I have previously expressed the idea that it will require an immense amount of 'political creativity' to get us out of the current predicament. By 'political creativity' I don't really mean what might traditionally be called being a 'good politician'; I also don't just mean a 'good communicator', although that helps, too. The issue I'm trying to address is that we need to craft real, and novel, solutions to the messes that we've created- messes that include things like physical infrastructure but also economic inequality, and that ultimately include the ideological frameworks within which we make our decisions. We need to be able to do things in new ways; we need to be able to make decisions that lead to those new ways; and we need better frameworks for gathering information, reasoning and debating about it, and arriving at courses of action.
This will not be easy.
To better illustrate what I'm railing against, I will offer a close(ish) examination of two recent editorials: one is a contributed editorial piece offered to (and then by) the New York Times, entitled "The Problem With Grocery Stores Isn't Profits. It's Reality"; the other is a similar piece that appeared in the Washington Post, entitled "845,000 dead on U.S. highways. Why not address the main cause?". I'm aware that the problems in each of these publications' houses are well known, but I want to press into them anyway to illustrate my point.
There are some important ways that the two pieces differ; the important way that they are the same is that they both offer very limited views of a specific subject, and leave us, the reading (and thinking) public to fill in the rest, an exercise that is less like filling in gaps than it is drawing the rest of the moon when the authors have offered us only a crater. The reader is left by the articles adrift in a sea, without the tranquility that the authors hope we will be lulled into.
The two articles discuss widely differing topics. The NYT article is a discussion of the proposal by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, to create publicly funded grocery stores; the WaPo article is a discussion of the tragic cost of traffic deaths on American roadways, and a proposed solution.
The context of each article in its respective newspaper is important: WaPo has recently declared openly that its editorial pages will promote individual freedom and free markets; the NYT, like much of the New York political establishment, is roiling at the possibility that Mamdani, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, might secure the office of Mayor.
But, perhaps our first point, neither article broaches these topics directly. The NYT article wears its anti-Mamdani slant on its sleeve, but only briefly broaches the idea that he would be a bad candidate or a bad mayor; instead, it is a treatise about the logistics of running 'real' grocery stores. The WaPo article doesn't seem, on its surface, to address free markets at all. We can examine the WaPo flavor of this issue, which is not quite legerdemain nor exactly subterfuge, first.
We can begin by acknowledging that it's slightly unfair to critique an article based on what it doesn't say. The article is actually heartfelt: the author reflects on the 845,000 lives lost in auto accidents during his career covering automobiles. It's a sobering number. He makes two observations about the rate at which these deaths occur. The first is that safety equipment has improved dramatically over this time period, and this has lessened the loss of life substantially. I propose that we can all mostly agree that this is good - mostly; I'll get back to that.
The second point he makes is that many of these deaths are, in his view, the result of a single cause: bad driving. He contrasts his own experience in numerous driving schools (often advanced or even 'stunt'' driving), where he learned a variety of techniques and concepts that give him greater control over the car, with the relatively light training required to become a licensed driver in most of the 50 states. And, moreover, he notes that our commitment to driving - specifically, our attention when on the road- is too casual: people do all kinds of things while they are driving. He offers a list of things he's observed. It's terrifying.
But here is where we can begin to see what's missing in the author's argument. Putting aside one sidelong comment about 'bad roads,'' and a few strange things - for example, he explicitly states (without elaboration) that we don't need "more laws or fines" - it would be helpful to look at other countries' driver training and requirements, and, if the evidence supports this, discuss how their traffic death rates may be lower as a result. The author does not do this.
There is also another gambit that the author could have taken: Yes, the addition of safety equipment makes driving in and riding in a car safer for the people in the car; I, again, agree with that, but will bring in the 'mostly' from above: This safety equipment does not necessarily make it safer for pedestrians or bicyclists. In fact, one route for cars to become 'safer' is by adding size and weight; but as they do so, they become more deadly for everyone not inside them. This extends to other cars as well. If I, when driving my 2008 Honda Fit, collide with another Honda Fit, the safety mechanisms in my car (and the other guy's) will do a good job. If I collide with a larger SUV (several have more than double the curb weight of my car) my Honda Fit is toast.
The result is a kind of arms race: your car gets safer by making mine less safe. It would be awesome if the author mentioned this, but he does not. (A related hypothesis is the suggestion that the safer one's own car gets, the more likely one is to worry less about safety- that safety features contribute to drive distraction. I have no evidence that this is true, but it seems worth investigating.)
But this is not the biggest omission; there is an entire category of other solutions to the high number of traffic deaths, one that is breathtakingly simple, but glaring in its absence from this essay:
Drive less.
For the record, as I write this essay, I'm in a library, having driven my erstwhile Fit about 400 miles in the morning, and likely to drive the reverse trip this evening. I know what it means to 'love the open road'. I get it.
But: Public transit. Bicycle infrastructure. Car-free zones and pedestrianized areas. Walkable cities. These would all reduce traffic deaths.
