March 23: All Political Economy Edition

Bob Herbert at the New York Times addresses the financial "meltdown" at the state and local government levels:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/opinion/20herbert.html

When hundreds of thousands of teachers, among other public employees, hit the streets as the year progresses, we'll see just how bad this is. Well, actually, I can tell you now: It's so bad that I've pretty much given up on job-seeking stateside and am instead vigorously pursuing teaching employment abroad -- with tons more response in 48 hours than I could hope to see in 48 months in the United Stares. It's very very bad, folks.

Kathryn A. Higgins at The Faster Times describes how being poor and applying for various sorts of assistance can be " a full-time job":

http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2010/03/22/how-being-poor-can-be-a-full-time-job/

I can relate to this, too, as I just qualified for food stamps today. That's a tough moment for a middle-class kid!

The perspicacious historian and intellectual Tony Judt is understandably concerned about where we find ourselves:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest.... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/03/tony-judts-warning.html

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rutten22-2010mar22,0,5702961.story

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23848

Judt can well be concerned about where he finds himself, as well, stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease and unable to move or even breathe on his own. Yet he continues to illuminate the way for the rest of us, in a new book Ill Fares the Land, and in occasional pieces such as this interview in the London Review of Books:

We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? 

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n06/tony-judt/the-way-things-are-and-how-they-might-be

It has gotten so that even conservatives such as David Brooks are looking longingly toward communitarian ideals, which are finding a new spokesperson in "Red Tory" Phillip Blond:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html

Brooks predictably took a beating from libertarians and free-marketers for venturing in the communitarian direction, but with all due respect for the engaging libertarians out there -- Tom G. Palmer, say, or Ron Paul -- they are awfully doctrinaire for a group that has never and will never wield actual political power. Brooks is at least demonstrating some flexibility here, taking the edge off the slightly caricatured view of him that progressive Matt Taibbi likes to indulge.

Among notables born on this date are psychologists Erich Fromm and Philip Zimbardo, painter Juan Gris, composers Julius Reubke, Franz Schreker, and Michael Nyman, scientist Wernher von Braun, film directors Akira Kurosawa and Mark Rydell, cinematographer David Watkin, botanist John Bartram, science fiction writers H. Beam Piper and Kim Stanley Robinson, pop singer Chaka Khan, rock singer Ric Ocasek, novelist Roger Martin du Gard, and actors Joan Crawford, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Ugo Tognazzi, and Amanda Plummer. When Tony Judt criticizes, in the words of reviewer Tim Rutten, "a simplified Anglo-American reading of that generation of Austrian thinkers -- the economists Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Schumpeter, the social philosopher Karl Popper and the managerial theorist Peter Drucker -- whose traumatized experiences of fascism drove them to oppose any governmental intervention in economic affairs" (the Mises-ophiles in particular can become ultra-tiring), what he would like to bring into balance with those Austrians' views could be partially represented by the deep social humanism of an Erich Fromm, their great contemporary who also had his roots in Germanic culture.