The Broken Society

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told The New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime, and, as a result, four million security cameras.

In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.”

The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”

Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon. He’s on a small U.S. speaking tour, appearing at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum Friday and at Villanova on Monday.

Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian U.S. But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. This country, too, needs a fresh political wind. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.

Helicopter wedding

“Everyone wants to be better than the others,” said Subhash Goyal, whose travel company handles three or four helicopter weddings every year in the Delhi region. “This is how the new rich behave. They want to show off and say, ‘I have more money than you.’ ”

Irish

Perhaps I was lucky enough to be Irish in a past life:

But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of “refreshment, light and peace,” to quote the ancient Latin liturgy. These scribal doodles eventually became elaborate design elements, leading the way to Irish masterpieces like the Book of Kells.

The scribes also contributed jokes, poems and commentary to the works they replicated, saving for us a world of fresh insights. One scribe, tortured by the difficult Greek he was copying, wrote: “There’s an end to that — and seven curses with it!” Another complained of a previous scribe’s sloppiness: “It is easy to spot Gabrial’s work here.” A third, at the bottom of a tear-stained page, tells us how upset he was by the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy. In these comments, sharp and sweet by turns, we come in contact with the sources of Irish literary humor and hear uncanny echoes of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett.

Obama and healthcare

Obama is embarking on a Truman-esque tour of the country in an effort to pass the health care bill. A bold and necessary move...what is at stake here is not just health care, but our nation's ability to pass any major legislation.

I should remember this.

Thoreau

If Thoreau became the prophet of wilderness for modern environmentalists, maybe the “Green Environmental” movement needs to reflect more upon the necessity for individual independence than about their social intrusion to save the planet. Nature can and does heal itself. Man’s contamination is much more than ecological pollution it is fundamentally a defilement of spiritual union because of human hubris.

The prominence of Thoreau as a dissenter often overrides his submission to the natural order. Alfred Tauber concludes: “Thoreau had no philosophy of "the whole," nothing to account for the individual together with his interpersonal relations. Indeed, the strength of his message is also its abiding weakness. He cherished solitude. Acutely self-conscious - of his social position and claims to professional recognition as a writer, of himself as an observer of nature, employing original and even idiosyncratic methods, and most important, of his spiritual relationship to the cosmos, which he at various times referred to as pantheistic, savage, and sublime - he made existential isolation a requirement for his pursuits.”

Quotes

The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that this is the fourth decade in Congress in which it has failed to deal with anything substantial, from education to health care.

nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opinion/31rich.html

Predictably Irrational

Whenever I handed out a sheet that had a regular picture, its inferior version, and another regular picture, the participants said they would prefer to date the "regular" person—the one who was similar, but clearly superior, to the distorted version—over the other, undistorted person on the sheet. This was not just a close call—it happened 75 percent of the time.

This is the problem of relativity—we look at our decisions in a relative way and compare them locally to the available alternative.

But guess what happened. Once salaries became public information, the media regularly ran special stories ranking CEOs by pay. Rather than suppressing the executive perks, the publicity had CEOs in America comparing their pay with that of everyone else. In response, executives' salaries skyrocketed. The trend was further "helped" by compensation consulting firms (scathingly dubbed "Ratchet, Ratchet, and Bingo" by the investor Warren Buffett) that advised their CEO clients to demand outrageous raises. The result? Now the average CEO makes about 369 times as much as the average worker—about three times the salary before executive compensation went public.

Consider this: if I asked you for the last two digits of your social security number (mine are 79), then asked you whether you would pay this number in dollars (for me this would be $79) for a particular bottle of Côtes du Rhône 1998, would the mere suggestion of that number influence how much you would be willing to spend on wine? Sounds preposterous, doesn't it? Well, wait until you see what happened to a group of MBA students at M I T a few years ago. What were we trying to prove? The existence of what we called arbitrary coherence. The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: although initial prices (such as the price of Assad's pearls) are "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only present prices but also future prices (this makes them "coherent").

When I got back to my office, I analyzed the data. Did thedigits from the social security numbers serve as anchors? Remarkably,they did: the students with the highest-ending social security digits (from 80 to 99) bid highest, while those with the lowest-ending numbers (1 to 20) bid lowest. The top 20 percent, for instance, bid an average of $56 for the cordless keyboard; the bottom 20 percent bid an average of $16. In the end, we could see that students with social security numbers ending in the upper 20 percent placed bids that were 216 to 346 percent higher than those of the students with social security numbers ending in the lowest 20 percent (see table on the facing page).

Two groups bidding on willingness to hear a noise: one group gets 10 cents, the other 90 cents. When asked to bid once more, the 10 cents group were willing to listen to the sound again for a lower price than 90 cents people.

You're walking past a restaurant, and you see two people standing in line, waiting to get in. "This must be a good restaurant," you think to yourself. "People are standing in line." So you stand behind these people. Another person walks by. He sees three people standing in line and thinks, "This must be a fantastic restaurant," and joins the line. Others join. We call this type of behavior herding. It happens when we assume that something is good (or bad) on the basis of other people's previous behavior, and our own actions follow suit.

It seems then that instead of consumers' willingness to pay influencing market prices, the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers' willingness to pay.

So what happened when the "customers" flocked to our
table? When we set the price of a Lindt truffle at 15 cents and
a Kiss at one cent, we were not surprised to find that our customers
acted with a good deal of rationality: they compared
the price and quality of the Kiss with the price and quality of
the truffle, and then made their choice. About 73 percent of
them chose the truffle and 27 percent chose a Kiss.
Now we decided to see how FREE! might change the situation.
So we offered the Lindt truffle for 14 cents and the Kisses free.
Would there be a difference? Should there be? After all, we had
merely lowered the price of both kinds of chocolate by one cent.
But what a difference FREE! made. The humble Hershey's
Kiss became a big favorite. Some 69 percent of our customers
(up from 27 percent before) chose the FREE! Kiss, giving up
the opportunity to get the Lindt truffle for a very good price.
Meanwhile, the Lindt truffle took a tumble; customers choosing
it decreased from 73 to 31 percent.