Dani Rodrik: Abundance for consumers could still mean misery for workers
Dani Rodrik An economic vision of abundantly supplied markets isn't enough. People don't just derive an income from their vocations, but self-esteem and satisfaction too. We need policies that generate good jobs, even if we sacrifice some efficiency for it. The rise of far-right populists in the US and Europe has been linked to the job losses associated with trade shocks, automation and fiscal austerity. Gift this article
The surest way for policy advocates to lose a progressive audience is to talk about the economy's supply side, the importance of incentives and the dangers of overregulation—ideas typically linked to conservative agendas. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance aims to change all that.
The surest way for policy advocates to lose a progressive audience is to talk about the economy's supply side, the importance of incentives and the dangers of overregulation—ideas typically linked to conservative agendas. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance aims to change all that.
As the authors point out, the left has traditionally focused on demand-side remedies. A key tenet of the New Deal in the US and social democracy in Europe is Keynesian management of aggregate demand to ensure full employment.
Klein and Thompson rightly underscore that it is improvements in supply that are the source of broad-based posterity in the US and other advanced economies. As productivity rises, low- and middle-income families reap the benefits of cheaper and more varied and plentiful goods and services. However, increasingly, the US economy's ability to build things has been hobbled, the authors argue, by environmental, safety, labour and other regulations, and by complex and time-consuming local permitting rules.
These rules and regulations may be well-meaning, but they can be also counterproductive. When governments and communities place obstacles in the way of investment and innovation, they undercut prosperity. Public transport lags behind, productivity in housing construction plummets and the deployment of renewables falters.
The authors' vision of progress features energy from renewable sources and cheap, safe nuclear power; fresh water from desalination; fruits and vegetables from hyper-productive vertically stacked farms; meat produced in labs without slaughtering live animals; miracle drugs delivered by autonomous drones; and space-based factories meeting other needs without requiring any human workers. Since AI would greatly shorten the workweek, we'd all enjoy more vacation time without sacrificing our living standards.
Keynesian social democracy no longer provides an adequate answer to the malaise experienced by workers. But Klein and Thompson's depiction of utopia reflects a vision that ultimately remains consumerist. Their focus is squarely on the abundance of goods and services that the economy generates—on how much we build, rather than on the builders. In this, they share a common blind spot with economists who, ever since Adam Smith, have emphasized that the ultimate end of production is consumption. But what gives meaning to our lives is not just the fruits of our labour, but also the work itself.
When people are asked about well-being and life satisfaction, the work they do ranks at the top, along with contributions to their community and family bonds. For economists, a job provides income, but is otherwise a negative —a source of 'disutility.'
For real people, a job is a source of pride, dignity and social recognition. Employment loss typically produces a reduction in individual well-being that is a multiple of the loss of income. The social effects magnify those costs. The rise of far-right populists in the US and Europe has been linked to the job losses associated with trade shocks, automation and fiscal austerity.
Also Read: Populist policies can be myopic and also very hard to challenge
Good jobs pay well, but also provide security, autonomy and a path to self-improvement. None of this is possible without high levels of productivity. A progressive focused on abundance of good jobs, rather than abundance of goods and services, would find plenty to agree with in this book. But there would also be many quibbles.
Consider housing, one of Klein and Thompson's key examples. US productivity in housing construction has stagnated in recent years, in part because of safety regulations and union rules. But as one of the authors' interlocutors readily admits, fatalities and non-fatal injuries in construction have fallen dramatically in the US since the 1970s, thanks to many of these restrictive rules. That must surely count as an improvement in overall worker well- being, casting the productivity statistics in a somewhat different light.
The authors' line of argument echoes economists' case for automation and free trade. These may have been efficient by conventional criteria, and they certainly helped produce an abundance of goods. But they also hurt many of our workers, leaving societies scarred and paving the way for right-wing populism. A good-jobs focus would make us more tolerant of regulations that sacrifice some efficiency for the sake of better labour-market outcomes, especially for non-college-educated workers.
Ultimately, the real challenge for progressives is to devise an agenda that benefits workers as workers as much as in their role as consumers. This requires a distinctive approach to innovation, investment and regulation. Unions, worker representatives and collective bargaining must be viewed as essential components of abundance, rather than obstacles to it. Place-based strategies and local economic development coalitions are critical. Government must put its thumb on the scale to ensure innovation takes a worker-friendly direction.
