The journal Foreign Policy conducts a yearly survey to highlight failed states. Top of the list for 2009 is Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Sudan and Chad. The USA, lodged between France and Singapore, is ranked 159. The least failed states are the Scandinavian democracies with Norway, Finland and Sweden coming in 177, 176 and 175 respectively. The USA, at first glance, seems to be in a relatively good position. But look again. Amongst the measures used to construct this index are group paranoia, uneven economic development, progressive deterioration of public services, security apparatus acting as state within a state and the rise of factionalized elites. When we look at these in more detail as they apply to the USA, the long-term trend is not comforting.
There is intense group paranoia in this country, especially strong on the right as the wackiest are given voice by talk radio hosts eager to boost their ratings and by a Republican Party seeking traction through partisan politics. An open society needs a free marketplace of ideas, but what we are witnessing is the rise of voices that demonize and delegitimize that necessary interchange. Inequality has increased in the past thirty years in a trend that transcends which party is in power. The very wealthy have gotten even richer while rising costs and stagnant incomes squeeze the middle class. The stock market meltdown wiped out many of the assets of the middle class. Public services are also getting worse. To fly from Asia or Europe to arrive at a USA airport is to fly from the First World to the Third World of public services. Public infrastructure has been underfunded and poorly managed. There has been an assault on government waged since Reagan. And in the wake of 9/11 security measures have trumped individual liberties. State security has been beefed up, extended and deepened. And there is the rise of factionalized elites. Finance capital is now dominant. Goldman Sachs personnel, whether former, present or future, now dictate fiscal policy. And the political elites are less and less familiar with the everyday experience of average Americans.
So scoring the USA on the indices of a failed state:
• group paranoia--check
• uneven economic development--check
• progressive deterioration of public services--check
• security apparatus acts as state within a state--check
• rise of factionalized elites--check.
The USA is not yet a failed state. But it is heading in that direction. Failed states begin somewhere. The USA in its present crisis could be at a starting point on the road to failure. For those who have ever wondered about when and why great empires and nations fall, perhaps they now have an opportunity to witness this process unfold.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Whose Country?
These are difficult times. I am not speaking of the great recession that is causing economic havoc. No I am referring to the crisis of belonging. Two stories to illustrate my point. The first is told through a recent video clip of a public meeting in Delaware hosted by Congressman Mike Castle. A white woman stands up and harangues him about Obama not being an American citizen. She is repeating the ranting of the right wing bloviators, but there is a moment of authentic grief in her voice when she says, “I want my country back.” She articulates an often understated yet strongly embraced white fear that somehow the country she knew and cherished is being taken away from her. The obvious intellectual retort is to remind her that this was never just her country: it was stolen from the Indians and developed by people of all colors from all over the world. The country has too complex a history to submit to easy readings or singular appropriations.
The other story concerns Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s run-in with the Cambridge police. We will never know the exact details, as it is a case of he said /he said. But what is clear is that the confrontation crystallized issues of class and race and probably age. It seems more the result of testosterone than skin color. But for many blacks it was just another example that police oppression is a clear and present danger that has not yet faded into history. For many whites, myself included, it seemed a more complex scenario of race and class with a privileged black man expecting more deference than he was receiving. In this case the privileged man is Gates, a very well paid Harvard professor who jets around the world, is a constant presence in the media, and can call upon the President of the Unites States as a character witness. Startled that a policeman would question his presence in his own home--and who would not be startled--he responded with the message of class--you are dealing with someone important--but also of race, when he remarked that this is how a black man is treated in America. Gates felt attacked. The policeman felt betrayed by a President who seemed to defend his buddy publicly without knowing all the facts.
A middle-aged white woman, a rich black guy, and a young white police officer: they all feel under attack; they share a sense of threat and dread that pervades our culture. The US has no single ethnic or racial identity. That fact is a source of strength but also a source of anxiety, and it is this anxiety that informs the delusions of a white woman who can question the national identity of her President, a privileged black professor who responds in class terms by invoking race memories and a white policeman in someone’s own house who fails to recognize the charged politics of a racial encounter. In each case, there is a profound sense that power and authority is somewhere else, controlled by the other. There is a crisis of belonging that we need to address. The “discourse entrepreneurs” of race and class and gender--the always available black spokesperson, the right wing ideologue, the routine racist--only add to our woes by coming up with the simplistic slogan, the easy remarks, the crazy claims . Some of the early commentators on the Gates incident repeated the need to have a discussion of race. No. Spare us the easy slide into comforting clichés. We have had enough unsophisticated discussions of race that fail to understand the overlapping and often undercutting concerns of class and age and gender and sexual orientations. Gates to his credit addresses some of these issues in his writings, so it is ironic that while his work elicits the nuanced view, this one incident generates the simplistic response. We need more intelligent debate where the freighting of complex issues with simple slogans of race or political alignment is replaced by more complex understandings of the sources of difference in this country. Failure to address this complexity leads everyone to think that it is not their country. And when more people believe that, we really are in big trouble.
