Will We Ever Learn?

  The scene: The wake of a major recession, caused by excesses by wealthy individuals and corporations.  The nation, particularly the middle class and small businesses, has been severely damaged.  The Democratic Party presses for reform and more regulation.  The Republican Party splits between its mainstream conservatives, who support the status quo, and a fringe group demanding a sweeping change in the party's direction.  The time: 2013, after the Great Recession of 2008? 

  Nope—I am writing about the turn of the 20^th century, after the devastating Panic of 1893.  Ironically, the Republican Party's fringe were then left-wing progressives calling for legislation that would limit the power of the great trusts and monopolies, and provide more protection for unions and the average citizen.  (Remember: the Republican Party was at that time truly the party of Lincoln.)  Fortunately, the president was Theodore Roosevelt, one of the Republican fringe who—after being relegated to the powerless office of Vice President by the mainstream of the party—had succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of President McKinley.  By virtue of that accident of history, Roosevelt almost single-handedly launched the Progressive Era of the first two decades of the 20^th century.

  That era is the subject of an excellent new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.  As the title suggests, it is a twin biography of Roosevelt and Taft, the 26^th and 27^th presidents of the United States.  It also contains a series of mini-biographies of the so-called muckraking journalists, notably S. S. McClure, publisher of the influential McClure's magazine, and those who wrote lengthy exposés for it—among them Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffans and William Allen White.  It is a massive book (over 900 pages, about a third being copious end notes documenting its many quotations) but for all its length a very worthwhile read.

  I need not summarize Bully Pulpit here.  That has been done in a splendid review in the New York Times by Bill Keller, formerly executive editor of the paper.  Suffice it to say that the biographies of Roosevelt and Taft are fine pointillist paintings of the men, their families, their philosophies and their long-term interdependence—gripping even for those who have read about them previously.  The biographies of the muckrakers are much shorter, but explain how each became a stentorian voice for the people and against conglomerations of corporations and corrupt politicians.  The book illuminates how Roosevelt, Taft and the muckrakers interacted to change the course of the nation.

  Of course, Teddy Roosevelt dominates the book, as he did the era.  Scion of a rich and famous family, he was brash, hyperactive, and multi-talented: a prolific writer, a consummate politician, a warrior, a rancher and a big-game hunter.   He made his mark as a politician by being marvelously open to others' insights, especially the muckrakers' investigations of excesses in the country, always probing to get an understanding of the thinking of the masses.  Taft plays a secondary, supportive role—a counterbalance to Roosevelt's sometimes-immoderate forays.  They both used the Congress, the courts and executive power to break up trusts that had monopolized the oil, steel, railroad and financial industries through bribery, corruption and intimidation; and to empower the middle class and labor unions in their opposition to those trusts.

  Goodwin's book cannot help but focus one's attention on the repetitive folly of the business cycle, as new generations forget the lessons of the past.  We have had three such major cycles in the United States in the past 150 years, each starting with a period of increasing laissez faire that led to an extraordinary disparity of wealth, income and power between the moneyed classes and the rest of the population.  Major economic crises ensued, followed by periods of reform:

 

• In the aftermath of the Civil War, the period of laissez faire was accompanied by the ascent of the robber barons in railroads, steel, oil, finance and other industries.  The Panic of 1893 called forth the reformers and regulation of the Progressive Era described above. 

• Subsequent laissez faire excesses during the Roaring Twenties led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal then added massive new regulation to the economy, reining in the free-wheeling financial and industrial sectors and empowering unions.

• In the 1970s and 1980s, laissez faire came back in favor, with many of the New Deal's regulations being reversed.  Subsequent excesses caused the Great Recession starting in 2008.  There is a still-ongoing period of regulatory reforms, against those who purblindly again want the market to "do its magic" unimpeded, and therefore are busy chipping away at those reforms.