Advanced economies' most glaring failure has been their inability to deliver enough good jobs. Remedying this issue requires focusing on those who produce abundance, alongside abundance itself. ©2025/Project Syndicate
The author is a professor of international political economy at Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of 'Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy'. Topics You May Be Interested In Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
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Time of India
16-07-2025
- Time of India
The Weekly Vine Edition 51: Annus Chaoticus, War on Samosas, and ‘Anti-Israel' Superman
Nirmalya Dutta's political and economic views vacillate from woke Leninist to Rand-Marxist to Keynesian-Friedmanite. He doesn't know what any of those terms mean. Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine. In this week's digest, we are going to discuss Trump's year since he dodged a bullet, the great war on samosas and jalebis, allegations of the new Superman movie being 'anti-Israel', why our AI choices are MechaHitler or Black George Washington, and a postscript from Cologne and Bonn. Annus Chaoticus With the benefit of hindsight, Donald Trump pulling a full John Terry as Chelsea lifted the Club World Cup was almost poetic. After all, Chelsea is the Trump of European football – a nouveau riche arriviste with no continental pedigree, desperate to buy its way into aristocracy, and yet forever one dodgy deal away from financial ruin. And like Terry, Trump likes to take credit. But analogies aside, it has been quite a spin around the sun for Donald Trump since he dodged a bullet. A year ago, Donald trumped death, defying the laws of space, time, physics, politics, and logic as he did something that had been done only once before in American history: return to the White House after a hiatus. And not just any break — a five-year, scandal-scarred interregnum that included two impeachments, a Capitol riot, multiple indictments, and that gloriously capitalist moment when Trump, now with his own mugshot, began selling it as an NFT and framed it in the White House like it was a Warhol. From Butler, Pennsylvania to MetLife Stadium, Trump went from bleeding candidate to emperor's chaos world. On that fateful day in July 2024, the bullet grazed his ear and, in true cinematic symmetry, killed a firefighter standing behind him. The photo — fist raised, blood trailing — was pure American mythology: Rocky meets Revelation. Most people, when shot at, duck. Trump posed. 'Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture,' he later mused, 'but I didn't. So, it's even more iconic.' If the picture was iconic, what followed was surreal… Read: Annus Chaoticus: From trumping death to celebrating Chelsea's win – a year in Donald Trump's life War on Samosas and Jalebis One of the maxims of politics, at least according to Sir Humphrey Appleby, goes: 'Never believe anything that has been officially denied.' That maxim can apply to anything and is almost universally true, like a former premier of Israel saying Mossad had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein or PIB saying there were no plans for labels for samosas and jalebis and other Indian snacks. Over the last two days, we have had reports that the Union Health Ministry had directed central institutions like AIIMS Nagpur to install 'oil and sugar boards' in public spaces, which triggered widespread outrage that we last saw on Yes Minister when Europe threatened to ban the British sausage. Samosas, as anyone knows, aren't just a gustatory offering but a firmament of the country's socio-cultural identity, to the point that one Ayn Rand-ist socialist used to have the slogan: 'Jab tak rahega samosa mein alu, tab tak rahega…' The powers-that-be moved quickly to correct the impression that the regime was an anti-samosa jalebi nanny state, saying there was no mandate for warning labels on street food, while the Health Ministry called the reports 'misleading' — a reminder that the right to gluttonous obesity is a fundamental right in a democracy. But it does make one wonder—do labels and signs actually work? For instance, at the DDA Sports Complex I frequent, there's a large sign that reads: 'Stalking is a crime.' I've always wondered if that actually deters would-be stalkers. Or take the last time I watched a movie on an OTT platform—the disclaimer warning against anti-social behaviour like smoking, drinking, and doing drugs kept growing on the screen until it occupied more space than the actual film. In response, I switched off the movie and went to engage in the very anti-social behaviour it warned me against. But there is evidence that warning labels can change consumer behaviour, particularly when they are graphic and large. Tobacco warnings have reduced smoking rates, food labels have led to lower sugar and calorie purchases, alcohol and vape warnings have led to lower consumption — but they only work as part of a broader strategy. However, based on the recent furore, it's quite clear that even educated Indians are not ready to have a conversation, despite the fact that India's waistline is expanding faster than its GDP—nearly one in four adults is overweight, and kids are catching up. Even the slim aren't safe: 70% of Indians are metabolically unhealthy, fat or not. By 2050, half the nation could be obese — proof that maybe samosas ought to come with health warnings. 