bottom up

There’s a weird symmetry between the Right and the Left. It’s difficult to articulate, but it’s becoming clearer to me now. They’re both Keynesians, only in different domains. The Left are Keynesians about economics, the Right are Keynesians about political strategy. The trouble with either is that Keynesianism doesn’t work very well anywhere it's applied.

Lest I lose my reader straight out of the gate, allow me to explain in simpler terms the defining characteristics of what I’ll call the “Keynesian Model.” This model:

1. Deals almost exclusively in macro-level aggregates.

2. Holds that these aggregates are mostly informative.

3. Information can be successfully used for macro purposes.

For example, in economics, Keynesians want to tweak or “stimulate” the economy by raining largess on particular sectors to stimulate aggregate labor demand, say.

But the trouble with this way of looking at the world is:

I. The micro-level is where most of the action is.

II. The devil of the economy is in the details of billions of individual means-ends actions, coordinations and transactions, which makes knowledge mostly local.

III. These details are far to complex to be reduced to aggregates and manipulated to positive effect.

Now, I believe the Left has figured out I-III in the political domain, though sadly not in the economic (indeed, I seriously doubt they care about the micro mechanisms of economic growth at all, as I argue here.  Keynesian policies of the Obama Administration are merely a pretext for the end of consolidating power, economics be damned. But I digress.). The point is, the right seems to be under a similar spell, except in their approach to political strategy.