  Will we ever learn?  I doubt it, for such madcap cycles have been occurring with regularity since at least the Dutch tulip mania of the early 17^th century.  In this opinion, I am in the good company of John Kenneth Galbraith who in his little gem of a book, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, concludes that "there is probably not a great deal that can be done.  Regulation outlawing financial incredulity or mass euphoria is not a practical possibility." 

  When will the next disaster hit?  No one can tell, not even Nobel Prize-winning economists, for all their expertise.  As Galbraith once famously said, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

An Odd Couple

  Mason B. Williams' City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York maps my political genome.  During my entire youth in New York City in the 1930s and early 1940s, I was molded by the titans of the book's title: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.  How could such heroes not have left an indelible imprint on my political genome, which remains almost unmutated to this day?

  They were an odd couple: Roosevelt, a patrician scion of an old New York Dutch family, raised to be a country squire, who thought cities were too large; La Guardia, the son of immigrants, for whom urban life represented the vibrancy of the nation. Roosevelt, from relatively conservative origins, who became the very definition of a liberal Democrat; La Guardia, a natural liberal, who worked his way up through the small New York City Republican Party (there were some liberal Republicans then!) to avoid becoming a vassal of the Democratic Tammany Hall, a corrupt machine organization. 

  Both had enormous charm, charismatic in their outreach to the people, spellbinding in their speeches.  I well remember FDR's "fireside chats" over the radio, then still an unfamiliar venue for a politician.  Invariably starting with the words "My friends," he indeed entered the nation's living rooms as a friend, coherently explaining the reasons for his policies.   (Listen here to the first of them, just days after he took office, clarifying the bank holiday he had proclaimed.)  I remember too the weekly radio talks by the "Little Flower"—the meaning of "Fiorello"—particularly those toward the end of his mayoralty in 1945 when the newspaper-delivery union was on strike and he resorted to reading the Sunday funnies over the air.  (Get your laughs here watching a film of him reading "Dick Tracy" to the kids.)

  The two were born in 1882, and therefore were in their twenties and thirties during the Progressive Era of the first two decades of the 20^th century.  It was the era of the muckrakers, who exposed political corruption, squalid living conditions of the poor, monopolistic practices, dangerous working conditions, and unsanitary food-processing.  It was also an era—from the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt through that of Woodrow Wilson—of legislative and constitutional reform, e.g., the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and Interstate Commerce Commission (both controlling monopolistic practices), and the passage of amendments creating the income tax, direct election of senators, and woman suffrage. 

  Those Progressive decades made a major mark on the political philosophies of FDR and La Guardia, philosophies that had to await a renaissance until after the Roaring Twenties—a decade characterized by a diminution of governmental involvement in society and the start of the Great Depression.  Then, at the depth of the Depression in 1933, the odd couple came together in their new roles as president and mayor-elect to show how a strong federal government, in an until-then little practiced complementary relationship with cities, could redefine the nation's urban life.

  Both men saw the Hoover administration's policies during the first three-and-a-half years of the Depression as grossly inadequate to address the meltdown, especially in their lack of attention to cities, many of which, including New York, were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  They advocated a much more proactive federal government, which would pump money into the economy by vast expenditures on infrastructure projects in the states and cities in order to stoke employment. 

  They both hit the ground running.  FDR had his famous One Hundred Days in early 1933, in which a spate of acts of Congress and executive orders reversed Hoover's cautious approach.  The Little Flower, after quickly cleaning up the corruption and disorganization of New York City's Tammany-suffused municipal government, was the first mayor to approach Washington to propose federal funding of municipal projects; he had elaborated a list of them for Roosevelt well before taking office on January 1, 1934. 

