The Left at the Local Level: Aiding Access

One of the things I have been asking myself in the last five years as I have become more active in my community is “What does it mean to be a leftist at the local level?”.

You see, one of the things that makes me mad about policy discourse at the federal level is the household analogy, where we “need to tighten our belts” in times of trouble but that is the exact opposite response since it only exacerbates the times of trouble. The constraints at the higher level are not one of finances but resources that become idle just when politicians say it is time for austerity.

As much as I hate it at the federal level, that analogy is somewhat true at the local level, because we are constrained not just by the tax base, but state laws limit how much and how quickly holes can be filled. You can have referenda, but there are always competing priorities both within and between governmental units. 

The best thing you can do as a leftist, in my opinion, is to make sure that the institutions you have power over are run as efficiently as possible. Milwaukee kept electing socialists in the twentieth century because so called “sewer socialism” worked in maintaining efficient and equitable public services.

There is a next step though. When I was knocking doors for the referendum in 2016, the thing that I tried to emphasize was that the library was for more than books. The library is a community center, and it has evolved from the mass-literacy project spearheaded by Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago. As the role changes, the library has always been a center of information. That is why I am so excited for projects like this in Edwardsville.  Having a social worker on site can help people with coordination issues connecting with the state at different levels, and the library is by definition in your neighborhood. Navigating the social welfare system is time consuming and relies on much individual savvy from individuals, so I am glad to see this sort of thing expand – perhaps even into Brookfield. Creating access to social workers connects the most needy to programs that could help. The problem is making sure that people are aware of the program.

Bernie Sanders for President

As both a private citizen and someone chosen by the people of the Village of Brookfield to serve in government, I want to talk about who I am and why I support Bernie Sanders for both the nomination of the Democratic Party and as the President of the United States.


I think there are many policy reasons to support Bernie, from how he approaches the student debt crisis to healthcare. However, for me what drives this is that he is the most human and genuine person to be this close to the presidency in a long time. I does take a certain kind of narcissism to put yourself up for any office, let alone the highest in the land. What it seems to me from watching the man since before he became a senator is that he is driven by the ideal of making the world a more fair and equitable place. The idea behind Bernie’s policies is that no one should be left to suffer, and that no one should be left behind. 

I do have a personal stake in this. I have been insured for a long time, but there was a time when I was not. During that time, I had several medical emergencies I had to make quick choices about. When I was hit by a car, I declined treatment from the EMTs because I could not afford an ambulance ride. When I was passing a kidney stone, instead of going to the hospital I went to google to see what I should do. When I cut my hand I did go into the hospital and the bills I received for some stitches were the equivalent of two months of take home pay for me. 


I do not want to live in a country where people have the sort of fear and uncertainty I had in those moments. I would happily be taxed more as we transition to a system where everyone is covered. We can do it. We cover less of our people and we still pay out twice the GDP in health expenditures as other OECD countries do. With that, we still have worse health outcomes. Bernie’s health care plan is the only one of the Democratic candidates’ plans that remove the profit motive where it sits at every level of the transactional health delivery system we have in America today. Other plans who try to make a rhetorical move where you can keep your plan if you like it enables predatory health insurance companies and every other intermediary you are not even aware of to still exist and to keep creaming off profits.


There is more to Bernie than health care. He understands that the world is accelerating in how fast carbon emissions are affecting global weather patterns and has embraced the Green New Deal. He understands that the accumulation of economic and political power is detrimental to the nation if it wants to keep calling itself a democracy. He has known this for years, and he has fought for it for years. I hope that when you vote in your primary as a Democrat, and in the fall as an American, you choose Bernie as your next president.

Alternate Economic Histories: The Great Inflation

I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but one of the things that really got me interested in economics was that I was unemployed for two years after the crisis. I had somehow lost two jobs in 2008 and I did not have a local network so no matter where I applied or what I did it felt like everything was going right in the trash. It was incredible disheartening. One that that was my savior was knowing that other people were in the same boat as I was. I waited for the data releases and their analysis by economists and journalists in the popular press to show that yes unemployment is drifting down, but it still is persistent with the “long term unemployed”. 

One of the things that was going around during that time was a chart of the changes in wages over time. It was a histogram of the percentage change within bands, and the lesson was that the vast majority of wage changes during the immediate aftermath of the crisis was stuck at zero. It seemed that the prices of labor were sticky in a nominal sense. No one was really taking wage cuts. Jobs were eliminated or stuck at zero increase. There was legislation in place for states to incentivize job sharing like was more broadly seen in Germany but to my knowledge there was little take up of this structure. If you were employed, you had extraordinarily little power and you were happy to have a job since most people knew people who had lost jobs or housing or both.

