Public ideas
A progressive economic agenda
Writing in Social Europe, Mariana Mazzucato provides advice for social democrats in her short article Towards a progressive economic agenda. It may be familiar territory for many – for years Mazzucato has been consistently urging the left and progressives to reject any idea of a trade-off between “society” and “the economy”, and to embrace a strong economic agenda, involving public investment in infrastructure, innovation, education and institutions to foster wealth creation. Governments should set the direction for the transition to net-zero economies, and crowd in investments “rather than cleaning up the messes left by bad policies and harmful business practices”.
She sets out five dimensions of a “winning progressive economic policy agenda”, all rooted in solid economic and social theory, with a stress on the real economy where people make real wealth-creating investments, rather than the financial economy where people shift money around without contributing anything useful. In previous publications she has characterized the finance sector as “wealth-extracting”, distinguishing it from “wealth-creating” industries in the real economy.
Fukuyama – still an optimist
“We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.”
That’s a quote from Francis Fukuyama, writing in The Atlantic, More proof that this really is the end of history. He observes the rise of muscular authoritarians in many countries, but he notes two weaknesses of such regimes. A concentration of power leads to poor-quality decision-making, and when strongmen are separated from those they govern their regimes can become fragile because they cannot detect how the people are moving.
His article covers the rise of authoritarian “leaders” in Russia, China, Iran and the USA, while urging readers not to give in to a fatalism that sees democracy in inevitable decline. In what could be a message for Americans before they go to the midterm elections, he writes:
Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted.