So I guess I, too, am unhealthily obsessed with Tom Friedman. I won’t mince words: I think he is an idiot. But he’s also the mouthpiece of a set of “ideas” that seem to be a media consensus. Friedman tells us his dream solution to our current crisis:
“President Obama announced today that he had invited the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to join him and his team at Camp David. ‘We will not come down from the mountain until we have forged a common, transparent strategy for getting us out of this banking crisis,’ the president said, as he boarded his helicopter.”
Really? That’s your ideal? That the bankers, industrialists, and economists who dragged us into this mess be the ones in charge to get us out? What evidence do we have that they make good decisions? That their “practical experience” is but one of failure? That their ideas were any good?
Again, I won’t mince words: the practice of the economics discipline failed us. I can hear the economists complaining now, “we academic economists are different!” But their failure is transparent. “We” may have failed their models. But unfortunately we live in our world, not the models’. It’s equivalent to what sociology went through in the late 60s – when our theoretical models were based on reproduction only to be confronted with massive transformations. We failed at an explanation of that which we should have been best equipped to explain. I’m not so smug to think that today I am right, or even have good answers. But neither am I blind to the ideas that helped get us where we are, nor arrogant enough to suggest that deploying them again will get us out.
Which brings me to my final point, and it’s name calling: the “ideas” strike me as little more than ideology. These folks – industrialists, bankers, economists – are our own nations’ version of [insert your favorite ideologue here]. I’ll go with Maoists.
If I were to guess I’d say my ideology is empiricism.
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If you’re unhealthily obsessed with Friedman, you probably have already seen this video from last April at Brown. If not, you can find it embedded in my blog and do doubt elsewhere:
http://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2008/04/pies-and-pieties.html
Friedman is, in my book, one small step above David Brooks, who has also been obnoxious and undeservedly smug recently. The beginning of Friedman’s article today makes a strong and credible case that this is an enormous crisis and that any solution will have to be enormous, untested, and risky. Then he goes on to fantasize that the solution will be…. smallish, testable, and safe, i.e., run according to the same rules that got us into this mess in the first place.
Why aren’t government guarantees of consumer mortgages “on the table”? How about nullification of debt swaps? Both of these would be bold, risky, and untested — but far more likely to succeed.
I don’t want to change the tone, so please continue the rant. I just want to say Hear,hear! and I (heart) Shakha!