Politics And Culture

In David Brooks' latest column, he observes the pointed disagreement between the German and American Governments in how to approach the economic crisis. American leaders argued... governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued... what was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence. He notes that the early returns seem to favor the Germans. Recycling Von Hayek, he believes this is because

The economy can’t be played like a piano — press a fiscal key here and the right job creation notes come out over there. Instead, economic management is more like parenting. If you instill good values and create a secure climate then, through some mysterious process you will never understand, things will probably end well.

The crucial issue is getting the fundamentals right. The Germans are doing better because during the past decade, they took care of their fundamentals and the Americans didn’t.

He believes the underlying reason the Germans have done better is because they "inherited a certain consensus-based economic model", while Americans have inherited an economic model that "fosters disruptive innovation (of the sort useful in Silicon Valley)" but has "a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking." Recycling Moynihan, he believes it all reduces to:

Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions...  German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well...  The U.S. has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling... [where] political division frustrates long-range thinking.

To blame irresponsible government on "political division", is simply to re-frame the question: Assuming this is, in fact, so (and I am not convinced): Why is American politics more divisive than German politics?

What seems evident to me -- and perhaps implicit in Brooks' argument -- is that the divisiveness in American politics is a reflection of the divided-ness in American society. We lack the ethnic ties that bind other societies, and -- as illustrated by the WTC Mosque debate -- we lack any unifying conception of American Ideals/Values.

One the other hand, it is not clear that the cause of institutional irresponsibility is political divisiveness. For example, in Von Hayek's teaching, the values the "parenting model" calls for instilling, are the context-specific product of an evolutionary trial and error process. In other words, much clearer with-in a consensus-based context than a disruptively innovative one.

The ultimate argument contra-Brooks is Japan, consensus-based and not particularly politically divisive, in whose economic footsteps, America is now following. In contrasting Japan and Germany, what sticks out is the resistance the Japanese have towards accepting responsibility for WWII war crimes against the willingness of Germans to do so. It should not be surprising that being a society which generally accepts responsibility is related to having a government that acts responsibly. What is reflexively somewhat more surprising is what this indicates of American society.