America is haunted by a deep and growing anxiety about the structures of its economy. This anxiety crosses all lines of ethnicity, class, religion, party, and ideology; it has been an equally powerful force in the striking rise to power of former fringe figures Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ; in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street; and at the kitchen tables of millions of ordinary, apolitical Americans. It is not a mere selfish concern about who gets how much. It is a moral anxiety, a concern about what kind of people we are becoming. Is America still a country where it pays to âwork hard and play by the rules,â in Bill Clintonâs famous phrase? Or have we become the kind of place where cheaters consistently get ahead and slackers get a free rideâwhere working hard and playing by the rules is for suckers?
Hollow Prosperity and the Empty Economy
America is a prosperous countryâby historical standards, breathtakingly so. But we are not satisfied with our prosperity; it feels hollow. The richer we get, the more dissatisfied we seem to become. Where our ancestors were anxious to achieve affluence, we are anxious about our affluence. Our booming economy feels empty.
Ironically, even as economic structures dominated by the aristocratic hierarchies of the past are more and more completely dismantled by the dynamic churn of global markets, our sense that the rich donât deserve their wealthâthat the whole system is rigged against the little guy, and itâs useless to work hard and play by the rulesâhas steadily increased rather than decreased. People distrust and resent the economic system dominated by bankers and tech entrepreneurs even more than they used to distrust and resent the systems that were dominated by kings and priests.
You can see this feeling of hollow prosperity in the stark contrast between economic policy debates in the early twenty-first century and economic policy debates in the second half of the twentieth century. From Eisenhower through Clinton , public debates about economics were dominated by technical questions. How do we manage the business cycle ? How do we keep down inflation? How do taxes and regulations affect growth? How much debt is sustainable? Key moral questions did occasionally take center stageâespecially where economic policy intersected directly with matters that were of more than just economic concern, such as racial segregation or health care. And politicians , as always, dressed up technical questions in moral language to whip up popular support for their preferred policies. At the bottom, however, economic debates were managerialâthey were about what techniques we should use to manage our affluence. Prosperity was solid enough to be technical.
Those days are over. Economic debates today are all about outrageâwhich is to say, they are fueled (often unconsciously) by moral anxieties. We fear there is no moral core to our prosperity.
Nationalists are outraged that we donât have big walls and high tariffs to protect our people. How these things are supposed to work in practice almost never gets discussed. In the face of a deeper moral anxiety that our institutions no longer have any moral core, which is supposed to be to take care of their people, mere technical issues are beside the point.
Socialists are outraged that the government doesnât provide free, universal medical care and college education . How these things are supposed to work in practice almost never gets discussed. In the face of a deeper moral anxiety that our institutions no longer have any moral core, which is supposed to be to take care of their people, mere technical issues are beside the point.
From bailouts and bank regulations to basic universal income and Brexit, itâs all the same story. People are outraged, and outraged people donât care about technique. If youâve been sold a machine that turns out to have a missing button or a misaligned gear, youâll call technical support. But if you think youâve been sold a machine thatâs actually a hollow shell, and doesnât have any of its most important working parts, youâre not going to call technical support. Youâre going to call the cops.
The institutions of economic powerâthe businesses and financial houses and regulatory agencies and intergovernmental institutionsâare still controlled by people who care about how economics works . But they now live in a parallel universe, separate from the public discourse that shapes economic policy. They are struggling to figure out how to do their jobs in a world where nobody trusts them, and nobody cares about technique.
But this change is also visible far beyond public policy debates. It runs much deeper. It goes down to the roots of who we are.
Taking an Uber ride through the streets of Omaha, heading to a seminar at Creighton University, one of the authors of this book noticed a building with an impressive glass dome. Hundreds of small windows fit together in an intricate pattern to form the dome. He remarked to the Uber driver on the buildingâs unusual and impressive architecture.
âYup,â the driver responded. âI put in most of that glass.â
The driver, who looked about 75, explained that he had worked most of his life in window installation. Over the course of a long career, he had worked on most of the larger buildings in Omaha. Now that he was beyond the age for that kind of work , driving for Uber allowed him to stay connected to his professional legacy.
âI feel pretty good, driving around the city, seeing all the glass I put in,â he said.
But he said it in a bittersweet tone, one that reminded its hearer that it was not only in this driverâs personal history that such things felt like they were departing the present for the past. The world where people were allowed to care about that kind of thingâthe world where your daily work amounted to something important, something whose worth could not be measured in dollars and centsâseemed to belong to Americaâs past, not just to this driverâs past.
Almost nothing is more debilitating in the life of a nation than a pervasive moral anxiety. Wars and disasters may be catastrophic in the short term, but a persistent moral anxiety robs people of dignity and meaning. It destroys peopleâs sense that their decisions matter, that they are moral agents. In some it breeds cynicism, injustice, and exploitation; it breeds anger, resentment, and political extremism in some others; and among still others, a paralyzing state of dependency, learned helplessness and susceptibility to manipulation. Among all but those of the strongest character or firmest faith, it plants a disturbing seed of doubt, nagging away at us, whispering that we canât really be sure our lives have any significance. And slowly, the seeds grow (Berger 1967, 22â24).
