Solutions from When the Clock Broke

John Ganz has ideas

At the conclusion of the book, Ganz takes a look at some through lines from the 90s. So here is his takeaway at the end of “When the Clock Broke.” Mistrust of the federal government is the effect of conservative politics as much as the cause. It is like the unhappiness in a bad marriage where divorce is impossible yet one party, the Republicans, have become invested in keeping it unhappy. The good news has been that when people accuse Obama of being a socialist, it reduces the stigma on the left, and no one even understands what socialism really is.

Most people don’t realize that the US government and its funding have been the indispensable investor in new US technology, essential to the development of everything from solar energy to Tesla, from computer touch screens to innovative pharmaceuticals. The government funded private winners who get all the public credit and profit while the government takes the financial loss and gets the political blame for the losers. Risk is socialized while rewards are privatized. But views are changing among the young.

On economics, Americans have been leaning left. We know this from ingenious and elaborate surveys, asking people to create their own ideal distribution for the US. The hypothetical countries were much fairer than we are and fairer than what people think we are. Ganz say that a reset of the balance of power in a big way must be an overriding goal. Left of center Americans let themselves get played too long by the economic right.

On the other hand, he suggested it is best to be nonbinary. Progressives insist we move beyond rigid binary categories concerning gender and sexuality. Psychologists now consider the mind and consciousness to be fundamentally nonbinary, and individuals are neither absolutely rational nor delusional. It is a continuum and most of us are clustered on the sane side. We need to become economically nonbinary.

But that is nearly impossible when one of the two parties is cuckoo and operating in bad faith. The only hope is sticking to goals that can seem radical; optimizing the economy for all Americans but being flexible on how we get there. Can we use all the laboratories available; states, cities, other countries, to see what is successful?

Look at Yang’s universal basic income and look at what Alaska does. In Alaska, each person gets a payment each year. Could we replace our patchwork of programs with a unified system? What do Americans own in common that could generate income? The air? Our Water? How about the internet and semiconductor industry? GPS? Weather data? We need to behave like seed investors. We have all created Facebook’s value. But the internet economy has come to be unfair. We are not being paid for our data.

The powerful continue with the idea that government is bad. They want us to believe in the perfect mythical yesteryear, that establishment experts are wrong, science is suspect, we are entitled to our own facts, short-term profits are everything, liberty equals selfishness, inequality is not so bad, and universal healthcare is tyranny.