Why I’m Here

I’m here, at CenterMovement.org, for three reasons. First, I want to make political discourse civil, rational, and fact-based rather than angry, vicious, and personal. Second, I want to bring people to the center: we are, after all, a representative democracy in ambition, and common sense often implies compromise, which in turn implies moving to the center. Third, I want to help establish the right incentives for the governing rather than relying on the good will of remarkable – hence, highly unusual — individuals to advance political policies and programs. There are reasons behind each of these reasons, and some personal stories can perhaps best reveal them.

First is the most important lesson I learned in college; it came from my father and was about the power of civility. Providentially a sophomore (from the Latin, simultaneously smart and stupid) on the East Coast in 1970, the year and place student strikes may just have peaked in intensity, I called my parents collect in the midst of the furor. My father picked up, and I began my salvo post haste. “A professor here has just said that ‘capitalism is a dinosaur that should wade in the ocean before it falls on land and crushes a million people.’” I guess my plan was for Dad to slam down the phone after yelling, “I’m not paying for this phone call on top of this so-called education!” so that I’d be sufficiently incensed to overcome my shyness and hop on a bus to join a protest in Cambridge. Dad, after all, was proud to call himself a Republican, even though he was actually a 19th Century Liberal.

No slamming, no yelling, no bus trip, no protest. None. Rather, this is what I got: “I’m glad you’re finally interested in politics. I was a socialist my sophomore year at Yale. But I think you’re only hearing one side.” I was disarmed. No one else had a father like this. He loved the energy on campus. He loved meeting the professors. One – the Rhodes Scholar lawyer teaching “Law and the Administration of Justice” – even asked Dad for advice on his life. By interlinear, my father told me to stop trying to push him away by differences of opinion: he’d always love me, he’d always be there for me. He did always love me, he has always been here for me, even though now, twenty months after his death, his loving presence and values are internal and memory-based. Dad didn’t give up. He saw people fully and then helped them reveal their goodness. Of course I want political discourse to be civil, rational, and fact-based – how could I not?

Second is the lesson I learned about character and action. I’m also here because of where I was three months ago: fortunate enough to sit next to Drew Harris, a board member’s brother and associate professor at Central Connecticut State, during an annual meeting I ran for a foundation in NYC. Drew there and then introduced me to an important question: “Are you trying to solve a problem or just engaging in recreational griping?” I was immediately gripped by this choice. And a modest amount of introspection yielded the uncomfortable insight that I’ve been a recreational griper for years now, particularly in matters of politics. Now it’s time to work for change.

Third are the general insights gleaned from all those Economics lessons I devoured in and outside the classroom. When I realized I want to take and promote action, and do so with civility, I knew that I also want to avoid complaining about individuals’ actions, focusing instead on analyzing and altering the incentives they face. How can I not, after my educations in economics?

As an undergraduate economics major at Wellesley College, I learned that if we’re willing both to repress reservations about the distribution of income and to accept assumptions of perfect competition (including perfect information), there’s something satisfactory, even glorious, about outcomes achieved by the intersection of supply and demand curves. (OK, I’m odd, very odd, but someone has to love math.) I also learned that if some of these assumptions do not apply, the government should intervene and solve the problem(s).

Here’s how we analyzed behavior in the private sector. Individuals and firms seek to maximize utility and profits. Most decisions are made, as they should be, on the margin – by comparing the extra costs to the extra benefits of change. If prices shift, so will behavior.

Here’s how we analyzed behavior in the government sector: We didn’t. Not once did we ask what motivates government, what incentives and constraints government faces. All we noted was that fiscal policy – especially using government spending to smooth away business cycles – was flawed because of all the lags: lags in diagnosing a recession, lags in deciding on spending projects, lags on contracting for the chosen projects, lags in getting the spending on those projects. “Shovel Ready” applies only to the last lag, and then not so very often.

Writing East/West Trade newsletters two years for Cyrus Eaton, Jr., both father of one of my best friends and son of the controversial Canadian/Clevelander simultaneously, if oxymoronically, denigrated as “a Commie Lover” and “the Last of the Robber Barons,” made me even more interested than previously in agriculture, so on I went to the University of Chicago to further my education in economics with the goal of working for the U.N. Food for Peace. There, I was obliged to be as analytical in my approach to the government sector (Milton Friedman refused to let us call it the “public” sector) as I was in my treatment of the private sector.

