The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (36 page)

Every American can play a role. No class war is needed or intended. Yet as America’s greatest businessmen, from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros, have known, those with great business skills have great responsibilities as well. Not only is there no excuse for hiding money in tax havens or lobbying to cut taxes that are urgently needed, there is a high civic responsibility to support public collective actions necessary and to augment those public actions with private philanthropy and leadership. The tens of billions of dollars given by Gates, Buffett, and Soros for global health, poverty reduction, good governance, and political freedom are proof of what can be accomplished by farsighted individuals who turn their unique business acumen to global problem solving as well as policy.

We are, in the end, stewards of the future at a time when our shared future is imperiled by economic divisions, shortsightedness, and a growing ecological crisis. We have great tasks ahead, to redeem once again the American trust in democracy and equality. We have a high responsibility to our children and other generations that will come. Let us begin anew.

For my parents
Theodore and Joan Sachs
paragons of justice, compassion, and happiness

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A work of political economy is necessarily a work of individual responsibility: only the author is responsible for the interpretations of a nation’s political and economic life. At the same time, such a work is inevitably the result of countless discussions and debates with colleagues, friends, and family.
The Price of Civilization
in that sense is also a group product, the result of a social process over several years of trying to make sense of America’s ongoing political and economic crises.

As always, my family was the first resort for sharing my half-baked ideas and having the worst ones removed quickly from the kitchen. And indeed it was the kitchen where Sonia, Lisa, Adam, Hannah, Matt, Andrea, and I most frequently congregated to try to make sense of the daily economic news and to try to piece it together into a larger canvas. With gratitude to all for allowing me to clog up the kitchen table for years with streams of opinion survey results, national accounts data, presidential budgets, and mountains of books, book, books.

Aniket Shah, my special assistant at the Earth Institute, was the constant, skilled, and relentless navigator at my side, helping me to organize, analyze, and sift through mountains of data and studies, and pressing me to be clearer, better focused, and more timely (!)
in making sense of it all. Without Aniket, there would be no book. We were overjoyed to be joined in the final months by Claire Bulger, newly arrived at the Earth Institute, whose keen eye and precision helped to clear up ambiguities and to ferret out errors through the final polishing of the manuscript.

As usual, I leaned heavily, and I hope not
too
heavily, on friends and colleagues to read various parts of the manuscript and to give me their insights and commentary. I am delighted to thank Meir Stampfer, John McArthur, and Foad Mardukhi for their very careful reading and detailed comments. I am indebted to my father-in-law, Walter Ehrlich, for his relentlessly penetrating observations and interpretations of public events, and for his thorough comments on parts of the manuscript. I give thanks, too, for the inspiration of Ted Sorensen, who generously shared with me his life-affirming vision of government as an instrument of peace and problem solving. With his passing this year, we have lost a voice of reason, compassion, and optimism. And as always I am deeply grateful to my colleagues Erin Trowbridge and Kyu-Young Lee for helping me to extend the public policy dialogue through social networks, blogs, and media debates.

For many years I have felt that America’s harsh politics and divisive public discourse are shortchanging the public’s deep longing for well-being. A wonderful trip to Bhutan last year, and my ongoing efforts with Bhutan’s enlightened leadership to promote Bhutan’s concept of “Gross National Happiness,” have helped me to understand more clearly how societies in our era can champion the pursuit of happiness. I extend my special thanks, therefore, to Prime Minister Jigme Thinley; His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk; Bhutan’s permanent representative to the UN, Lhatu Wangchuk; and Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Commission on Gross National Happiness.

America’s political discourse is so toxic in part because of the irresponsibility of much of the media, notably the countless TV and radio shows that draw viewers through extremism utterly untethered
from truth and basic civility. It’s been a great privilege, therefore, to be able to discuss the topics of this book on television shows that are marked by good conversation, good humor, and a consistent sense of decency. I thank Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Fareed Zakaria, Tom Keene, and Charlie Rose for their professionalism and sense of responsibility, and for welcoming me as a regular participant in their programs.

This book was written in the course of an overfilled schedule at the Earth Institute, the United Nations, and on-site work throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. I could find the time for thought and reflection only because of the excellence and unstinting generosity of my colleagues in all facets of my work. I would like to give special thanks to my chief of staff, Joanna Rubinstein; my executive assistant, Heidi Kleedtke; Director’s Office support Donald Wheat and Suzette Espeut; MDG Centre directors Amadou Niang and Belay Begashaw; Earth Institute COO Steve Cohen; and Earth Institute associate director Peter Schlosser. For a decade now, Columbia University has been the ideal home in every way for this range of work, and for that I am profoundly grateful for the leadership of President Lee Bollinger.

My editors and literary agents turned a book concept into a reality through their unstinting professionalism at every turn. Random House editor Jonathan Jao has been scintillating and cogent at every turn. His suggestions and editorial talents are reflected in every high point of the book. The low points, I fear, are the places where I didn’t listen carefully enough to his sage editorial advice. As in my past books, Scott Moyers and Andrew Wylie guided me at every twist and turn, from the very first musings about the usefulness of a new book on America’s political and economic predicament to the delivery of the final manuscript. In the course of three books now, they have made book writing a wondrous glide path from conception to landing, a talent that an inveterate and relentless traveler like me appreciates to the skies.

To all of you, I am grateful for your confidence in my ideas, while of course absolving you from association with those with which you take issue. To the readers, I thank you in advance for the joys of dialogue and collegiality that you have consistently shown me in the ongoing lives of
The End of Poverty
,
Common Wealth
, and my other books and articles.

