There's one major thing missing, though: an assessment of the current state of Western economies and expectations for the future. Economist Robert Gordon (Rise and Fall of American Growth) cogently argues that Western economies entered a period of supply-side "secular stagnation" in the 1970s and have since failed to generate the productivity growth needed to sustain long-term investment and necessary levels of economic growth. Gordon shows that the information and computer tech revolution, as broad-based as it has been, has failed to produce the level of productivity growth needed. Real wages have stagnated.
Without such growth, social democratic parties and governments lose the ability to direct surpluses to the benefit of working and middle class families and lose the local community and union political solidarity that drove social democratic successes after WWII.
The only solution is for government to DIRECTLY invest in the social and material needs of the people, dragging along support from the private sector. Addressing the widening affordable housing crisis across advanced democracies would be a good place to start.
Check out my Substack newsletter, REVIVING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY for a discussion of all this
Great podcast!
There's one major thing missing, though: an assessment of the current state of Western economies and expectations for the future. Economist Robert Gordon (Rise and Fall of American Growth) cogently argues that Western economies entered a period of supply-side "secular stagnation" in the 1970s and have since failed to generate the productivity growth needed to sustain long-term investment and necessary levels of economic growth. Gordon shows that the information and computer tech revolution, as broad-based as it has been, has failed to produce the level of productivity growth needed. Real wages have stagnated.
Without such growth, social democratic parties and governments lose the ability to direct surpluses to the benefit of working and middle class families and lose the local community and union political solidarity that drove social democratic successes after WWII.
The only solution is for government to DIRECTLY invest in the social and material needs of the people, dragging along support from the private sector. Addressing the widening affordable housing crisis across advanced democracies would be a good place to start.
Check out my Substack newsletter, REVIVING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY for a discussion of all this
https://henrymoss.substack.com/p/reviving-social-democracy-72b
Henry Moss