If the Affluence We Pursued Brought Us to This, of What Use Was the Affluence?

Not many debates in Washington bring to mind Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but that’s where I found my thoughts drifting in the middle of last Tuesday’s event at the American Enterprise Institute. I was there with AEI’s Scott Winship to kick off EPPC’s “Crossroads of Conservatism” series, debating the resolution: “Public policy in recent decades has caused economic changes that have worsened the quality of life for most Americans.” You can watch the whole thing here. 

The value of debate, over rote presentation of talking points, is in the real-time interplay of conflicting ideas, allowing both participants and audiences to see which ones fit together logically and which ones do not. That in turn requires an effective resolution, and on Tuesday we had a doozy. No set of metrics would conclusively prove anything. Rather, each side had to present a narrative consistent with the available data that explained coherently what has been happening in the country. As I said in my opening statement, I was reminded of torts class in law school, where the claim has its various elements—duty, causation, harm—and the advocates must marshal evidence that persuades a jury, by the preponderance of evidence, who is to blame for what.

Scott was representing the view prominent on the Old Right that the American economy has been delivering well for the American people, but it turns out this position lands the proponent in an impossible spot: blaming rising affluence for a declining quality of life for all Americans, which would seem rather unavoidably to imply that the economic growth and technological progress of recent decades has been bad for us and we should pursue the reverse. I don’t think Scott believes that, but it was where his position led, which teaches something valuable about that position.

As Anton Chigurh asks Carson Wells, in McCarthy’s haunting line: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

My opening statement focused on the questions of what “quality of life” means, how we might measure it and interpret data about trends in its various components, and what those trends in fact show. The trends diverge sharply for the winners versus the losers in the modern economy, which, I argued, was powerful circumstantial evidence that economic changes have driven those trends. And seeing as economists and policymakers had proudly promised to effect such changes, it did seem fair to hold them accountable for the result.