Barack Obama sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s Bob Davis and Amy Chozick’s yesterday to talk about economic policy in considerable detail. There are plenty of interesting exchanges, but I was especially fond of Obama’s remarks about empiricism.
The Journal asked about what role Bob Rubin might play in an Obama administration, and Obama noted that he likes to hear competing ideas from Rubin to Bob Reich to “folks in between.” When the Journal asked if he’s willing to give Reich “another shot,” Obama said:
“I tend to be eclectic. I do think we’re in a different time in 2008 than we were in 1992. The thing I think people should feel confident in is that I’m going to make these judgments not based on some fierce ideological pre-disposition but based on what makes sense. I’m a big believer in evidence. I’m a big believer in fact. You know, if somebody shows me we can do something better through a market mechanism, I’m happy to do it. I have no vested interest in expanding government or setting up a program just for the sake of setting one up. It’s too much work.
“On the health-care front, for example, if I actually believed that just providing a tax cut to everybody would solve the problem of lack of health insurance and cure health-care inflation, I’d say great, that’s a nice way to do it. It prevents a lot of headaches. But I’ve seen no evidence that the kinds of policies John McCain puts forward would actually work.
“If I saw strong evidence that an additional $300 billion in tax cuts that John has proposed — without a clear way of paying for it — would actually boost economic growth and productivity, I’d be happy to take a look at that evidence. But I haven’t seen that. It’s all conjecture.”
I realize my perspective is clouded in part by nearly eight years of mind-numbing disappointment in a president and his team who, as one White House official once boasted, create their “own reality,” but the kind of pragmatic thinking Obama outlined to the WSJ is not only heartening, it helps reinforce one of the key differences between the contemporary ideologies of the left and right.
I’m reminded of a terrific articles Jonathan Chait wrote a couple of years ago (but which I can no longer find online).
We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.
The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy — more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition — than conservatism.
Now, liberalism’s pragmatic superiority wouldn’t matter to a true ideological conservative any more than news about the medical benefits of pork (to pick an imaginary example) would cause a strictly observant Jew to begin eating ham sandwiches. But, if you have no particular a priori preference about the size of government and care only about tangible outcomes, then liberalism’s aversion to dogma makes it superior as a practical governing philosophy.
Obama didn’t mention Chait, but Chait’s description of liberal pragmatism mirrors Obama’s comments about how he approaches policies like healthcare.
McCain says, for example, that he wants to extend more coverage to more people, including those with pre-existing conditions. But that, of course, would require imposing government regulations on insurance companies. Regulations are wrong, not because they don’t work, but because they conflict with conservative ideology. McCain’s policy can’t conflict with the ideology, so those with pre-existing conditions are left behind. It’s a simple matter involving priorities — political philosophy over political pragmatism. Obama’s thinking is the reverse — the goal isn’t expanding the size of government or contorting a policy to match an ideology; it’s about reaching the desired practical goal.
More generally, consider the tax-cut argument in 2001. Bush’s sales pitch was all over the map in explaining why the cuts would be worthwhile. On different occasions, Bush insisted tax cuts for billionaires are a good idea when the economy is bad, when the economy is good, when the deficit is low, when the deficit is high, when the public needs to spend more, when the public needs to save more, and when energy costs are too high. One quickly got the impression that the tax cuts were not about achieving a desired policy goal — the tax cuts were the policy goal.
The same applies to privatization. The right will argue that privatizing a government service — say, Social Security to take a random example — will produce a variety of policy goals (broader wealth, increased savings, fewer government expenditures, lower taxes, etc.) When faced with empirical evidence that privatization wouldn’t generate those goals, the right will offer a different policy rationale. If it’s debunked as well, it doesn’t matter because the right wants privatization anyway. Their ideology dictates that privatization is, prima facie, superior. Whether it achieves an additional policy goal doesn’t matter, because privatization is the policy goal.
As this relates to the public discourse, Chait said it makes “empirical reasoning pointless.” For most conservatives, the logical process “begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.” It prompted Paul O’Neill, Bush’s former Treasury secretary, to note that when dealing with Bush administration officials, “You don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.”
For Obama, the principal question is, “Does it work?” For McCain, it’s, “Is it ideologically sound?”