Thinking about Keynes

As some of you may know, Béatrice has been in France over the last couple of months. She’s been helping her Dad and Mom who are 93 and 85 years old respectively. Her Dad has been waging a battle with congestive heart failure and Béatrice is doing her best to help him keep his fighting spirit intact. So if you have a moment to send some thoughts, prayers, good vibes, and positive wishes wending their way to the southwest of France, we’d greatly appreciate it!

In any case, being in “bachelor mode” has left me with some time on my hands. And, hey, there’s only so much Sports Center one can watch in a given day! So I’ve been thinking about Keynesian economics to keep myself out of trouble. It’s funny, isn’t it, how one returns to childhood themes and thoughts? My Dad taught economics and was, I believe, a bit of a “Keynesian” himself. I think Dad liked the fact that Keynes was a bit of an outsider in economic circles and not so much a professional academic as someone who had a foot in multiple camps, including, ethics, politics, philosophy, and the arts. Hey, anyone who hung out with Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell and made them both feel like “dim bulbs” in comparison must have had something going for him!

For what it’s worth, it was kind of fun being the only kid in my circle who knew who Keynes was – not that that got me any dates or anything. I also think the name “John Maynard Keynes” had and still has a kind of atavistic power for me. As such, he shares that distinction with Eugene O’Neill. When I was a kid, both of their names gave me something of a frisson or existential shiver. Maybe it was because Dad was studying Keynes at USC while my step-mom was simultaneously studying O’Neill at “Valley State” (since dubbed Cal State Northridge). I also think this combination of an interest in economics and theater is what compelled me to write not one, but two plays where the hero was an economist (WWJD? and Safeway Encounter). That probably also has something to do too with the total indifference with which the wider theater world (not to mention the Econ crowd!) has greeted these humble efforts. But there you go….

Of course, Dad was an actor before he became an economist. So that link was there as well.

If you’d like to see my Dad on film, just go to the link below. He comes up at the 3.55 mark. He’s the hard-nosed upper upperclassman who gives Burt Lancaster a hard time about his mighty sloppy bed…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-hmsxznWMw&feature=related

For many reasons, I wish my Dad was still here. But one of them is that we could talk about Keynes. When I was younger, I was too far impatient/bored/full of myself to want to go into any of the macro-micro-miso elements of economics. But now I wish I could ask Dad what he thought of Keynes’ place in our very fractured and heartsick modern world. Above all, I also wonder what Dad would think of the fact that Keynes has been enjoying something of a “comeback” lately.

Everything is kind of a stock market, isn’t it – including the bauble/bubble of reputation? For many years after World War II, Keynes’ name and policies were “golden”. They were linked for most Americans to the deficit spending programs of the New Deal that kept the Great Depression from devouring us all. As such, Keynes was lumped together (on this side of the pond at least) with FDR. It’s funny how both men excite the same passions in folks on the Left and Right. To the arch conservatives, they’re both “closet Commies” who introduced the virus of invidious, insidious “socialism” into the Body Politic. Therefore, they are both devils - which you would think would make them figures of honor for most Progressives. However, for many people on the Left, they are highly ambiguous figures who are often condemned for “saving” a capitalistic power structure that might better have teetered and tottered on down into the Abyss of History. And the fact, that Keynes was kind of withering in his estimation of Marx’s technical “chops” as an economist didn’t endear him greatly to many Lefties either. But, for me, that’s one of those arguments – like, “Did Ornette Coleman really know how to play the saxophone?” - which is far above my pay grade to adjudicate!

In any case, Keynes’ “stock” plummeted during the Reagan/Thatcher/kinda-sorta-Bill-Clinton/Bush1-Bush2 years. Meanwhile, Milton Friedman’s theories about the dynamism of free markets held greater and greater sway. Get rid of those cumbersome regulations! Tear down the wall between commercial and investment banks! Get government out of managing the economy (except for a very limited role in setting interest rates to ensure price stability). Cut those deficits! Lower those taxes! Balance that budget! Lift that barge! Tote that bale! And get out of the way! Government is slow, cumbersome, unwieldy, and always fighting the last war. Markets are dynamic, self-correcting, armed with better information, and always moving in a rational way towards an ideal equilibrium where (except for the, ahem, occasional “shock”) there is happiness and full employment for all (if, ahem, at slightly lower wages than some might wish). In this paradise on earth, the occasional “bubble” (if such a thing even exists) is quickly pricked by super-rational investors armed with perfect information and neat computer models that precisely calculate risk and quantify investing like some glorified kind of life insurance where one can predict “actuarial” variables down to the last percentile of finger-lickin’ good accuracy.

Most of all, you will never see the “black swan” of a full-fledged market collapse (except at very, very long intervals and certainly never twice in the same century). Make it more like once every… every… Well, how old is the universe again? Well, longer than that!

I think we all know how that worked out….

So what about Keynes in all this? Does he have something to offer us still? I know buckets/gallons/tsunamis of ink have been spilled on this but I have been thinking about it more than a wee bit myself lately. In particular, the moral, ethical and philosophic implications of some of his thinking have been rattling around inside my little kuh-noggin. But I see that I have come up to the end of my self-imposed blog limit. Can’t be too long and windy in these blog posts! This is an era of short-attention spans! Beginning with my own! And besides a “very special episode” of “Buffy” is about to come on the SciFy channel! So I’ll hold those thoughts until next time. Tee, hee! That will also give me a little more time to brood and ponder on what to say next!

Is that a manipulative cliff-hanger or what? Shameless!

