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 |  Subject: A Critique of Government That Progressives — Myself Included — Need to Hear  Fri Feb 18, 2022 8:39 pm | |
| The economist Alex Tabarrok discusses the public choice theory of government failure.
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
At any given moment, there are a couple big ideas I’m working through on the podcast and in my columns. And the big one right now, the one occupying most of my time, actually, and my thinking, is what I’ve called supply side progressivism, or to be a little less wonkish about it, a liberalism that builds. Here’s a way to think about it. In my lifetime, at least, progressivism has been very much about helping people buy or afford the things they need.
So universal health insurance, which has been a lot of what I’ve focused on in my career, helps people buy health care. Food stamps gives them money to get food. Housing vouchers gives them money for rent. Pell grants give them money for college. Social Security is money for retirement. The child tax credit is money to care for children. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit, they give workers more money to buy whatever they want. And nothing I say here, nothing, not a word, takes away from the urgency of that agenda. We need all of that and more. That is table stakes of being a decent society.
But I’ve also come to believe that progressivism doesn’t build enough. It doesn’t dream enough about creation. And a lot of the problems you see in places where progressives govern reflect that. We didn’t build enough homes. We didn’t build enough clean energy or low emission public transit. There aren’t enough good public colleges or good public preschools.
And this statistic — it always breaks my heart as a University of California grad — since 1965, California has built one, one new University of California campus, one. The greatest public higher education system in the world, bar none, we stopped adding to it, even as the UCs we do have began turning more and more students away. Just an absolute shame.
So that’s level one of the problem: We don’t build the things we already know how to build. It’s not some feat of engineering to build a home or build a new UC. We’re just not doing it. But then there’s also level two. We don’t put enough resources into building and creating the things we don’t yet know how to build. And a lot of the problems we need to solve, a lot of the future we need to invent requires innovation.
We’ve had an object lesson in how much that can do to improve human life in the past couple of years. Social insurance cushioned the economic blow of Covid. It did remarkable things there. But it was mRNA vaccines that have been the true miracle that have saved the bulk of the lives. And look ahead, solving the climate crisis while still spreading the miracle of abundant energy, that’s going to require invention. Feeding a world population that’s growing in a humane and sustainable way, that’s going to require invention. And a list like this can just go on and on and on.
It is not just social insurance that will make the future more humane than the present or the past. It is invention. And then it is being able to build those inventions into social and public goods. Liberalism used to do this. It did it through much of the early 20th century, particularly. But to get back to that kind of liberalism, it requires government to do more to help, sure. But it also requires government to do less to hurt. And that’s what today’s show is about.
So Alex Tabarrok is an economist at George Mason University. He’s a blogger at Marginal Revolution. And he’s a libertarian, someone I’ve known for years and sparred with often. We do not think about politics very similarly. But recently, he’s been bugging me to read a classic book in public choice economics called “The Rise and Decline of Nations” by Mancur Olson. This is a book about why advanced societies become sclerotic, why they become incapable of building.
The argument is that stability and wealth lead to interest groups and bureaucracies and endless meetings and negotiations and complexity, and then over time, you begin to have a society that prizes bureaucracies and interest groups and navigating them and internal politics, that society becomes weighed down by its own success. It’s a disease of abundance. But the result is that over time, getting anything done becomes harder and harder. Growth slows down, innovation slows down. And so the ability to make the future different than the past, that also slows down.
And there’s clearly truth here. I mean, look around. But this critique is often wielded against a government by people on the right. And to my frustration, it becomes then self-fulfilling. It becomes a rationale for outsourcing, for privatizing, for undermining what the government can do.
But I wanted to take it differently. What if you took the critique seriously, but you also believed, as I do, that you need government to do big things and build big things in order to solve big problems. What light then does Mancur Olson and public choice economics shine on how to make government work better?
And so I thought it’d be an interesting experiment to ask Alex to come on the show and talk about it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Alex Tabarrok, welcome to the show
.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alex-tabarrok.html?showTranscript=1
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