Closed Skies
The LAT's Paul Thornton blogs on the latest protectionist travesty. Dan Drezner asks, "Ah, the Democratically-controlled Congress -- is there any step towards economic liberalization that they won't block?"
Dynamist Blog
How to Search Any Website, Including This One
Add the term "site:" and the domain name to your Google search, e.g., "site:dynamist.com kidney" to search for things I've written about kidney transplants. (This particular search turns up 48 items, only one of which is not about kidney transplants.) You can use the same command to search top level domains like .edu or .fr--a handy trick for finding academic research on glamour ("site:.edu glamour").
NPR Interview
I will be on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday to discuss my Atlantic column on chain stores (new link good for three days). Check local listings for the show time. Audio will be available here after 1:00 p.m. ET on Saturday.
UPDATE: Thanks to the good people at Arts & Letters Daily, my chain stores piece now has a permanent free link here.
How Journalism Is Changing
In an interview with Jay Rosen, John Harris, who recently left the WaPost for a startup venture, exactly identifies how journalism is changing:
We live in an entreprenurial age, not an institutional one. That's been true of many professions for quite a while, and increasingly (and perhaps somewhat belatedly) it is true of journalism. The people having the most satisfying careers, it seems to me, are those who create a distinct signature for their work--who add value to the public conversation through their individual talents--rather than relying mostly on the reputation and institutional gravity of the organization they work for. In your own way, you are an example of this with PressThink.
There are certainly examples of people fashioning this kind of entreprenurial career within the Post. Woodward is the most famous, but more recently Tom Ricks and Dana Priest are good examples, as are talented writers like Laura Blumenfeld and Dana Milbank.
But in general organizations like the Post or the New York Times have been insulated from the spirit of the age--precisely because they were secure and prestigious places to work. Once people got a job there, they tended to stay for years and even decades. Most of the people in those newsrooms are creative, and in my experience they tend to think of themselves as individualists and even iconoclasts. But the reality for many (including me until two weeks ago) is that they have careers that are more reminiscent of the 1950s, when people got hired at General Motors or IBM and stayed put. I believe that for people who want this type of stability, journalism is not going to remain an attractive profession for much longer. But people who adapt will thrive and end up having more fun than in the old days.
The WaPost has adapted better to this shift than the NYT, which desperately wants to deny it. The interview is full of such truths and worth reading in full.
Liberalism and Dynamism
Maybe because I did something similar in TFAIE, it seems much clearer to me than to many other commenters that Brink Lindsey's TNR article is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values. Nor did Brink cook this up post-election. It reflects thought going into a book he's been working on for several years. [Since several sites have linked to my post below, I've added some of this as an update to that post as well. Sorry for the repetition.]
I wouldn't throw all conservatives overboard, but I've long agreed that alliances are fundamentally shifting. From my 1999 address to the Mont Pelerin Society:
The good news is that just as the breakdown of socialism has created new alliances against markets, it has also created new alliances in support of them. The idea that markets produce not chaos and disruption but positive, emergent order has become common in the same circles where a generation ago socialism, or at least technocratic planning, was all the rage. Some of you may have seen, for instance, this endorsement of market dynamism from a noted economist: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." The source of that upbeat assessment of markets was Larry Summers, now U.S. secretary of the treasury and the epitome of a Cambridge economist.
If Schlesinger's hysteria exemplifies the attitudes of centrist stasists, Summers' optimism represents a new centrist coalition on the side of dynamism. That does not mean that Summers is a classical liberal, of course. It simply makes him, and other centrist dynamists, the sort of ally on behalf of markets that anti-socialist conservatives were in an earlier time. The American center (and, I suspect, Britain's New Labour) is full of chastened technocrats who have come to accept the practical limitations of state action and the practical advantages of economic freedom.
There are also many political "moderates"--journalists, scholars, technologists, scientists, artists, and business people, all far less famous than Summers--whose intellectual appreciation for self-organizing systems has come from outside economics: from complexity theory, from the decentralized evolution of the Internet, from the process of scientific discovery, from ecological science, from cross-cultural exchange, from organization theory. These centrist dynamists share an appreciation for dispersed knowledge and trial-and-error evolution that spills over into their attitudes toward markets. They do not always prefer markets to government, but they usually do. They lack the reflex that says a single, government-imposed approach is the best solution to public problems. They are more concerned with finding mechanisms to encourage innovation, competition, choice, and feedback. One thing that makes our political discourse confusing is that the term moderate does not distinguish between those whose moderation implies an appreciation for market processes and those whose moderation suggests just the opposite--a long list of schemes for small-scale government tinkering.
Even more striking is a profound split on what used to be the left. While leftists like Sennett are attacking economic dynamism, their erstwhile allies are finding in markets the values of innovation, openness, and choice. The counterculture has morphed into the business culture--to the consternation of both commerce-hating leftists and cultural conservatives. The left that gave us socialism is not the left that gave us personal computers and Fast Company magazine. Yet both the PC and America's hot new business magazine were unquestionably created by people who, by both personal history and political agenda, saw themselves as left-wing critics of establishment institutions. Individuals who would have no great love of "markets" if that concept implied static, hierarchical, bureaucratic corporate structures have embraced the idea of markets as open systems that foster diversity and self-expression. The very characteristics that make stasists wary of markets lead an emerging coalition of dynamists to defend them.
