It was not the alarmists in the mid-20th century who led the way out of the darkness but rather the “recoverists”—those who took stock of the good things we can build on even as the alarmists at America’s Manichean poles continue to dominate so much of social and conventional media.
This is from Ryan Streeter, “The Great American Freak-Out and How to Address It,” in Law and Liberty, April 30, 2021. Somehow I had missed it even though I check that site every day. Law and Liberty is our sister publication. HT2 Arnold Kling for highlighting it today.
Ryan Streeter, by the way, is the director of domestic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
There’s so much positive in that article.
A few highlights follow.
On the American Dream
Americans also want to believe in the future, that getting ahead and opportunity are still fundamental to being American. More people consistently value the economy over the hot-button that elites tell us are more important, such as climate change or inequality, and most Americans are satisfied with the opportunity to get ahead. Belief not only in the American Dream but that people are actually living it is rather widespreadin the country, even if people don’t fare as well by objective mobility measures. Claiming the American Dream is dead has served useful purposes on both the left and the right in recent years, but most Americans don’t actually believe it, including the working class. In September of 2020, 42 percent of the country believed they were on their way to achieving the American Dream. Perhaps surprising to the pundit class, that jumps to 45 percent of the overall working class, and even higher to 55 percent of the Hispanic working class. Economists and pundits have been decrying stagnation in the middle and the bottom of socioeconomic America for years, yet people living in the middle and the bottom have surprisingly high levels of confidence in the American Dream.
I’m actually not quite as surprised as Ryan. I’ve been saying and writing for almost 20 years about the fact that a majority of people at all income levels have had their real income increase substantially. A lot of economists don’t know that; many people in those income groups do.
On Breaking Down the Government School Monopoly
And when it comes to the always-politicized educational establishment, the appetite for good schools and the innovations that support them are more baked into the American psyche than they were a generation ago. In 1990, there were exactly zero charter schools in America. Today, there more than 7,500 public charter schools, serving over 3 million students, primarily low-income students of color. Eighteen states havevoucher programs, and given the pandemic’s forced national experiment with homeschooling, new forms of schooling such as hybrid models, are abounding. As partisan as K-12 fights can be, the embrace of charter schools and other educational innovations at the grassroots is not.
Streeter’s Conclusion
It is important for recoverists within American political life to find each other and coalesce around common projects so that alarmism has less of an effect on policymakers. For recoverists hoping to make the future better by building on the past, it is worth pulling a page from the century-old playbook to find new ways to defend the first principles, practices, and institutions on which all of these good things depend. Neither the Mont Pelerin Society nor the Great Books nor C.S. Lewis was inventing entirely new ideas. All of them were recovering anew those things without which a healthy and flourishing society is not possible.
Does Streeter overstate his case? Probably. And some of the commenters on Arnold Kling’s post on Streeter’s article have said why. But I’ve stayed away from quoting the items on which I think he overstates.
Those who know me know that I’m a glass-half-full person. So of course this kind of article would appeal to me. But just as even paranoids have enemies, even optimists often have reason for hope.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
May 14 2021 at 10:22am
Has Streeter solved the affordable housing problem? Has he figured out how manufacturing can be brought back into the country so that workers are not limited to warehouse and delivery jobs? While I am an optimist on lots of fronts, these two continue to vex me. I’ve been reading Alec MacGillis’s fine book on Amazon’s impact to the economy (it’s a bit misleading of a book as it covers way more than just Amazon) and it’s depressing in a number of ways. He does touch on the two question above.
I’ve not seen any libertarian reviews of the book or the questions it raise. Until that happens, my faith in libertarian approaches will still be lacking. I do read a lot of libertarian blogs but wonder if they are not just an echo chamber of like-minded individuals.
Jon Murphy
May 14 2021 at 10:31am
As a point of fact, the authors write a lot here (and elsewhere) about NIMBYism and its affects on housing. The topic comes up very frequently here and elsewhere. In fact, David Henderson had a discussion not too long ago, in which you participated. So I am a little surprised at your comment here.
Alan Goldhammer
May 17 2021 at 7:34am
You are ignoring the fact that housing builders are not interested in constructing moderately priced housing. In the absence of regulation, only high end single family houses, apartments or condos will be built. This is what we are seeing in our area and only the country requirement for moderately priced housing has any impact on this. It is not NIMBYism but the desire to maximize profits on the part of the builders. Nothing wrong with that of course, but you cannot state that builders will be exercise a moral compass and build lots of moderately priced housing. They won’t!
BS
May 17 2021 at 1:29pm
When someone moves up from a moderate dwelling to a high-end one, someone else may occupy the moderate one. And the average quality of dwelling rises.
Jon Murphy
May 18 2021 at 8:33am
Not ignoring it. It’s irrelevant. Producers can do whatever they want. But there are two sides to any transaction. If they build higher-end housing, then they want to lure higher-end folks there. So, they make the higher-end housing better. People move, leaving older units open. Since the owners of those units do not want them to go empty, they either lower the price or offer different incentives to get people to move in. Either way, more housing becomes available and the real price falls over time.
For every transaction, there is both a buyer and a seller. The seller cannot just charge any price he wants. If he charges too much, there is a surplus and he must lower his price.
MarkW
May 14 2021 at 12:00pm
It seems like anybody worried about NIMBYism and loss of factory jobs should be cheering Amazon’s effect on the economy. In its warehouses, Amazon provides jobs that are comparable in pay and job requirements (skill levels, physical demands, repetitive motions) to factory work. At the same time, Amazon’s services (delivery, cloud computing services) are among those that make remote work more feasible and reduce the demand for working, living and paying for housing in expensive, high-demand locales. California’s population shrank for the first time last year — I believe ‘exit’ is going to be the most powerful tools against NIMBYism and high housing costs. Winning tough political fights is required to even begin to reduce housing costs via development — good luck. But no political victories are required to solve housing costs problems via foot voting.
MarkW
May 14 2021 at 10:30am
even optimists often have reason for hope
It might be a bit of a non-sequitur here, but David, if you haven’t already, you should sign up for Apple TV and watch Ted Lasso. It’s the best series for eternal optimists that I’ve seen in many years. The sky high IMDB ratings are not wrong.
David Henderson
May 14 2021 at 1:56pm
Thanks, MarkW.
David Henderson
May 23 2021 at 3:53pm
Mark W,
Thanks. We’re watching it and loving it.
Weir
May 16 2021 at 11:35pm
At this point we can take it for granted that if a governor’s on TV sounding the alarm about the danger of “snowbirds” jetting back home from Florida and “imploring people to take this seriously” and to be afraid, be very afraid, then inevitably that governor will herself have ignored her own predictions of doom about this peril and she will herself have flown in and out of Florida, secretly, because she doesn’t take her own claims seriously.
So this is the bright-side of the pervasive and numbing hypocrisy of the authoritarians issuing these scary predictions. I can feel reassured whenever I hear their doom-mongering because it’s just inevitable that my cynical assumption is correct and the politician doesn’t mean what she’s claiming.
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