On Compromise In Washington

Last major update on 11 February 2013.  Last major correction 5 June 2013.

Compromise -- Art or Science

"Why," people wonder, "can't Congress work things out?  Give and take?  Horse trade?  Split the difference? Just compromise and  do something?!"

Well, I know why, if by "something" is meant comprehensive and enduring solutions to big problems.  Problems such as as jobs and unemployment, debt and deficits, growth and sustainability, health care and aging, retirement and longevity, energy and global warming, poverty and strife.

The true believers at each end of American political opinion are righteously sure that they know how to solve these and other problems, while the rest of us who make up the muddle in the middle are confused and uncertain, knowing only that no one can predict the future and that past ideologies have, one by one, failed.

The old ways to compromise have been found wanting.  Splitting the difference?  A lazy way that works well enough when the stakes are small, there is no "right" number and it is past time to move on.  Horse trading (I'll vote for this if you will vote for that)?  It has been the sordid means to noble ends, as in the cases of Lincoln  and slavery and LBJ and voting and other struggles for rights for marginalized Americans.  But mostly it merely divides up the pork for local gain, serving a national purpose accidently if at all. Give and take?  See horse trading. 

That leaves working things out.  Find win/win solutions. Play only non zero sum political games.  But even then compromise is only an art, when it should be a formal science.  Working things out begins well enough.  Serious people without ideological blinders set aside narrow interests and pragmatically seek a way forward. Goals are set. All options go on the table.  Sensible ones stay there.  A "realistic" plan for meeting those goalsis drawn and reported to responsible officials.  Then -- usually -- nothing happens absent a crisis, and then only the crisis is addressed.  Examples: when we "fixed" social security a generation ago. 

But, you say, our politicians are mostly lawyers, seldom scientists. Their focus is on winning office and debates, not on discovering. Who are they to rely on controlled experiments, predictive model building, double blind testing, assesment of results by preset criteria, and the other tools of the scientific method?   Could they -- and we -- we ever accept the humbling ethos that every outcome is at best a partial failure from which to learn?  That every theory is flawed? That other societies do some things better than we? 

How do we get legislators that are comfortably steeped in the scientific method and ready to experiment?  One it tempted to begin with Shakespeare's solution:  "First, kill all the lawyers!"

In the midst of this righteous diatribe I have to make a humbling confession.  For hundreds of years Sakespeare has been quoted out of context.  According to Morris Dees, a lawyer and founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is in the business of putting hate groups such as the Klan out of business, what the Bard really said was "If tyranny is to prevail, we must first kill all the lawyers."  Even "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations" gets it wrong by  quoting the short version.  5 June 2013.

Not that the scientific method cures all.  Scientists squabble fiercely.  Some cling tenaciously to discredited theories for the sake of the careers and institutions built upon them, and in general prove conclusively only one thing: that they are human and prone to covet fame, riches and status as payoffs on a par with the advancement of knowledge.  Sometimes it is necessary to wait until a generation or two have left the stage before the next act can begin.

But begin it does.  Inexorably.  Ceaselessly.  Incrementally.  And all the while, without meaning to, trashing cherished beliefs, knocking down religious, philosophical, stereotypical and moral fences with a steady barage of belief killing facts. 

The Political Economy - A Case Study

Theories of political economy, however cherished, are no different.  Capitalism, while the best system contrived to date, fluxes all too often from expansive heights to depressive depths, which economists are unable to either predict or anticipate.  At one extreme inflated wealth is produced; at the other, it vanishes leaving only very real creditors stiffed by hords of debtors left jobless and homeless.

Capitalism also has other major deficiencies, for example a tendency to concentrate economic power, turn it into political influence and thereby endanger the equality of individuals before the law and the foundation of democratic government itself.  Furrther, the ability of democratic governments to equip the capitalist engine with the appropriate governors is far from proven and lamentably limited.  Money, credit and debt are the variables in the equation we have yet to formulate and prove that would give us the levers with which to macro-manage an exuberent capitalism rooted in a democratic society.

Instead of setting out to learn how to organize economic activity into an effective controlled producer of income and wealth that provides for all while rewarding creativity, productivity and leadership, we divide into rigid schools of economic theology and preach at the infidels of the other camp.  Neither side has a monopoly on truth -- or stupidity.

We have had only one president, elected in the midst of our worst economic collapse, The Great Depression, who rejected the old remedy of inaction and boldly experimented.  That Franklin Roosevelt was often wrong and only partially successful when  right, is why the recent Great Recession did not cause more misery than was suffered in the 1930s. 

Students of the Great Depression such as Ben Bernanke had learned from the frequent failures and slender successes of the remedies of Roosevelt's day.  They had a better grasp of what to do and how to do it. They could not speed up today's recovery from an old fashioned financial panic, but they did halt the slide.  Unemployment peaked at half what it was in the mid 1930's, and the belated boost of the stimulus program is fueling a slow recovery that now seems to picking up steam.

We have had other presidents who were not so helpful.  Herbert Hoover started many of the prototype programs of the New Deal.  That he was too little and too late, was demonstrated by Roosevelt's greatly expanded support for these and his own ideas that usually failed also.  Only the spur of war put America back into business.  War of course is the worst possible government program, but it does show that government action can fuel a boom.

The least helpful president was that amiable dunce, Ronald Reagan, who professed to admire Roosevelt while finding government not the solution but the problem.  Of course government alone is neither.  Capitalism is the essential fountain of freedom and prosperity -- if we can get to stop acting like dancing waters.  Government, however inept it can be, has to be the regulator that contains the steam in its boiler and so gets useful work out of the engine without gruesome blowups.  There basically is nobody else to do the job.

The best theory of how to set the economy on a smooth, sustainable path to growth is still that of John Maynard Keynes, if only we would test it.  Counter cyclical activity that reduces government debt in boom times by taxing away the froth and increases it when a downturn begins by pumping deficit money into the economy, is what Keynes  and his followers have consistently advocated, but we have never systematically tried.

More precisely we have tried only the pumping part.  A few states have a rainy day fund, but it is used mainly to keep government running during down times while satisfying a legal requirement to annually balance the government's budget.  Even the biggest states are helpless to shore up their economies when ill winds blow through the nation economic house.