More Beyond Blue

Walter Russel Mead has continued his excellent American Interest series "Beyond Blue" with parts 4, Beyond Blue Part Four: Better Living in the 21st Century, and 5, Beyond Blue 5: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. This a is an outstanding series, based on rethinking the Blue (liberal) social model that worked pretty well in the past but clearly is no longer applicable in today's world.

The essence of the issue in part 4 is summed up in the following quotation:

120 years ago, agriculture was in crisis because fewer people were needed to produce the world’s food supply. Today, the middle class is endangered because fewer people are needed to do the world’s routine factory work and information management. In both cases, the economic dislocation and painful change were the side effects of progress rather than the signs of dissolution. The reality last time around was that with fewer hands needed at these routine tasks, more human energy, talent and skill were available to do other things: to produce the goods and services that a more sophisticated and much richer modern industrial society would want and need.

Today we don’t need our whole workforce to provide for the wants of industrial society. Fewer and fewer workers produce all the food, all the factory products and all the basic administrative and technical support the social machine needs in order to carry out the tasks of the industrial age. So what do we do with the rest?

From Part 5 on jobs, this quote struck me as right on:

Some mourn the passing of the old ways; some are glad. It doesn’t, fundamentally, matter. The real political division in American today is between those who think the old days can come back if the government does the right things (tax rich people; pump enough money into state and local government, health care and the higher ed industry; raise tariffs high enough and sprinkle enough subsidies on enough industries to protect and rebuild the manufacturing sector) and those like Via Meadia who think that Humpty Dumpty can’t be put together again, no matter how many of the king’s horses and king’s men set up federal egg patching programs.

Those who think the magic can return are free to organize into political movements and rage against the dying of the light; it’s a free country and VM thinks everyone should do their best to advance their ideas and policy options in the political world. But this fight will at most slow down the pace of change; the real contest in America is going to be about what to do next. Energy over time is likely to flow from nostalgia for the old toward the construction of the new.