Does the author consider them? Nope. The focus is resolutely on individual responsibility: make people better drivers.
There is even a sad note to his essay. "No one really thinks we can get down to zero traffic deaths." Oh, well. I guess there's nothing to be done.
In short, the entire framing of the article is about maximizing individual skill via better driver training programs. Not even re-training or re-testing over a driver's lifetime: just, apparently, better driver's ed classes. That should do it.
If the article about cars is blind to all the non-car options, it can at least be somewhat forgiven: the author is a 'car guy' and one would expect his expertise to be in the cars themselves, and not in things like urban planning. No such forgiveness is available to the author of the second essay. She loses the opportunity for this forgiveness when she presents her discussion as a kind of hard lesson; specifically, when the title of her piece says, "It's reality."
This is a common tell: When someone begins to lecture you about 'reality,' it is generally as a means to insist that what they are saying simply cannot be questioned. It shuts off discussion, and that's the point. Usually the 'reality' that is being described is only one of many possible realities. Often in economics, it ends up being a justification based on common practice, current statute, or some other condition that could, in fact, be changed. But it is critical to the standing of the author's argument, and usually of the author themselves, that you accept their reality, and so they insist on it. The condescension - the implication that you simply didn't understand the 'real' world - is not a bug, it's a feature.
In this case the author attempts to put Mamdani supporters in their proper place by explaining the 'reality' of operating a grocery store. Such operation requires balancing rent, supply chains, wholesalers, inventory, advertising, pricing, and management. Complex decisions and trade-offs must be made; it's definitely not the simple task that Mamdani's supporters must clearly assume that it is.
I propose that there is no clearer indication of the author's (and the NYT's?) misunderstanding of the Mamdani phenomenon than the fundamental premise of the article. The article presumes Mamdani's supporters are mistaken for supporting him because they do not understand the dynamics of running a grocery store. I think this is wrong.
They are supporting him because they do understand it. In fact, they understand it very well.
Many of the lines in the article, read from this perspectives, are confessions. Consider: "There is a science that's applied to making sure the product sent to the shelf is actually going to be purchased, and that science costs money."
One can quibble with this quote (from another journalist) that it is not, in fact, a science (I am assuming that things like replicable controlled double-blind experiments are rare). Calling it a science is just another way to suggest that it is esoteric and complex, beyond the ken of those not 'in the know'. But in any case, the assertion that what you are paying for at the grocery store has little to do with the cost of the product and a lot to do with the cost of this 'science' is an indictment of the current system.
Or consider this: "Wholesalers offer stores lower prices if they participate in promotions, with in-store coupons and prominent placement. To take advantage of such offers, the city would have to be a marketer of branded products - often, less healthy, higher-margin products."
Combined with this: "... retailers need to stock high-margin snacks and processed foods to subsidize fresh produce, meat and fish, which carry lower profit margins"
Re-read these from a consumer's point of view, and especially a consumer being lectured by the essay's author. Wholesalers and retailers don't just determine a price and a profit margin; they are engaged in a constellation of negotiations in which the stores' bargaining chips are coupons and prominent placement. That is, your choice as a consumer is being determined by manipulative strategies: they decide what you see, how you see it, and what you pay for it in money (of course) but also in actions like clipping coupons, scouring the back aisles, or scanning loyalty cards. And you'd better buy the unhealthy foods in order to 'subsidize' healthy ones.
Buy the Cheetos or you can't have any fruit.
For years the argument has been that capitalism provides an advantage by giving consumers choice; the amply stocked rows of shelves at the grocery store are often cited as evidence exactly of this. But behind the scenes, that 'choice' is being puppeteered: the store decides what you see, and plays three-card-monte with what you pay. And the result is that what you buy - in fact, what you have to buy, apparently, for the whole system to work - is, frankly, crap.
This line of thinking extends a bit further when the author insists that government-run stores would have to pay higher wages and pensions to their employees. The translation of this is that grocery stores can only exist if the people working in them can't make a living doing so. (Perhaps it's fair to say that the checkout clerks and stockers have to be paid less to 'subsidize' the profits of management.)
All of this may be exactly why New Yorkers favor Mamdani: They know that when they're in a store they're in a kind of trap where brightly colored paper is strategically placed in front of their eyes, and they are cajoled and snookered into buying products that are 'food-like', but not real food. And then they are told that the market solves all problems better than anything else - but not, apparently, if the problem is providing healthy food. (Increasingly they are also often told that these companies need to collect more and more of their personal data; our default expectation is now that we are being constantly surveilled.) They can easily feel stuck in a system that isn't working for them, and this essay shows exactly why.
None of it is 'reality'; we have built it all, and we can build it in other ways.
The author of the grocery essay helpfully connects that essay to our other one by extending the argument into urban planning and politics. Our car guy may not have presumed to dabble in other fields, but our grocery store discussant has no need for such self-restraint. The author argues that Mamdani may do other fearful "unrealistic" things: Provide public transit for free! Take power away from the armed police! And - brace yourself, as I am sure that you will not have seen this coming - Raise Taxes On Wealthy People!
