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Index And One Last Introduction To The Public And Its Problems By John Dewey

Posts in this series.

1. Introduction To New Series: The Public And its Problems by John Dewey
2. Why Read Old Books?
3. The Public And Its Problems By John Dewey
4. The Public In John Dewey’s The Public And Its Problems
5. What Would John Dewey Say About Court-Packing
6. Dewey On The State
7. Failing At Democracy
8. Dewey’s Functional Definition of Democracy
9. Dewey’s Aspirational View Of Democracy
10. Dewey’s Aspirational View Of Democracy
11. The Port Huron Statement
12. The Social Critique Of The Port Huron Statement
13. Democratic Values In Practice
14. Bad Habits Of Thinking Make It Hard To From Community
15. The Two Commmunitites And The Future Of Democracy
16. The Public’s Problem In Finding Itself
17. Final Thoughts On The Public And Its Problems

I’ve been promising to read this book for some time. I wrote Post 1, the original introduction, last March, but didn’t follow up for some of the reasons in the post; plus Stephanie Kelton’s excellent book The Deficit Myth seemed more important. I wrote Posts 1, 2, and 3 before I got very far into the book. Post 2 seemed like a decent reintroduction. But now that I’m well into the book I see it differently. It’s not a work of political science as I thought. It’s frankly philosophical. It brings Pragmatism to bear on the problem of government. That requires a different introduction, one in which I explain a bit of why I think this book is relevant today.

Early on in my writing here I discussed Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, written in 1962.

Kuhn starts by describing what he calls normal science: the day to day practice of scientists. Their work is based on an infrastructure consisting of theories of various strengths, instruments, and techniques that together make up a paradigm. This paradigm organizes their thinking so that they have an idea of what they are doing when they do physical and thought experiments. Kuhn says that normal science uses the paradigm to solve puzzles. The puzzles themselves are set up by the paradigm, and the scientist expects to be able to solve them using the rules and equipment of the paradigm.

That seems obvious in the case of physics and biology, but it’s also true in the social sciences. [1] We understand sociology, psychology, economics and political science through frameworks, which Kuhn calls paradigms, consisting of theories of various strengths, instruments, and techniques which we use to think about how our society works. These fields overlap in politics and government, and the paradigms do too.

There is a battle inside the Democratic Party between a group of centrists and a group of progressives. The battle pits progressive policies against the centrist’s drive for power. Progressives offer a range of policies that they believe will help the American people, such as Medicare For All, The Green New Deal, police and criminal law reform, and changes to laws that unfairly favor the rich and powerful, like tax laws. The centrists include both neoliberal corporatists and a bunch of mushy liberals. They claim there is a middle ground on every issue. They argue that the only important thing is winning more elections, They promise good stuff if they win, presumably mild improvements like the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, or Obamacare. Nothing they propose is sufficient to the actual problems we face.

I think the Democratic Party lacks a paradigm of governance. There is no internal agreement on basic issues of governance or policy. [2] I am a progressive in the sense that I favor the policies they do. Those policies have wide support, but we aren’t winning. It’s worse than that. As a segment of the Democratic Party, progressives also lack a theory of governance, a paradigm shared by a large enough number of people that they would be in a position to actually govern. To see this, imagine that Bernie Sanders had been elected this year. How would he fill the thousands of Presidential appointment slots? Are there that meany people ready to govern who agree with his positions?

One good place to look for a paradigm is at the writings of John Dewey, including The Public And Its Problems. All of Dewey’s thinking is based on the philosophy of Pragmatism. [3] One reason I like Dewey is that he is a champion of small-d democracy. His life was devoted to making life better for all of us, using government at all levels.

In this post I suggestged an economic program for the left, hinged on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech from 1941 and Modern Money Theory. It still seems plausible to me, especially because MMT is based on a pragmatic approach to economics. Now I see that what I forgot was the crucial issue of a philosophy of governing, a philosophy of the reasons for governance, in short, a paraddigm.

To put that in everyday language, I mean a story about our nation that justifies and guides the actual practice of governance. That philosophy should offer a way to justify choice of policies, and a way of identifying the core group of supporters as people who agree with the paradigm and the choices it suggests. One good story is the US as the Can-Do Nation, a nation that loves problems and loves to solve them. I think that is a nice description of pragmatism in action.

A governance paradigm should begin by asking two philosophical questions: what is the nature of the individual, and how do we operate in the world. I think centrists accept the neoliberal answer to the first question: human individuals are atomized utility maximizing creatures, with little or no social connection. They think the problem is explaining why such atomized individuals would stick together. They argue that the answer is the social contract theory. That theory leads them to answer the second question with some form of compulsion as the reason human beings more or less behave.

Dewey flatly disagrees, as we saw in this post. As we go through this book, I plan to look for ideas that might be useful in a paradigm for progressives.

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[1] The post goes into a critique of economics that I would state differently today.

[2] I won’t air my grievances with the Democratic Party in detail here. I’ll just note that the party has done nothing for the economic well-being of people it asserts are its core constituencies: working people, unions, and especially Black and Brown working people. It has done practically nothing to restrain corporate power in any sphere of life. It has not tried to educate people about economic issues. For the most part it aligns itself with the Republicans on economic theory. It does little to defend its minor successes on social issues, and less to expand them. Inevitably the limits of action are imposed by the most conservative Senators, whether it’s Joe Lieberman or Joe Manchin.

