DeLong asks the rhetorical (I hope) question, how the hell is Barack Obama going to fix all this. Him say:
The Obama administration is going to be rebuilding and reconstructing five major sectors of the American t. It has no choice--there is no other option. It has to remake:
- Autos
- Housing finance
- High finance
- Energy
- And the big one—health care
On what principles and through what procedures is this extraordinary exercise in structural economic reform policy going to be accomplished? I get how to do the macroeconomics of Obama administration economic policy. I don’t get how to do the structural side…
There's a reason he doesn't know how to 'do the structural side'. It's because Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't collapse in a day either. We evolved the problems that we have and they have pushed us into crisis. The sudden appearance of crisis is therefore illusury. It seems like somebody made a wrong turn off a cliff, but it was more like driving on balding tires on the edge for many miles. The result is a broken car and a long hike out of the woods. But nobody wants to seem to want to do the hiking. They want to call in an airlift, but you can't airlift all of GM. You can't airlift Citibank. They are on the slopes of Everest. If they're too big to fail aren't they also too big to rescue?
It seems to me that the problem with all of these problems is the idea that we can solve them in short order. The very presumption that what's wrong with America - the accumulation of long term dysfunctions that brought us to crisis, can be undone and set right is incompatible with the very concept of 'sustainability'.
I hear in this impatient desire all the requisites for revolution. We don't need a revolution. We need, maybe at least, to go without GM for a while.