The results weren’t comforting. Wellesley professors had already taught me, through the construct of the Production Possibility Frontier, that, unless it lessens inefficiencies, the real cost of government spending is not taxes but rather the decline in private production and therefore consumption or investment due to the diversion of resources away from the private sector. (See www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics2.asp for more on this concept.) Chicago professors refused to let me assume that the government would always, or even often, act to correct a problem, whether by spending, taxing, or regulation. George Stigler taught me that we cannot understand the effects of regulation by reading the statutes, while Milton Friedman asserted that action should not be its own reward, even though Americans usually act as if it is. Both professors told me to consider this possibility: sometimes market innovation and free trade are better in the long run at restraining monopolies than active government regulation. Both the importance of big business in politics and the revolving doors between industries and the bureaucracies allegedly policing them should give citizens pause. Chicago forced me frontally to face the fact that Government is neither God nor Santa Claus. Government is people, just like you and me, and none of them has either a free bag of goodies or perfect information. Inefficiencies and their correction aside, everything Government gives it gets from us, and centralized information may be even more incomplete and untimely than local fact-finding (such is particularly the case in Agriculture, as the Soviet Union learned at great political and economic cost). What about the complexities of enforcement, unintended consequences, and simply knowing the “proper” equilibrium? When I was younger, I never thought of them. Now, I’m obsessed with them.

The questions then become all about incentives, because, in the main, people are drawn to rewards and shy away from punishments. Politicians must get elected and re-elected. They need money and votes – and here, when I talk about “money” I mean just the means within the law to buy air time and other media coverage to gain name recognition, educate voters, and inspire them to come to the polls. Do members of the Congress and Senate, on average, get re-elected by acting in the national interest and foregoing state projects of pork? I think they do not. Can Republicans win elections in part through the support of Big Oil and then subsidize Green Energy? Can Democrats win elections in part by the voting and financial support of unions and then deny support to bills that organized Labor presents? I think they cannot. Why, then, am I angry when the Congress and Senate approved “stimulus plans” that have lots more to do with locally and politically motivated benefits than with national stimuli? Why, then, am I angry that the federal government, now Democratic for the first time in eight years, chose to bail out General Motors and Chrysler – only briefly but expensively deferring bankruptcy? The incentive structure predicts these outcomes; there’s little point in blaming individuals. Or parties. At best, members of Congress will represent their districts and states. More likely, they will represent well-organized and wealthy vested interests within and without those states. Please note that I am not letting individuals off the hook by focusing on incentives. I remain hopeful that heroic individuals can and will rise above temptation. But they’ll be rare, and even rarer will be their reelection until the electorate responds by insisting on structural change.

My fifth and final story returns to my first, deepening and saddening its context.

When my father was that sophomore socialist at Yale, he returned to the campus from a weekend away to find a note posted on his door: “See Campus Security.” There he was handed a telegram: “FATHER KILLED IN CAR ACCIDENT STOP COME HOME STOP MOTHER STOP”. Dad’s dad was a playboy, often clad in his full-length raccoon coat, nationally ranked in tennis, and the alleged founder of soccer at Yale, touring Europe as its captain. Dad didn’t talk much about his past, but when he did, he’d confess, “I’m embarrassed to tell you, but I wasn’t surprised Father died in a car accident: he always drove too fast — way too fast.”

These stories help explain why I’m here. They may well go the distance in predicting that I’m going to criticize many government policies for being pulled together too fast – way too fast. I want to get the details right. I don’t want the “quick” to be the enemy of the “better”. We must balance short-run urgency with policies that improve long-run outcomes. My top priority is my four children. I am here, at CenterMovement.org, for the long haul because I care about their future and therefore the future. Together we can make a difference. And we must.

Anger is appropriate only if it inspires constructive action. Recreation has its place, but so does work. Instead of griping about poor incentives, I’m going to act to change them. I plan to persuade you to help, and I plan to succeed. This site is all about conversation, discussion and exchange. Let them begin. Let them begin now, with you telling me where I’m right, and, more importantly, where I’m wrong. Respect me enough to continue my education. There’s a lot of good work to be done.