The other story concerns Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s run-in with the Cambridge police. We will never know the exact details, as it is a case of he said /he said. But what is clear is that the confrontation crystallized issues of class and race and probably age. It seems more the result of testosterone than skin color. But for many blacks it was just another example that police oppression is a clear and present danger that has not yet faded into history. For many whites, myself included, it seemed a more complex scenario of race and class with a privileged black man expecting more deference than he was receiving. In this case the privileged man is Gates, a very well paid Harvard professor who jets around the world, is a constant presence in the media, and can call upon the President of the Unites States as a character witness. Startled that a policeman would question his presence in his own home--and who would not be startled--he responded with the message of class--you are dealing with someone important--but also of race, when he remarked that this is how a black man is treated in America. Gates felt attacked. The policeman felt betrayed by a President who seemed to defend his buddy publicly without knowing all the facts.
A middle-aged white woman, a rich black guy, and a young white police officer: they all feel under attack; they share a sense of threat and dread that pervades our culture. The US has no single ethnic or racial identity. That fact is a source of strength but also a source of anxiety, and it is this anxiety that informs the delusions of a white woman who can question the national identity of her President, a privileged black professor who responds in class terms by invoking race memories and a white policeman in someone’s own house who fails to recognize the charged politics of a racial encounter. In each case, there is a profound sense that power and authority is somewhere else, controlled by the other. There is a crisis of belonging that we need to address. The “discourse entrepreneurs” of race and class and gender--the always available black spokesperson, the right wing ideologue, the routine racist--only add to our woes by coming up with the simplistic slogan, the easy remarks, the crazy claims . Some of the early commentators on the Gates incident repeated the need to have a discussion of race. No. Spare us the easy slide into comforting clichés. We have had enough unsophisticated discussions of race that fail to understand the overlapping and often undercutting concerns of class and age and gender and sexual orientations. Gates to his credit addresses some of these issues in his writings, so it is ironic that while his work elicits the nuanced view, this one incident generates the simplistic response. We need more intelligent debate where the freighting of complex issues with simple slogans of race or political alignment is replaced by more complex understandings of the sources of difference in this country. Failure to address this complexity leads everyone to think that it is not their country. And when more people believe that, we really are in big trouble.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Westward Across The USA
I got lucky. Good weather. A clear cloudless sky and a window seat on an early morning flight from Baltimore to San Francisco. In 1804 it took Lewis and Clark nearly two years to reach the Pacific. Wagon trains following the Oregon Trail took between four to six months to cross just half the country. In 1876 a train from New York to San Francisco took nearly 84 hours. In late June 2009 a standard flight took me under six hours.
I still have a childlike enthusiasm about flying. I always try get the window seat and, if the weather permits, prefer to look on the earth below rather than close the blind and watch the latest movie. To see the country unfold before you is an experience that borders on the magical.
First we rise from the tarmac to leave the eastern seaboard. It is late June, early morning. Below, the earth is sensuous green almost tropical, heavy with humidity. The sprawling suburbs of Megalopolis soon give way to the wooded ridges of the Appalachians. I look out for the telltale signs of mountaintop coal removal. Too far north. It looks like virgin territory, the river systems outlined by the sinuous lines of early morning mists.
Appalachia: photo John Rennie Short
We cross the Ohio Valley. A giant coal-fired power station shooting a white smoke high into the air to fall as poisonous particulates where I live and breathe. We fly west into the land of the giant grid. The landscape here is an embodiment of rationalist enlightenment thought and the product of the 1785 land ordinance that divided the lands into units of 640 acres combined into one mile squares that stretch in a seemingly unending grid across the land. We fly west across the well watered river plain rich in alluvium into the drier lands where the square grid now share the same space as the round circles of the center pivot irrigation systems. The land is all geometry, a humanized rational landscape.
