Another Future For Our Republic
The enlargement of EU in and was premature. Both speakers agreed the enlargement of EU, which involved also the Czech Republic, was premature. Jacques Delors pointed out that neither a deeper integration nor any reform of the European institutions preceded the enlargement. The accession of 12 new member states made the Union ungovernable. According to him, the post-communist states were searching for protection and economic support.
Thus the accession negotiations were very much about the single market and the issue of political union was dealt with only a little. Crisis of the euro? The problem lies in speculation and the violation of rules. On the other hand, he criticized the European Comission for its long silence about the irresponsible behaviour and the explicit violation of rules by certain states. He pointed out that the salaries of Greek civil servants were rising three times as quickly as those of their German counterparts.
Yes, it could be without the Czech Republic. The issue of the negative attitude of some states towards a deeper integration, which would ensure some budget control and prevent a potential next crisis, was discussed as well. The Czech Republic is one of the loudest oponents of any socio-economic measures carried out on the European level.
At the same time, it is vital for him that the eurozone have a single budget, and the states without the euro will have to get reconciled with not participating in certain European negotiations. True to his mission of a chair of the European Comission, Delors suggests to deepen the integration by means of small gradual uniting adjustments. And, when hard-pressed as in the early s, the government could create jobs directly.
Nothing about the expanded role of government during the New Deal would have been remotely possible before the progressives. American growth in the decades that followed World War II was based on remarkable new technologies that went back to the s, but whose main effects were not felt until after the war, such as electricity, the internal combustion engine, new drugs and chemicals, air travel, plastics, new communication technologies including the telephone and fax machine , new entertainment technologies radio, movies, and television , and countless process innovations that increased manufacturing productivity.
These technologies transformed what we consume, how we work, and where we live. They disrupted organizations and destroyed jobs, but also helped create many millions more jobs and lifted almost all economic boats. The United States has never had an equal society by international standards, but post growth significantly boosted incomes both at the top and at the bottom of the income distribution.
Helping countries rebuild after World War II created larger markets for American appliances, cars, planes, and movies. American goods became cultural icons around the world. By the start of the s, however, this world had begun to change. Other countries, such as Japan, had figured out how to make high-quality manufacturing products. American consumers wanted cheaper goods — such as textiles, clothing, furniture, and electronics — and falling transportation costs made it easy for American companies to establish global supply chains running across borders. At the same time, spectacular improvements in the silicon chip and the falling cost of computer technology made possible a new age of automation, in which increasingly sophisticated machines took over tasks previously performed by labor.
Initially, this seemed no different from what had happened in the s and s. But the intensity of this computer-assisted wave of automation in manufacturing and some services — first for low-skill jobs and then for medium-skill jobs — amounted to a profound departure from the pre pattern. Workers displaced from good jobs found it increasingly hard to be reemployed with similar wages and benefits. The days in which technological progress lifted the incomes of all Americans seemed to be gone.
Instead, productivity gains translated into high incomes for people who owned companies and highly educated workers who were already well-paid. For most of the population, there has been very little growth in inflation-adjusted incomes since the s. And the system of personal income tax is much less effective at redistributing income today than it was in the s and s.
Globalizing firms also found it increasingly straightforward to reduce their corporate income taxes.
Future of the Czech Republic in Europe
Today the effective corporate tax rate on an immensely profitable company like Apple, for example, is allegedly negligible. Just like at the end of the 19th century, this economic dysfunction has produced political dissatisfaction and a turn against the status quo. The election of Donald Trump as president can be traced to multiple factors, but one defining element is the perception by many voters that they have been left behind in recent decades.
Productivity has increased on average, but many feel that their economic future has become much less certain — a remarkably similar situation to what prevailed in the s. As in the s, the established political system, on either side of the aisle, is not producing solutions to our current predicaments. Some of this is lack of foresight. Some of it is directly because money and influence have permeated every contour of our political system in a way unseen since at least the age of the robber barons. At the turn of the 20th century, the wealthy resisted higher taxes, putting up a fierce struggle against the Sixteenth Amendment.
Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson were opposed at every turn when they tried to impose restrictions on what powerful business people wanted to do. It is no different today. We need to coalesce around how best to create shared prosperity. This necessitates increasing productivity — the growth of which has been weak of late — and creating more well-paid jobs as well as finding better ways of redistributing the gains from new technologies and globalization in the fairer way.
We should start with egregious economic problems and then address the political structures that resist attempts to improve the situation. The world is very different from what it was in , but there are definite parallels in terms of what we need. Redesign antitrust for the era of big data: The role of large, dominant corporations in the U. This is not just because of Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like in the tech sector. Even in other parts of the economy, a handful of firms across a broad range of sectors — such as mobile phones, air travel, beer brewing, and hospitals — have increased their market shares and profits at the expense of other companies and of the consumer.