Were I better at Google, I might be able to find the exact chart I am thinking of, but I cannot. Instead, below is a proxy that shows in aggregate just how close to the floor wage changes were for years after the crisis.

Playing with the different time series on FRED will show you different looks at this change, and if you overlay various inflation measures you can see that there was not much move in real wages either during this time.

One of the reasons I heard during this time was that policy makers were laying off the gas on both monetary and fiscal policy tools was that they were afraid of inflation. Many of people who were in the position to be of influence on economic matters had been in graduate school or were young scholars during the inflationary period that coincided with the Vietnam War and Nixon’s closing of the gold window signaling the end of the Bretton Woods system and the full introduction of free floating fiat currency. We know of the story of the Volcker shock and the recessions of the early 80s as breaking the back of inflation, but what we do not talk about often is how the political move of breaking unions was not just a signal that labor was waning, it also had monetary policy effects. The neoliberal project of favoring business was aided on both sides of the Atlantic. Thatcher went after the miners, and Reagan sacked the striking PATCO Air Traffic Controllers union were signals that it was open season on unions. With the decline in union density we see that there was a parallel decline in inflation. This gets us to the point where economists are calling the period the “Great moderation” and claiming to have ended the business cycle. 

The thing about economic history is that we are often fighting the last fight. Worried about inflation so we do not use proactive policy to make sure everyday citizens do not withstand the worst of the crisis. We bail out all the banks and pat ourselves on the back that the bailouts eventually returned 1% on invested assets while people lost homes and livelihoods and we started talking about secular stagnation and worried about hysteresis and threw around terms like “the new normal” instead of asking if there were more we could do. And hopefully we will learn from this crisis to be better prepared for the next one. The problem is that you cannot run back time or make experiments on the results of macro policy. So, when things go bad you must either say we could have done better or convincer yourself that there was no alternative. 

But there were alternatives to the great inflation. 

The Keynesian economist James Tobin was arguing in 1984 that “Inflation control is a public good” (53), noting that it does impose a genuine cost on society. This is hard to believe for someone of my generation, where the highest the Fed funds rate has been about five percent, and the CPI has been quiescent. Tobin, in his article “A Social Compact for Restraint” argues for just that, a “mutually assured disinflation” (54). What Tobin lacks in his argument is a realistic theory of change, hoping for a nation consensus through presidential leadership to self-impose wage policies to keep inflation down. While I am hopeful for coming together in a kumbaya moment between labor and capital, we saw how history actually played out, where the power of capital overwhelmed labor to the point where labor in its organized form is a very week countervailing power. 

To make Tobin’s idealized world in 1984 a possibility, we really need to look at how power exists and is wielded in the economy. You must create the incentives to make that change you see in your mind’s eye, incentives for both sides of the labor / capital divide. The English Marxist David Purdy speaks of just such a balance in his review of the history of the 70s, “The Wages of Militancy”. Purdy advocates for just the same sort of social compact that Tobin hopes for, in the accelerating inflation period of the 70s to be a time for “the labor movement to bid for hegemony by offering to accept voluntary pay restraint in exchange for structural reforms aimed at democratizing the economy” (1). Purdy’s’ work contains a lot of the “inside baseball” history of the ideological infighting within the English Left in the 70s but there are some nuggets that we can take from him. One is that he points out that the denialism of the trade unionists to accept that their continued wage increases had macroeconomic effects (9) so that the denialism led them to not see that they could play a role in containing them. Purdy also emphasizes the social problem of high inflation, even for a labor government, in that high and unpredictable inflation decreased business confidence and bringing inflation under control to prevent social unrest (12). The problem with bringing inflation under control from the top down is that the way we do it is by creating unemployment or trying to use wage and price controls. The mechanisms used did not work, so the conservative government ended up using the first choice, an event he calls a “bloodless civil war” (15). 

For Purdy, there was a real alternative in having a strong labor movement that would have been willing to accept lower or frozen wages in exchange for “workers’ participation in decision-making from the shop floor to the company boardroom, via a system of elected worker directors” (15-6). What we see Purdy outline is a missed opportunity since the real history is one where labor lost power in over a decade of Conservative rule in England. Unfortunately, we cannot run time back and break the inflation through worker power as Purdy suggests. This has knock-on effects in that Labor was weakened and had no voice in the aftermath of the next crisis. What I think it does, however, is raise an interesting question of what it means for worker power overall. Purdy focuses on wage bargaining being a driver of inflation, where “it is hard to imagine a clearer example of individual rationality leading to a social pathology” (14), so that when we talk about worker power we should keep the big picture in mind. But what it also suggest to me is that there are many angles to the call in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the famous closing lines that the workers of all lands need to unite because there is nothing to lose but our chains. The call is for revolution, but what Purdy outlines is revolution by another manner, in that labor becomes capital, or at least their concerns are equal and parallel in terms of management of firms. There is more than one meaning of worker control of the means of production, I guess.


