Open and Political Manifestos
I (π») have recently finished reading Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital. I'll start with a very quick overview and review and then dive into a tangential point about political manifestos, romance and (as always) Georgism.
In Brief
The gist of the book is: in recent decades the economy has had fantastic growth, but middle class stagnation; trade has resulted in fantastic consumer benefits, but also some economic losers; multinational corporations bring amazing benefits, but are accumulating dangerous amounts of power; immigrants greatly benefit the economy, but can cause some tensions.
How can we keep the good and reduce the bad? Invest in education and infrasture. Reform the tax code to be simpler, more efficient, and to not benefit large, rich corporations. Tax carbon. Simplify regulations but have stronger anti-trust. Use international agreements to hamper tax havens.
All good bread and butter stuff. If you're the sort of person who free trade, immigration and global capital appeals to, you won't find anything much to disagree with and probably even less new to you.
And that what gets me to my other thought...
Political Manifestos
My main issue with Open wasn't its evidence, its suggestions, or its ideas. It was just boring. It was clearly written for a mass audience, was very simple, repeatedly repeated things, had somewhat annoying "call out" boxes like a textbook, and did I mention repeatedly repeated things?
This is where I think the "manifesto" as a medium has some great value. It is more than just an informative tract or a convincing argument. It is a call to action. A clarion call to arms. There is romance and passion entwined in the writing, and it aims to inspire and elevate.
The flipside, arguably, is that manifestos therefore can be a touch overwrought or detached from the facts. Fair criticisms, to be sure, but I just want to share some comparisons between similar ideas in Open and in Progress and Poverty. Definitely, Open is more succinct and economical (dohoho) with its words. But I do think something is lost in its sparse simplicity. Surely there can be a middle ground. Have a read and decide for yourself...
On Political Economy
Open:
Learning the lessons of the past, and of economics, will keep us from repeating the policy mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, or turning to new variations of those old mistakes. While bad policy choices can be politically appealing, they are also destructive to prosperity and humankind.
Progress and Poverty:
Political Economy has been called the dismal science, and as currently taught, is hopeless and despairing. But this, as we have seen, is solely because she has been degraded and shackled; her truths dislocated; her harmonies ignored; the word she would utter gagged in her mouth, and her protest against wrong turned into an endorsement of injustice. Freed, as I have tried to free herβin her own proper symmetry, Political Economy is radiant with hope.
##On Economic Suffering
Open:
In recent decades, middle-class incomes have stagnated, fueling economic insecurity. Economic growth did not benefit American households as long expected; although growth continues, inequality surged, and prosperity failed to reach the middle class.
Progress and Poverty:
Carlyle somewhere says that poverty is the hell of which the modern Englishman is most afraid. And he is right. Poverty is the openmouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough. The Vedas declare no truer thing than when the wise crow Bushanda tells the eagle-bearer of Vishnu that the keenest pain is in poverty. For poverty is not merely deprivation; it means shame, degradation; the searing of the most sensitive parts of our moral and mental nature as with hot irons; the denial of the strongest impulses and the sweetest affections; the wrenching of the most vital nerves. You love your wife, you love your children; but would it not be easier to see them die than to see them reduced to the pinch of want in which large classes in every highly civilized community live? The strongest of animal passions is that with which we cling to life, but it is an everyday occurrence in civilized societies for men to put poison to their mouths or pistols to their heads from fear of poverty
On Making Work Harder
Open:
If we simply discarded our computers, dumping them into the harbour like so much imperial tea, that would generate a great deal of demand for labour throughout the US economy. We would need labour to do all those things computers used to do more efficiently: computations, filing, data entry, and consumer interactions of all sorts, from booking travel to selling clothes to trading financial assets.
Social Problems:
...many people think and talk and write as though the trouble is that there is not work enough to go around. We are in constant fear that other nations may do for us some of the work we might do for ourselves, and, to prevent them, guard ourselves with a tariff. We laud as public benefactors those who, as we say, "furnish employment." We are constantly talking as though this "furnishing of employment," this "giving of work," were the greatest boon that could be conferred upon society. To listen to much that is talked and much that is written, one would think that the cause of poverty is that there is not work enough for so many people, and that if the Creator had made the rock harder, the soil less fertile, iron as scarce as gold, and gold as diamonds; or if ships would sink and cities burn down oftener, there would be less poverty, because there would be more work to do.
On the Final Call to Action
Open:
We can do better. With kind hearts and tough minds, we should move forward - towards a more equitable globalisation.
Progress and Poverty:
Compared with the solar system our earth is but an indistinguishable speck; and the solar system itself shrivels into nothingness when gauged with the star depths. Shall we say that what passes from our sight passes into oblivion? No; not into oblivion. Far, far beyond our ken the eternal laws must hold their sway. The hope that rises is the heart of all religions! The poets have sung it, the seers have told it, and in its deepest pulses the heart of man throbs responsive to its truth. This, that Plutarch said, is what in all times and in all tongues has been said by the pure hearted and strong sighted, who, standing as it were, on the mountain tops of thought and looking over the shadowy ocean, have beheld the loom of land:
βMenβs souls, encompassed here with bodies and passions, have no communication with God, except what they can reach to in conception only, by means of philosophy, as by a kind of an obscure dream. But when they are loosed from the body, and removed into the unseen, invisible, impassable, and pure region, this God is then their leader and king; they there, as it were, hanging on him wholly, and beholding without weariness and passionately affecting that beauty which cannot be expressed or uttered by men.β
Perhaps it is just me, but I feel that the universal call to the romance of religion, poetry and philosophy, is just somewhat more compelling as a call to arms than asking for "a more equitable globalisation."