At the Polls, select Your Capitalism

At the Polls, select Your Capitalism



AmericanS who lose their jobs fare less well than workers in another developed countries.
¶ Faced with sharply contrasting approaches to our troubles, voters must grapple with two critical questions: What is the nature of our problem, you bet did we get here? First and last, we must confront the way our choices, as a society, have shaped our predicament.

¶ The sense of economic vulnerability weighing over the bourgeoisie has been building for decades, beginning well before the financial crisis and recession that scarred the last four years. We explain it to ourselves as a product of forces beyond our control: technology, which automated many formerly good jobs, or globalization, which put American workers in direct competition with cheaper labor in poor countries around the world. These relentless dynamics have sent unheard-of profits toward the prosperous few while threatening the jobs and eroding the wages of the rest.

¶ This understanding, while broadly accurate, ignores the role of our choices in managing the powerful global dynamics. Over the last three decades, every country in the world has been buffeted by globalization and technology advancing at a breakneck speed. But we have charted a unique course through the turbulent global waters, building a fiercer form of capitalism than earliest industrial nations. We're less believing of government and willing to accept market outcomes, including high inequality and deep poverty. More citizens of other countries, we tend to believe that success, like failure, is deserved.

¶ Our form of capitalism has led us to where we're today. The America may be good at generating wealth. It is arguably among the most innovative and entrepreneurial economies in the world, producing technologies that have been essential to powering global growth. But the American way hasn't been effective at transforming affluence into broad-based well-being.

¶ It may look as if our social and economic woes arena product of rampant globalization. To a large degree, however, they're a consequence of how we have chosen to address the opportunities and challenges of our high-tech, globalized world. Our cutthroat approach to capitalism has exacted high social costs.

¶ The America is probably less globalized than earliest rich countries. Our total trade — the sum of our imports and exports — peaked at about 31 percent of our total economic production in 2008, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By contrast, in Canada it amounted to 69 percent of the economy that year. In 2008, imports had only about 17 percent of the United States market, the smallest share among the industrialized nations in the O.E.C.D. In Germany that share was 44 percent.

¶ In in some manner we have reaped great rewards from our interconnected world. On average, income per person has grown 71 percent over the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation. This puts us in 16th place among the list of 29 advanced countries tracked by the IMF over the period. There are only a handful of places — Singapore, Norway, Luxembourg and Hong Kong — that enjoy a higher average income per person than the America.

¶ Yet for all the riches we have amassed, by the O.E.C.D.’s calculation, the income of Americans of working age in the midst of the distribution has grown less since the mid-1980s than in virtually every other developed nation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we suffer from some of the worse social ills known to the industrialized world.

¶ It's not just that income inequality is the keenest of any industrialized country. More American children die before reaching age 19 than in any other rich country in the O.E.C.D. More live in poverty. Many more are obese. When they reach their teenage years, American girls are much more expected to become pregnant and have babies than teenagers anywhere else in the industrial world.

¶ We understand the importance by babyhood development. Yet our public spending on babyhood is the meagrest among advanced nations. We value education. Yet our rate of enrolling 3- to 5-year-olds in preschool programs is among the lowest among advanced nations. Our 15-year-olds place 26th out of 38 countries on international tests of mathematical literacy, according to the O.E.C.D. The first nation to understand the value of widespread college education, the America has dropped from the top to the middle of the pack of our economically advanced peers in terms of college graduation rates.

¶ The American way has produced a high-tech health care system that offers sophisticated cures for those who can afford them, yet is astronomically expensive and poor at combating many run-of-the-mill ailments, and leaves millions uninsured.

¶ Our safety net — to protect the tenderest from globalization’s ravages — is threadbare. Where would you rather lose your job to cheap competition from China? In the America you'd lose healthcare, too — unless you had the money to buy private insurance. If you were the breadwinner in a family of four earning the average wage, benefits would replace only 52 percent of it, even including any extra welfare payments you were entitled to, the O.E.C.D. found. And they'd drop to 37 percent of your last wage after two years tops. In Britain, by contrast, you'd still receive over 70 percent of your wage for 60 months after you lost your job. And your healthcare needs would be addressed by the public, universal National Health Service.

¶ A particularly telling statistic speaks of how we deal with social dysfunction: there are 743 Americans in jail for every hundred thousand. That’s more than in any other country in the world, according to the International Center for Prison Studies. The next country down the list is Rwanda, with 595.

¶ Social ills like obesity and child mortality have, naturally, multiple and complex causes. But the battery of dismal statistics suggests, at the very least, a troubling pattern. Yet though we seem to suffer more than our fair share of social ills, by the O.E.C.D.’s calculation our world spending to address them is smaller as a share of the economy than in any other country in the developed world.

¶ Daron Acemoglu of the MIT, James Robinson of Harvard and Thierry Verdier of the Paris School of Economics have proposed an economic taxonomy that divides the world into two types: cuddly countries like those in Scandinavia, where robust governments manage big welfare systems, and cutthroat capitalists like the America, willing to tolerate more inequity to encourage effort and entrepreneurship. Life might be better in cuddlier spots. But harsh as life in cutthroat nations mayhap, the world needs us to grow.

¶Americans work longer hours than workers in any other developed country, the authors note, perhaps because delivering a smaller slice of our income in taxes makes us willing commotion so. Most important, they argue, the America produces the greatest share of the world’s technological breakthroughs and innovations, the main fuel of the world’s economic growth.

¶ In trying to reconcile the enterprising spirit that the American brand of capitalism provides with its social costs, American voters must choose between Mitt Romney, the businessman who offers to move the economy forward by making government smaller and more effective, and President Obama, who offers the government as an agent to assist the less prosperous, to put a thumb on the scale on the side of the have-nots.

¶ The taxonomy developed by Mr. Acemoglu, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Verdier may strike voters as too crude a rendering of societies’ complexities. Their proposition that a cuddly America would lead to less innovation and growth around the world has come for some harsh criticism. But they offer voters a fundamental insight: when it bears on dealing with the challenges arranged by overwhelming global forces, there is a choice.

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Ditulis oleh: Unknown - Thursday, November 1, 2012