Just as it was for the progressives, the first order of business is to reduce the power of these corporations by antitrust and other regulations. But we need more than the existing tools and perspectives to achieve this. Market power in the age of railroads was based on building a bigger network, and owning key routes between major hubs.
It’s Time to Found a New Republic
Market power for the future is increasingly based on controlling large amounts of data, because it is more, better quality, digitized information that lets you train machine-learning algorithms effectively. The robots are coming, just like the movies have warned, but the real power — for good and ill — is in software and increasing returns to data. If one self-driving car company does well initially, it will be able to collect more data — and then further improve its algorithm. Other companies will not be able to catch up.
The conventional commercial doctrine is that data are proprietary to the companies that collect them. This needs to change profoundly and completely since the playing field can only be leveled by making data available to all potential competitors. One way of achieving this is to ensure data belong to the people who generate the information, i. Enforcing this principle will ensure that data can be accessed by all, but also that individuals are compensated for the activities that generate information, at the same time as receiving a strong degree of privacy protection.
Rethink education — and rebuild social safety as a trampoline, not a net: The progressive movement was made possible by, and then gave a further impetus to, free high school education for everyone — a revolutionary or even preposterous idea when first proposed, which in retrospect greatly increased the productivity of workers in manufacturing and more broadly.
It’s Time to Found a New Republic – Foreign Policy
Today we need a complete rethinking of education, from preschool through post-college, including much more emphasis on acquiring flexible skills. People need to become capable of working with all kinds of new technology and dealing with the computer programs that are under development.
- Solving the dilemma.
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Most importantly, more people need to develop skills that will be complementary to what new machines can do. Artificial intelligence will destroy some lines of work completely — as it has already started to do in finance, accounting, and inventory control. But in other occupations, artificial intelligence will simply increase the potential productivity and effectiveness of the workforce.
New technology will also help create entirely new tasks and occupations that can generate jobs for the next generation. For instance, cybersecurity, an entirely new field, will not only deploy algorithms to detect threats and attacks, but will generate employment for engineers to design the products, experts to examine algorithmically identified threats, and people to work on infrastructural investments. We can see these changes only in broad contours at this time, but they clearly imply a need not only for a major expansion of higher education across all kinds of skills, but also an urgent and complete restructuring of U.
The focus instead needs to be on helping people bounce back into the labor force and rise higher through being able to get a better job. People must be better able to get ahead through hard work, whatever their family background, and to withstand all kinds of adverse shocks — from globalization, technology, or any other source, and must be able to do so without their families suffering undue hardship. This is an essential part of sharing the prosperity that will come from higher productivity.
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A basic income guarantee for everybody might help, but such proposals are neither sufficient nor properly targeted. A smarter safety net would provide more assistance for people making transitions from one job to another. Making high-quality education free for everyone would be a step in the right direction in this context. Technology can help with this, including through all kinds of on-line instruction. Loading up on student debt does not really help anyone — or our nation — prepare for what comes next in the world economy. Leveling the playing field for labor: And if spending on machines reduces corporate taxes — as is often the case — this encourages the firm to employ less labor.
At the same time, the existing U. In effect, the tax system subsidizes and encourages investment in machines. If we lived in the world of the s, this would not be so bad, because most of the new machines then complemented workers in tasks they were already performing.
But today the subsidies go to robotics and artificial intelligence algorithms that are directly replacing workers. The economy needs a fundamental restructuring of the tax code to lower the taxation on labor and remove all of the subsidies to machines so that the playing field is leveled for labor. We should not fear robots that can increase productivity and benefit us all — but we would be ill-advised to subsidize their deployment when this comes at the direct expense of workers. The same principle applies to offshoring and outsourcing. Globalization, too, can be turned into a force for shared prosperity but not when companies are subsidized for shifting jobs abroad because it reduces their tax bills or enables them to sidestep regulations.
A genuinely comprehensive tax reform must be a central part of efforts to level the playing field for labor against both capital and offshoring. The progressives understood that their economic reforms required change in the political system. This is no less true today. Just as in the time of robber barons, we need political reform that strengthens democracy by reducing the power of special, moneyed interests on the political process and unaccountable politicians. Bringing sunlight to influence activities: A first step in strengthening U.
Campaign finance reform is one oft-emphasized area, and rightly so.
The huge resources necessary for running a campaign not only make political candidates turn to individuals and corporations with big pockets, but practically shut off the ability of regular citizens to have their voices heard. But campaign finance is the tip of a much nastier iceberg. Money calls the shots in Washington not just because of campaign financing, but because of lobbying and the broader influence industry. Lobbies have traditionally been much harder to regulate, because much of their work is performed behind closed doors as opposed to campaign financing, which is more clearly visible.
The only way of neutralizing the effects of lobbies is by creating greater transparency. In this, technology can help. Artificial intelligence and big data analytics can be used to track everything that happens in the political sphere — automatically raising flags when they detect frequent meetings with certain networks of individuals or excessive amount of resources being expended relative to what is normal or regarded as acceptable.