Diagnoses and prescriptions for “Late Capitalism”

Common problems

• The Rise of the Meritocracy has been a mess (Michael Young)
• We’re Coming Apart (Charles Murray)
• “Deaths of despair” (Anne Case & Angus Deaton)
• “Millennial burnout” and “Workism” (Anne Helen Petersen & Derek Thompson)
• Not enough babies (Lyman Stone)
• Increasing Inequality (Piketty, Saez & Zucman)

Competing Explanations

• It’s all the Neoliberals’ fault! (Monbiot, and really too many to name)
• The Great Stagnation (Cowen, Thiel, Gordon)

Common Among Explanations

• The music stopped sometime around the 1970s

Competing Solutions

• Make America Grow Again
  • YIMBY
  • Moonshots
• Make Stagnation Safe Again
  • More tax and transfer
  • Expand the safety net

Question

• Are the common solutions mutually exclusive?

Work-around for potential mutual exclusivity

• Positive sum investments in public goods
  • Public health
  • Infrastructure
  • Education
  • Basic scientific research
  • Long-ball experimental investments

In Fairness

• \\ Critics of inequality have a point when it comes to needing an elite that has skin in the game with respect to public institutions.
• // Defenders of the growth(+) paradigm (see Cowen, Stubborn Attachments) have a point when it comes to needing a pie large enough to continually improve human well-being — not to mention meet our “embedded growth obligations” (Eric Weinstein).