  The fruits of La Guardia's achievements under joint federal-city funding are legion, recognizable even to those who are not New Yorkers: the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown Tunnels, the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson and East River (now FDR) Drives, the New York Municipal (now LaGuardia) Airport, the renovation and improvement of a much-deteriorated Central Park, as well as construction of myriad other parks, schools, public housing projects, and sports facilities, and support for music and the arts.  At the Little Flower's urging, the Roosevelt Administration thus poured hundreds of millions of dollars into New York City's economy, creating tens of thousands of jobs, helping to revitalize and modernize the city, and removing the specter of bankruptcy.  The city would scarcely be recognizable as it is today had it not been for those investments.

  The FDR-La Guardia relationship was uniquely robust.  As Williams puts it, they had a common purpose "beyond the simple renovation and augmentation of the common wealth.  They sought, too, to elevate people, families, and communities by using the power of government to meet [needs] private production could not—with the ultimate aim of promoting happiness."  Williams quotes Roosevelt saying that La Guardia “is the most appealing man I know.  He comes to Washington and tells me a sad story. The tears run down my cheeks and the tears run down his cheeks and the next thing I know, he has wangled another $50 million out of me.”  La Guardia's clout with FDR increased even further when he was elected president of the U.S Conference of Mayors in 1935, a position to which he was re-elected annually for the next ten years, making him one of the most influential politicians in the nation.

  My political genome writhes painfully as I reminisce.  Despite the appalling difficulties that were faced during the New Deal era, it was for me an enthralling demonstration of how savvy, dedicated leaders can guide the progress of a nation for the better; as a naïf, I couldn't imagine a lesser sort of politican. 

  Now, almost three-quarters of a century later, many of my generation cannot fathom how and why the country has descended to its present state: a disjunct agglomeration of feuding jurisdictions and the pols representing them, all lacking a strong common commitment to the health and welfare of the entire polity, especially the least fortunate among us.  I cannot help harking back to a question I asked in a previous posting about our present fractious era:  "Is devotion to the collective good passé?"  Those of us who cut our teeth during the New Deal have reason to fear so.

A New Prospectus for Science?

  I was recently delighted to come across the works of Professor Philip Kitcher of Columbia University, one of whose books I cited in [1].  An acclaimed philosopher, he blessedly doesn't seem to have a metaphysical bone in his body—unlike those whose philosophy-cum-metaphysics I have decried [2,3].   I was therefore inspired to read another of his books, Science in a Democratic Society. 

  The book argues that science only very imperfectly conforms itself to the role it should play in a democracy, a failing that has resulted in increasing popular suspicion of its results.  It notes that respect for science in the U.S. has fallen far from that in its post-World War II heyday, during which era it was much influenced by Vannevar Bush's famous report to President Roosevelt, Science, the Endless Frontier.   Kitcher thinks a newer prospectus for science is essential for our era.

  Kitcher points to a harsh indicator of the falling esteem for science and scientists:  The new sciences of molecular biology, genetic modification of organisms (GMO), and global warming have been received with mistrust, anger and denial by substantial numbers.   He maintains that the shift is partially because science has not properly included itself as much within the conventions of democratic consensus as is currently expected of it.  Scientists remain too much removed from most of the citizenry, sometimes seeming to set themselves up as godheads looking down on the values and wisdom of the folk.  Society is culpable too, for it does not adequately educate all its members about the results, methods and limitations of science.  Kitcher therefore addresses his book to a proposal for returning science to a more-accepted position.

  In a perfect democracy, Kitcher writes, each adult would be fully informed and have equal weight in decision making.  While that may be possible in a democracy with only dozens of people, it of course isn't in one with millions.  Large societies have therefore organized "divisions of epistemic labor":

"Consider the entire range of questions pertinent to public life, all matters about what the society should aspire to and how it might realize whatever aims are set.  These topics are partitioned, divided into nonoverlapping sets, and for each set in the partition except one, a particular group of people is designated as authoritative with respect to that set.  For the remaining set, epistemic equality holds: that is, on these topics each citizen is entitled to make up his/her own mind. …

"[W]hat ideals to adopt, or what goals to pursue … should be assigned to that set of topics on which citizens should make up their own minds.  Moreover some questions about facts might also belong in this set, issues about which each of us can be expected to be competent, or even privileged."

