Health care: the last post?

At the risk of counting chickens, it appears that today congress will pass the most significant piece of healthcare reform since the 1960s and in so doing validate one of the central parts of the mandate that sent Barack Obama to office.

A relentless battle, each side pulling off more comebacks than Muhammad Ali and Bill Clinton in combination, has culminated in an extraordinary week of political manoeuvring in the House, leaving the Democrats within a hair’s breadth of passing this damned bill. Whatever happens, whether it’s a success or a failure, if this law gets to Obama’s desk, the President will have notched up his second major entry in the history books alongside his astonishing electoral triumph sixteen months ago.

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What goes around comes around...

From a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin, on possibly soon to be outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stevens, one of the last remaining adherents of a Republican politics otherwise long since dead:

"John Paul Stevens, who will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on April 20th, generally bides his time. Stevens is the Court’s senior Justice, in every respect. He is thirteen years older than his closest colleague in age (Ginsburg) and has served eleven years longer than the next most experienced (Scalia)... In some respects, Stevens comes from another world; in a recent opinion, he noted that contemporary views on marijuana laws were 'reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student.'"

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Individualists of the World, Unite!

Review of Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

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Complexity and collapse? (Warning: wonkery ahead)

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article by Niall Ferguson called ‘Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos.’ Read it yourself, but the substance of the piece is that we should not think about the rise and fall of imperial systems in terms of traditional seasonal or cyclical narratives (which to Ferguson means Vico, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Kennedy and Jared Diamond), since empires, like all other social organizations, are complex adaptive systems subject to arrythmic changes. In normal person English, this means that the collapse of an imperial power like the modern United States can happen in a matter of months and years, not centuries.

The piece marks a continuing enthusiasm on the part of Ferguson, dating back at least to his Virtual History book, for thinking about history in the context of complexity theory, something I endorse – but with increasing caution as time wears on. There’s no doubt in my mind that societies are complex systems; this is self-evident. Ferguson’s warning about the potential speed with which one can collapse is also well taken. The problem is with how we go about taking the scientific model and applying it to the human world; and here I believe we should be much more cautious than Ferguson is being.

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The great global nosh-up continues...

In another great 'voice of reason' piece in the LRB, John Lanchester acutely summarises the fix we're in. The combination of an arrangement of electoral interests that provides no opportunity for fiscal discipline; an unwillingness to restrain the big banks meeting ignorance about how exactly to do so without damaging 'honest' banking; and a looming debt hangover that will make us realise quite how comparatively mild the cost of the recession has been so far (compared, that is, both to prior recessions and the inescapable mathematics of how much we've paid to keep our economies moving) ... all this leads to only one likely outcome: inflation.

"The government has to cut the deficit. That involves raising taxes and cutting spending. The government can’t do it too quickly, or it would tip the country back into recession. But the government will have to administer some cuts in spending, because the bond market insists on it. The government can’t cut too thoroughly, because the electorate won’t wear it. Inflation looks like the only way out. Not too much inflation, because the bond market wouldn’t like that. Also, the rules currently forbid it – but the rules, let’s face it, are the least of the problems."

When alienating the voters or the power elite gets thrown out of the window, inflation is the variable that allows the global economic equation to add up back to zero.

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