The giant grid: Photo John Rennie Short
We cross the 100th meridian that marks an important climatic divide between wet and dry, fertile and arid. In the late nineteenth century, John Wesley Powell suggested that west of this line the climate was too dry to support intensive agriculture. The powerful railway lobby overrode his proposal and generations of failing farmers paid the price. The dry landscape is still a testament to Powell’s sage proposal. The grid begins to disappear as we fly across the gently rising upper plains and then…almost without warning the western edge of the Rockies rises up dramatically. The first sight of the snow capped peaks take me by surprise and elicit wonder. It is midsummer yet they are high enough to retain winter snow in north facing crevices and shaded cracks.
The Rockies: photo John Rennie Short
The sharp edge is soon replaced by the high plateau, an eroded gullied landscape still freshly scarred from the turmoil of its recent creation. Stark, beautiful and empty. It is a dry, desiccated landscape full of gorges and gullies, long strips of ridges, possibly a meteorite crater quickly glimpsed before it disappears. Slashed and gashed, jagged, raw and rough.
The High Plateau: photo John Rennie Short
Then, another sharp rise in topography as the snow streaked peaks of the Cascades mark the western edge of the Rockies. I look straight down and glimpse the convex granite slopes of Yosemite, one of the nation’s first wilderness parks. Their vertical majesty flattened out by my 35,000 feet aerial perspective. Then the grid of the Central Valley, one of the most productive lands in the nation. There sits the grid square of Sacramento. The ocean is almost in sight. We cross the dry foothills, golden and brown, the plane loosing altitude rapidly as it gets ready to land. We fly low across Silicon Valley, skim the bay and land at the airport.
I still have a childlike enthusiasm about flying. I always try get the window seat and, if the weather permits, prefer to look on the earth below rather than close the blind and watch the latest movie. To see the country unfold before you is an experience that borders on the magical.
First we rise from the tarmac to leave the eastern seaboard. It is late June, early morning. Below, the earth is sensuous green almost tropical, heavy with humidity. The sprawling suburbs of Megalopolis soon give way to the wooded ridges of the Appalachians. I look out for the telltale signs of mountaintop coal removal. Too far north. It looks like virgin territory, the river systems outlined by the sinuous lines of early morning mists.
Appalachia: photo John Rennie Short
We cross the Ohio Valley. A giant coal-fired power station shooting a white smoke high into the air to fall as poisonous particulates where I live and breathe. We fly west into the land of the giant grid. The landscape here is an embodiment of rationalist enlightenment thought and the product of the 1785 land ordinance that divided the lands into units of 640 acres combined into one mile squares that stretch in a seemingly unending grid across the land. We fly west across the well watered river plain rich in alluvium into the drier lands where the square grid now share the same space as the round circles of the center pivot irrigation systems. The land is all geometry, a humanized rational landscape.
The giant grid: Photo John Rennie Short
We cross the 100th meridian that marks an important climatic divide between wet and dry, fertile and arid. In the late nineteenth century, John Wesley Powell suggested that west of this line the climate was too dry to support intensive agriculture. The powerful railway lobby overrode his proposal and generations of failing farmers paid the price. The dry landscape is still a testament to Powell’s sage proposal. The grid begins to disappear as we fly across the gently rising upper plains and then…almost without warning the western edge of the Rockies rises up dramatically. The first sight of the snow capped peaks take me by surprise and elicit wonder. It is midsummer yet they are high enough to retain winter snow in north facing crevices and shaded cracks.
The Rockies: photo John Rennie Short
The sharp edge is soon replaced by the high plateau, an eroded gullied landscape still freshly scarred from the turmoil of its recent creation. Stark, beautiful and empty. It is a dry, desiccated landscape full of gorges and gullies, long strips of ridges, possibly a meteorite crater quickly glimpsed before it disappears. Slashed and gashed, jagged, raw and rough.
The High Plateau: photo John Rennie Short
Then, another sharp rise in topography as the snow streaked peaks of the Cascades mark the western edge of the Rockies. I look straight down and glimpse the convex granite slopes of Yosemite, one of the nation’s first wilderness parks. Their vertical majesty flattened out by my 35,000 feet aerial perspective. Then the grid of the Central Valley, one of the most productive lands in the nation. There sits the grid square of Sacramento. The ocean is almost in sight. We cross the dry foothills, golden and brown, the plane loosing altitude rapidly as it gets ready to land. We fly low across Silicon Valley, skim the bay and land at the airport.