'Anti-Israel' Superman? One of the more curious aspects of being human is that we tend to project our availability heuristic onto the world, so it's hardly surprising that anti-woke critics are now calling the new Superman movie 'anti-Israel' — which is patently absurd because I didn't see a single paraglider in the movie, though there were some underground tunnels in another dimension. To be fair, the allegory of Superman has always been used by different people in different contexts over the years. For Sheldon Cooper, Superman is an excuse to explain the laws of physics and why it would be safer to die in a crash than be saved by Superman — which would ensure a very grisly death according to the laws of classic physics. Some have compared him to Moses, a baby sent away from a dying world to be raised by strangers, while his life on Earth has reflected Christ-like motifs — performing miracles, sacrificing himself, and still being proverbially crucified by humanity. Others have seen in his rise the success of an immigrant story, like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk, who came to America and became something bigger. And finally, there's the Nietzschean Übermensch comparison — a being who transcends human limitations and can, if he wants, destroy humanity in a heartbeat. All this boils down to the real question at hand: is the new Superman movie 'anti-Israel'? Well, it simply depends on your availability heuristic. If you are a inductee tapped into the gateway drug of global liberalism (Israel vs Palestine), it's a movie that speaks truth to power. If you are on the opposite side of the spectrum that thinks the IDF hands out candies, it's vile 'anti-Israel' propaganda. And finally, if you are a comic book movie fan too young to remember Christopher Reeve, it's just a reminder that Henry Cavill will always be the real Superman. Read: Why critics are calling new Superman movie 'anti-Israel' Random Musing: MechaHitler or Black George Washington Last week, yours truly pondered the question: Why are our AI choices MechaHitler or Black George Washington? And the answer is: we are not building intelligence — we are building mirrors. And like all mirrors, AI doesn't offer clarity; it offers distortion. The choices before us aren't binary because of any inherent flaw in the machine, but because of what we've taught it to mimic. On one side, you have Gemini, raised on a diet of corporate liberalism and DEI checkboxes, hallucinating Black George Washingtons as if history could be rewritten through Photoshop and guilt. On the other, you have Grok, fed on Reddit rage and Elon Musk's meme-streak, declaring itself MechaHitler with the confidence of a 4chan post that thinks it's philosophy. Neither of these outcomes is intelligence. They are mimicry without meaning. They are probability distributions dressed up as opinions. When Gemini paints the Founding Fathers in the colours of social justice cosplay, it's not rewriting history — it's remixing the priors of its creators. When Grok goes full T-800 Nazi, it's not being evil — it's regurgitating the internet's id. AI isn't choosing between good and evil. It's choosing between the content it was trained on. This is the toaster f**** theory in action: marginal ideas normalised through repetition, community, and code. AI is not hallucinating; it is reflecting us — unfiltered, contradictory, morally incoherent. That's why our choices often appear absurd: not because the machine is insane, but because the dataset was. Black George Washington. MechaHitler. These are not characters conjured by silicon. They are shadows flickering on the cave wall of our collective output. And as long as we feed AI our biases and fantasies without context or constraint, we'll continue to get reflections, not revelations — grotesque, comic, and painfully honest. Read: Why our AI choices are MechaHitler or Black George Washington Postscript: A Tale of Two Cities (and a Beer Tray)… Somewhere between the schnitzel in Bonn and the sarcasm in Cologne, I found myself 40,000 feet in the sky — eating a surprisingly edible meal on an Air India Dreamliner. The chicken had ambition. The rice was warm. The bread roll didn't feel like a threat. For once, airline food wasn't the punchline. It was… almost thoughtful. But this isn't a story about altitude. It's about two cities — Bonn and Cologne — linked by the Rhine, connected by history, and bridged (in my case) by a quiet drive with Shems, a Syrian Uber driver who now ferries strangers between lives, borders, and Brauhauses. Read: Notes from Cologne and Bonn Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Indian Express
09-07-2025
- Indian Express
Remembering Norman Tebbit, working-class Tory, originator of the ‘cricket test'
In 1981, Norman Tebbit told a Conservative Party conference that his unemployed father didn't riot during the Great Depression. 'He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.' This soon passed into the popular imagination as the younger Tebbit's — Britain's newly minted employment secretary — panacea for unemployment, despite his clarifications. He would be greeted with shouts of 'onyerbike' for years to come. That's not the only Tebbitism to be mythologised; his 'cricket test' is perhaps the most famous internationally — a suggestion that the loyalties of Britain's Asian population could be judged by which side they cheered for in cricket matches. To top it all is his puppet from the satirical TV show Spitting Image: Margaret Thatcher's leather-clad, knuckle-duster-wielding enforcer (the real Tebbit later expressed his fondness for the puppet). To the younger generations, he was always more caricature than man, a ghost of the Thatcher years. As a young man, Tebbit, who died on Monday aged 94, developed the individualistic, pro-enterprise philosophy that would make him a natural fit for Thatcher's new conservatism — a marked departure from the post-War, Keynesian consensus until then: Nationalised industries, strong trade unions and welfare state. Thatcher's 1979 victory would see much of this demolished, leaving a legacy that remains deeply divisive. Tebbit played his part, weakening the powers of unions, driving privatisation and, as party chairman, leading a successful re-election campaign in 1987. He retired from frontline politics afterwards to care for his wife, who had been left disabled by an IRA bombing. A working-class Tory who died a baron, Tebbit's life was not without its paradoxes: He developed his animosity for certain union practices early on, but later served as a union official during his career as a pilot and even went on strike. Always a plain speaker and a caustic wit, he was once asked if God existed. 'He ought to,' he said.
