First Drafts of History

A second and more chilling explanation of why elites proved so incompetent at governing the Greek economy — as well as the larger, global one — is related to what Mr. Manolopoulos calls the “Washington consensus,” a faith in deregulation, free trade, mobile capital flows and fiscal responsibility that he considers elitist.

Two elements of this consensus — market deregulation and the liberalization of capital flows — helped create enormous pools of global credit, making it “easier for short-termist governments to abandon the principle of fiscal responsibility,” since spending not financed through tax hikes could be financed by foreign loans, he says.

Last but not least, all this free-flowing capital has prompted bubbles — in housing, finance and other areas — that add volatility to national economies and impose harsh costs, particularly on the poor and middle classes.

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.

Many great American fortunes are monuments to the ability of the generality of mankind to prefer a good product to a bad one when the prices are approximately the same. Yet from Plato down the philosophers who have dreaded democracy have feared it because they believed it incapable of appreciating excellence…. As between soaps selling at the same price, yes, buyers eventually will prefer the better; but as between ideas, oh, no!

Adolph Ochs denied this. He held that the discrimination of the American public is not confined to material things. He was no perfectionist. He never believed for a moment that all people, or even that most people, are really intelligent; but he did believe profoundly that intelligence runs in roughly the same proportion at all economic levels. He believed that in a population consisting of a hundred rich, a thousand fairly well-off, and ten-thousand poor, if you find ten intelligent among the rich, you will find about a hundred among the well-off and about a thousand among the poor….

No social philosopher, monarchist, aristocrat or proletarian, has maintained seriously that all people are equally endowed mentally. Where American democracy diverges from other theories is in its insistence that neither heredity nor fortune is of much effect in determining worth; which means that the bulk of human value is to be found in the bulk of the population.