New Ideas

About this time in every election cycle, we begin to hear candidates, pundits and observers talking about how we need "new ideas."

The belief in new ideas isn't universal, though. Or even belief in novelty of any kind. For example:

"9  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9

At least in human affairs, the preacher who wrote that book seems to be right. The more familiar you are with history, the more it appears that every so-called new idea is just a revamping of some idea long known to humankind.

Even so, if the idea is something you have never heard about, it seems new.

Yesterday's New York Times had an article lamenting not just the paucity of new ideas, but the shortages of any ideas at all. Neal Gabler, senior fellow at the Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California writes of The Elusive Big Idea. Gabler observes that not only do we no longer have big thinkers, our best new ideas seem trivial. He attributes the problem to a surfeit of information, readily available over the internet, which paradoxically crowds out thought and ideas.

The economist Jared Bernstein takes issue with Gabler. At least in the field of economics, Bernstein contends, ideas have been suppressed by a confluence of wealth and power.

"The financial crash of the 2000s revealed a confluence of many powerful and socially disruptive forces: levels of income inequality not seen since the dawn of the Great Depression, stagnant middle-class living standards amidst strong productivity growth, solid evidence that deregulated markets were driving a damaging bubble and bust cycle, deep repudiation of supply-side economics, and most importantly, even deeper repudiation of the dominant, Greenspanian paradigm that markets will self-correct." Despite the evidence and the warnings of economists, Bernstein continues, "And yet, at least from where I sit today, we let the moment pass.  Far from a debate over a new paradigm, our national political economy discussion is bereft of ideas, leaving us mired in recession as we self-inflict one economic wound after another.  Forget new ideas—we can’t seem to correctly apply the old ones!"

Why is that?  Bernstein explains: "Why did we squander the opportunity?  Not because there’s so much information on the web.  It is, at least in part, because the concentration of wealth and power blocked the new ideas from a fair hearing."