I have a specific way in which I tend to be wrong. I walk behind. Every day the world turns and every day I try to adjust my belief system to the reality of the moment. You’d think I’d be able to spot the emerging challenges and changing tectonics pretty quickly. As a newspaper columnist, I am paid for one skill above others: careful observation. But sometimes I’m just slow. I have an intellectual disability.
Reality has changed, but my mental boxes are just there. Worse, they prevent me from even seeing the change that’s already happening — what the experts call “conceptual blindness.” I try to tackle the problems of a period through the frameworks of the previous period.
It’s only when I dismantle and reconstruct those prejudices that everything becomes clear – until the next historical change.
Let’s start at the beginning.
When I was in high school and college, I was a democratic socialist. I was fascinated by the left-wing radicals of the 1930s – the way they wrote, painted, marched and organized on behalf of working men and women. I saw the world through the lens of class struggle.
That was certainly a useful framework for the 1930s, when the economy was heavily industrial and millions were starving and unemployed. But when I was in college in the early 1980s, the economy wasn’t like that. America was suffering from stagflation – high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. The main problem was sclerosis. Over the years, special interest groups had clogged up the economy with overly cumbersome regulations, labor rules, perverse tax structures, and all the other sinecures economists call “rent-seeking.”
The United States needed a dose of dynamism to keep the entrepreneurial and innovative juices flowing. It wasn’t until about 1985 that I realized that the people I despised – Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – were actually doing something useful and necessary.
So I turned to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal to drink deeply from the sources of free-market thinking. For a while, this bet on free market economic dynamics seemed to pay off. It was the late 1980s and 1990s – the golden days of globalization, liberalization, the early creativity of Silicon Valley.
In the early 1990s, The Journal sent me on many reporting trips to the USSR and later Russia, and anything uncool in New York was cool in Moscow, so being a right-wing editorial writer had to be groundbreaking and hip. I paid close attention to all the privatization plans that were circulating. If state property could be divided among the masses, a new capitalist Russia could be born.
I saw, but did not see the sheer amount of corruption that was going on. I saw but did not see that property rights alone do not spontaneously form a decent society. The primary problem in all societies is order – moral, legal and social order. It took me a while to see that what Russia really needed was not privatization first, but law and order first.
By the time I got to this job, in 2003, I had my doubts about the free market education I had been getting, but not soon enough. It took me a while to see that the post-industrial capitalist machine – while innovative, dynamic and wonderful in many ways – had some fundamental flaws. The most educated Americans accumulated more and more wealth, dominated the best residential areas and bestowed benefits on their children. A highly unequal caste system developed. Little by little it dawned on me that the government would have to become much more active if every child was given an open field and a fair chance.
I started writing columns about inequality. I called my right-wing economist friends and they felt that inequality was a problem, but few had done much work on the subject or thought much about how to tackle it.
I saw but did not see it. By the time the financial crisis hit, the flaws in modern capitalism were blindingly obvious, but my mental boxes still weren’t changing fast enough. Barack Obama was trying to figure out how to boost the economy and I still had that ‘deficit is the problem’ mentality from the 1990s. I’ve written a number of columns urging Obama to keep the stimulus fairly small, columns that look wrong in retrospect. Shortages are important, but they were not the main challenge in 2009. I was against Obama’s automatic bailout under the free market, and that was wrong too.
Sometimes in life you have to stick to your worldview and defend it from criticism. But sometimes the world is really different than before. In those moments, the crucial skills are the ones that no one teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.
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