[3]The word pragmatism refers to the American philosophy. I give a short primer on Pragmatism in three posts, here, here, and here. Also this.

Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics Part 11: Conclusions

The introduction to this series is here.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.
Part 8 is here.
Part 9 is here.
Part 10 is here.

This series is an outgrowth of a series of short essays [links here] on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Change. Economists desperately want people to think they are scientists, so much so that they will put on lab coats as in this delightful story.

Donning customized white lab coats, University of Delaware officials cut the ribbon on the new Center for Experimental and Applied Economics at UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources last week.

“Our experiments pay people cash to analyze their decisions,” said Kent Messer, a professor … .

Chapter 2 of Mankiw’s introductory textbook has a section titled “The Economist as Scientist”. He claims that just like physical scientists, economists “… devise theories, collect data, and then analyze these data in an attempt to verify or refute their theories.” P. 22. Based on this section, I thought he was saying that the 10 principles I’ve discussed in this series were in the nature of scientific principles. I suggested that with the addition of methodological ideas and some basic assumptions about the goals of a society, they could be treated as a paradigm in the sense Kuhn describes.

The goals of this series were: 1. to examine that possibility; 2. to see if these principles served as a structure for neoliberal economic theory, and 3. to see if there were other ways of looking at these principles that would be enlightening.

The first goal seemed perfectly reasonable. According to Kuhn, you don’t write a physical science textbook unless the community of scientists who study that area agree on a paradigm of the discipline. But my brief looks at these principles makes me think that they are either vacuously true, reductive to the point of absurdity, or hotly contested by other economists. I think I have shown that these principles do not operate as a statement of agreed-upon ideas about the way the economy works. They barely describe individual activity in any useful way.

Consider Principle 4, People Respond to Incentives. Of course they do sometimes, and sometimes not. And sometimes they respond in wildly disparate but perfectly reasonable ways. You see a car advertisement offering a price break for buying right now. Does Principle 4 help you understand how I might respond? Here’s a harder example. Interest rates go up. That creates an incentive to do what? Buy a house before rates go up further? Wait to see if higher interest rates cool off the housing market so houses are cheaper, so maybe even with higher interest rates your mortgage payment will be lower? Consume less and save more money? Wait for the stock market to go down and buy stocks? What conclusions can be drawn from this principle? How is it useful? Any time you might want to apply it, you have to look at the specifics of the situation, including the people who are supposedly going to respond to the incentives. Also, lacking data, there is a strong tendency to assume other people think like you do.

The function of the paradigm for Kuhn is to provide a platform for further research in what he calls normal science. There is an economics example in Part 10, the effort to figure out the relation between inflation and employment. People like Laurence Ball and Sandeep Mazumder of the International Fund, whose work I quote, can make a living working on ways to find an historical relationship, regardless of whether it says anything about the future. But surely if the relationship cannot actually be specified usefully after years of effort, it isn’t a real principle, and it doesn’t form the basis for a sensible research program. Morgenerally, Mankiw admits that in this blog post that there is much about macroeconomics that people don’t know.

Kuhn says that there is a difference between physics and chemistry textbooks and social sciences textbooks.

In history, philosophy, and the social sciences … the elementary college course employs parallel readings in original sources, some of them the “classics” of the field, others the contemporary research reports that practitioners write for each other. As a result, the student in any one of these disciplines is constantly made aware of the immense variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the course of time, attempted to solve. Even more important, he has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself. P 164

That does not describe Mankiw’s textbook which reads just like the physics and chemistry textbooks Kuhn describes. There are summary remarks about historical figures in the field, and the discipline is presented as a cumulative result of a steady progress of understanding. There is no question about the truth content of a single statement in Mankiw’s text, no hint that respectable economists reject his conclusions. Any student who only takes intro to economics using Mankiw’s textbook will never learn about the massive differences among schools of economics, will never learn that there are alternatives to the monetarist/neoliberal views implicit in the book, and will never have a way to examine economic policy problems from any perspective other than Mankiw’s.

That is what makes this textbook approach so dangerous. Mankiw presents a finished survey of the field, with the imprimatur of authority, when there is no consensus. It’s a fair reading of this book to call Introduction to Neoliberal Economics. It’s not fair to call it a balanced presentation of a discipline shot through with contested assertions.

I think I’ve shown that the discipline of economics has not reached the stage at which it is possible to create universal principles. That is a waste of time, and I will not spend any more time thinking about it. But it isn’t just that there aren’t any universal principles. As Kuhn would point out, with so many schools of economics there is no platform from which to evaluate any principle. The various schools conflict with each other on every possible level, and there is no way to test any theory that will satisfy the proponents of the exact opposite theory.

The worst part is that the rich have a death grip on economic policy. They choose to support policies that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us, and they hide behind a veneer of economics professionals who say the things that they want to hear. Those people teach economics using textbooks like Mankiw’s and that of Samuelson and Nordhaus. They control policy, because they have taught the leaders of today.

This and the preceding series have been really depressing to me. There is a tiny ray of hope. Bernie Sanders is the ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee. He appointed Stephanie Kelton as Chief Economist. She is the brilliant economist who chaired the Economics Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and she is a noted scholar in the field of modern money theory. That is a completely different way forward, and one that works for progressives and frightens conservatives. That’s got to be a good thing.