Greider on Fogel in the Nation

I def want to see us follow up on JC's post about the Roberts nomination. Problem is, I don't anything about the guy. And I don't think I'm the only one. The American Progress Report arrived in the inbox yesterday morning with the subject line "The Nominee You Know Nothing About."

But for now, I got a UofC reference for you. I've been working through a backlog of Nation issues, so just getting through the cover story of the 27 June '05 issue:

Riding Into the Sunset: It is time for a serious solution to the problem of retirement
security.
William Greider
The Nation (June 27, 2005 issue)

The 2nd half of it repeats the usual sort of progressive complaints about corporate/free-market approaches to these issues. But the interesting part is the first couple sections, which presents an alternative to the CW that aging population and ever-increasing life spans are a "monumental problem." Instead, Greider frames his article with the themes from a recent book by Robert Fogel, "a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and a septuagenarian himself." Here's Greider's summary of Fogel's thesis:

America, he reminds us, is a very wealthy nation. The expanding longevity is not a financial burden but an enormous and underdeveloped asset. If US per capita income continues to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent a year, the country will have plenty of money to finance comfortable retirements and high-quality healthcare for all citizens, including those at the bottom of the wage ladder. When politicians talk about raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 in order to "save" the system, they are headed backward and against the tide of human aspirations. The average retirement age, Fogel observes, has been falling in recent decades by personal choice and is now around 63. Given proper financing arrangements, he expects the retirement age will eventually fall to as low as 55--allowing everyone to enjoy more leisure years and to explore the many dimensions of "spiritual development" or "self-realization," as John Dewey called it.

"What then is the virtue of increasing spending on retirement and health rather than goods?" Fogel asked in his latest book, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2000). "It is the virtue of providing consumers in rich countries with what they want most." What people want is time--more time to enjoy life and learning, to focus on the virtuous aspects of one's nature, to pursue social projects free of economic necessity, to engage their curiosity and self-knowledge or their political values. The great inequity in modern life, as Fogel provocatively puts it, is the "maldistribution of spiritual resources," that is, the economic insecurity that prevents people from exploring life's larger questions. Everyone could attain a fair share of liberating security, he asserts, if government undertook strategic interventions in their behalf.

Fogel's strategic interventions are modelled on pension systems such as (specifically) TIAA-CREF, calling for compulsory saving, but would be adminstered by the federal government. And interestingly, Fogel also calls for a progressive redistribution of wealth. Not the kind of thinking one expects to be coming out of the UofC econ dept. Read the piece for more details.

Arun and I were saying a couple weeks ago that it was really silly and stupid of us not to have taken a single econ course at UofC. Intellectual snobbery induced by all those budding I-bankers.

Speaking of UofC economists, I'm hoping to make it to the Commonwealth Club next Thurs for the Levitt and Dubner event. After going back last week to hear one our city Supervisors speak, I decided to splurge on a membership to the CC. Here's one speaker I'm looking forward to: the RZA in a few weeks.

One last link for those of you that stuck with me this far: a live Moodymann mix I got through the 313 list. Moodymann's known as a deep Detroit house head, but this mix starts out with some funk (check out at least the first track, a twisted Prince-like track titled "Freaky Muthaf*cka") and then segues into some live vocal jazz.