Review of Cass’s book The Once and Future Worker This review appeared in french in Paris, and has been translated by Emmanuel Todd
In a world without manufacturing, based uniquely on the tertiary economy, one sees neither gains in productivity nor increases in purchasing power. As Cass reminds us in a felicitous formulation: “Everyone can’t just serve each other coffee.” The production of tangible, exportable goods remains indispensable.
Cass on the Ezra Klein podcast
The Ezra Klein Show, July 16 2020
Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
But then he launched an insurgency. Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets.
What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policy making, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy.
Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.
In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.
References: The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass “Removing the Blinders from Economic Policy” by Oren Cass. Book recommendations: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Aggregate GDP: Pay less attention to this indicator. We do a lot of analysis at aggregate level, but any given group or place isn’t looked at, need to focus in at those not doing as well. Measure consumption, increases in consumption when it is size of your television isn’t correlated with healthy families and communities through to the next generation.
Are people being able to achieve self-sufficiency, creating stable families
Basket of Indicators: Savings rate, not aggregate savings rate. Savings rate of typical household with children. Not reliant on transfer payments, but are net economic contributors.
Median Wage. Family Status. Divorce rate is not the way to look at it .. its families not being formed in the first place, instead marriage rate and fertility rate. Share of kids being raised in stable households.
Look at the health of local economies and communities. NY Times looked at county by county and share of personal income came from transfer payments. in the 1970s you were at 10 to 20% income from gov’t transfers, now you get 30-40% in some places and up to 50% in others. This shows economy is not working.
Finance: cut up and merge companies or go on to work and make real things in the economy
Culture and economics and the black community: family breakdown, fleeing of manufacturing from where black people live, economic devastation made it hard for families to remain stable. Now it’s happening to white communities. Divorce rates, drug addiction .. exposed white people to same economic conditions, they followed along the same trends, but treated differently. For instance the way crack and opioid are treated.
Post 2012: Slow recovery from recession. Post-Romney, Pre-Trump… academic research confirming shocks to labour markets deeply damage communities that they have trouble recovering from.
Oren Cass Working Goal
A labour market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.
For most of the country, and most conversations, ivy league degree and job in investment banking, has very little status value, and is very negatively associated with a lot of things.
Klein: But hold it, what I’m getting at there, is that who holds status in society is important. The professions that attract the most powerful and selective cohorts, I think problem in the economy is that we mis-classify status.
Cass: In every human society you will have status, and positions of authority, that’s why they are high status. We want is a society is that anybody whereever they live can find work, feel they are a productive contributor and support a family that can sustain itself. Stable job paying $40 – $50,000 per year. This is what we should be talking about as policy goals.
Klein: Some of what you’re saying is severed from a power analysis. Wall St. players get their voices in the op-eds. Their voices set policy.
A society is going to have an elite thta exercises power. The 2 most important levers to pull.
1. what is the pool in which they all swim. ideas matter, trace way people opted different policies to get where we are today. Economic Piety Story (get a big pie for all)
2. At end of day, whoever is exercising power, is still subject to the coalition that their power is built on. The way coalition is structured is focused on certain groups and not others, so a realignment is needed.
opposed to any public funding for child care, the household should take care of child care. move toward an economy in which a single earner could earn enough so that both parents don’t have to work to support a household. Even a quite poor paying job that a second earner, is still going to earn more enough to pay child care. what is least affordable is to stay at home.