Lumberjacks of the mind

George F Will, as is his wont, bemoans interventionism in the following terms:

In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages and then reduced employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.

Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision making. Which sounds familiar.

But his conclusion should make us think twice:

[...] A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over.

More here.

Some of us might be tempted to say the fact that a New Deal is being contemplated is precisely because the capitalist tools our economies have tended to use lead to the same damn thing over and over.

For it wasn't the New Deal or government intervention that encouraged banks to set up dodgy investment arms and put at risk their retail funds, deposits, customers and reputations. It wasn't outsized parasitic bureaucracies that led corporate boards to pay their staff fifty percent of their revenues in salaries and bonuses. It wasn't the state unbound which froze the desire of all banks to lend to their own customers and each other.

Thus it is, surely, that our challenge is twofold. How to know history without reneging on it. How to learn from history without repeating it.

We are blessed with the benefit of hindsight. We are blessed with the benefit of immensely powerful analytical tools. It shouldn't be beyond us to get it right this time round.

Unless, of course, the ideological trappings of our current systems of work have so shaped our tools to the inevitability of their ways of seeing that we are unable to step outside the mindsets such inevitabilities impose.

Are we blinded to reality by our very immersion in detail? Who can offer the overviews we need to clear away - to allow us to ignore - the undergrowth?

In need of an ecology of information, is it actually lumberjacks of the mind we most urgently require in order that we may see ahead with the clarity we desire?