I'll denote as "Set A" the topics Kitcher says should reside in the domain of the public at large.

  Kitcher asserts that increasing public wariness of science boils down to this:  Many have concluded that scientists have arrogated to themselves decisions on set-A topics that should be reserved for the body politic as a whole.  In molecular biology, particularly the use of embryonic stem cells and cloning, they believe that scientists have pre-empted fundamental decisions on the value of life, which belong to set A.  The same applies to the contentious issue of GMOs and the fear many have about polluting the environment, another set-A topic.  The perception of science thus "running amok" spills over to the most important issue of all, global warming, where the populace should clearly listen to the experts, but many don't because of accumulated doubts about scientists' integrity and objectivity.  I myself suspect that this increased mistrust has magnified anti-evolution and creationist fervor beyond its levels a half century ago.

  To cope with this erosion of trust, Kitcher proposes a way to align science better with democratically derived values.  He calls it "well-ordered science," a paradigm in which "specification of the problems to be pursued would be endorsed by an ideal conversation, embodying all human points of view, under conditions of mutual engagement."  Such a conversation would be conducted more in the spirit of a town-hall meeting than through today's hierarchical political mechanism.  It is a utopian concept, but one with valuable insight into the necessary interaction of science and the public in a democracy. Kitcher clearly has a Jeffersonian faith that truth will out in reasoned discourse among well-informed people.

  In even imagining the suggested "ideal conversation," a clear tension arises between two conflicting concepts of science: an autonomous effort, largely unconstrained, for discovering fundamental principles of nature (mostly a position of scientists); and a means for solving practical problems, restrained within the context of societal values (mostly a concern of the laity).  Kitcher submits that the tension must be resolved by fully enlightened, give-and-take dialogs equally involving experts who represent the viewpoint of science in the abstract and laypersons who represent the values and needs of society as a whole.

  The book devotes hundreds of pages to elaboration of "well-ordered science."  There is no way to do justice to this difficult discussion in a short essay, but a brief summary of stages of Kitcher's ideal conversation is illuminating:

•  Assessment of Options.  Scientists lay out the significance of possible courses science might take, indicating which have intrinsic interest ("pure science") and which have more immediate practical potential ("applied science").  The object is to bring all discussants to a tutored state on science and to try to come to agreement, based on societal values, on options worth pursuing for the good of both abstract science and society at large.

•  Certification of Results.  As the debate on global warming illustrates, a coterie of scientists cannot alone persuasively certify the results of science when faced with untutored denial and claims of fraud and misrepresentation.  Instead, certification must involve participation by informed, disinterested and trusted laypersons whose imprimatur will lend credence to results, which scientists by themselves cannot.  Standards of certification must be high and transparent, acceptable to all.

•  Application of Results.  Even if scientific results are certified as true, it is not clear that a resource-limited and value-constrained society would want to take action on them, and if so, for whose benefit.  What are the benefits of building another particle accelerator compared to those of conquering cancer?   Should GMOs be further deployed, and if so how should their benefits and disbenefits enter the assessment?  How should global warming be addressed, taking account of both present needs and future menaces? 

  To many, Kitcher's scheme may appear too well-ordered—frighteningly regimented and even Big-Brotherish—undermining the classical conception of science as free-wheeling and independent in pursuing nature's truths without substantial interference.  Others will assert that there can be no agreement in the ideal conversation about the values held in set A, hence no decisions on courses of action laden with these values.   Kitcher takes pains and many pages to assuage such fears, arguing not only that they are exaggerated but that science will flourish more in a democracy using the widespread decision-making participation he proposes.  

  Although I share the concerns just mentioned, I applaud Kitcher for calling attention to an important and escalating problem and examining it rationally.  His prescriptions may seem utopian, but it is often necessary to strive for an otherworldly utopia in order to achieve a worldly harmony.