Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] What I observe — and this is a book I’ve just finished reading by James and Deborah Fallows called Our Towns, and one observes this — is as you travel around the country, our national politics stinks to high heaven. A lot of local cities are doing well. And they point to Greenville, South Carolina; Fresno, California; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Nashville. Detroit is doing reasonably well. Those cities are all run by people who say, “There’s all those culture war, cable TV issues — we’re putting that nonsense aside, and we’re just going to talk about . . .” I was with this guy, mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, and he talked about where to put the lamp post, where to cut the grass, the basic management issues. The cities that are doing well are run by people who do business, private-public partnerships. They focus on community colleges, and they produce measurable results for working-class Americans. To me, all you have to do is take the success of all these mayors at the local level and try to nationalize it. And that’s completely plausible to me. When you look at times of American history when we have recovered, turned around the social decline without the benefit of war, it’s like periods from 1890 to 1910, and generally we take some local, series of local movements, and we merge it into a national movement. In the 1890s, we had all these civic organizations that grew up all at once. We had the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, the Boys Clubs, the Girls Clubs, the temperance movement, the settlement house movements, the NAACP, the unions. They all grew up in five years of each other. Then they joined together eventually and formed the Progressive Movement, and they cleaned up government. So to me, if you want to look how America changes, look around what’s happening locally and figure it’ll probably nationalize at some point. The earliest appearance of David Brooks on video, I believe, is still on YouTube. You’re a young man and you’re challenging Milton Friedman on the Chrysler bailout. You remember this encounter? [laughs] Sadly, I do. It’s like one of those early traumas that will live with me forever. [laughter]…

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