We want to build a world where everyone has a right to food, healthcare, a good home, an enriching education, and a union job that pays well. We think this kind of economic security is necessary for people to live rich and creative lives — and to be truly free.
…
I encountered Mayer’s quote from an essay1 by Mathieu Desan and Michael McCarthy exploring the differences between various flavors of socialism and arguing that ‘capitalism is the chief source of human suffering today and a system that promotes the worst of human behaviors’. They want an end to capitalism. Full stop.
Note that this is the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. I agree with much of their prognosis — that unfettered capitalism and the inequality between business owners of great wealth and the average citizen are a scourge — but I believe that the principles of social democracy — highly regulating markets and distributing the fruits of capitalism — may be enough to meet Neal Mayer’s vision, and also achievable without a capital-R revolution.
By the way, as I wrote in a note this week, the Working Families Party supports a transition to social democracy:
The political organization that I align with most is The Working Families Party, which is the leading social democracy organization. Unlike the Democratic Socialists of America, social democracy doesn’t mean the end state of a transition away from unfettered capitalism is state control of nearly all market activities. The DSA is advocating the end of capitalism in its entirety -- democratic socialism or market socialism -- while social democrats accept the idea of mixed economies, but where capitalism is heavily regulated and profits are heavily taxed.
As James Talarico said in his successful senatorial campaign in Texas,
The only minority destroying America is the billionaires.
Resurfaced
Purpose is a smokescreen.
Earlier this year, Margaret Heffernan wrote a searing indictment of corporations, Purpose is Pointless. I wrote about it:
Margaret Heffernan was in rare form in Purpose is Pointless, writing about No More Tears: the dark secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris, a chilling tale [emphasis mine]:
What I can’t do is is read No More Tears believing that Purpose or any other fancy face-saving formulation of business buzzwords can have impact on a business culture sufficient to withstand the temptations of profit. But profit alone cannot be the sole culprit here. Widescale abuses of power in organizations whose only business is (or should be) the improvement of human life—charities such as Oxfam, Save the Children, institutions such as the Catholic Church and Church of England—cannot but make any serious student of leadership and management stop and ask: after a century of research, authorship, debate and (apparent) reform, have we learned nothing? What, seriously, can we offer now that defies the cynical conclusion that these businesses and institutions are all the same? And what credible hope can we offer younger generations that working inside organizations will not infect them with wilful blindness? If J&J is one of the most admired corporations in the world, what must the rest be doing?
At the very least, we need to stop reaching too quickly for a consoling bundle of magic words. Purpose has become a smokescreen, a disguise. Pretending to, or encouraging a belief in, a higher value system beyond profit is a feint. Deceptive and mind-numbing at worst, decorative and distracting at best, it is a displacement activity which looks like conscience but cannot induce it. We will get nowhere until business can forswear abstract nouns and learn to use language that is practical and tangible. We also have to call out the suspects that keep making repeat appearances at every crime scene: Scale, Competition, Speed and, yes, Purpose: the over-zealous belief in an organization so devout that it blinds followers.
A must-read.
Good jobs.
About a year ago, I responded to a piece by the economist Dani Rodrik, whose book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? has achieved international acclaim [emphasis mine]:
In This Is What a Good Job Looks Like2, economist Dani Rodrik argues that efforts to reclaim manufacturing job in the US are misguided. Countries like China have lost millions of manufacturing jobs in recent years as they transition to a more technology-based economy.
Economic populism should instead focus on service jobs, especially good jobs: one that pays a decent wage, a degree of autonomy, and opportunity for advancement. Also, a populist agenda should focus on technological innovation, ‘deploying government programs to redirect it in a more worker-friendly direction’, although he doesn’t detail what ‘worker-friendly’ entails.
Despite recent commentators and pundits clamoring for a move to the right, Rodrik believes ‘it is not clear that Democrats have given economic populism a real chance’, despite Biden’s industrial policy attempts. Economic populism should not be framed in the way Trump and his cronies have, with protectionist tariffs and calls for a return to manufacturing.
The sorts of service jobs projected for the coming decades -- home health and personal care aides, fast food and counter workers, and retail sales -- won’t be turned into good jobs just by raising wages: that might increase unemployment among younger workers, as we’ve seen in Europe.
Rodrik looks to China’s green revolution as an indicator of how an industrial policy focused on technology jobs can change everything. The US has history to draw on with the DARPA example of a concerted long-term technology agenda, leading to advances in myriad areas, like the internet.
But, ‘when innovation remains completely in the hands of private firms, benefits for workers remain limited. Companies have a bias toward technological solutions that limit worker autonomy, concentrate tasks, focus on surveillance and squeeze the greatest surplus out of employees.’
He points to examples of health care, retail, and education where AI (LLMs) can enable frontline workers to take on greater agency and accomplish more. But he doesn’t explicitly say that such workers should be paid more given greater productivity.
‘We need nothing less than the good-jobs equivalent of the green industrial policies that have been so successful in China: a political project that speaks to and empowers the working class. Existing examples suggest such a path is not a fantasy. It requires political leaders to shed their preoccupation with manufacturing and embrace the kinds of public-private collaboration that drives economic transformation.’
But I don’t expect we’ll see that from this administration. Maybe the Dems will incorporate this into their post-Trump agenda.
One reason to return to these ideas: the Dems will lead both houses of Congress in just a few weeks.
…
Ambiguous loss.
Adam Grant wrote3 about the grief experienced by Democrats in 2024 when Trump was reelected to the White House. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and many people on the right are grieving, something we can relate to from our 2024 experience.
Some excerpts from my notes:
Philip Tetlock analyzed decades of predictions about political and economic events and determined that ‘the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.’ Ouch.
So we should anticipate that a great deal of prognostication about the next four years will turn out to be wildly wrong.
Many people who have predicted extreme events are just lucky, not smart.
‘Our struggles to predict the future aren’t limited to events. They apply to our feelings, too. In the heat of the moment, we overindex on our anguish today and underestimate our capacity to adapt tomorrow.’
‘Political defeat is an example of what psychologists call ambiguous loss (see). We may be mourning the death of our hopes and dreams, but it’s temporary. We forget that unlike people, plans can be resurrected. That was true for Trump supporters in 2020, and it’s true for Democrats now.’
‘Pain and sorrow are never permanent. They evolve over time, and ideally they help us make sense, find meaning and fuel change. As the author and podcaster Nora McInerny put it, “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.”’
‘Ambiguous loss is not a funeral. It’s a reckoning. Like touching a hot stove, it hurts so we don’t miss its lessons. Feeling devastated about an election is a cue to figure out what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again. A sense of righteous indignation can energize us to stand up for our principles. Anxiety about what comes next can help jolt us out of complacency.’
‘It’s unsettling to realize we have no power to predict the future, because it means we aren’t in control of our fate. But in the midst of hardship, embracing uncertainty proves liberating. At the worst of times, just as at the best of times, it reminds us how quickly our fortune can change.’
Take stock. Pollsters and prediction markets didn’t handicap the 2026 midterms perfectly (at least not until the very end, when Polymarket and Kalshi did better than the pollsters).
Looking ahead to 2028, we'll still be half-blind about that election, even given the bluenami. And even though the Dems were wildly victorious, we don’t hold a supermajority that can overturn a presidential veto. As Grant said, ‘Anxiety about what comes next can help jolt us out of complacency’. So, let’s not be complacent.
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