The horrors.
If we are to offer any grace to our business reporter, we can find a starting point for doing so in the fact that she is not alone. Economics as an entirety suffers from a specific kind of falsehood: The false belief that the dynamics under study are generalizable because they reflect not situational and contingent aspects of a particular historical conjunction, but eternal truths about human behavior that can be plucked from, say, grocery store shelves and replaced into policing or tax policy or public transit. In other words, there is a persistent belief that we are all homo economicus - rational actors, and good consumers.
The tools to see beyond this are not available to economists. But they exist; they are simply placed in different social sciences.
To understand, we can look at one of the other comments our grocery writer makes: "But are community board members going to argue over whether to stock Pringles or Lay's potato chips? Should a city-owned store even sell sugary soda? Should vegetarians who are morally opposed to killing animals be forced to subsidize other New Yorkers' steak purchases?"
The first sentence here is doing a lot of work: it argues, essentially, that 'community boards' would be undertaking what is now being done by the network of wholesalers and retailers who are deciding that your shelves should have Pringles or Lay's. This is the typical argument against government control: that this is a problem for the market to solve, rather than a collective action of consensus-building. This by itself is a straw man.
Markets can be wonderful. One of my personal favorite examples is of the market that was established by some U Chicago professors that allowed exchanges among food banks. Food pantries must be economic entities (they have goods coming in and going out, and expenses to cover, etc.), but they are not profit-motivated, and their number were especially resistant to the idea of using a market to balance their collective supplies. But they found that the market allowed the participating entities to balance shortfalls of supplies in one location with surfeits in another in an effective way. What is critical about the example is that the market had a very specific set of rules; these prevented things like cornering the market or any of a number of other problems that would work against the larger goal that the group had come together to achieve. (This design of markets, incidentally, may actually qualify as a kind of 'science': it's tractable, replicable, and quantifiable - I have no objection to this.) But if this market had a very specific set of rules, and it worked because of them, then this works against the idea that 'markets' in the abstract always work and can solve everything in the best possible way.
This opens a role that our author does not consider (and may not want to): That the community board is not deciding between Pringles and Lay's, but is deciding on the appropriate market design. One suspects that our author would be strongly opposed to this: surely civilians who don't know how the 'real' world works should not be entrusted to put boundaries on that system? And moreover, if they did, perhaps the principles that the author understands very well, and the reason she is a trusted authority on the 'real' world and given the platform in the NYT, would be changed and no longer apply?
This is speculative (and not likely what Mamdani is recommending). But consider the second part of the statement, "vegetarians who are morally opposed to killing animals' being 'forced to subsidize' steak purchases."
This is a vastly different kind of statement. It suggests an entire network of financial entanglements, and, more importantly, a meaning being assigned to those entanglements. It invokes a collection of accounting practices, a definition of 'my money' and 'my benefit' vs. 'others' money' and "others' benefits". It is manifestly social. It is also as 'real' as every other constraint that the author notes.
But it is not purely economic. Economics begins and ends within a specific range of definitions for these issues: 'mine', 'yours', 'us', 'them', who is subsidizing whom, whose behavior is mine to worry about. We have similar discussions in other domains: Should I pay health insurance for employees who are doing immoral things? Should I pay taxes if one millionth of my tax dollar funds an abortion somewhere in the world? The answer from economics is to be strict about yours and mine, and allow your choice to be severed from mine entirely.
This was always a kind of fiction; we are more connected than we often admit and maybe even know. And we have seen where that approach leads: It leads to flashy store shelves, coupon incentives, marketing games, and poor food options. For that matter, it also leads to low driver training, giant cars, cities gutted for parking lots, no public transit, self-absorbed driving, and deaths.
In the face of this, economists only offer the idea that their version of 'reality' is the only one that can possibly work. Meanwhile, if solutions exist in other social sciences, they are driven downward and disparaged.
When I speak of political creativity, I mean the need to fix this. I mean that we need to find better ways of understanding our social world, and better ways to frame our interactions within it. Markets will play a role, I'm sure; but they needn't be elevated above all other solutions. There is a desperate need to counterbalance the immense creativity that has gone into the elaborate proliferation of tax shelters, s-corporations, capital gains exceptions, limited liability corporate entities, and other mechanisms that are constructed for a variety of goals, but mainly to allow money to flow upward. Instead we can look to a wide array of other arrangements whereby people engage with and participate in different social and economic structures to achieve specific goals. If those goals are more sharply focused than simply making a profit - say, if they include reducing traffic deaths, or providing affordable healthy food options, or public transit, healthy lifestyles, health care, education - it may lead to a much better world than one in which city residents pick from a convoluted menu of mostly unhealthy, processed food, and in which 30,000 people die each year in car accidents.
Surely a better world is possible.