On the Contrary

I am beginning to wonder if we are the problem.  Or said another way, I am not sure we know what we know.  We think in comfortable patterns or frames, that is, ways to conceptualize things, and I am wondering if we have almost everything wrong.  Let me give you an example:

I was watching/listening to Rick Sanchez on CNN yesterday at lunch while I worked out.  Rick’s news show tries to involve the listener into the news.  He is using feedback from Twitter, email, etc.  Yesterday he had a group of “average” citizens who he was interviewing about various news items.  The one that caught my attention was the one about the 8-year old that shot his dad and a friend, or alleged to have.  He invited on of his guest to comment and she began by saying, “I have an eight year old and…..”.  She has an 8-year old like the rest of us haven’t at one point in our lives and now she has real insight into this event.  Not only do we not know what we don’t know, we are using this misinformation as informative.  My point is simply this:  Someone who has studied child psychology and deviant behavior might have had some insight into this child, and been able to a give us a little perspective.  What we got was the blind leading the blind masquerading as informative.  She could have had some real insight or it could be totally misleading based upon anecdotal experience.  We don’t differentiate anymore.

Why do I bring this up?  Because we are facing challenging times that require us to rethink everything we have been doing.  It would appear that we have gotten almost everything wrong.  We thought we could bully our way through the world and it has turned out to be a nightmare.  We find out there are limits to military power.  We thought the ends justify the means when interrogating “terrorists” and now we have a compete mess at Guantanamo.  We thought the market would make all the right decisions if we just let its invisible hand flop free.    Now that we have found that all these “conventional wisdoms” were wrong and we are looking for answers, my fear is that we have a tendency to fall back on false logic once again.

The biggie out there is the economy and what to do about it.  We all have lived under the sway of conservative economic philosophy that says low taxes stimulates the economy, along with few government regulations, low government spending, low deficits, and lots of savings.  Guess what, that may all be wrong.  I would recommend a wonderfully challenging book, “The Predator State”, by James Galbraith, that questions many of these beliefs.  To make a long story short, he challenges all these premises with, oh dare I say it, facts.  For instance he says we will always have a deficit in our economy and attempts to wipe it out have caused some of our severe recessions.  The point here is that he is afraid liberals have bought into the conservative group-think and we could be prolonging our misery.

Now Barack Obama’s economic team is coming up with a plan that challenges some of these assumptions and he is going to have a fight selling it because there are some who just can’t let go of the old ideas.  John Boehner, House Minority leader has challenged the Democrat’s plan of major investments in infrastructure to stimulate the economy by chanting the conservative dogma, lowering taxes and reducing government spending.  Now this appeals to us because it is the conventional wisdom and we are use to believing in it, but if you look around us, all you see is lowered taxes that did not stimulate the spending necessary to jump start the economy, and cutting government spending will just further exacerbate the problem.  In fact maybe lowering taxes just allowed people to have more money to spend on frivolities that does not move us forward instead of investing in our energy future through government planning and spending.  Anybody need another Hummer?

So it is time to think outside the box.  Clearly the knee-jerk reaction is where is this money for spending going to come from.  We are going to have to grow the deficit.  We have no choice.  The real discussion here ought to be about how we invest in our future through investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, water treatment, high speed railroads, alternate energy), while keeping the deficit manageable.  In other words, what is a manageable deficit?  Haven’t heard that one discussed because we are still in the debt free mode.  As Obama and his team try to actually think outside the box, the media and the mindless criticism based upon old thinking is all the rage on the cable news shows.  Just keep in mind that the people who didn’t see this coming are the same people who are now experts on criticizing plans to get us out.

One last little thought here:  Yesterday there was a report compiled by prominent former policymakers from the United States and Latin America by the Brookings Institution that basically found that our whole approach to Latin America is backward.  Most prominent was a call to totally reverse our strategy of isolating Cuba.  What we have been doing is counterproductive.  No fooling.  We have allowed policy to be set by old thinking, conventional wisdom, and of course a lunatic fringe in South Florida.  It is just another example of thinking outside the box and doing things that work instead of things that satisfy some emotional or idealistic need.  It is time to step back and really see what’s around us instead of reflexively doing what we have been doing.  Kind of the opposite of being conservative.