Author: ken

… and Denial as Well?

The “shakeout” has put Goldman Sacks and JPMorgan Chase at the top. Astonishing news, and, for some, a confirmation of Schumpeter’s view of the inexorable process of “creative destruction,” the way capitalism weeds out inefficient firms and rewards successful adaptation.

But the applause is muted, to say the least. As David Segal put it in Sunday’s New York Times, there is a “widespread sense that winners in this economy are produced by a game that’s rigged.” (see Windfalls for Bankers, Resentments for the Rest) Some economists have commented on the fact of this “recovery” shows that the “bailout worked.” But others facing foreclosure or joblessness can only feel resentment and rage at the continually widening gap between the rich and the poor. The silence of many political leaders suggests a form of embarrassment. No one wants to claim credit.

There will be a backlash. Taxing the rich to pay for Obama’s medical plan will be easier. Setting up a Consumer Protection Agency in the banking industry will be easier. But, apart from that, it is unlikely that increasing meaningful oversight of the financial industry will occur.

The danger is that we will simply return to business as usual: virulent competition among a handful of firms to make financial instruments more profitable – and a return to the denial of risk that was the underlying fault in our financial collapse. And where will the resentment go?

Possibly that resentment will attenuate as health care reform occurs and other defects in our social safety nets are repaired. The perception of the gap and its unfairness may fade – but it will not disappear. It will become part of what we don’t know we know about our economic system.

The Investors and the Jobless

The news about jobs is devastating. Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal provided an analysis suggesting that the problems are deeper and far more intractable than had been thought (see The Economy is Even Worse Than You Think). Wednesday’s New York Times, points out the discrepancy between the official figures and the real numbers (see Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes – though the print version was headlined far more bluntly: “In Recession, a Bleaker Path for Workers to Slog.”)  The official figure is 9.5 percent;  but in many states, the real figure is over 20 percent.

At the same time, technology companies are set to announce dramatically improved earnings (see in Tuesday’s Journal, Can Investors Hang Their Hats on Tech?) and Wednesday’s paper brings news of whopping profits at Goldman Sachs, sure to set off a renewed round of out-sized bonuses (With Big Profit, Goldman Sees Big Payday Ahead)

Wednesday’s stories are both on the front page, next to each other.  But they are not linked. For me the important news is how far apart they appear to be, as if there were separate populations with markedly different and distinct bits of news to follow — and, of course, different interests.  It is almost  as if we live in two separate if sometimes overlapping countries, each irrelevant to the other.

What we don’t stop to know we know is how strange this separation is.  One set of news is about investments and the recovery of credit markets.  The other is about people who work.  Right?  We can see that on some level, of course, they are linked.  Yes, it is about recovering from the recession.  But the more we stop to think about it, the more we are forced to see concerted acts of consciousness keeping them in different domains.

From one perspective, keeping them apart allows us all to stay on our accustomed paths, not questioning that things are going on as they always have, always do.  It suggests that actually little has changed in the familiar array of social and economic issues we face.  From another, keeping them apart prevents the dismay and outrage that might be experienced by the dramatic contrast between the haves and the have-nots.  Putting them together might imply that something should be done about it.

Is this what it means to be in a recession?

Palin and the Rest

“No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for [Palin] for president,” according to the USA Today/Gallup poll. This was after her resignation as governor of Alaska last week. Amazing!

In this Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich cites that poll, concluding that “she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.” The commentariate rightly calls attention to how flaky and inconsistent Sarah Palin is, but Rich notes that “The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. . . . The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.” (see She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It)

It may be a bit too early to identify a political movement, but the poll figures do suggest that the opposition to Obama is emotionally strong and deeply polarized. On an ideological level it is fragmented, off-balance. Politically it seems ineffective. Yet something powerful is going on beneath the surface.

It looks like many Republicans, demoralized and desperate, are engaged in a form of “splitting,” a psychological defense that divides the world into sharply contrasting spheres of black and white. Suffering from a form of panic, they need to affirm something, but they are hampered in thinking clearly and effectively.

This support for Palin is not likely to last. She seems to be truly undisciplined and illogical, lacking the skills to make it as a national politician. Sooner or later she will crash and burn – if she hasn’t already. And the “movement” Rich identifies may not outlive her. But the poll tells us something truly important about the American mood right now.