Monday, June 15, 2009
The cacophony of the power-tooled suburbs
I live in the suburbs. Low density with lots of greenery, and that is the problem. All that greenery has to be whacked and manicured in order for the suburban image to be achieved and maintained. Grass has to be cut in summer, leaves blown in fall, snow plowed in winter, trees and bushes pruned in both spring and fall. None of this is done slowly and quietly by hand. No. Brute, electronic force does it all. My neighbors, each with the carbon footprint of a medium-sized African city and the mechanical clout of a small European army, wield an ear-wracking array of power tools. They use these on the weekend. During the week the hired gardening crews marshal their own arsenals of landscaping weaponry whose decibel levels resemble sticking your head three feet from the jet engines of a 747. The end result is a neighborhood filled with the electrified screech and aching whine of the machine.
The manicured lawns and precision cut trees of suburbia rely on noisy machine power. Because I do much of my work at home, I get to listen to the landscaping firms who work during the week and then also to hear my neighbors exercise their right to make as much noise as possible on the weekend with a battery of ever-escalating domestic machinery. Unlike the big central city where there is a constantly high level of background noise, the leafy suburbs go quiet in the late evening, but that makes the daytime noise all the more difficult to take. Not inured to the constant noise of the city dweller, the suburbanite who lives in the suburbs, rather than just sleeps there, has to experience the deafening weekday noise of professionals as well as the weekend warriors. Because of the constant drone of the power tool, the suburbs are leafy and green, but definitely not quiet.
Photos: John Rennie Short
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Comfort of The Grid
For the past 10 days in Milwaukee my journey to work is a 15-minute walk from an apartment complex to the university library. It is an easy path to chart as I follow the rigid grid system of the street layout. Now the concept of the grid has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, particularly regarding the notion of an “unfortunate” triumph of geometry over geography, of an artificial human-made network with unforeseen consequences imposed on the natural landscape. And yet the grid system also has its advantages: for example, it is a great comfort to visitors in a new city, easy to understand and simple to navigate. I contrast such ease with my experience in Tunis last August, when I wandered through the tortuous street layout of the old Medina, hopelessly lost and pulling a suitcase through the crowded, narrow walkways. Arabic curses filled the air behind me as my suitcase bumped against unsuspecting legs. Disorientated, sweating profusely and on the verge of panic, I reached my hotel more by sheer luck than guided skill. In contrast to the unknowable layout of this centuries-old organic street pattern, the grid is a friend to the visiting stranger.
North Prospect Avenue, Milwaukee
My commute is along North Prospect Avenue through a neighborhood of dwellings built as the 19th century turned into the 20th. What I like about this area is the quality and quantity of usable public space. From the edge of most houses, there is a porch that extends about 10 feet, an unfenced front garden of about 30 feet and then a sidewalk, of around 20 feet. The early summery weather coaxed people onto to their porches and into their gardens. The porches and gardens are semi-public spaces, as people using them become part of the total street scene. The street reminded me of a remark by Jane Jacobs, the grande dame of Urban Studies, who noted that the more people we have on the street, the safer we feel. This neighborhood contrasts with many of the new up market areas, where despite the sinuosity of the street pattern (a contemporary reaction to the grid), the amount of public space is minimal; many affluent areas have no sidewalks, and few have the generous public and semi-public space along North Prospect.
We need more usable public space. It is not police that make us feel safe in public but the presence of lots of people going about their everyday business. Other people make us feel safe. And to use public space we have to be generous in our allocation of usable public space. We need to avoid design determinism, forms of design facilitate rather than cause human behavior. But the quality and quantity of public space does have an affect on the livability and conviviality of cities.
North Prospect Avenue, Milwaukee
My commute is along North Prospect Avenue through a neighborhood of dwellings built as the 19th century turned into the 20th. What I like about this area is the quality and quantity of usable public space. From the edge of most houses, there is a porch that extends about 10 feet, an unfenced front garden of about 30 feet and then a sidewalk, of around 20 feet. The early summery weather coaxed people onto to their porches and into their gardens. The porches and gardens are semi-public spaces, as people using them become part of the total street scene. The street reminded me of a remark by Jane Jacobs, the grande dame of Urban Studies, who noted that the more people we have on the street, the safer we feel. This neighborhood contrasts with many of the new up market areas, where despite the sinuosity of the street pattern (a contemporary reaction to the grid), the amount of public space is minimal; many affluent areas have no sidewalks, and few have the generous public and semi-public space along North Prospect.
