"We need, so he argues, to [...], and persist in the profligacies of crony capitalism."

It was a very tantalizing tidbit, Yochai, but I cannot figure out if it is meant as a satire on the free-market bent of Hundt, or a clear headed realization that as we cannot eleminate the profligacies of crony capitalism, we could put them to the best possible use in an outcome-oriented manner. This train of thought may lead to a fascinating set of policies.

I've been struggling with the unions vs. entrepreneurship issue for a couple years now. Unions have a profoundly useful purpose in any economy, and that's to help workers keep the playing field level when they go to the negotiating table with their bosses. These days, folks with a (good) college education are often have enough negotiating power that they really can use the threat of leaving as a bargaining tool to get a better or just execute that threat and find a better deal. In my industry, IT/software, this is the prevailing mentality: just quit and get a better job. And this is true up and down most of the job ladder from entry level all the way to senior executive. Before you dismiss this as the privilege of rich college kids or "management", recall that this is true in many, many office jobs and industries, and as Steve Rose reminds us, there are an awful lot of Americans who make enough money to do this. On the other hand, there are definitely the "unprotected" - anyone who works retail or any sort of unskilled job. These folks have very few possibilites to threaten or execute a job change for leverage. For them, the backstopping of a union is not just nice it's critical. The general aspiration of the public is to "cross the gap" from unskilled to skilled labor, or to have their kids do it. Unions' DNA is composed of protecting unskilled workers from getting a raw deal from management - it's what they've always been there to do. And the precise reason for their decline is that workers that have "crossed the gap" do not bring their unions with them, and do not trust unions. Ask yourself how many people you know that got to go to college because their union household could save for it, yet are weak on unions or anti-union. Unless unions reorient themselves to address this, they'll have a hard time getting broad public support.

The other essential thing you're touching is this. Reed's agenda is basically centered around the DLC's core policy prescription: accept that the industrial economy is giving way to a service/information economy, and try to help workers get ahead in that new economy via market incetivation rather than market restriction. But viewing that as an answer relies on the very rosy view that if we can just get people some education they'll do just fine. That's good as a long-term goalpost, but it's pretty short on what happens between here and there? Can we ever get everyone across the gap, and even if we can, what do we do in the half-century where lots of people are on the unhappy side of it?

I do profoundly support the long-term goal of a competitive, entrepreneurial America, especially one buttressed by social services that keep the commons in good shape: environment, healthcare, social insurance, access to capital etc. And I think Democrats should structure their agenda to keep us moving towards that goal, and not retrench with protection of industry or other dangerous bureaucratic entanglements. But it ain't easy. The Republicans refuse to accept that the gap exists, much less that getting across it requires anything other than personal virtue. Thus their simplistic answers: let the Free Market Fairy take care of people via Competitive Pixie Dust. In doing this, they manage to capture a lot of people's aspirational economic views: that they can and will get a good job, open a business, realize growth in their assets and investments.

Progressives, being realists about this subject, are struggling to bridge that gap. We cannot expect people to buy into our vision of a robust, equitable future if we cannot tap into people aspiration and hopefulness. On the the other hand, we deeply value providing opportunity for all. We must somehow unite these. The DLC's efforts to do this have always veered toward market solutions. While I don't attribute this to the corporatism that others accuse the DLC of, I think they tend to view moderation and Third Way-ism as a policy goal rather than a context-specific response to the politics of the 70s and 80s. Somehow they always want to split the difference a little bit more. On the other hand, there a plenty of unreconstructed progressives who still hold out that Marx's economic sociology can somehow be applied to the 21st century. It cannot. There are many ways to square this circle, and almost all of them involve standing up for the best of government. As I noted in response to Reed's initial post, it's an awfully fine mincing of words to think that the government can offer strong buttressing services and not be "redistributing" income.

Sorry for the long rant - make of it what you will.

I regret that I still see nothing new here at all, and very little of interest.

China here plays the same role as the Soviet Union did in the 1950s and '60s to justify the national highway system, the massive investment in science generated by the space race, and to a lesser extent, as an added justification for the second reconstruction. That is, it is an external threat that provides the justification for investment in core public goods.

Unfortunately, the danger that the Soviet threat posed was the politicization of the economy and the creation of a military industrial complex which, or all its accomplishment, produced very little. So the notion of yet another national policy based on xenophobia and paranoia politicizing the economy, pre-selecting winners and then guaranteeing the victory of those winners, no matter what, is hardly endearing.

China will leave us in the dust if we do not adopt a set of strategic policies that will make us a more entrepreneurial, risk-taking society capable of competing in the global knowledge economy.

And the United States is not already an entrepreneurial, risk-taking society competing in the global knowledge economy?

Was this intended to be a meaningful prescription. Or did a set of buzzwords take on a life of their own.

How entrepreneurial can a society afford to be? How much risk should a society undertake? How many chucks should a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck would chuck wood?

Assuming that the United States is not sufficiently entrepreneurial and risk taking, why not? Was it once sufficiently entrepeneurial, and has gotten all stodgy? If so, why? And if that's the case, are Reed's solutions meaningful?

Or is this simply a situation of 'pray harder'? The answers are revealed truth, and if they aren't working out yet in real life, then the answer is not to go back and rethink... but just keep doing what you're doing, harder, longer, louder, faster until you succeed (or collapse).

We need, so he argues, to invest massively in knowledge infrastructure, wake up from our ideologically-motivated failure to invest in education, universal healthcare, and a social safety net, and persist in the profligacies of crony capitalism.

Laudable, but hardly revolutionary. And in truth, the short term trends all seem to be going the other way. Everyone gives lip service to a highly educated well trained work force... And in fact, some employers are motivated by just such a thing. But no one wants to pay for it.

