Too Much Technology, Not Enough Soul

...He was first, and I'm still jealous...

...He expresses uneasiness with the "old ends/new means" definition of neoliberalism before finally adopting it himself...

...They are angry when lawyers for women's groups, in pursuit of sexual equality, would cement in place credentialized inequality by having judges step in to decide what each job in the economy is "worth ." They are angry when the government must scrimp on Social Security checks for destitute retirees because wealthy retirees demand an equal "entitlement ." What's missing from Rothenberg's account, in short, is any strong sense of the neoliberal values that might animate a new ideology...

...The result is less a natural evolution than a mad scramble to build up technological skills, in which it might make eminent sense to protect and subsidize crucial domestic industries even if competitors can temporarily do it cheaper...

...But social issues are secondary, I think, to the health of thc economy...

...On January 19, 1977, the 'era of limits' ended...

...For those who think income distribution always should be made more equal, that the impact of luck and fate on individual destiny should be eliminated, politics must seem like a Sisyphean struggle to stamp out all of capitalism's side effects...

...Second, instead of trying to muffle the material inequalities generated by the marketplace, neoliberals would restrict the world in which those inequalities matter...

...Entrepreneurship (including collective forms like profit-sharing and worker-ownership) builds a strong GNP 12 ways, but it is also fun, an activity that satisfies the basic human urge to dream and build...

...What are the "locked out" to be let into...

...These neoliberal arguments recognize that culture—in particular, the culture of corporate and government bureaucracies—affects an economy in ways that can't be explained by freemarket theory...

...They will endlessly refine the techniques for achieving economic growth in "the world of the eighties" while assuming, without much discussion, that this growth will in turn buy that traditional liberal thing called "social justice...

...Instead, Rothenberg repeatedly imposes themes on his material that are dry, technical, and only half right...

...In particular, "appropriate technology" is a cover for much confusion, as you might expect...

...Lenin never would have tolerated such ideological infidelity, and I don't see why we neolibs should have to either...

...A show trial would be too obvious...

...Conventional liberal rhetoric is filled with an impulse to "redistribute" income in a "progressive" direction—but there is no impulse that tells us when the redistribution stops...

...It seems the semiconductor industry, locked out of foreign markets, wanted Congress to retaliate by threatening to close off our markets to countries that did not offer us "reciprocity...

...Were they to ask themselves this question, I think they would discover that their values, their ends, are not the same as traditional liberal values...

...Rothenberg does a bit of sneering as well...

...They are angry when the dueling bureaucracies of the Pentagon give us mindless defense budgets, arm American soldiers with rifles that jam, and leave them dead in botched missions in Iran and Beirut...

...I hope the other half gets written before the next Democratic convention...

...Rothenberg breathlessly describes how ("sounding the postindustrial clarion call") Hart and an aide "moved in at that point, drawing up their own legislation, using the [semiconductor industry's] framework, but slashing through it and substituting 'free trade' for 'reciprocity' wherever the word appeared ." What exactly Hart's switch of buzzwords accomplished we are never told...

...Auto plants need investment and training, too, after all—and if their managers had been a little less concerned with their quarterly profits, and if their unions hadn't won automatic raises unmatched by productivity gains and negotiated work rules that blocked the introduction of more efficient methods, we might today be hailing the new, high-tech auto industry instead of bailing it out and boasting of our growing service sector...

...But this promising line of thought is tossed off as an aside...

...No wonder that, in place of a more concrete idea of a just society, many liberals came to substitute an allegiance to the specific mechanisms they had devised to counteract the excesses of laissez-faire...

...Social justice" came to mean whatever unions could extract at the bargaining table, whatever housing HUD was putting up, whatever the EEOC was suing for, whatever Social Security and unemployment compensation were paying...

...Does Rothenberg know something we don't...

...Neoliberals, having questioned many of these mechanisms, are forced now to confront anew the basic value questions left unanswered by New Deal liberals...

...They are angry when government can no longer afford to construct subways, libraries, roads, or public housing because traditional liberals protect a law called the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the government to pay inflated wages anytime it builds anything...

...Rothenberg lists "centralization" as one of the New Deal tenets that the neos, with their affection for small, entrepreneurial organizations, are rebelling against...

...But neoliberal "human capital" theory recognizes that (unlike natural resources) a nation's level of education and training (its "human capital") can be changed by government...

...Still, I like to think that the nobler half of me wishes Rothenberg's book were as successful as his Esquire article that put neoliberalism on the map...

...There's no dispute over ends, only means--or maybe only the means to achieve the means, to bake the pie that feeds liberal good intentions...

...And you gave Mort Kondracke five...

...You know the list...

...No wonder they sneer at neoliberalism over at The Nation...

...Are social issues secondary...

