diagnosis. It's what historian David Greenberg brilliantly identified as a "last-chapter" problem: authors with big ideas and tough analyses tend to get mushy, banal and vague when it comes to recommending what to do next. As Klein neatly put it, Obama's "speech got right to the heart of our economic problems. The solutions got right to the capillaries."


This is all sharply observed. But let me humbly suggest --as I write in my book Capital Offense and elsewhere, and as others such as Yves Smith and Dylan Ratigan have argued -- that the only way to get to a better last chapter of good policy for fixing our economy is to write a new first chapter. We need, in other words, to revisit our premises and honestly acknowledge how many of our fundamental economic assumptions have been wrong over the last three decades or so.

This observation is itself a sad last chapter (or at least blog post), of course, since we're currently going in the opposite direction in Washington. The more complex our problems have grown, the more simplistic and shallow the economics bandied about in Washington have become.   That 9 pct approval rating for Congress (which is now less popular than communism and polygamy) is no accident. Maybe when they get to zero pct some cosmic light will go off, the "polarity will be reversed" as in one of those Star Trek episodes, and the universe will be saved. I'm not counting on it, you understand. Just trying to spice up my last chapter.