Gotham Diary:
Separately
23 July 2013
Kathleen asked me what was wrong — I’d been sitting still in my chair, looking, I suppose, fairly bleak — but, very unusually, I begged off, saying only that it was “nothing personal.” I wanted to stew in it a bit here first, and to leave the feeling undisturbed until the time to do so.
One fine day in the spring, Kathleen and I took Will to Central Park. Our outing had its ups and its downs, mostly ups — and one or two scares. I was remembering the worse of these last night. Will wanted to clamber on some rocks and I could not catch up to him. He was running away from me, and would not come back when called. Being Will, he did not push this too far. He surrendered just soon enough for me to gag on the bitter horror of imagining him disappearing behind a boulder. Really disappearing.
Last night, what this memory triggered was the imagination of something else: the novel that might begin with such a scene. This was really more memory than imagination also, for what would such a book be, at least in its opening premise, but a variation on Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time?
I thought of the work of putting the novel together. The procedural encounters with police officers, to start with. The dreadful announcement to the child’s parents. How could anyone voluntarily imagine such scenes clearly enough to realize them on the page? How could anyone get up in the morning knowing that the day’s work comprised the writing of an episode involving the flutter of false hopes? Which would be more onerous, the unpleasantness of the story or the labor of composition?
I sat in my chair and experienced my massive lack of vocation as a novelist. It was nothing personal.
***
What’s worse is that what I do want to write about is beyond me, not that that stops me. I want to write about political economy, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t know what that term even means. Reading AO Hirschman, I clambered up a rock of my own, and now I’m running off into a wilderness, while common sense calls me back, in vain. I am possessed of the intoxicating illusion that something stupendous awaits discovery, just up ahead.
Why not “economic politics”? Why should one term modify the other, assuming thereby a supplementary role? Is there no way to balance two nouns?
The Russians, for all their talk of the means of production and their disdain of parliamentary procedures, saw the running of the country as a purely political matter. Theorists vied for political endorsement, and then their policies were imposed on industries. Or it might be that thugs did the imposing. There was no genuine economy.
The Americans did just the opposite. They saw the running of the country as a purely economic matter. Capitalists large and small were given free rein to invest at will. Regulators were captured, legislators bought off.
Both the Russians and the Americans wound up in the same becalmed boat: not enough — not nearly enough — real jobs.
Have we learned the lesson yet? Politics and economics cannot be sold separately.
The Chinese seem to be aware of this, but China is undergoing a transition so extraordinary — experiencing, in little more than a tenth of the time, the economic upheavals that played out in the West over two centuries — that nothing can be learned from their example until they either settle down into something stable (and less arbitrary) or blow up.
What is the “right mix” of politics and economics? How do you keep politicians from muddling the economy, and capitalists from rigging the politics? Is it a good idea for businessmen to run for political office? What distinguishes the deals that politicians make from the ones made by commercial traders?
It seems clear to me that the healthy functioning of any society depends on an arm’s-length alliance between politics and commerce in which neither predominates. In the past, such alliances have emerged fortuitously, only to disintegrate under pressure. What we need, and haven’t seen yet, is an alliance firm enough to control disruptive pressures.
Just for the record, I’m in the middle of two related books, Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — I saved the best-known title (though not, in my view, the best book) for last — and Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. I’ll leave you with a thought for the day that’s drawn from the latter: Emma Rothschild argues that Adam Smith intended “the invisible hand” not to stand for an actual economic force but as an ironic joke. Ha ha.
It’s like going back to school.