...To this natural professional rivalry must be added a modest disappointment at the lack of attention devoted to certain lesser-known proponents of neoliberalism...

...Oh, by the way, you know that great new movement I've been telling you about for 246 pages...

...It seems hurriedly thrown together, not in the proofreading sense but in the idea sense...

...Richard Gephardt) whose stated goal is to "manage the transition" to a "postindustrial ...human capital intensive" economy...

...But wait a minute...

...The trade chapter ends with an anecdote that is all too typical of The Neoliberals, a dramatic rendering of Hart's High Technology Trade Act of 1982...

...FDR may have tried to corner the ice market in his early years, but his political legatees have enshrined the values of the bureaucrat rather than the values of the entrepreneur...

...He notes that "The Washington Monthly for years has stressed the line, 'The unions are killing our schools.' " But he dismisses this complaint summarily, saying, "The teachers unions do not set policy or establish curricula...

...Until neoliberals declare and elaborate on their own distinctive values, they will get more accounts like Rothenberg's, portraying them as high-tech Chamber of Commerce types who care only about economic growth, who differ from Reaganites mainly because they are more sophisticated in recognizing the need for government action to sustain that growth...

...The cover predicts we are "marching to power...

...But once this has been done (and once we've eliminated all the phony inequality represented by the lawyers, granthustlers, asset-rearrangers, cost-overruners, taxshelterers, and other pie-slicers who enjoy affluent lifestyles without making a commensurate contribution to social health or wealth), redistribution need not continue to be an end in itself...

...In fact, for most neoliberals, trade is a far more complicated subject...

...We recommend that firm steps be taken to instruct the masses on Comrade Rothenberg's mistakes...

...Even Gary Hart, for all his free trade talk and attacks on Mondalean "protectionism:' suggests that we use trade barriers to protect domestic industries while they are being modernized...

...And there's certainly a good argument that the more rapidly changing, innovative, and risky an industry is, the bigger the role the government must play training people for their jobs (sorry, I mean implementing a "human capital policy"), if only because employees don't stay with one firm long enough to make it worthwhile for the firm to pay for the training itself...

...It's this failure to aggressively define ends that allows neoliberal-baiters like The New Republic's Bob Kuttner to dismiss the movement as "a swamp of ambiguous moderation, managerialism, generational politics, and futurology...

...I mean really, Randy...

...The United States cannot resist it ." Decentralization, concentration, competition, cooperation—oh, well, you know, whatever's "appropriate...

...The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics...

...Rothenberg tries manfully to jazz up the proceedings, but he brings to bear only the most lame magazine writer's devices, especially the one that grabs readers' attention by taking an ordinary mundane event and hyping it into a pivotal world-historic epiphany...

...It needs another run through the typewriter, and also another run through the brain...

...Randall Rothenberg...

...n]ineteen seventy-one was the year the world economic system collapsed .") Nor, when it comes to economics, do Rothenberg's explanatory powers present any threat to Paul Samuelson...

...They are angry when the knobs fall off their new Chevrolet—when corporate myopia lets the Japanese grab our markets and jobs...

...66 Randall Rothenberg's The Neoliberals is well-focused and presents a distinct cast of personalities, but his vision of neoliberalism is bloodless...

...The Neoliberals meets all three requirements, but at a high price...

...Now Rothenberg has expanded his article into a book that says many other nice things about us, in particular about The Washington Monthly...

...He accurately reports the central neoliberal charge that "the interests of some groups within the [New Deal] coalition no longer coincide with the national interest ." But he offers few examples to back this up (apart from pointing out that there aren't very many unions in the entrepreneurial high-tech sector) and little sense that the neolibs might have arrived at their position out of genuine anger, as opposed to sober reflection from a seminar room at the Kennedy School or a hot tub in Silicon Valley...

...Only two index citations—two...

...Rothenberg has an unerring ear for the lame anecdote and the quote that confounds instead of clarifies...

...They crave "social justice" as much as the next liberal, but they realize it can be financed only out of an expanded economic pie...

...Rothenberg's awe of high-tech reflects the view of many neoliberals—they (and he) are always talking about "the industrial paradigm" changing into the "post-industrial" something-or-other...

...Neoliberals, according to Rothenberg, want to help "older industries that are losing competitiveness" to die gracefully...

...I wanted to write this book, but I didn't and Rothenberg, to his credit, did...

...Rothenberg also makes much of a supposed shift from liberal "macro" fiscal policies to neolib "micro" policies that focus on individual firms, and then talks about neoliberals' "faith in the market ." But it is precisely because neoliberals don't have faith in the market to automatically produce the most efficient firms that they have developed their critique of managerial shorttermism, and their distinction between productive pie-expanding activities, like designing better production lines, and equally lucrative but not-so-productive activities like advising conglomerates how to shuffle their assets through mergers...