The mobility of capital and investment means that it is simplest to move to a region whose demographics, whether slave labour or highly trained, fit your needs. There's no particular incentive to create those conditions. The Entrepreneurial, risk taking society is eating its seed corn, but frankly, that's the best, short term, immediate solution. And frankly, if you want to be competitive, then you can't afford to do anything else.

So, Reed's proscription here, much as we'd both like to see a better world, is just another recipe for eating the seed corn.

Instead, I understand him to be suggesting that life-long education coupled with a social and medical safety net should provide the insurance necessary to shift to a much more risk-taking, entrepreneurial culture. Open communications and information infrastructures, targetted antitrust enforcement, and pro-entrepreneur tax policies must complement these changes.

This sort of rhetoric was becoming stale and empty in the 1980's. I don't see it as terribly realistic or profound. So, fifty year old steelworkers or stockbrokers can just go back, start all over again, re-educate, retrain and then do what? Start all over again. Doing what? You want fries with that?

Is Entrepreneurialism the only thing? We're all going to get rich selling each other hats? I'm sorry, I come from a hardscrabble entrepreneurial family. The reality of entrepreneurialism is that people work like dogs, have no security at all, and 90% fail within five years. That's just the way it works.

These proscriptions seem like a recipe for an endless merry go round of creative destruction, a continual changing of hats, dipping into and out of the job market like fish, assuming that jobs like those fish, are fundamentally interchangeable despite requiring skill sets. Last week I was a computer programmer, but in five years I'll be a brain surgeon, and two years after that a carpenter. Human beings are to be free electrons bouncing around in self creating molecules of infrastructure.

With all due respect, I'm glad that you read the book and find something worthy in it.

But your monologue fails to persuade. I see in it, only the endlessly repeated buzzwords of a bygone era, its promises hollow. I appreciate the attempt to cobble a hoary load of cliches together as a raison d'etre of progressive reform and social renewal. But ultimately, my question is the same as yours...

Will it work?

For all this vision, what does it amount to in real terms. These grand utopian principles, these buzzwords, what exactly does it come down to when the pedal hits the medal, when you're on the ground floors and front lines? When Mister Reality comes through the front door, takes off his shoes and decides to set a spell?

How is this not simply more of the same old same old? And does the wrinkle that 'Oooh the chinese are gonna get us!' really juice up a prescription that on its own merits is tired and not particularly working?

There was a study done a few years ago which showed that the greater the concentration of wealth at the top was, the less healthy and competitive, globally, the economy of the country was.

Given that this country has gone for competing globally, it would seem obvious that we ahould pay attention to this information.

I think I understand Reed Hundts view. He's really arguing for nothing more than a return to Clintonism, and the completion of the Clinton program. It's just more of the same old Third Way, neoliberal market worship we had in the nineties. The mantra of the Clinton era was “change”. the idea was that we are all supposed to embrace and learn to love the idea that we are fatalistically doomed to living in a lightning-paced world where we have to change our jobs every few years, change our "careers" just as frequently and move several times from one part of the country to another.

In order to play the role of well-machined parts in the chaotic ever-changing economic machine, a machine that has miraculously transcended any susceptibility to real human control, we constantly have to be retooled, or retrained (never actually "reeducated", or even educated to begin with). To compensate for the constant insecurity, dislocation and episodic unemployment, we get to have a wonderful "social safety net". The safety net is there so that when we fall off the roller coaster, the economic Leviathan can scoop us up in its jaws and reinsert us into some new car.

We also get to have gobs of craptastic American consumer stuff in this world. This proves that our "standard of living" is rising.

The trajectory of this rocket to the future actually lands us in a debased form of human existence that continually pulls spouse apart from spouse, parent from child, friend from friend and neighbor from neighbor. It is a brave new world in which all human relationships are built to be transient. Their are few real vocations - just jobs - and nothing that builds depth and rootedness and enduring bonds. Your identity consists of nothing more than can be packed in a U-Haul. Home isn’t where the heart is, or the place where your life-long friends live - there aren't any of those. It's just a house that you speculate in, and cohabit with your probably very temporary spouse and temporary children.

I never thought I would see so many Democrats gushing over this dehumanizing go-go capitalism, with its radical deregulation, “creative destruction”, easy money, rampant speculation and hucksterism, and all the other quick buck, socially indifferent wonders upon which it is built.

The Telecom Act … that’s the one that helped give us that world class, watchdog media we all admire so much, right. The media that revealed the truth, keep us out of Iraq, and saved all those soldiers' lives, right? It opened up the competitive waters so well that 5 huge fish gobbled up everyone else.

And hear this: according to the market gurus, there is absolutely, positively no choice about any of this, you see. We just have to become mechanized, deracinated consumers of sensation and nothingness, because we must maintain our competitiveness. It's those damn Chinese - there the ones to blame if anyone is! We'll have to remember to retool ourselves into defense workers, so we can build a lot fancy new bombs and death rays and incendiaries and giant floating murder factories. We'll need to fight a war in the not-to-distant future, and creatively destroy those yellow bastards - and then very progressively transform the survivors into Democrats. Man, there is nothing like a common enemy to make me feel all warm and unified with my fellow Americans. My life will have purpose again. Thank you Mr. Hundt!

I’m no economist, but I just don’t beleive people were meant to live this way. There has to be some way we can build a society around enduring, sustainable communities, and reverse the trends that are turning us all into parts sold for our labor, and shipped around the country like so many UPS parcels. When are "progressive" economic intellectuals going to tell us how we can get the kinds of lives we really want, rather the kind of life the Great Market God demands that we have.