Speaking of shameless, here’s another piece of video for you on a (somewhat) related (and quite mean-spirited) topic. But it does speak to how well many of us learned about "the dismal science" back at school:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouXB-tvUF4w

Post Election Blues

Musing on the “Republican wave” of last Tuesday, I got to thinking about a question that has haunted me for my entire adult life. Why doesn’t the white working class seem to feel any attachment/attraction to the progressive message of fairness, social justice, and truly equal opportunity? This haunts/troubles me deeply because I feel that if the folks who are often labeled as the “guns, gays, and God” crowd ever did get behind the progressive message this country would be utterly transformed in the blink of an eye. I like to tell myself too that it hasn’t always been this way. Texas once had a thriving progressive Democratic party and FDR was seen as virtually a saint in many parts of the deep, deep, South. So why is it now that “red state” and “red neck” seem virtual synonyms? Searching for answers, as always, I thought I’d turn to country and western music and see what I might learn. So here we go….

Merle Haggard: Big City

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou5tnqSLNlM

You have to start with Merle because he is the high priest of a certain libertarian/progressive mixture that characterizes what I think is a profound confusion/discord between embracing the idea of fairness on the one hand and engaging in a kind of cranky “I’m going to bite my nose off to spite my own face” distrust and hatred of any kind of organized, formal response to social injustice. This song illustrates it perfectly. So we have “some lyric” (as Merle might put it) that completely expresses working class frustration:

“Been working every day since I was twenty/And not a thing to show for everything I’ve done./There’s folks who never work and they got plenty./Think it’s time that guys like me…”

Well, you think for a second that Merle might finish this line with “go out and get a gun…” But instead he says, “should have some fun,” which is a different thing altogether. Sigh… Then, with the chorus, Merle goes entirely off into libertarian la-la-land:

“Turn me loose and set me free/Somewhere in the middle of Montana./Give me all that I’ve got coming to me./And keep your retirement and your so-called Social Security./Big city, turn me loose and set me free.”

Can anyone tell me what those lines mean and who they are addressed to? Social security is somehow the problem? Boy, I just don’t get it. When you hear Merle Haggard classics like “Hungry Eyes”, you can’t for a moment doubt that this man knows what it’s like to feel hunger and class snobbery and deprivation in his bones. But who is responsible for it? If you listen to a song like “Fightin side of me…” you get the answer that it is those “squirrely guys who don’t believe in fightin…” Hearing that my heart sinks into my shoes.

Gretchen Wilson: Politically Uncorrect

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZu0nExoN9s

Merle Haggard actually makes an appearance in this one so it’s kind of a hand-off to the “new generation” of country music as represented by Gretchen “Redneck Woman” Wilson. Again, there is this sense of total identification with the people who work and toil and suffer every form of exploitation. But what is the remedy? The Bible? The Flag? The Forefathers’ plan? Oh, that’ll do it, alrighty! That’s just the ticket! And again there is the sickening feeling that the people who are not giving any “respect” to the “workin’ man” or the “single Mom raisin’ her kids” are the people who make up the progressive movement itself. So there’s always this feeling that the responsible parties are the very ones who might be seen as allies in another dimension/space-time continuum.

Josh Thompson: Way Out Here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0sYnro_3Rc

Josh Thompson is part of the C&W rear guard that is fighting a (mostly losing) battle to preserve the “outlaw” roots of the music; e.g., Willie, Waylon, and the boys. So he is very much struggling against the boy bands and Brittany-style-cutie-pie-clones that make up most of the horrible country schlock on the radio. A couple of his lyrics in this song really stand out for me:

“Our houses are protected by the Good Lord and a gun/And you might meet ‘em both if you show up here not welcome son…”

It’s a shocking and defiant line and one likely to raise the hackles of a lot of people. However, when I heard it, I remembered being in Bullard, Texas, with my Aunt Fay. We were driving out in the country and she was looking for the house that my grandfather had built back in the 30s and where my grandmother, Aunt Fay, and my mother grew up during the Depression after his early death from “tuberculosis of the bone”. We finally found it – a tiny place really – way out in the middle of nowhere - when two rather large men emerged from inside who looked like your prototypical denizens of the “backwoods.” With a look of real suspicion, they asked who we were and what did we want. “Oh, boy, “ I thought, “I’m going to get to be in my own real life Flannery O’Connor story. Lucky me!” However, my Aunt quickly explained that I had come out all the way from California to learn about my Texas roots and to see the house where my Momma was raised. Well, within 10 seconds, we were inside getting a tour of the house and ended up sitting out on the porch with those “good old boys” and their family and eating homemade peach ice cream. So I guess the flip side of this line is that if you are welcome, Son, you’ll see a level of hospitality and genuineness that is often lacking in our soulless “big cities.” So go figure…

“We’ve got a fightin’ streak that’s a mile wide but we pray for peace/Cause it’s mostly us who end up servin’ overseas.”

If you ever watch the News Hour on PBS, you’ll know how they sometimes run memorials to the war dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just heartbreaking stuff where they show all these (now dead) 22-year-old kids with their beautiful, young, fresh faces. Next time you watch it just count how many of them are from the South. Usually, it’s about 50%. When you realize what a small proportion of the country Southerners really are, that figure brings home the truth of Thompson’s words. At the same time, who is the “son” who is being advised to not show up “not welcome?” Hard, hard not to believe it’s us… the liberal/progressive community. And, once again, the remedy is only a kind of nostalgia that the country should be run “the way it used to be/the way it oughta be…” But what does that mean? And when was that anyway? Anybody got a clue?

So there you have it. What seems to be a profound contradiction between valuing the poor and hating the very people who claim to want to work on their behalf. Any solutions to this dilemma? Any ideas? Let me know. Meanwhile I’m going to go soak my head in some Tennessee sipping whiskey and listen to some Jimmy Rodgers…

"But my pocket book is empty./And my heart is filled with pain./A thousand miles away from home/Waiting for a train…"