by PAUL KRUGMAN
THIS FIGHT IS OUR FIGHT
The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class
'These days, one often hears laments that academia has become too insular, that scholars aren’t willing to participate in the hurly-burly of real-world debate. “Professors, we need you!” declared my New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof, urging academics not to “cloister yourselves like medieval monks.”
Such laments are often accompanied by praise for the handful of professors who do step outside the cloister — people like Jill Lepore, who combines the roles of Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer. Oddly, however, I’ve never seen Elizabeth Warren mentioned in this category. Yet it’s hard to think of a better example.
Warren went from Harvard law professor to highly effective policy activist. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, was her brainchild, and by all accounts has been remarkably successful at catching and deterring fraud. Then she became an influential senator, one who was widely expected to be a sort of external conscience for Hillary Clinton’s presidency, de facto leader of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
Then came the Trump upset. Now prominent Democrats need to figure out how to be effective leaders of the opposition — as the party’s base sees it, the resistance. Warren’s new book is in effect a manifesto offering one vision about how that role should be played. Is it persuasive? The answer is complicated.
Warren lays out a position I’d call enlightened populism. She rails against the growing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite; argues that this concentration of economic rewards has also undermined our political system; and links unequal wealth and power to the stagnating incomes, growing insecurity and diminishing opportunities facing ordinary families. She puts a face on these stresses with capsule portraits of middle-class travails: a Walmart worker who needs to visit a food pantry, a DHL worker forced to take a huge pay cut, a millennial crushed by student debt.
She also makes good use of the autobiographical mode. . .
Yes, what Warren is preaching sounds very much like the second coming of the New Deal — as she herself acknowledges: “We built it once, and we can build it again.” But: Warren brings an edge to her advocacy that many Democrats have shied away from, at least until recently. Even the Obama administration, while doing much more to fight inequality than many realize, balked at making inequality reduction an explicit goal.
Furthermore, Warren comes down forcefully on the left side of an ongoing debate over both the causes of inequality and the ways it can be reduced.
One view, which was dominant even among Democratic-leaning economists in the 1990s, saw rising inequality mainly as a result of ineluctable market forces. Technology, in particular, was seen as the driver of falling wages for manual work, and attempts to fight this trend would, the argument went, do more harm than good — raising the minimum wage, for example, would lead to job losses and higher unemployment among precisely the people you were trying to help.
Given this view, even liberals generally favored free-market policies. Maybe, they suggested, rising income inequality could be limited by spending more on education and training. But limits on income concentration and support for workers would, they assumed, mainly have to come from progressive taxes and a stronger safety net.
The alternative view, which Warren clearly endorses, is all for taxing the rich and strengthening the safety net, but it also argues that public policy can do a lot to increase workers’ bargaining power — and that inequality has soared in large part because policy has, in fact, gone the other way.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/books/review/this-fight-is-our-fight-elizabeth-warren.html?
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016183568
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