...But in Rothenberg's hands, the down-to-earth fear of bureaucratic self-interest gets reinterpreted as a muddled critique of "systems analysis," just as fear of being driven out of business by the Japanese becomes an awareness of "The Global Unit ." John Naisbett, watch out...

...Alright, I admit, I'm jealous of Randall Rothenberg...

...They want "more equality," "more compassion," or, as Samuel Gompers would put it, just "more...

...As nations become richer and more skilled, they drop their unskilled jobs and move up the ladder of industrialization in a sort of natural evolutionary process...

...The Neoliberals' low point is the chapter on international trade...

...But he got only half the story...

...When they stop ducking this obligation, I think they will have at least two good responses...

...Rothenberg concludes, "Nowhere is there a sign of the fearful 'picking winners and losers' syndrome...

...It isn't...

...I can see the New York editors now, telling Rothenberg what they told me: the book must have a clear "focus," a distinct cast of personalities, and must be done in time for the Democratic convention...

...Rothenberg says neoliberals have weakened the liberal commitment to redistribution...

...In his chapter on "human capital," Rothenberg doesn't mention anything as low-tech as firing incompetent grade-school teachers...

...Hmmm...

...But a few pages later he says the "neoliberalism of the 1980s harkens back to TR's New Nationalism," and quotes approvingly from TR's 1912 acceptance speech: "Concentration and cooperation in industry in order to secure efficiency are a worldwide movement...

...Simon & Schuster, $16.95...

...But those sentiments don't add up to a social vision...

...Rothenberg probably doesn't claim to be a card-carrying party member, which is fine, but to some extent his lack of empathy for the movement has produced a stunted characterization, which isn't...

...Aside from certain deviationist tendencies (see dossier, attached), that article was lively and sympathetic, and well received among the masses...

...The idea of national service and the neoliberal insistence on saving the public schools should be seen as attempts not just to help out the economy but to preserve a community life where a kid from the ghetto and a kid from Beverly Hills meet as equals...

...But much of the neoliberal critique of industry applies equally to low-tech and high-tech...

...Neoliberals see a potential for harmony, not contradiction—for synergy, not just balance— in the simultaneous pursuit of capitalism and community...

...In context, these are only glimpses of a road not taken, indications that Rothenberg could have produced a much better book than this if he hadn't been rushed by the need to be first...

...muses Senator Bill Bradley at one crucial moment...

...You will remember Rothenberg from his 1982 cover story on our movement in the bourgeois publication, Esquire...

...The tragedy of The Neoliberals is that Rothenberg clearly knows what's missing from his own portrait...

...Only a community that devalues money can fully value entrepreneurship...

...I wish Rothenberg had stepped back a bit and tried to figure out how much of neoliberalism has to do with silicon chips and how much has to do with old liberal institutions, such as unions, that might have become obstacles to prosperity even if Dr...

...Rather, as Michael Kinsley has said, "We want a society where heights are available to climb and also to fall from ." This means neoliberals cast a skeptical eye at the elaborate middle-class subsidies—like unemployment compensation, the Davis Bacon Act, the civil service system, or labor contracts requiring automatic wage increaes—that conventional liberals have built up as a means to protect the nonpoor from risk...

...Well, they are angry that the biggest obstacles to the revived WPA-style work program that could do the most to help the poor are now the construction and municipal unions who most righteously invoke the memory of FDR...

...Where New Deal Democracy has come to mean being taken care of by large paternalistic organizations, in accordance with permanent credentials, neoliberals value the freedom of each individual to try and fail—not just because the "industrial paradigm" has changed, or Rothenberg misses neoliberalism's potential for harmony, not contradiction, in the simultaneous pursuit of capitalism and community...

...One function of a book like this, presumably, is to take ideas that are seemingly unconnected and find connections even those who call themselves neoliberals might not have seen...

...This is the most thorough treatment of our movement to date, and of course should be required reading for every concerned American...

...What do neoliberals want society to look like...

...Admittedly, this is a failing shared by many of Rothenberg's subjects—particularly the Wirth-Hart-Tsongas high-tech crowd—who are more comfortable focusing on means rather than ends, who indeed describe their political stance by making the means/ends distinction (Hart: "What is changing is not principles, goals, aspirations, or ideals, but methods...

...One important free-trade tenet, for example, is the theory of "comparative advantage," which holds that each nation will prosper by producing what it produces best—given its natural resources, etc.— and trading for the rest...

...They are not secondary to the structure of the economy...

...When Comrade Peters, in a publicity blurb, calls it "timely and important," he uses most of the positive adjectives that can in good conscience be applied to Rothenberg's work...

...If Rothenberg thinks that unfireable bureaucrats and their unions have no influence because they don't formally "set policy," then he couldn't have been as avid a reader of this magazine as he seems...

