{"id":1027,"date":"2014-11-03T06:15:30","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T11:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1027"},"modified":"2014-11-03T06:15:30","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T11:15:30","slug":"sufficient-liberal-stories-the-krugman-function-part-4-transition-milwaukee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1027","title":{"rendered":"Sufficient Liberal Stories–The Krugman Function Part 4 – Transition Milwaukee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sufficient Liberal Stories–The Krugman Function Part 4 – Transition Milwaukee<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, Paul Krugman\u00a0appears entirely confident<\/i>\u00a0in the future of the American way of life and the growth of a globally inclusive economy. \u00a0He is similarly confident in our ability to address climate change by running that economy on renewable energy.<\/p>\n

This needs two significant qualifications.\u00a0 First, it is unclear whether this is what Krugman hopes, or what he expects; whether he is rallying us in an inspirational mode, or lecturing in an analytic one. \u00a0In contemporary political culture the roles of coach and analyst are becoming increasingly indistinct and it may not be possible to separate the two.\u00a0 Second, Krugman\u2019s optimism is clearly dependent on the ability of political liberals to get wrong-headed, fuzzy-thinking conservatives out of the way; it is only by becoming lost in the enthusiasm of a pre-game pep-rally that one could feel all that confident about liberal prospects in upcoming political contests. \u00a0A good deal of commentary these days seems to be busy staking out terrain from which the commentator can say, when things have gone very badly indeed one day, \u201cdon\u2019t look at me, I told you this would happen if you didn\u2019t listen to me\u201d<\/p>\n

Setting aside the various undercurrents that pull at any person putting ink to paper or fingers to keyboard, Krugman\u2019s narrative, itself, is very optimistic, and for reasons that form the major subplot of that same narrative. \u00a0As we began to show in our last installment, political efficacy, easy choices, as well as the ever-popular free lunch, are built into the narrative as the ultimate driver of action. \u00a0All narratives contain within them a \u201ctheory\u201d of cause and effect, whether it is the fate, history, chance, and interconnection we see in Thomas Hardy, or the exercise of individual virtues Jane Austen deploys, to mention two very different narrative theories of cause. \u00a0In history, Karl Marx argued that history was driven by class conflict, while in Darwin history is moved by the act of survival and ability to procreate.\u00a0 Enlightenment philosophers viewed historical change as the conquest of myth by reason.\u00a0 Krugman is most similar to the latter.\u00a0 In his story the action is moved by practical insight, the courage to accept its conclusions, and the determination to act upon it.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sufficient Liberal Stories–The Krugman Function Part 4 – Transition Milwaukee. On the face of it, Paul Krugman\u00a0appears entirely confident\u00a0in the future of the American way of life and the growth of a globally inclusive economy. \u00a0He is similarly confident in our ability to address climate change by running that economy on renewable energy. This needs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[157,244,482,614],"class_list":["post-1027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-conservatism","tag-economics-2","tag-liberalism","tag-paul-krugman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}