 
Cited

David Purdy, “The Wages of Militancy: Incomes Policy, Hegemony and the Decline of the British Left,” http://david.purdy1@btopenworld.com, July 7, 2006
James Tobin, “A Social Compact for Restraint,” Challenge, March-April, 1984
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Hourly Earnings of All Employees: Total Private [CES0500000003], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003, February 17, 2020.

Diamonds Do Not Shine, Only Play With Light: Charles Joseph Mihelic Remembered

I’m going to cry. We lost a father and husband. We all lost a friend. I lost a hero, a man larger than life so I never needed to read comic books because I had his stories.

I wrote an obituary for the papers, checking the boxes that the genre requires. But first I wrote a more true version.

It is with a heavy heart that we must share with the world the passing of Charles Joseph Mihelic, MD. On the second of this month, Chuck suddenly and unexpectedly, slipped the confines of this mortal coil to challenge the deities of all canons to fistfights and matches of wits. We wish him well on his quest, but there are many here who mourn him. We have called him by many names: Joey, Chuck, Babe, CJ, Dad, ToeToe - maybe even Chas at a point in the 70s but a lot of things happened during the seventies that not everyone remembers.

But we do know that in the seventies he met the love of his life on an April Day in a small town in Alaska. With her, Mary Douglass Bowman, he lived a life that would be hard to contain between the covers of a book, let alone be done justice within the limitations of this mournful missive. Any roll call of the lives he touched would be incomplete as he lived a life of service to the communities he lived in, seeing people sometimes in the worst day of their lives and using his training and native intelligence to save lives and try to mend what was broken.

We can note those with holes in their hearts never again to be filled. Mary, with her constant companion gone. John Patrick Mihelic, a little brother now without his boyhood protector. Children Amanda Marie, Catherine Ann & husband Scott Schlobohm, John Edgar & wife Anita, and Norman Joseph left with only their memories. Grandchildren Bonnie, Joe, and Lilly for whom he will live through our stories. Let us not forget Pat Neptune, who was a valued aid in the later years.

We mourn Doctor Mihelic because of these stories. We mourn a man who saw the world as it was and tried to create a new reality around him. He did things his way. He did this in part because he had to. Born in the South End of Saint Joseph, Missouri, options were limited. You could work at the slaughterhouses, or you can seek your story in the wider world. His ticket was the military, signing up to serve his country in 1969. Then there is the biography. He trained as a Special Forces Medic, went to school and trained as a doctor at UMKC. He worked as a doctor. And then rejoined the military and helped keep Kuwait free in Desert Storm. He then moved to West Virginia and made a home here as he worked in various medical facilities in the north central part of the state.

But - this life that we live is not wholly defined by what you did at work. It is only a part of who we are. The life we live is not just filled with the activities we do, Every time we start listing the worry is that we will forget something. By these measures he lived a full life, from cliff diving and swimming with the sharks to mountain and rock climbing and martial arts and .. it goes on. The body betrays you and you slow down and try to keep active, turning to things like woodworking and cooking. Always learning, reading about history and staying abreast of political developments.

For us, this is not the defining measure of a man. These are the stories that matter. It is the people we touch in our lives that is the most defining legacy we leave. This has been illustrated all this week, as the immediate family has been overwhelmed with the outpouring of love and affection from all the lives he has touched. That these relationships are now but memories, this is why we mourn.

So, I want to talk about my dad. I want to remember. I want to remember the smell of Old Spice and Captain Black. I want to remember the rough skin on his cheek as I kissed him. I want to remember family pile-ons . I want to remember camping and building models and soccer on the flat and wanting to work out with him just to be near him as we listened to staticy talk radio. I want to remember looking for him in the crowd at all my football games and wanting to impress him in all that I do.

I still want to impress him in all that I do. I want to live a life that he would be proud of, because he was my model of masculinity. It was not the sporty things he did though. It was not academic or professional success. What I want to model, what I really learned from him is how to love. Watching him love Mom over the decades was the best example I could have had about how to be the best man you could be.

Dad was multifaceted, and we all have our own stories, but what breaks my heart the most is seeing that story come to an end. If I can make Anita feel half as loved as Dad made Mom feel, I will have lived a successful life.

In this time, and as long as you live, please share your stories. It is how we keep him alive.

