Fixing America

A Marshall Plan. And Pain.

I received an angry, hopeful email, something like a cry. “These essays”, it said, “are beneath you. Why don’t you talk about solutions? Why are you so negative about America?”

Let’s start with solutions, and step backwards from there into talking about talking about America for a second.

Maybe you already maybe know my big three, my trifecta of indicators. Let’s think about them very clearly. Life expectancy is falling, the middle class is a minority, and the polity doesn’t represent what people want (ie, 70% of people want public healthcare, but 0% of politicians do). Short of war of natural disaster, a society can’t be broken in more profound ways. That’s not negativity — that is reality.

That’s precisely why America needs to be fixed in the biggest ways. In nearly every one of these essays, I mention the idea of a Marshall Plan for America. I think some of you think I’m just saying it, like an offhand remark, and thus I don’t “talk about solutions”. Yet I’m not kidding: it’s not a joke, a metaphor, an idle thought — I couldn’t be more serious. How else is the trifecta of collapse — the three biggest ways a society can break — to be turned around? Little alterations to the tax code or outraged editorials about Trump’s ignorance or pie charts comparing health insurance premiums, laudable as they might be, aren’t going to do it. None of those are thinking nearly big enough.

What does a Marshall Plan mean? It just means building stuff that elevates people’s quality of life. What? It doesn’t really matter what. As long as it’s not obviously useless stuff, like a giant wall, guns, or more casinos. Anything and everything with real social utility. Hospitals, schools, universities, high speed trains, green energy grids, social care systems, the investment vehicles to fund them, the people to staff and manage and run them. You can add to that list as you see fit. Investing in it massively, with a plan that spans a decade or two, a continent, maybe a world, several generations, and every group in society. A genuine plan to build the future. The more unrealistic and ambitious and hopelessly idealistic, frankly, the better. You can’t take baby steps out of the Grand Canyon. (Before you ask: how to fund it? That doesn’t matter, either. Interest rates are zero. Such a plan could be funded for free, in a bazillion different ways, through bonds, taxes, shares, central banks, the treasury, whatever. Funding is just financial engineering: zero rates forever mean that the economy is waiting, desperate, crying out, for such a plan.)

What might happen as a result? Two great economic paradoxes that are slowly killing off prosperity — and thus causing extremism, nationalism, authoritarianism — might be fixed. First, the labor paradox: unemployment is low, but incomes are still falling in real terms. That shouldn’t ever happen (think about it: more people working should make wages rise, right?). It means an economy of Uber drivers and butlers is emerging. By creating new industries and huge numbers of better jobs, that lethal paradox could turn around. Second, the “productivity paradox” — productivity isn’t rising, despite technology robots blah blah. Productivity isn’t rising because we’re not making stuff of real value anymore: just trading paper chits about a nation of Uber drivers and butlers. So by creating new industries that create significant amounts of real value again, that paradox too might be resolved.

Now. That brings us to the interaction between me and you. I know these essays are painful to read. I debate writing them at all for the very reason that they have to be. If we want to talk about the big ways in which things can be fixed, then we have to discuss the big ways in which things are broken. It’s a little like talking about a broken marriage: painful, but necessary. If you want to talk about tax codes and pie charts, there are any number of places to do it. Head over to Vox and nerd away.

For me, though, that school of thinking is the economic equivalent of a psychological defense mechanism. It only really serves one function: to prevents us from the pain of ever having to think about the real, genuine, profound issues of living in a broken society. The pain of living in a broken society. Discussing that reality is painful because it has to be. We’ve avoided discussing it for decades now because it is painful. To discuss it we must reflect on our mistakes and flaws and failures. That is indeed painful. It feels like being broken open, doesn’t it?

That’s the point. There is a strange and wonderful thing about emotional maturity. Pain and joy, you learn, are both worthy in their own ways, both beautiful, noble, because they are true. They are both experiences. And before we are here to be “good” or “bad”, we learn that we are just here. With all our flaws and failures and fragilities and dreams. When we learn just to see the broken parts of ourselves, then we are maturing, opening, our possibility unfurling and stretching into the sun. Otherwise, hidden in the darkness, they become our demons. So the act of being open is as necessary for the maturity of a broken society as it is for the broken heart in every human soul. Growth in that sense is pain. The pain of the seed, the raindrop, the spring.

So when I write these essays, I am really inviting you to share my pain. Now you might not want to share my pain, or offer me yours. I understand that. Really, I do. That’s OK. I share mine with you because I think our pain contains our possibility. Unless we really feel our pain, here and now, then we will never really understand, embrace, the fullness of ourselves. We will stay broken, instead of seeing the wholeness of seer, which is the truth of love.

Umair
July 2017