On the old political spectrum, socialism defined the left. That meant that the more you opposed socialism, for whatever reason, the further right you were. On the old spectrum, therefore, classical liberals were on the right, which makes us the right wing of the dynamist coalition.
It matters a lot whether we define our central challenge today as opposing socialism or as protecting dynamism. If we declare "the left" our enemies and "the right" our allies, based on anti-socialist assumptions, we will ignore the emerging left-right alliance against markets. We will miss the symbolic and practical importance of such cutting-edge issues as biotechnology, popular culture, international trade, and Internet governance. We will sacrifice whole areas of research and innovation to stay friendly with people who'll agree to cut taxes just a little bit, and only for families with children. We will miss the chance to deepen the appreciation for market processes among people who lack the proper political pedigree. We will sacrifice the future of freedom in order to preserve the habits of the past.
At some point, of course, we have to talk about foreign policy. But there is no single "libertarian" or "liberal" foreign policy position to begin with, so alliances will be based mostly on judgment calls in specific situations.
Help Wanted
D Magazine is looking for a managing editor, and the ad is worth reading even if you don't live in Dallas or aspire to work in magazine publishing. From what I know of the job, and of similar positions elsewhere, it's an accurate description.
Brink Lindsey on Liberal Fusionism
Writing in TNR, Brink Lindsey calls for "a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress," a fusion of people the headline writer unfortunately calls "Liberaltarians." The historically inclined might simply call them liberals (and I have my own neologism, hence this site's name). It's a provocative piece and well worth reading (the Cato link is subscription-free), especially by Clintonite liberals. But the alliance Brink proposes requires three difficult shifts:
1) A commitment on both sides to a safety net for the poor but not to pursuing economic equality for its own sake. This is the easiest part and has largely happened already, despite protests from both hard-core levellers and anti-transfer libertarians. But many of the loudest Democrats and libertarians (small-l, the relevant ones) won't go along.
2) An abandonment of Herbert Croly-style technocracy as the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party, not only in economics but in social policy, where "centrists" like Hillary Clinton tend to confuse governing with raising children. Technocracy long ago lost its ideological oomph, but Democrats have a knee-jerk commitment to regulation. Today's good government liberals generally pay homage to tolerance, pluralism, and market processes. The trick is to draw connections between those values and specific policies.
3) A deliberate resolve to form a dynamist alliance at a time when "progressives" are increasingly redefining themselves as stasist populists--trade protection has become an ideological position, for instance, rather than a favor for special interests--and many self-styled "small government" supporters argue vociferously for vast expansions of police and planning powers to limit immigration. In this regard, I am more encouraged by the defenses of trade coming out of places like TNR and Slate than I am by the fawning on Jim Webb coming out of Reason. (The guy even wants to bring back the draft, which used to be a deal breaker for libertarians.).
If it's going to happen, such an alliance can only start among honest intellectuals who are not interested in scoring partisan points. How many of those are left, I'm not sure.
UPDATE: Maybe because I did something similar in TFAIE (developed further here), it seems much clearer to me than to other commenters that Brink is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values.
Demonstrate your support for "big books." Pre-order Brink's forthcoming book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture
People Are Weird
Remember this post about how a stranger gave Chantal Adamson a kidney after reading her mother's plea on MatchingDonors.com. The kidney is still working, but the donor is in the news again--on a decidedly unrelated matter. It seems she's charged with hiring someone to kill her estranged husband before their divorce went through. From the local news article: "How could a woman who donates a kidney to a stranger also plot a murder? The State Police detective investigating the case says 'bizarre human behavior happens every day.'" That's the truth.
Jet Age Internationalism
Remember when "It's a Small World" was a cute fairytale?
The resignation of John Bolton is as good an excuse as any to share Sandra Tsing Loh's delightful reminiscence of the innocent internationalism I remember so well as part of my 1960s childhood. (I revisited this passage while researching my next Atlantic column, on airline glamour, but the quotation didn't make it into the final version.) From Depth Takes a Holiday
International--what a guileless, friendly world. As a kid in the sixties, I remember drinking up everything international: Expo 67! UNICEF! The five intertwining rings of the Olympics! International...House of Pancakes! "Come in!" international people always seemed to be saying. 'We don't care where the hell you're from. Have some flapjacks!"
Ah, when "looking like the U.N." was a compliment, suggesting a nicely harmonious mix of costumes and skin colors--Star Trek with smoother foreheads.
A Pariah's Triumph
"Once in a blue moon a reporter meets a man who changes the world by sheer force of will, character, and vision," writes Jonathan Rauch, in a column explaining why Franklin Kamen, whose papers were recently added to the Library of Congress archives, fits that description.