We need more usable public space. It is not police that make us feel safe in public but the presence of lots of people going about their everyday business. Other people make us feel safe. And to use public space we have to be generous in our allocation of usable public space. We need to avoid design determinism, forms of design facilitate rather than cause human behavior. But the quality and quantity of public space does have an affect on the livability and conviviality of cities.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Dateline Milwaukee
Two items in today’s news. The first is that the Comptroller of the City of Milwaukee proposed the privatization of Milwaukee Waterworks, the public utility that provides drinking water to the citizens of the city. Note: I am currently in the city doing research in the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The second piece of news is that General Motors is closer to bankruptcy as the company was unable to reach a deal with its bondholders to swap debt for equity. The federal government, unwilling to let the company sink into oblivion, will continue to prop it up. The federal government will end up owning almost 70 percent of the famous company.
Two very different government trends. On the one hand local government, loaded with debt, responds by selling assets, cutting budgets and laying off workers. On the other hand federal government, also loaded with debt, prints more money, spends money and makes major investments through the stimulus package.
The country is experiencing two very different policy responses to the economic crisis simultaneously. At the local and state level we are in the world promoted by the conservative economists--cut deficits and reduce spending. At the federal level we have a return to Keynesianism--never mind the deficit for the moment, just spend the damn money. So while I receive a tax credit from the feds, the State of Maryland cuts my wages.
It is proper to try a variety of policy responses to a major economic crisis. But should we be pursuing such contradictory aims? We are now in the confusing world of market economics doctrine at the local and state levels with Keynesian spending at the federal level. When we get out of the crisis, proponents of both policies will accept credit and assign blame to the other. The Keynesians will say that the recovery was hampered by the actions of state and local governments while the Republican right will point to the rash spending of the feds.
In an ideal world where thought experiments do not have social consequences, we could designate a few states to try the right wing policy and not accept any federal stimulus. In the real world, the governor of South Carolina, earlier this year in a bid to burnish his credentials for a Presidential run, initially refused any federal stimulus money. He was voted down by popular feeling that rightly put welfare before ideology.
The root of the paradox is the federal structure that is much lauded across the land but clearly has its limitations, nowhere more acutely than in the present crisis where one level spends while the other cuts. We have competing economic polices, and because we will be unable to fully test just one, the doctrines will remain untested. This competition will remain even after one worked and the other one didn’t. Since we are employing both at the same time, we will never really be sure which one works the best.
Two very different government trends. On the one hand local government, loaded with debt, responds by selling assets, cutting budgets and laying off workers. On the other hand federal government, also loaded with debt, prints more money, spends money and makes major investments through the stimulus package.
The country is experiencing two very different policy responses to the economic crisis simultaneously. At the local and state level we are in the world promoted by the conservative economists--cut deficits and reduce spending. At the federal level we have a return to Keynesianism--never mind the deficit for the moment, just spend the damn money. So while I receive a tax credit from the feds, the State of Maryland cuts my wages.
It is proper to try a variety of policy responses to a major economic crisis. But should we be pursuing such contradictory aims? We are now in the confusing world of market economics doctrine at the local and state levels with Keynesian spending at the federal level. When we get out of the crisis, proponents of both policies will accept credit and assign blame to the other. The Keynesians will say that the recovery was hampered by the actions of state and local governments while the Republican right will point to the rash spending of the feds.
In an ideal world where thought experiments do not have social consequences, we could designate a few states to try the right wing policy and not accept any federal stimulus. In the real world, the governor of South Carolina, earlier this year in a bid to burnish his credentials for a Presidential run, initially refused any federal stimulus money. He was voted down by popular feeling that rightly put welfare before ideology.
The root of the paradox is the federal structure that is much lauded across the land but clearly has its limitations, nowhere more acutely than in the present crisis where one level spends while the other cuts. We have competing economic polices, and because we will be unable to fully test just one, the doctrines will remain untested. This competition will remain even after one worked and the other one didn’t. Since we are employing both at the same time, we will never really be sure which one works the best.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Five Lessons From The Economic Crisis
The economic crisis, as many have said, is too good an opportunity to waste. But what can we learn? Here are five things:
1. The financial services sector is bloated and inefficient. The market will correct some of the issues, such as those rating agencies more concerned with maintaining good relations with institutions than with adequate and risk assessment. Trust has been broken between many of the firms and institutions and will only be reestablished with better business practices in the market place. Now that everyone perceives the many under-assessed risk and over-promoted gains, returning back to the status quo is impossible. So self-reform will occur in the market.