The worst part of our anxiety is that we keep trying to fix the problem, but nothing we try seems to help. Politicians in both parties keep affirming their fervent devotion to Americaâs traditional economic virtues : diligence, honesty, entrepreneurship , opportunity for all, and earning your success by doing work that makes the world a better place. They promise, and sometimes they even implement, ambitious plans to preserve our way of life. Yet somehow the scoundrels are always still on top, and the slackers never get off their cans and out of their parentsâ basements. We have lost our sense that working hard and playing by the rules pays off. And the seeds of meaninglessness continue to grow.
We wrote this book because we believe there is hope America can overcome the anxiety of affluence, the sense that our prosperity is hollow and our economy empty. We are not offering Polyannaism; indeed, we argue that the threat is even worse than most people have yet realized. The causes of hollow prosperity are older and deeper than one election cycle or even one generation. Nonetheless, we believe the problem, though large, is within the reach of human action. Hollow prosperity is not inevitable, even in a growing economy. A dynamic, modern economy is not doomed, by some inevitable law of nature, to become an unbreakable âiron cageâ of materialistic selfishness, as Max Weber feared (Baehr and Wells 2002, ixâlxiv).
The moral misdirection that causes our hollow prosperity is the result of a long series of specific choices made by particular people in identifiable times and places. They did not have to make those choices. They could have made better choices. So can we. We live within structures and constraints created by our ancestorsâ choices, so getting out will be the work of a generation or longer, not of one election cycle. But if enough cultural leaders, especially economic leaders, grasp the deeper causes of the problem and prioritize effective solutions, our moral disorders can be licked. Greater challenges have been conquered before and will be conquered again. Hope will not put us to shame.
What Causes Hollow Prosperity?
Are we really losing the world that Omaha driver looked back on? After all, people have been raising the alarm about moral decay for a long time, yet the world goes on. The limit of nostalgic absurdity may have been reached by Richard Weaver , whose romantic longings for the lost agrarian world of the Old South led him to construct an intellectual history of the West consisting of nothing but unbroken moral decline. Some people like to point out that every generation since the fourteenth century has complained that the generation rising to take its place was morally inferior to itself; to this objection, Weaver boldly replies: Yes, and it was true every time (Weaver 1948, 1â17).
We are not interested in nostalgia, still less in futile attempts to resurrect old social models that have passed away for good reasons. But we think the signs are clear that hollow prosperity is a real problem. Radical movements driven by economic resentments and outlandish policy ambitions used to exist on the fringes of American life, even as radicalism on other issues (civil rights and sexuality, for example) often took center stage and sometimes enjoyed impressive victories. Now, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have been followed by the simultaneous rise of possibly the two most economically extremist candidates ever to have a real shot at the presidency: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders . There is really no precedent in American history for the current triumph of economic radicalism. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide plenty of examples of politicians who were like Trump and Sanders âmen who consistently lost elections, or won them only in idiosyncratic constituencies; who were shut out of serious public forums; and who enjoyed what little success they had through niche-market rabble-rousing that attracted little general attention. Now, not only have these two extremists climbed to the tops of their respective parties, but they are the models being emulated by future presidential aspirants.
That kind of thing does not come out of nowhere. This book will argue that the underlying source of the anxiety that our prosperity is hollow is the indifference of our economic systems to moral categories. Our current economic system was not created with the intention that it would promote greed , envy, sloth, gluttony, vanity, and other selfish desires in our economic lives. But that is only because it does not even recognize the existence of these things. It does not see them as relevant to its design and functioning. Worse, as we will show, the conscious indifference of our economic thinking toward moral categories has facilitated an unconscious adoption of economic thought that is much worse than merely indifferent to morality; it actively promotes our worst instincts. Our refusal to think about virtue and higher purposes in economics has made it possible for us to unknowingly adopt economic structures that actively deform us (without our realizing it) into selfish, materialistic economic actors.
The result of this conscious moral indifference and unconscious moral deformation is visible all around us. We find it in business practices that extract money without creating value for the customer; in crony capitalism that uses illicit collusion or government favoritism to enrich big firms and political cronies at the expense of customers, investors, small businesses, and entrepreneurs; in able-bodied people at all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum living in long-term dependency on one-way subsidies from others (the state, churches, friends, and family); and countless other ways. Our conscious indifference to moral categories creates a culture in which we feel like those who have wealth generally donât deserve itâthat working hard and playing fair doesnât pay. Our unconscious moral deformation creates a culture in which that perception is increasingly accurate.
This moral indifference and deformation wears many ...