Democrats and liberals are slowly and inevitably discriminating their reactions to Obama. There are real questions about the stimulus package, Guantanamo, his commitment to gays, and so on. Gradually, inevitably the idealizations surrounding Obama are wearing away, and his approval ratings are in decline. But these are complex real problems and we are right to think about them, question them and disagree. The process is based in reality.

The Republicans, by contrast, are not only having difficulty crafting an opposition. They are having trouble thinking.

Echoes of the Present

Commentators in the past few days have tried to express what they think is the lesson of Robert McNamara’s career. But reading between the lines, it is not difficult to see that what they don’t know they know is how their comments reflect their thoughts about a more recently retired secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Moreover, their perceptions about the Vietnam War apply to the War in Iraq too closely to be coincidental.

As Bob Herbert put it in Tuesday’s New York Times: “Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.” No ambiguity here about Herbert’s judgment of the man.

He goes on to make explicit the parallels between the two wars: “None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II.” He notes, as well, that the pursuit of both wars relied on the use of deceptive intelligence. (See After the War Was Over)

Other commentators have striven to be less heated, more balanced. Errol Morris, creator of an Academy Award winning documentary on the former Secretary of Defense, noted: “For me, the most telling moment in . . . “The Fog of War,” is when he says, ‘Perhaps rationality isn’t enough.’ His career was built on rational solutions, but in the end he realized it all might be for naught.” That is, Morris explains, focused on trying to prevent nuclear war, McNamara not only failed to see the kind of war he was actually fighting in Vietnam but also failed to appreciate its appalling cost.

Morris does not make it explicit, but again the parallel with Iraq is striking: a focus on large geopolitical issues similarly blinded Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration to specific truths about Iraq and prevented them from planning an appropriate war. (See McNamara in Context)

Philip Bobbitt, the brilliant author of The Shield of Achillies and, more recently, Terror and Consent, makes a comparable point about the limits of rationality: “his confidence in this sensible effort at reform [in the Pentagon] . . . blinded him to the need for a change in strategy in Southeast Asia.” But Bobbitt adds that “Mr. McNamara’s obsession with quantitative planning tended to make matters worse: though we killed more and more of the enemy, we were never able to protect civilians adequately.” Clearly, no one could miss that this is also a point about the Iraq War. In attempting to help the Iraqis, presumably in bringing them the benefits of democracy, we have inflicted extraordinary damage on the entire population. (See Calculus and Compassion)

It has been said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. It could be said just as well that we in the present are doomed to see history as a reflection of the present. What Herbert, Morris, and Bobbitt – like the rest of us – don’t know they know is how embedded in the present are their perceptions of the issues and dilemmas of the past.

Is It Just Human Interest?

Strange that something so massive and significant, so disruptive to everyone’s life, is so hard to find on the front pages of our papers or in the evening news on TV. Occasional new statistics, of course, revised government proposals, and a slew of human interest stories – but that’s about it.

There are several common psychological reasons for this. By now, the recession is old news – and old news, like old information, doesn’t grab our attention. Nor, of course, does it sell. In addition, we prefer news stories that mesmerize and shock us: scandals, deaths, bombs or natural catastrophes. And then there is the fact that, for the most part, the news that surrounds us is sad and disappointing. Who wants to know about it? Consciousness is highly selective. It edits out the repetitive, the unimportant, and the much of the unpleasant.

But I think something else is at work here: the fact that the recession affects us all so differently. What has disappeared from the front pages is the plight of those on the margins: the unemployed, the dispossessed, the uninsured.  (See buried in yesterday’s New York Times a story headlined: Safety Net Is Fraying for the Very Poor.) Our common understanding of who we are as a whole all too frequently edits out those who struggled to keep up, who gave up and disappeared.  Even offical statistics often find their way around them.

This is not just about the chronically poor.   Many in the middle class have moved away from homes they lost or jobs that were eliminated.  Retired early to vacation homes or moved in with relatives, we often lost sight of them.  The shuttered stores and businesses, as well, and those who have become reclusive, afraid or ashamed to go out.

“It’s a good thing we have the stimulus package,” said the senior researcher quoted in the Times, author of a study on how the poor are coping.  “But what happens to the most vulnerable families in two years, when most of the provisions expire?”

Will they reappear then? And the others?