2. Self-interest amongst financial institutions should ensure major changes, yet the sector is incapable of true self-regulation. They simply do not understand what’s best. They do not even know what’s right, what’s sound or in some cases what’s legal. So we now know that formal regulation is needed, necessary and long overdue.
3. The current systems of regulation are inadequate. The failure to identify the fraudulent Madoff enterprises despite many warnings and red flags indicate that the SEC basically failed. We need not only new regulations but also a new regulatory order with less cozy relations between the players and the regulators.
4. Economic deregulation as the dominant ideology has been dealt a deathblow--at least until the current interventionist mode is delegitimized. There have been three dominant economic ideologies in the US. At the beginning of the twentieth century, laissez faire capitalism held sway until the Great Depression rendered its underpinnings of limited government obsolete. The New Deal and Keynesian economics inaugurated a more interventionist government and mixed economy system. The stagflation of the 1970s forced a reassessment, and the election of Thatcher in UK and Reagan in the US reflected the political rise of a deregulated, minimal state. Opinion shifted to the right so that even New Labour and the Democrats boasted of cutting income taxes and of reducing the size of government. The latest economic crises have swept away the assumption that unfettered markets lead to untarnished growth. We are now at the beginnings of a new fourth era, one in which government has a larger and more central role in terms of both direct fiscal intervention and of greater regulation.
5. Our sense of time is affected. To live in period of sustained long-term economic growth makes it easy to believe in timely progress towards bigger and better and brighter things. All the pension funds, for example, are based on the assumption that investments will always just grow and grow. That linear sense of an upward trajectory is being replaced by a more circular sense of repeating cycles: our present condition is compared and contrasted with the Great Depression. Yet whether or not we are repeating or avoiding history is moot. What is not moot is that our confidence in a steadily increasing curve of growth and expansion is shattered. The future is now, but it is not the optimistic future we have been led to believe.
1. The financial services sector is bloated and inefficient. The market will correct some of the issues, such as those rating agencies more concerned with maintaining good relations with institutions than with adequate and risk assessment. Trust has been broken between many of the firms and institutions and will only be reestablished with better business practices in the market place. Now that everyone perceives the many under-assessed risk and over-promoted gains, returning back to the status quo is impossible. So self-reform will occur in the market.
2. Self-interest amongst financial institutions should ensure major changes, yet the sector is incapable of true self-regulation. They simply do not understand what’s best. They do not even know what’s right, what’s sound or in some cases what’s legal. So we now know that formal regulation is needed, necessary and long overdue.
3. The current systems of regulation are inadequate. The failure to identify the fraudulent Madoff enterprises despite many warnings and red flags indicate that the SEC basically failed. We need not only new regulations but also a new regulatory order with less cozy relations between the players and the regulators.
4. Economic deregulation as the dominant ideology has been dealt a deathblow--at least until the current interventionist mode is delegitimized. There have been three dominant economic ideologies in the US. At the beginning of the twentieth century, laissez faire capitalism held sway until the Great Depression rendered its underpinnings of limited government obsolete. The New Deal and Keynesian economics inaugurated a more interventionist government and mixed economy system. The stagflation of the 1970s forced a reassessment, and the election of Thatcher in UK and Reagan in the US reflected the political rise of a deregulated, minimal state. Opinion shifted to the right so that even New Labour and the Democrats boasted of cutting income taxes and of reducing the size of government. The latest economic crises have swept away the assumption that unfettered markets lead to untarnished growth. We are now at the beginnings of a new fourth era, one in which government has a larger and more central role in terms of both direct fiscal intervention and of greater regulation.
5. Our sense of time is affected. To live in period of sustained long-term economic growth makes it easy to believe in timely progress towards bigger and better and brighter things. All the pension funds, for example, are based on the assumption that investments will always just grow and grow. That linear sense of an upward trajectory is being replaced by a more circular sense of repeating cycles: our present condition is compared and contrasted with the Great Depression. Yet whether or not we are repeating or avoiding history is moot. What is not moot is that our confidence in a steadily increasing curve of growth and expansion is shattered. The future is now, but it is not the optimistic future we have been led to believe.
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