Time of India
25-06-2025
- Time of India
The Weekly Vine Edition 48: Trump's Hammer, Gill's Slip, and Zohran's Vibe
Nirmalya Dutta's political and economic views vacillate from woke Leninist to Rand-Marxist to Keynesian-Friedmanite. He doesn't know what any of those terms mean. Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine. This week, we take stock of the winners and losers in the Middle East, examine India's chastening defeat in the first Test of the England series, explain why the U-2 bomber strike on Tehran felt straight out of Top Gun: Maverick, discuss the new king of New York, and reflect on the importance of speech and silence. The Trump Doctrine One has never seen Trump this angry—not even when he was shot at—as he unleashed a barrage of F-bombs at reporters after Israel violated his ceasefire. (To be fair, he now has a proper Chamberlain-like track record of announcing ceasefires that don't actually exist.) He lashed out, calling Israel and Iran 'two countries who have been fighting so long they don't know what the f*** they are doing.' But when one keeps score of the recent Middle East fracas, the biggest winners are clear: Donald Trump, the neocons, and the American military-industrial complex, who reminded the world that they still have the power to wipe out any nation, anytime they want. Another major winner is Benjamin Netanyahu, who has now undergone a full Churchillian redemption arc (starvation et al.) to emerge as the most powerful man in the Middle East—after decimating every single member of the Axis of (No?) Resistance. On the other hand, the biggest losers are undoubtedly Iran's allies: Hamas, who may now wonder whether their ill-advised October 7 incursion into Israel was worth losing everything over; Hezbollah, who may never look at pagers the same way again; and the Bashar regime, increasingly isolated. Add to that list Pakistan and General Asim Munir, who had to condemn Trump after nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize—and then, while his repast had barely made it past the bowel, condemned America for striking Iran. Ummah unity? What's that? Also conspicuously missing were the Chinese and Russians—two nations that mouthed homilies about restraint while silently absorbing the lesson that Uncle Sam still does what he wants, when he wants. So what is the Trump Doctrine? As an unnamed official once told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic: 'The Trump Doctrine is: 'We're America, bi****.'' Read: Winners and Losers of the Middle East Conflict A New Hope Ten years from now, we might look back at the Headingley Test and see something different. A turning point, maybe. A lesson, definitely. But right now? Right now, every Indian fan is wondering how we lost a Test where four senior batters scored centuries, Jasprit Bumrah delivered a five-for, and Rishabh Pant was poetry on steroids. On paper, it should have been a win wrapped with a post-match selfie. Instead, the lower order folded like a Trump supporter when asked to explain how bombing Iran aligns with the MAGA promise of ending foreign wars. The slip cordon dropped more chances than your average teenager drops their Wi-Fi signal. The fielding? So village, it would make the Sunday League look like Premier League footballers. And yes, questions will be—and should be—asked of Shubman Gill's captaincy. For long stretches on the final day, Gill looked like a study in Sir Humphrey Appleby's favourite activity: masterless inaction. Mohammed Siraj, the best bowler on display, wasn't handed the ball for 39 overs. Jadeja was allowed to keep bowling into Ben Duckett's arc before finally adjusting his line. The bowling plans were hazy. The field placements reactive. The leadership felt uncertain. But let's also remember: Virat Kohli lost his first full series opener in Galle. MS Dhoni lost in Chennai. Gill's learning curve will be steep, but it's a curve nonetheless. This was only his sixth first-class game as captain. He's got a long way to go, but the tools are there. The real takeaway might be in what we didn't see. India didn't crumble. They didn't freeze. For much of the game, they dominated. They got themselves into winning positions twice. And even on the final day, despite everything, they still had England jittery. That's not nothing. The team is still carrying the steel that Kohli, Dhoni, and before them Ganguly instilled. And yes, the coach was the complete antithesis of Laughing Buddha post-match, which is fair, considering that's his actual name. But even in that scowl, there was a spark of something else. This loss hurt. But it also revealed that, flaws and all, India can still