Bobo has decided to tell us all about “Midlife Crisis Economics.” He says the Obama administration used to like to compare today’s problems to those that led to the Great Depression. But they differ in many ways. Well, to be truthful today’s problems may be more like the Panic of 1893, that followed The Gilded Age… Mr. Nocera, in “Glass’s Road to Redemption,” says after years of making amends for his former career as a fabulist at The New Republic, Stephen Glass has earned the right to practice law. Here’s Bobo:
The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.
When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.
But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.
According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.
Members of the administration have now dropped the New Deal parallels. But they have started making analogies between this era and the progressive era around the turn of the 20th century.
Again, there are superficial similarities. Then, as now, we are seeing great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top. Then, as now, the professional class of lawyers, teachers and journalists seems to feel as if it has the upper hand in its status war against the business class of executives and financiers.
But these superficial similarities are outweighed by vast differences.
First, the underlying economic situations are very different. A century ago, the American economy was a vibrant jobs machine. Industrialization was volatile and cruel, but it produced millions of new jobs, sucking labor in from the countryside and from overseas.
Today’s economy is not a jobs machine and lacks that bursting vibrancy. The rate of new business start-ups was declining even before the 2008 financial crisis. Companies are finding that they can get by with fewer workers. As President Obama has observed, factories that used to employ 1,000 workers can now be even more productive with less than 100.
Moreover, the information economy widens inequality for deep and varied reasons that were unknown a century ago. Inequality is growing in nearly every developed country. According to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, over the past 30 years, inequality in Sweden, Germany, Israel, Finland and New Zealand has grown as fast or faster than inequality in the United States, even though these countries have very different welfare systems.
In the progressive era, the economy was in its adolescence and the task was to control it. Today the economy is middle-aged; the task is to rejuvenate it.
Second, the governmental challenge is very different today than it was in the progressive era. Back then, government was small and there were few worker safety regulations. The problem was a lack of institutions. Today, government is large, and there is a thicket of regulations, torts and legal encumbrances. The problem is not a lack of institutions; it’s a lack of institutional effectiveness.
The United States spends far more on education than any other nation, with paltry results. It spends far more on health care, again, with paltry results. It spends so much on poverty programs that if we just took that money and handed poor people checks, we would virtually eliminate poverty overnight. In the progressive era, the task was to build programs; today the task is to reform existing ones.
Third, the moral culture of the nation is very different. The progressive era still had a Victorian culture, with its rectitude and restrictions. Back then, there was a moral horror at the thought of debt. No matter how bad the economic problems became, progressive-era politicians did not impose huge debt burdens on their children. That ethos is clearly gone.
In the progressive era, there was an understanding that men who impregnated women should marry them. It didn’t always work in practice, but that was the strong social norm. Today, that norm has dissolved. Forty percent of American children are born out of wedlock. This sentences the U.S. to another generation of widening inequality and slower human capital development.
One hundred years ago, we had libertarian economics but conservative values. Today we have oligarchic economics and libertarian moral values — a bad combination.
In sum, in the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.
The progressive era is not a model; it is a foil. It provides a contrast and shows us what we really need to do.
Bobo, sweetie, the Progressive Era followed the Panic of 1893, and no matter how you do math the Great Depression wasn’t 100 years ago. Don’t try historical analogies — you suck at them. Here’s Mr. Nocera:
Early next week, a lawyer will file a brief with the California State Supreme Court, arguing that his client has the good moral character to be admitted to the California Bar. His client is Stephen Glass.
Yes, that Stephen Glass.
He is 39 now, nearly 14 years removed from the events that made him infamous. You remember those events, don’t you? In his early 20s, as a staff writer for The New Republic, Glass committed one of the most egregious journalistic hoaxes of all time, writing an astonishing 42 articles over a two-and-a-half-year span that were either partially or entirely fabricated. For The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Harper’s and others, he turned in articles that had made-up characters, invented dialogue and imaginary scenes. When the truth came out, it was a huge scandal; Glass’s journalism career was, quite properly, destroyed.
But should the rest of his life also be destroyed? That, apparently, is the view of the Committee of Bar Examiners, which vets bar applicants for the State Bar of California. Given how Glass has turned his life around (more about that in a minute), it is a little hard to understand its resistance. So far, the committee has lost in two separate judicial proceedings, but it continues to press on, making this last-ditch appeal to the California State Supreme Court. I e-mailed John P. McNicholas III, the committee chairman, to ask him why his group was being so petty and vindictive. He hasn’t written me back.
Glass wouldn’t speak to me for this column either. But the record that was assembled during the first judicial proceeding, which took place in the spring of 2010, sends a powerful, and even uplifting, message about how a troubled soul can turn his life around. Enrolled in Georgetown University Law Center when the scandal broke, Glass was unhireable as a lawyer when he got his degree. A sympathetic professor, Susan Low Bloch, helped him land a clerkship with a District of Columbia judge. Then he moved to New York where he passed the bar but withdrew his application when he learned he was going to be turned down. To support himself, he wrote a fictional account of his misdeeds. He underwent intensive psychotherapy and sought out those whom he had wronged to apologize. He fell in love, moved with her to California and took — and passed — the California Bar exam.
Once again, no one would hire him. But one lawyer, Paul Zuckerman, after first tossing his résumé into the trash, fished it out. “Maybe I should give this guy a second chance,” he later said he thought, and he brought Glass on as a law clerk. During the judicial proceeding, Zuckerman described Glass as one of the finest people he’s ever hired.
Zuckerman wasn’t alone. In all, 22 witnesses testified to Glass’s good character, including Professor Bloch, the judge he had clerked for and, most remarkably, Martin Peretz, who was the sole owner of The New Republic when Glass fabricated his stories and was deeply embarrassed by the scandal. “I always thought redemption was within his means because he was fundamentally a good kid,” Peretz told me.
Bloch pointed out that “everyone who has interacted with him since the scandal is on his side.” His only enemies are those who remain mired in the past, still angered by what he did. None of them have had any serious contact with him in the subsequent 14 years. Not long ago, Jack Shafer, the media critic for Reuters, wrote a scathing article about Glass’s effort to become a lawyer, which essentially accused him of being a whiny excuse-maker — just like he was back then. To my mind, that’s a serious misreading of the testimony, in which Glass seems to go out of his way to not make excuses for what he did.
At one point, Glass said that the scandal was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Yet he quickly added that it was also the best thing that ever happened to him, because it forced him to face up to his failings. This he has clearly done. People who know him tell me that he is “relentlessly honest.” Having once been a pathological liar, he now won’t tell even the tiniest of white lies.
We like to tell ourselves that we believe in the power of redemption. People can make mistakes — even big mistakes — and, in time, recover from them. Stephen Glass is someone who made a big mistake. The infamy of his misdeeds will follow him forever. But if anyone can be said to have redeemed himself by his subsequent actions, it is Glass.
It could be up to two years before his case is decided by the State Supreme Court, I hear. Here’s hoping he wins. Yes, he once did terrible things as a journalist. But that was a long time ago. The California Bar should be so lucky as to have him as a member.
