Hacker Jacob S - American amnesia : how the war on government led us to forget what made America prosper

HAROLD SHAPIRO

JACOB S. HACKER is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He has appeared recently on PBS NewsHour, NBC, All Things Considered, and Marketplace. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

JENNIFER GRAHAM

PAUL PIERSON is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Copyright 2016 by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4516-6782-0

ISBN 978-1-4516-6784-4 (ebook)

To Our Teachers

T HIS BOOK is about an uncomfortable truth: It takes governmenta lot of governmentfor advanced societies to flourish.

This truth is uncomfortable because Americans cherish freedom. Government is effective in part because it limits freedombecause, in the language of political philosophy, it exercises legitimate coercion. Government can tell people they must send their children to school rather than the fields, that they cant dump toxins into the water or air, and that they must contribute to meet expenses that benefit the entire community. To be sure, government also secures our freedom. Without its ability to compel behavior, it would not just be powerless to protect our liberties; it would cease to be a vehicle for achieving many of our most important shared ends. But theres no getting around it: Government works because it can force people to do things.

The authors of the US Constitution were keenly aware of this fact. Eleven years after the Declaration of Independencewith its ringing declaration of certain unalienable rights and its clear-eyed recognition that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among menfifty-five American notables gathered in Philadelphia because they had become convinced that the absence of effective public authority was a mortal threat to the fledgling nation.

But Americans have never been good at acknowledging governments necessary role in supporting both freedom and prosperity. And we have become much less so over the last generation. We live in an era of profound skepticism about government. Contemporary political discourse portrays liberty and coercion as locked in ceaseless conflict. We are told that government is about redistribution and the private sector about production, as if government only reshuffles the economic deck rather than holding many of the highest cards. We are told free enterprise and big government are engaged in a fierce zero-sum battle (one sides gain is the others loss), when, in fact, the modern partnership between markets and government may well be humanitys most impressive positive-sum bargain (making both sides better off). We are told that the United States got rich in spite of government, when the truth is closer to the opposite: The United States got rich because it got government more or less right.

We suffer, in short, from a kind of mass historical forgetting, a distinctively American Amnesia. At a time when we face serious challenges that can be addressed only through a stronger, more effective governmenta strained middle class, a weakened system for generating life-improving innovation, a dangerously warming planetwe ignore what both our history and basic economic theory suggest: We need a constructive and mutually beneficial tension between markets and government rather than the jealous rivalry that so many misperceiveand, in that misperception, help foster. Above all, we need a government strong and capable enough to rise above narrow private interests and carry out long-term courses of action on behalf of broader concerns. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, one of the delegates noted: It has never been a complaint of [the Confederate Congress] that they governed overmuch. The complaint has been that they governed too little.there are complaints only about our leaders governing overmuch. But the truth is that although areas of government overreach certainly do exist, we have too little effective government, not too much.

We recognize that these words are likely to provoke doubt, if not disbelief. We ask only that these reactions be suspended long enough to consider the evidence. Fortunately, it is close at hand: in our nations history and in the history of every nation that has transited from poverty, sickness, and mass illiteracy to wealth, health, and enlightenment. Still, the forgotten roots of our prosperity are well buried. We have to dig deeply into the debris left behind by nearly a half century of ideological warfare to unearth the economic model thatin remarkably short order, beginning little more than a hundred years agomade us the richest nation the world has ever seen.

Like other advanced democratic nations, the United States has what economic analysts call a mixed economy. In this public-private arrangement, markets play the dominant role in producing and allocating goods and innovating to meet consumer demand. Apple brings us iPhones, and it earns sizable profits by doing so. Visionaries such as Steve Jobs see untapped opportunities to make money by satisfying human wants, and then draw on the knowledge and technology around them to produce goods and services for which people are willing to pay. Markets are the most powerful institutions yet developed to encourage and coordinate decentralized action in response to individual desires.