Must-read: Eduardo Porter: “As Jobs Vanish, Forgetting What Government Is For”

Must-Read: Eduardo Porter: As Jobs Vanish, Forgetting What Government Is For: “Though the decline of well-paid working class jobs is often portrayed as the inevitable consequence of globalization and technological change…

…it is in large part the result of a failure of government…. ‘Concrete Economics’ (Harvard Business Review Press) by J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen… ‘American Amnesia’ (Simon and Schuster) by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson… point out that for all our love of rugged individualism, government played a large and underappreciated role in reshaping the American economy before — and it could do so again….

High tariffs against imports imposed from the time of Alexander Hamilton, to help foster America’s industrial development… huge grants of land to build railways… [which] vastly increased productivity in agriculture… catalog retailing to centralized meatpacking… innovations that spawned entire industries…. Bolstering workers’ human capital… the Land-Grant College Act… the G.I. Bill…. Local governments across the country poured money and resources into an impressive expansion of secondary education…. Finally, the government directly created jobs — whether in the burst of infrastructure investment in the 1930s that gave us the Hoover Dam, among other huge projects, or the tenfold increase in federal spending from 1939 to 1945 as the government built up the military-industrial complex to fight Germany and Japan.

Why American politics turned against this successful model of pragmatic policy-making remains controversial…. The good news is that the United States may have the best opportunity in decades to overcome its anti-government political biases…. So what’s holding us back? The loss of a vision, once shared across much of the ideological spectrum, of what government can accomplish, when it is allowed to do its job.