Learning From the Past: Ideas for Full Employment Now

One of the things that I have struggled with in my studies is in how we look at economic history and how we use that to guide policy for the current moment. Looking at history can give one pause, but it can also create hope for a better world. The hope comes not just from bright linings in current developments, however. Going back to recent economic history, we can trace the path from war to depression to war. By seeing how responses to a crisis were planned and how they played out, we can hopefully evaluate what worked and what did not work to learn from prior times because even if the sweep of history introduces new complicating factors each time, it often rhymes.

One broad period we can learn from is the developed countries in the middle of the twentieth century. What you see is that policy makers were aware that the demobilization after the First World War led to slow and uneven growth and had a direct effect on the events of the Second World War. (Keynes saw it by 1919, others took more time). What is amazing is that British policy makers were thinking of a way to reorder society while the allies were still fighting Hitler on the continent. One such illustration of that attitude was “Full Employment in a Free Society,” a report by Sir William Beveridge. In the summary of the larger report, he makes a claim for three strong needs, one for peace, one for a job when you can work, and a need to have income support when you cannot work (1). The focus in the essay is the problem of unemployment, which for Beveridge is not just an economic problem, but also a moral issue for the “hatred and fear which it breeds” (6). The diagnosis of unemployment is one that focuses on spending through the business cycle, in that it is uneven and unpredictable and ultimately in the aggregate average just too low (7), too concentrated in certain cities ( 8), and in the British case too focused on international trade (9). To cure the ill of unemployment, Beveridge suggest that the answer is to always make sure that the demand for workers outpaces the number of people available to work (10), or “Jobs rather than men should wait” (12). 

Here it is easy to dismiss the idea. Of course, it would be nice if people all had jobs that took into consideration of their fundamental rights. However, Beveridge had a recent and valid comparison. The war itself showed that the lump of labor fallacy was not true. If the state wanted to bring everyone into the labor force and supply them with productive activity, they had the ability to come and do their job to defeat fascism, as “The demand for man-power in total war is unsatiated, and insatiable” (15). Just as in war there is always work that is undone, so the same follows in peacetime. In the good times and the bad, the lack in the economy is not want, but the “lack of purchasing power” (16). 

How do we do this according to Beveridge? We cannot rely entirely on the state to do it. We need to make sure that it is “a function of the state in future to ensure adequate total outlay and by consequence to protect its citizens against mass unemployment” in the same way that it is the state’s responsibility to protect the citizens from physical violence (20). Beveridge is at pains to point out that this does not mean full state control as in the Soviet Union but through a combination of encouraging consumption, added public spending, or even developing exports (21).  What Beveridge proposes in his essay is a long-term plan to reorganize society so that it is more equitable to everyone in society and to eliminate as much suffering and want as possible through the agent of state policy. It is prioritizing the wants and needs of everyone - planning as a social tool and an ongoing process, where the budget is not just about taxes, but how to manage the available labor, a “Human Budget” that looks at the resources available (26). Importantly, the vision outlined in the report is one that is proactive, aiming for “continuous steady expansion” (32) and not reactive to the business cycle, where society, “demands better houses and transport and light and power and schools and hospitals, without waiting for the opportunity when business men cannot make profits by selling less important things. Public outlay should be looked on as a means of meeting collectively urgent national needs, not as a gap-filling device” (35).

We can use this period as something to look back to as a guide for our policymaking. The economy was hot but there was a transition in the air. The memory of Depression was not too far away. In the postwar time, the economy in our imaginations became personified by the early television sitcom. There were jobs available for people to go to from their homogeneous suburb. These were jobs where one job could support a whole family and the expected leisure activities of that family while in the domestic sphere the wife helped raise the kids. It was the payoff of the struggle against fascism, and even if the red menace loomed over the oceans, the American Way was the best way as the US was the factory to the world that was rebuilding itself from the rubble of the Second World War or trying to create itself from the shadow of the colonial powers. We call this time the Golden Age of Capitalism, and the French call it Les Trente Glorieuses, because this was a time when capitalism just without trouble worked. The planning of the war years worked and the transition on both sides of the Atlantic was successful in that the depression was not entered into again when peace came. 

The thing about that is that if you start to look at the history of the time, it was not all Leave It to Beaver monochrome. This golden age existed in conflict with a lot of uncertainty and distrust towards the prevailing order. In 1954, the Supreme Court had to tell the states that separate was not equal and we are still fighting that battle today. Women who were demobilized from their role as the prime movers on the home front during the war felt anger and disenchantment from being marginalized, and we saw the rise of postwar feminism represented first in authors like Simone de Beauvoir to Betty Friedan through Gloria Steinem. Even the winners of the postwar expansion, the straight white males, saw pushback against the created norms, as the fiction of John Ford and a raft of midcentury male writes will illustrate, as well as the more systemic evaluations of the culture like C. Wright Mills’ White Collar or Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd show. In addition, we can easily find the cultural and economic dropouts from the Beatniks to the Hippies to see there was an undercurrent of disenchantment when things were finally working.

