Promoting Progress (2 of 2)
Promoting Progress (2 of 2)
We need a third option in the ideological center of American politics that promotes widely-shared progress and understands that this progress will largely come from society, not the government.
The following is the second excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. For full context, you can view the previous excerpt. You can order prerelease e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase for full price on Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
Progress is the single most important trend of the last century. Today, the material standard of living of humanity is far higher than it has ever been. This is not something that we should take for granted. Problems exist, just as they have always existed, but they are now less severe than ever. And the number of our problems is fewer than ever. It is merely our perceptions that magnify current problems into unsolvable crises.
Rather than abandon the concept of progress, we must learn from the ways our ancestors built progress in the first place. Our ancestors overcame problems far more difficult and complex than ours, and they did so with a much smaller base of technology and scientific knowledge. Most importantly, our ancestors gave us a toolkit for promoting progress that is still effective today, if we just give it a chance.
The fundamental problem is that neither the Left nor the Right has a concept of progress that is based on real human history. The Left compares our present condition to an ideological vision that cannot exist, while the Right compares our present condition to nostalgic memories that never existed. They are both excellent at provoking emotional reactions to mobilize supporters, but they are both bad at solving contemporary problems.
I do not believe that any existing ideology can make major contributions to maintaining progress in wealthy nations and enabling developing nations to experience greater progress. The fundamental reason is that none of them embrace human material progress as a primary goal. Far too many explicitly reject the concept of progress or are at least skeptical of it.
We need a new political perspective that is clearly differentiated from both the Left and the Right. We do not need to transform society (as the Left wants), nor do we need to preserve it in amber (as the Right wants). Instead, we need to roll back government policies that are undermining the foundations of progress.
We need a third option in the ideological center of American politics that promotes widely-shared progress and understands that this progress will largely come from society, not the government. This option cannot be based on reasonable compromises between the current positions of the Right and Left. Instead, it must offer an entirely new vision of the role of government that is both pragmatic and radical.
We need a Progress-based reform agenda focused on the following principles:
Promote long-term economic growth.
Create a prosperous working class.
Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.
Focus relentlessly on results.
Reform the political process to make all the above possible.
I sum up goal #1 as “Promoting Progress” and goals #2 and #3 as “Promoting Upward Mobility.” I will focus on goals #1, 4 and 5 in this book. In my next book, Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda for Uplifting the Working Class and Poor, I will focus on the second and third goals.
Promoting long-term economic growth must be the bedrock of a Progress-based reform agenda. Economic growth gives all individuals more material resources with which to solve their own personal problems and their families’ problems. Economic growth also supplies the material resources to take on improvements in education, health care, pensions, and care for the disabled, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Without economic growth, all other goals become far more difficult to accomplish because there are simply not enough resources available to achieve them.
Creating a prosperous working class is essential to ensuring that economic growth is widely shared and politically sustainable. Far too high a proportion of the benefits of our current economic growth go to the college-educated professional class. And much of that distribution is due to bad government policy.
We must implement policies that ensure that the working class receives a far greater share of the benefits of progress and that they do so by contributing to society. A prosperous working class will not achieve equality. However, in combination with economic growth, it will achieve upward mobility.
Promoting a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter that prosperous working class is also essential. With each generation, modern societies must pass on the necessary skills, habits, and values to the next generation. We cannot create a prosperous working class with no way for young people, particularly those from low-income families, to enter that class. By promoting a clear pathway into a prosperous working class, we can sustain this progress and upward mobility for generations to come.
Supporters of progress must focus relentlessly on results. A Progress-based reform agenda must never be allowed to degenerate into a dogmatic ideology that is fixated on certain policies regardless of results. While the long-term goal of promoting progress and upward mobility must be fundamental to our viewpoint, how we do so should always be determined by experimentation in the real world.
Like scientists looking for a cure for cancer or an entrepreneur trying to scale up a business, we must try many possible solutions and only scale one up once it has been proven effective by rigorous methodologies. The fundamental principles that I mentioned above will be very difficult to achieve. They will each require a great deal of experimentation with policy. Many proposed policies will fail to work, so they must be reformed or eliminated.
Supporters of progress cannot just dream up seemingly great policy solutions and then pass legislation. Instead, we must go into this project with a realization of how hard it is for government programs to achieve positive results in the real world.
Of course, this experimentation must avoid potential negative effects on society. In particular, we must respect basic human rights enshrined in the Constitution. Our experimentation must also be constrained by basic human decency, though admittedly this concept is hard to define. But these constraints still leave us a great deal of leeway for effective and ethical experimentation.
In the end, the actual results of a policy are far more important than the good intentions of those who implemented it. Only results matter, because it is results that affect people, not intentions.
Any reform agenda must also confront the problem of scarce resources. So much of our economy is now devoted to current government programs that there is no chance of finding additional revenues without serious negative economic consequences.
Rather than building up additional layers of government programs, a Progress-based reform agenda should focus on rolling back government policies that undermine the foundations of progress and upward mobility for the working class and poor. In particular, we should make energy, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, and consumer goods more abundant and affordable so that the working class and poor can afford to purchase those items on the marketplace without government subsidies.
Rolling back failed government policies will not only accelerate economic growth by reducing costs but doing so will also ensure that the benefits of that growth are widely shared. We should also decentralize government to promote the maximum possible amount of policy experimentation.
Finally, a Progress-based reform agenda must reform the political system. The American political system, which is polarized between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, leaves no space for any other perspective. Both sides are more concerned about rallying their base against the other side than about solving problems. For the good of the nation and the good of our movement, we must open up political competition to allow representation in state and federal government for ourselves and other outsiders.
The next excerpt is here.
The above was an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order prerelease e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase for full price on Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: