A subscriber to the wta-talk list noted yesterday, searching for a possible upside to Katrina,
for a huge majority of these disadvantaged citizens, they have the attention of all levels of Government like never before.
The thought is uncomfortably close to Barbara Bush’s clueless “they are better off now” comment but I confess I have had the same thought. Partly because I have long admired a book by Nicholas Lemann called The Promised Land, which was based on William Julius Wilson’s work on the underclass.
Wilson and Lemann argued that geographic and social isolation of the urban underclass had been created by desegregation (when middle class blacks left the inner cities) and de-industrialization. Looking back at the experience of FDR’s CCC work programs, which had got poor whites out of poverty and spread them all over the country, Wilson and Lemann proposed that a massive set of government work programs, building vital physical infrastructure like levees, or working in human service professions like nursing homes, could get people out of their isolated ghettoes, break the cycle of urban poverty and improve the security of the nation. This tragedy could indeed be an opportunity for such a change in opportunities for the displaced poor.
Unfortunately the United States is now controlled by plutocrats and anti-statist ideologues who think tax cuts are the solution to all social ills. So while the coastal disaster has spread hundreds of thousands of poor people across the US, it is unlikely that this administration will commit to the relocation efforts, jobs and education programs, or physical infrastructure investments necessary to keep them from remaining stuck in poverty. Before Katrina Louisiana and Mississippi were two of the poorest, sickest, and least educated states in the U.S., ranking with countries in the developing world, and in five years I think they probably still will be.
Sadly, I also read in this week’s New Yorker a piece by Nicholas Lemann, who it turns out is a New Orleanian, and whose parents have had to leave behind their home there. He’s pretty depressed. But in an accompanying interview, he does echo one sentiment that I’m hearing a lot: this is the beginning of the end for the anti-statist phase of our political cycle, as the 1927 New Orleans flood helped pave the way for the New Deal.
“New Yorker: Is this whole experience going to make people lose faith in government?
Nicholas Lemann: I certainly hope not. I hope it’ll have the exact opposite effect. Starting with Reagan’s inauguration, in 1981, when he said that government is the problem, I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that government is this kind of vague, ill-defined thing that does all this wasteful, stupid stuff, and nobody really needs it. This should be a moment that wakes people up to the need for a government that works. There’s no way to deal with this kind of thing without the federal government, as we’re seeing.”
So if we (and the world) are lucky, we may see progressives elected in the U.S. in the 2006 and 2008 elections who will start to reinvest in people and infrastructure instead of the military-industrial complex.
How does it all relate to technoprogressivism, the Singularity and emerging technologies? A key technoprogressive issue is the structural unemployment likely to emerge from economic globalization and automation. One of the key technoprogressive policy proposals is a basic income guarantee (BIG) to address both structural unemployment and the emerging “old age dependency” ratios attendant to life extension.
But one of the key debates in social policy (at least on the Left) has been about the relative utility of jobs programs and workfare versus “welfare” andbasic income. The jobs/workfare side has argued that (a) the quid pro quo of money for work gives people dignity, and reduces their dysfunctionality (TV watching, baby-making, crack-smoking, etc.), (b) addresses unmet social needs, and (c) is much more politically palatable than simple money-for-nothing. I think each of these arguments has merit, which is why we need to defend and expand labor-intensive government spending on health, education and infrastructure programs, and on job-training for jobs available in the private sector, at the same time that we build support for a basic income guarantee. Of course we will still face the situation that, at some point, a robotic tree planter displaces ten human tree planters, a nano-bot injection displaces a home care nursing team, and a robotic levee-builder displaces ten construction workers.
So BIG still needs to be front and center on our agenda, even as we struggle today to provide jobs, housing, education and a new, more sustainable, coastal economy and infrastructure for the victims of Katrina.
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