October 25, 2011 – 8:57 pm
I, like most concerned people these days, have been reading a lot about the global economic crisis. There’s a lot of good analysis floating around, but there are also a lot of stupid and crazy ideas flying about. There’s a lot to understand about the crisis, and, as the protesters of Occupy Wall Street have continually pointed out, the explanations draw connections between wide ranging topics such as campaign finance, foreign policy, anti-trust regulation, and the national debt. A lot of the people most at fault for this crisis would like us to believe that we need advanced degrees in mathematics to understand its causes and solutions. The truth is, even though most of us don’t have time to spend poring over tomes of macroeconomics, the big picture of the crisis isn’t too terribly hard to grasp. The difficulty is just in sifting out the right narrative from all the media noise. To that end, I’ve assembled a small set of articles that, in my opinion, are the ones you ought to read if you read nothing else about the crisis. I will give a short summary and critique of each. Hopefully, this will help give a holistic outline of the crisis, its causes, and its possible solutions. I don’t aim to be partisan in my approach, but I will aim to base my analysis on facts, rather than on the testimony of conflicting sides. If a criminal is caught red handed, there is no need to give credence to his excuses. Read More »
October 11, 2011 – 7:05 pm
In my previous essay, I discussed why anti-rationalism is the undercurrent of both the current global crisis and the nascent populist response to it. I was vague, though, about what, if anything, we can do about it. In this essay I want to give an outline in the spirit of Montesquieu and Rousseau of a theoretical constitutional government. The hypothetical government will institutionalize checks and balances to address the problem of institutionalized anti-rationalism. I hope that this exercise will elucidate the forms of possible responses to anti-rationalism, and suggest other possible, perhaps more moderate, approaches to reform in today’s democratic governments. I also hope that young democratic movements in such places as Libya and Egypt might read this essay and learn something from the mistakes of the older democracies. None of this should be taken to imply that the “rhetorical disarmament” I spoke about in the other essay is secondary or unnecessary. The first line of defense against anti-rationalism will always be to be scrupulous in distinguishing fact from opinion, and indeed this is probably the only defense populist movements have. Institutional reforms can only ever be a supplement to pro-rational rhetoric, and a last line of defense against anti-rationalism. No system of checks and balances can force officials to govern in good faith. Read More »
October 11, 2011 – 7:05 pm
These days the number of intractable problems facing the world seems to multiply every day, and the prospects seem dim for the enactment of any real solutions. Unemployment is the worst it has been in decades, debt is rampant, conflicts around the world continue to grow, and the environment is not getting any cleaner or cooler. I’ve heard it said that my generation is the Hopeless Generation. Raised in boom times with the expectation that we would inherit the most peaceful, prosperous, and enlightened era in human history, we now enter adulthood in a world that is increasingly violent and petty, into a work force that has no place for us. The legacy left by our parents will haunt us economically, environmentally, and politically for the rest of our lives. Read More »
