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Making America Great Again Isn’t Just About Money and Power [1]

['Robert J. Shiller']

Date: 2017-01-12

Difficult as job creation may be, making America great surely entails more than that, and it’s worth considering just what we should be trying to accomplish. Fortunately, political leaders and scholars have been thinking about national greatness for a very long time, and the answer clearly goes beyond achieving high levels of wealth.

Adam Smith, perhaps the first true economist, gave some answers in “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” That treatise is sometimes thought of as a capitalist bible. It is at least partly about the achieving of greatness through the pursuit of wealth in free markets. But Smith didn’t believe that money alone assured national stature. He also wrote disapprovingly of the single-minded impulse to secure wealth, saying it was “the most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Instead, he emphasized that decent people should seek real achievement — “not only praise, but praiseworthiness.”

Strikingly, national greatness was a central issue in a previous presidential election campaign: Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1964, called for the creation of a Great Society, not merely a rich society or a powerful society. Instead, he spoke of achieving equal opportunity and fulfillment. “The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents,” he said. “It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.”

President Johnson’s words still ring true. Opportunity is not equal for everyone in America. Enforced leisure has indeed become a feared cause of boredom and restlessness for those who have lost jobs, who have lost overtime work, who hold part-time jobs when they desire full-time employment, or who were pushed into unwanted early retirement.

But there are limits to what government can do. Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist, wrote that great nations need great cities, yet they cannot easily create them. “The great capitals of modern Europe did not become great cities because they were the capitals,” Ms. Jacobs said. “Cause and effect ran the other way. Paris was at first no more the seat of French kings than were the sites of half a dozen other royal residences.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/upshot/make-america-great-again-isnt-just-about-money-and-power.html

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