...Rothenberg's chapter on "industrial policy," like much writing on that subject, is suspiciously abstract when discussing how much the government would intervene in the marketplace, leaving the reader with the sense that something has been slipped past him...

...Rothenberg effectively analogizes the "lean and flexible" defense desired by military reformers such as Gary Hart and Colonel John Boyd with the flexible, entrepreneurial economy envisioned by Hart and Robert Reich--a theme that Hart, for one, has yet to discover...

...That is why this magazine endorses a guaranteed job for those who can work and a decent guaranteed income for those who cannot...

...Who decides which industries fall into which category—some to be phased out and others to get loans...

...But a second category of industries "retain potential competitive viability" and the government would offer them infusions of capital in a "coherent revitalization strategy...

...Apart from chapters on military reform and national service, The Neoliberals is devoted entirely to various piebaking recipes—industrial policy, retraining, flattaxes, consumption taxes...

...I would put it differently: neoliberals can give redistribution a clear, coherent, and self-limiting purpose, which is to provide that minimum level of material wellbeing necessary to prevent economic misery from destroying community dignity...

...Mickey Kaus is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...It's particularly silly that Rothenberg backs himself into this corner because by the end of the book he has hit on what I think is the correct and important neoliberal contribution: "The neoliberals not only affirm the place of competition in our economy, but further assert that only by creating a cooperative context for the economy will people feel secure enough to take wealth-producing risks...

...It would take an extremely gifted writer to render entertaining politicians (in this case Rep...

...They would carve out a communitarian sphere where class distinctions are dissolved, where the principle of equal dignity in citizenship prevails, where it is recognized that money is, after all, only money...

...He criticizes neoliberal politicians for coming "across as technocrats ." In his closing chapters he talks about national service and "neoliberalism's communitarian theme...

...Sure, neoliberals share the warm, old-time liberal intentions that are usually phrased ringingly yet vaguely as "helping the helpless," or "unlocking the locked out," "giving everybody an equal chance"—what Rothenberg sums up as a "concern for the lower classes and for equity considerations in general...

...But in his last chapter, he remarks, almost in passing, that "the neoliberal's warmhearted view of business is naive in the face of the greed of the corporate interests...

...Shockley had never invented the transistor...

...We argue that only in a community where everyone is guaranteed his dignity will people be willing to risk everything else...

...What are neoliberals angry about...

...But we have other ways...

...Only a community based on equality can accomodate material inequality...

...But, just between us, comrades, let us admit the truth: this is not a very good book...

...99 because it is the best way to achieve high-tech growth, but because it is a positive good in itself...

...Rothenberg says neoliberals "defend the free trade status quo," but the only alleged neoliberal trotted out to take this position is former Special Trade Representative Reubin Askew...

...For those of us who think neoliberalism is a potentially rich alternative to the standard ideologies of left and right, Rothenberg's choice of the economy as his "focus" is a 'disappointment...

...Most liberals accept capitalism as the engine of economic growth, but it is often an uneasy peace...

...After his strenuous efforts to build up neoliberalism's importance, these tossed-off criticisms seem inadequate...

...Sample: "The yen seeps out of Japan, seeking dollars, bidding up the price of the dollar and further weakening the yen...

...Unfortunately, while most of these ideas are worthy, they are also the reason why many commentators have accused neoliberalism of being "bloodless...

...First, instead of tolerating capitalism, neoliberalism champions its positive virtuesrisk-taking, creativity, and the excitement of change and accomplishment...

...Some neoliberal solutions are old-fashioned, too...

...But he makes a fuss about something called Microelectronics Innovation and Computer Research Opportunities (MICRO), a "nineperson tripartite committee" that former California Governor Jerry Brown set up to administer a $1 million (not billion, million) fund for basic research in microelectronics...

...Too Much Technology, Not Enough Soul BY MICKEY KAUS To: Neoliberal Revolutionary Council Central Committee Re: Comrade Rothenberg Our staff ideologists have now completed their analysis of Comrade Rothenberg's book, The Neoliberals...

...Rothenberg knows, for example, that neoliberals, like paleoliberals, believe government must regulate private industry where necessary to protect health, safety, or the environment...

...So there is no "natural" thing that any nation does best...

...Sounds like winner-picking to me...

...The three neoliberal economic "principles" he comes up with--investment, "appropriate technology," and cooperation—certainly are not exactly calculated to whip the reader into a frenzy...

...Well, never mind...

...To hear him tell it, most neoliberals are basically regular old liberals with some trendy new high-tech programs for encouraging growth...

...Maybe I'll get up and get a beer and think that one over...

...Nations can give themselves a "comparative advantage," an artifical boost up the ladder of industrialization and prosperity, if they are the first to develop the skills that are needed for more advanced forms of production...

...This suggests a failure of perspective...