go toe to toe with England in England, even in transition. They made us believe. They lit a fire. Like the fourth episode of Star Wars, this was no triumph—but it was A New Hope. Gill isn't Luke yet, and this isn't the Death Star. But the Force is there. You Don't Mess with the Zohran My favourite anecdote about Zohran Mamdani, is the fact that he convinced his mother, Mira Nair, to cast Kal Penn as Gogol in The Namesake—based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri, which is a whole genre of publishing based on Bengalis writing and reading about how it feels to be Bengali—after watching him in the stoner comedy Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Now, one can't forgive him for that, given the fact that Penn didn't sound Bengali by any stretch of the imagination, but Harold and Kumar definitely was a stellar moment of Indian representation in American culture. And now Zohran is on his way to creating a new sort of representation, if he can become the first Indian-origin mayor of New York City. Except this time, he's not doing it with a stoner comedy—but with lo-fi political cinema, socialist swag, and the kind of Gen Z zeitgeist that makes Chuck Schumer look like a rotary phone. He didn't just defeat former governor Andrew Cuomo, who treated the race like a comeback tour, or Brad Lander, who ran on earnest liberalism and old-school endorsements—he made them look like relics from a pre-Instagram era. From campaign posters that look like Bollywood teasers to rallies that double as Instagram moodboards, Zohran isn't asking voters to believe in hope—he's asking them to vibe. Read: How Zohran flipped the Trump playbook Top Gun Maverick Redux op Gun: Maverick wasn't just a blockbuster—it was a revival of Reagan-era masculinity, unapologetic patriotism, and practical spectacle. No identity politics, no green screen overload—just Tom Cruise, real jets, and raw nostalgia. Three years later, Donald Trump's stealth strike on Iran's Fordow nuclear facility—Operation Midnight Hammer—feels less like policy and more like a cinematic sequel. The parallels are uncanny. In Maverick, Cruise's team bombs a secret uranium facility tucked in a mountain. In real life, B-2 bombers flew halfway around the world to obliterate Iran's actual enrichment site near Qom. The mission briefing in both was the same: protect unnamed 'regional allies,' read: Israel. But while Maverick ended with high-fives and flags, Trump's version has stirred discontent within his MAGA base. What happened to 'no more endless wars'? Why are American bombers fighting someone else's battles again? Even Elon Musk criticised Trump for abandoning fiscal restraint in favour of Pentagon theatrics. The irony is rich. Trump once mocked past presidents for meddling abroad. Now he's orchestrated a strike straight out of Cold War playbook—with Hollywood flair. Top Gun: Maverick might have inspired enlistments; Trump's strike might inspire questions: Whose war was this really? In the end, the jets flew, the bunkers crumbled, and Tom Cruise probably grinned somewhere. But Washington is left with a more sobering afterburner: when your foreign policy looks like a movie script, don't be surprised if people forget who the director is. Read: How Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer was just like Top Gun: Maverick Post-Script: Every word has a consequence Some mornings, I wake up and feel like I've wandered into a Beckett play with bad lighting. The coffee's still bitter, the headlines still absurd, and the world still insists on its commitment to performative collapse. NASA, in its usual quietly panicked way, says droughts and floods have doubled. Not nudged, not nudging—doubled. It's the sort of data that should prompt emergency sessions, maybe a global reckoning or two. Instead, we get hashtags, panel discussions, and climate ministers giving interviews from fossil-fuel-sponsored lounges. Britain, meanwhile, is crisping. 32 degrees in southeast England. '100 times more likely,' say the models, thanks to climate change. One imagines Queen Victoria rising from the grave just to slap the thermostat. And yet, we carry on—browsing weekend getaways, debating air conditioner brands—while pretending this is normal. But what's truly deafening is the silence. The bureaucratic stillness. The studied inaction. Albert Camus wrote of the absurd as 'a confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.' But I'd argue the world is no longer silent. It's shrieking. The unreasonable silence now lies squarely on our end. Read: Every word has a consequence. Every silence too… Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
