Career Training

Paul Krugman says "these aren't normal times." Picking apart hoary clichés is like answering rhetorical questions, but still. We wonder: just when were those normal times?

David Brooks says, "In normal times, Americans would have been skeptical of proposals to double or triple the size of federal programs, but amid the economic fear, that skepticism fell away." Which, I suppose, is an answer of sorts.

Krugman is arguing for more money-to-the-moon, and Brooks isn't arguing anything so much as he is strolling the grounds of the Sanitarium in his bathrobe, but in either case one finds at base that charming American affection for a fanciful status quo, a deep-seated sense of sentimental nostalgia for an ineffable era of good feelings, decent profit margins, peace on earth, goodwill toward men, &c.

Such magical stability, to which we're supposed to aspire to return, is paired with an equally magical condition called "sustainable growth." The idea being that there are no real upper bounds to production, consumption, and the accumulation of wealth in a properly run society, so long as the pace of the increase is judiciously monitored. While I hesitate (or, I guess: I don't hesitate) to raise the specter of a crackpot Malthusianism, it seems to me that there may in fact be a point at which growth, as popularly defined, does indeed become unsustainable, and surely the enemy of anything we might mean by stability.

Our present troubles stem more from an imbalance between our declining productive capacity (as opposed to "productivity") and our increasing consumptive activity, and insofar as folks like the Krugster recognize this, they advocate investing our money in tangible economic activity--roads and bridges and hospitals and schools and so forth--while reorganizing our financial institutions so that they can again become agents for saving, reasonable lending, and modest investment rather than the main players in a vast speculative free-for-all. That's all fine and well, but seems to ignore the larger question of what happens next, in the medium and longer terms. With a few discrete exceptions, our principle economic activity neither makes much nor does much. What will all the out-of-work middle managers be doing in 2012, assuming Jerry Bruckheimner's MayanAztec Sungod doesn't consume the world first?