Robert Kuttner's Everything for Sale

...The major reason is also the obvious one: Kuttner is arguing for an old liberal and social democratic orthodoxy that it is now fashionable to disparage—and that some of my lefterthanthou friends still think is boring, even when they find themselves forced to defend it...

...This last point may account for the one academic argument in the book—Kuttner's effort to address the theory of "rational choice," which he regards as the prevailing ideological justification for much of what he opposes in American politics today...

...Kuttner argues his case at length...

...But I don't think that it will bear the weight that Kuttner assigns it...

...The reasons for its (relative) neglect have to do mostly with the current state of our political culture but also with certain strategic choices for which the author alone is responsible...

...Kuttner gives us no sense of what such an agreement might be like—no sense even of what it was like in the days when the "mixed economy" rather than the free market was common wisdom...

...But it is a large theory, and it has a wide variety of uses...

...This also is part of Kuttner's persuasive strategy...

...like contemporary biographers, who tell us what their subjects did on every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, he makes no concessions to the supposedly short attention span of the reading public...

...But his book is a judicious and detailed examination of where the market works as well as of where it doesn't, where its effects are beneficial as well as where they are pernicious...

...When capitalists decide how to invest their money, when consumers decide how to spend theirs, when workers decide whether or not to join a union, when vot98 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 ers decide to support this party or that one— all that they are doing, insofar as they are acting rationally, is "cost-benefit analysis," and the only costs and benefits that come into consideration are their own: how will acting in this way or that way advance or harm their particular interests...

...Writing a little late about a book that is meant to be topical and timely, I am going to focus on those reasons and on certain of Kuttner's choices...

...the position he defends is one in which he really believes...

...Indeed, his title is his only banner...

...he is in favor of a regulatory and activist state, which is also constitutionally limited and democratic...

...This book is intended as a careful sorting out, not a manifesto...

...they can't determine their own use...

...That's why people say, with a passion, that these goods should not be "for sale...

...And these can only be justified by invoking significant human purposes, morally attractive ends-in-view, collective political (rather than private consumer) preferences for dignity, say, or democratic empowerment, or equal social standing...

...But length and detail will probably inhibit many of the "common readers" to whom the book is addressed...

...State action, he insists, is the necessary means to the material well-being of the greatest number of people...

...The mixed economy had Keynesian theoretical foundations, but it was the practical achievement of parties and movements that embodied a moral vision and that could not have achieved what they did withBOOKS out that vision...

...He wants to defend the idea that everything should not be for sale entirely on efficiency grounds: "I will not be treating, except in passing, the market's moral limitations...

...But Kuttner is not writing under compulsion...

...Nor can we march without banners...

...Academic theories can certainly have an impact on political debate, but they have this impact only in conjunction with political forces that use them for particular purposes...

...Rational choice is a highly formalized account of economic and political decision making, based on the simplifying (reductionist) idea that all decisions are rational and self-interested and that they are always aimed at the "maximization" of individual preferences...

...What this adds up to, I think, is the American New Deal revisited or the European "postwar settlement," best represented by the achievements of the British Labor Party and the Swedish and German social democrats...

...A conjunction of left political forces would also be necessary, and this would reflect an underlying moral agreement favorable to egalitarian arguments...

...But reading Kuttner also strengthened my own conviction that the left can not stand firmly on any ground that isn't (also) moral ground...

...The latter is his more frequent target, since it is so much more powerful, and so dangerous, these days...

...and that's why we need alternative delivery systems...

...He is opposed to the allpowerful state and the planned economy...

...It lies somewhere between the left's once fierce antimarket radicalism and the currently triumphalist, equally radical, free market ideology...

...It's at least possible, if a little hard these days, to imagine political circumstances in which Rawls's strong insistence that rational choice yields egalitarian principles would find broad acceptance...

...One of the best illustrations of his method is his discussion of innovation—a big subject in contemporary economic theory and always a hard subject for the left, since individual ambition, competitive pressure, and entrepreneurial energy seem to provide a better account of invention and experiment than any of our own (no doubt nicer) descriptions of cooperative work and public enterprise...

...DISSENT / Spring 1998 • 99...

...Opposition to the market always seems somehow artificial...

...No liberal/left publicist or political figure should speak or write about any of Kuttner's topics without reading his book...

...though it is sternly resistant to the prevailing intellectual winds, it is equally resistant to the ideological style of the Old Left...

...This is a story in which the free market, as it is ideologically described by free marketeers, is either absent or ineffective...

...The market operates impersonally and, so it seems, inexorably, following what we have been taught to think of as "laws...

...The goods associated with these values are not equitably delivered by the market, sometimes they are not delivered at all...

...He understands that global competition now requires a revision as well as a renewal of left liberalism and social democracy, and that neither of these will be easy...

...the book is in fact a model of dispassion . . . and of economic rationality...

...Though he doesn't identify himself in quite these terms, this is the politics that Kuttner represents, and it is still a decent and effective politics—and much in need of strong intellectual representation...

...The theory overestimates the importance of purely individual calculations, and it undervalues moral judgment and social solidarity...

...He is right, of course, and I have not seen a better argument for this simple (but now fiercely disputed) proposition...

...His argument is open to disagreement and revision...

...it involves external forces, state interventions, bureaucratic regulation...

...It isn't an academic treatise, but it is an example of the political tract drifting toward treatise-like proportions, perhaps because Kuttner is uncertain (not without reason) about his common readers and also because he seems a little nervous about the responses of the professoriat...

...The ends that the marketeers claim to achieve can only be achieved with extra-market help...

...The detail is part of Kuttner's persuasive strategy and a large part of his book's value...

...Kuttner's pages on the importance of war and cold-war research, sponsored and paid for by the government, are exemplary in suggesting what the normal role of the state should be, indeed, has to be, if innovation is to be sustained...

...There now exists, for example, a revisionist Marxism based on rationalchoice theory (though this is an entirely academic enterprise...

...I share Kuttner's dislike of rational choice (even though I do try, sometimes, to make rational choices...

...The politics that Kuttner represents walks a little cautiously these days...

...Kuttner's book doesn't deal with these collective preferences (the word "equality" doesn't appear in his index...

...And the basic idea of rational choice was used in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the philosopher John Rawls to defend what is in effect a social democratic account of distributive justice...

...But were this to happen, it wouldn't be because of the power of the theory...

...rIi VERYTHING FOR SALE is a big book...

...Like any sensible person, Kuttner is willing to consider modifications of this politics (and also extensions of it, to address the problems of environmental degradation, for example...

...Very large companies, oligopolistic industries, and interventionist states play the key parts...

...He is making arguments, he says, not waving banners...

...MICHAEL WALZER is the co-editor of Dissent...

...Here is everything you might want to know about innovation and growth, labor markets, the banking industry, the problems of health care, environmental regulation, airline deregulation, and many similar issues currently or recently in the headlines...

...This theory is dominant today in most economics departments and increasingly so among political scientists, and it does indeed provide the basis for free-market arguments (as well as for mathematical models of market behavior...

...Kuttner focuses on technological advance, and tells a complicated story of how it is actually achieved...

...Liberal capitalist states, of course, play their part mostly in disguise, providing for economic DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 97 BOOKS growth while pretending that they are doing nothing more than ensuring national security...

...There is material here for a couple of dozen Dissent articles...

...Even his polemical passages are thoughtful and restrained...