I play with this dialectic in my mind because for my entire life, the economic and political landscape has moved. My father grew up in a world where there was a larger manufacturing base with long-tenured employees who would then retire on a pension from that company, but there was some class conflict but the unions and the corporations had an uneasy truce for the most part. My generation has seen jobs casualised and society atomized in a way that would astonish Riesman. We are 20 years past Putnam’s coining the idea of “Bowling Alone,” and social media has made this anomie even worse. Thankfully, there has been a political reaction to this. Unfortunately, the strongest reaction that has been successful so far is the movement to isolationist populism that is represented from the Tea Party movement through to the election of Trump. What gives me hope is that there has been a reaction from the left that started with the bank bailouts and opened the way from Occupy Wall Street through to the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020. The pendulum has been pushed far enough that there is now some push back to the idea that the rich have earned the just deserts and anyone struggling are just losers who deserve these struggles. 

Reading the summary of Beveridge’s report gives me a bittersweet feeling. In the darkest period of Europe’s 20th Century, policymakers were able to look forward and embrace ideas of equity and lack of want and realize that in the fight against fascism there had to be a fight for something as well. The report makes it clear that it is not a call for socialism but leaves it open as a potential path. The amazing thing from my vantage point is that they were ever able to implement any of it at all. America had a more paternalistic capitalism than we do now, but the welfare state then was more embedded in the corporations so that it was an ideal and never universalized. To call for policies outlined in the report would get you painted as a radical by bad faith actors – both then and now. “Radical” is true in the meaning the Beveridge looks at, in terms of getting at the root of the problem. I keep asking myself, if we must have some sort of capitalism, can we at least go back to that as an outline?  With the path we have taken and the lack of incentives and historical impetus to take us off the path, I am not optimistic but would be happy to be proven wrong. Perhaps we need not be looking backwards but forging a new way forward.
 
Works Cited:

Beveridge, William Henry Beveridge.  (1944). Full employment in a free society: a summary.  London:  The New Statesman and Nation, and Reynolds News

Science is a Process

There are varied pedagogical approaches to teaching science.

I have a weird CV so I might have perspective on this.

Teaching chemistry, you go from “the smallest piece of a substance that can exist was called the ‘atomos’ by the Greeks” to VSEPR theory at the intro level.

You show many different models that over the course of 200 years represented the best guess of the makeup of the atom and how these came together to make molecules and ions. Many of these still have explanatory power. The working model of the atom I use in my head is the solar system model, even knowing it is “incorrect”.

The thing is that most students will not go deeper. What you can illustrate through this process is that science is a process of discovery. Rutherford’s gold foil experiment? Wow, look at all the empty space in the atom! We even teach blind corners, like phlogiston. Heck, we as a society went from there to splitting the atom in 130 years or so. That is incredible progress.

I dropped chem, started writing poems, and was in a bad place professionally when the 2008 crisis hit. I went and started reading up on economics the same way I approached learning chemistry. I tried to stay abreast of the current debates in the blogs and papers, but I went to Smith and Ricardo and Marx and Mill and Bagehot to Hayek and Keynes and Schumpeter to get a grounding of what was going on.

Imagine my surprise when I first took a formal, undergraduate macro/micro sequence where none of those people’s thoughts featured. We started out with graphs and roles of money but it all existed as received wisdom. The same thing happened when I took the same sequence for my MBA. It was only when I took the sequence again at Roosevelt that any historical perspective was brought in.

This is the problem in that the intro classes are what the science is for a lot of students. It is a received set of axioms that are unchangeable even in the face of empirical evidence. “Look at my graph, of course the minimum wage increases unemployment,” they say. “It’s Economics 101”.

What this misses is the idea of economics as science and thus as a process of discovery. It is harder than in the “pure” sciences because humans are more erratic than atoms, but we do a disservice by not showing the process.

I'm Already Against the Next War

In 2002 to 2003, I stood in protest against the Iraq war.

Today I stand in defiance of escalation of the existing war with Iran. The minute we laid sanctions on that state, we started acts of war against innocent civilians.

Yesterday’s attack by our government on foreign soil is an unnecessary provocation in a volatile region.

Our job, as lovers of the best in humanity, is to find those who stand unequivocally against violence and to stand with them.

Here I am.