FURTHER READINGS

One of the great joys in writing this book was the opportunity to read and savor dozens of major volumes and hundreds of academic papers on topics ranging from moral philosophy, to political economy, to modern American history, to neurophysiology. The book’s hundreds of endnotes and list of references will help steer the reader through the massive amount of scholarly writing on the topics addressed in this book. Since there is so much material, I think it is also useful to offer some suggestions to readers on a more limited and focused journey through the literature.

The following describes some of the key books that I found to be most important as I pondered the complex landscape of American political economy. This is not a representative sample of books, nor a comprehensive account of heated debates, but rather a personal view of many of the high points of analysis. These are books that made a deep impression on me as I tried to sort out fact from opinion and truth from propaganda. I’ve grouped the books into major categories, though there are inevitable overlaps across these fields, as I hope the text makes patently clear.

Modern American Political History

The events detailed in the book really start in the 1960s, at the apogee of activist government, the era of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s War on Poverty.
The Liberal Hour
, by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, offers a wonderful narrative of that era. The end of activist government is treated in many places. One excellent book is
Chain Reaction
, by Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, which describes how the civil rights era, and the realignments it created, led from the Kennedy-Johnson 1960s to the Reagan 1980s. Another superb book describing how the 1970s were a political bridge between the liberal 1960s and conservative 1980s is
Pivotal Decade
by Judith Stein. Sean Wilentz thoroughly and cogently describes the Reagan years and their long legacy through 2008 in
The Age of Reagan
.

There has perhaps been no more consistent and able chronicler of America’s descent into a modern Gilded Age than Kevin Phillips. Since Phillips first accurately proclaimed
The Emerging Republican Majority
in 1969, he has chronicled the rise of modern finance-based capitalism in America, and its debilitating effects on politics and society. Phillips’s tomes on the new Gilded Age include
Arrogant Capital
(1994),
Wealth and Democracy
(2002), and
Bad Money
(2008).

The Economics of Happiness

After a long lapse in the serious study of economic well-being, economists have finally begun to take happiness seriously again as an area of research. Two exemplary recent texts in this new field are Richard Layard’s
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
and Carol Graham’s
The Pursuit of Happiness
. They build on a veritable outpouring of hundreds of scholarly articles in academic journals. Another powerful book that challenges the assumed links between
consumer goods and well-being is Avner Offer’s
The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950
.

The Neuroscience and Psychology of Happiness

Of course, economists are not alone in trying to understand the links between consumerism and well-being. Indeed, they are late to the table. Psychologists and neuroscientists have been at it for decades, and in recent years have been making breakthroughs with powerful new tools such as brain scans. Fascinating recent accounts of these psychological and neuroscientific insights include Donald Pfaff’s
The Neuroscience of Fair Play
, David Linden’s
The Compass of Pleasure
, Deirdre Barrett’s
Supernormal Stimuli
, and Daniel Gilbert’s
Stumbling on Happiness
. If there is a consistent theme throughout these studies, it is that much of what delivers well-being depends on unconscious mental processes and brain pathways of which we are only dimly aware. Yet as a society and economy we’ve learned to tamper with those pathways, often dangerously, not only through narcotics use but also through pervasive and invasive advertising, the visual imagery of mass media, new and unhealthy methods of food preparation, and the relentless PR campaigns fed by corporate lobbying.

Wisdom of the Ages

Well before there were brain scans and public opinion surveys, there were philosophers who acutely considered the human condition and the pathways to life satisfaction. Two who have left a lasting mark on humanity for more than two millennia are the Buddha and Aristotle. Though Buddhism has primarily affected the course of civilization in South and East Asia, while Aristotelian thought has mainly
affected the course of civilization in the West, the two great schools of thought share deep insights and also complement each other. One of my great joys in writing this book was the chance to savor Aristotle’s classic tome
The Nicomachean Ethics
, considered by some in the West to be the greatest philosophical tract ever written. As for the Buddha’s teachings, in addition to specific texts such as “The Four Noble Truths” and “The Eightfold Path,” I have long found the Dalai Lama to be the most inspiring guide to Buddhist thought, and was especially moved by his
Ethics for the New Millennium
and
The Art of Happiness
.

In the modern era, from the European Enlightenment till today, philosophers have continued to speculate about the deep motivations of human action and the ultimate sources of human well-being. Adam Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
remains one of the most acute (and also entertaining) texts on the many motivations of individuals as they are influenced by social dynamics and status. Modern philosophers have emphasized not only what gives happiness but what delivers justice. Revisiting the famous debate between John Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice
and Robert Nozick’s
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
remains a very powerful way to reflect on the themes of individual liberty versus social justice and ethical responsibility. Philosopher Peter Singer has added a powerful utilitarian voice to the debate in recent books such as
The Life You Can Save
. One powerful attempt to bring together the lessons of the ancient sages, the wisdom of the modern philosophers, and the insights of modern psychology is Jonathan Haidt’s
The Happiness Hypothesis
. This book is sure to stimulate thinking and debate and helped me to wend my way through the long history of human speculations on these crucial topics.

Economic Underpinnings

The main economic theme of the book is that the United States has lost the appropriate balance between the market and the government.
Economic well-being depends on a mixed economy. Adam Smith knew as much. Readers of
The Wealth of Nations
(especially Book V) will recall that Smith favored the active role of government in law enforcement, public works, and education, among other areas. The two most influential “small government” texts of the twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom
and Milton Friedman’s
Capitalism and Freedom
, are much more frequently quoted than read. This is a shame. Both are well worth reading today, in part to remind readers that even arch—market liberals like Hayek and Friedman believed in government responsibility in the economy, not least to protect the environment, provide infrastructure, and ensure an educated population. On a related note, the German market economist Wilhelm Röpke, in
A Humane Economy
, brilliantly emphasized the need for moral boundaries to protect human values from the overbearing pressures of the marketplace.