WAITING FOR TURGOT:
THE MAKING OF A PUBLIC ECONOMIST
Draft -- Chapter 2
II. WAITING FOR TURGOT: THE MAKING OF A PUBLIC ECONOMIST
As I stated in the forward to these essays, I have been motivated to react to a criticism of a rationalist, modern vision (call it here the "public choice" vision) which rejects "the romantic notion often proposed by civic republicans that both voters and legislators are, or can be, motivated by public spirit rather than self interest and that they can effectuate their desires through rational discourse rather than strategic, self maximizing behavior". (Rubin, 1993).
I was struck by this statement as well as an associated statement by Professor Rubin about the optimistic strand of public choice (notably the "impracticality" of demand revealing -- see Forward), which led me to organize this essay and the following one around what might be called "confessions of a political romantic, neo-classical economist, followed in the next essay by "confessions of a Tertium Quid". In the process of this reconstruction, I try to define a pragmatic approach to geo-classical public economics.
I saw myself in the "practice of social art" removing those things which Weber called the "petrification of institutional life" and which romantics believe negate the emotional side of life (their basic quarrel with modernism). My last book retained this modernist perspective. There I started (in Chapter 1 of my 1980 book) by trying to show the possibilities of "rational calculation in the socialist community", addressing problems posed by both Weber and von Mises around 1920. In so doing, I also posed challenges to democracy as we know it (particularly in the "governance of enterprise").
These essays take a different point of departure, relating mechanism design to "the democratic imagination". I want to show how incentive-compatible mechanisms can attack the "petrification of institutional life" and bring "enterprise" within the effective control of individuals and their communities.
In this and the following essay, I pick up on the main theme in the forward, engaging in an exercise of personal and social deconstruction while also presenting "the narrative" underlying the idea. This might be called as discourse on the democratic imagination (Hanson, 1985) which tries to link the remembrance of things past with the future, so as to reconcile hope with memory. In the process, I am reconciling my liberal-humanitarian ideology (pragmatic liberalism) with the conservative ideology and classical political theory. The following two essays then set the stage for an elaboration of practical approaches for making the reconciliation (in practice) in the concluding essay. In so doing, I seek to define a reflexive philosophy that responds affirmatively to "the consequences of modernity". After Giddens (1990), I call it "utopian realism".
I am not a man of letters, say in the tradition of a Hawthorne, Emerson or Thoreau (who starts Walden with a chapter on "Economy". I will try a bit of this (in terms of "civic economy" for late 20th century America late in this essay. Nor do I have the wicked satire and irony of Hawthorne, although the spirit of has romantic novels, The House of Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance guides much that is contained in these essays, particularly the more personal sections which I have written for my "natural daughters". For them, I begin to reframe the proposition that America's Irving Babbitt borrowed from one of Goethe's unfinished plays, "The Natural Daughter": "The classical is healthy: the romantic is diseased". You might call these essays: "Confessions of a Neo-Classical Economist".
Confessions of A Neo-Classical Economist.
This essay started out in early 1995 as I was divorcing, selling my house (of seven gables), and planning a new career. First, I had to decide on "going to Russia" to lead a project involving intergovernmental fiscal federalism in Russia. I was attending the annual meetings of the American Economics Association (the AEA's centennial) and making a decision on finally joining that association.
I decided that I was no longer a merely a Nockian, consigned to writing memoirs that might be entitled (like Nock's autobiography) Memoirs of A Superfluous Man (1943).(1). I had been a longstanding member of the Nockian Society ("No members, no dues, no meetings"). I have unconsciously made one exception in the case of the Henry Simons Society whose members meet once or twice a year presenting interesting papers and engaging in stimulating discussions on classic liberal political economy and public choice.
In paying $70 and joining the professional association (the AEA), I began to engage in a debate (often with myself) on the conflict between my reformist ideas (classical liberal theory) and my "pragmatic liberalism" which is the practicing philosophy I have learned (or grown into) over my working life. In part this was also Nockian in that A. J. Nock often advised against trying to perfect society. "There is only one way to improve society", he used to say; "present it with one improved unit, - yourself". I keep Nock's stricture firmly in mind as I disengage from 25 years in the practice of "Regulatory Star Wars" and begin to engage in the Practice (and theory) of Social Art.
This is the second of four essays on the process of disengagement and re-engagement if you will. The essays are also concerned with "the narrative" underlying an idea, called the demand revealing process. The process is designed to better harmonize individual and social desires. As an American bureaucrat economist who invented the idea about three decades ago, I develop the idea here in the context of "reflections on political economy" which have absorbed me, even more so than demand revealing, over the same three decades.
I start with the challenges of (a.) presenting an improved self and then, like Miles Coverdale (hero of The Blithedale Romance), to (b.) reach out and try to become part of "the democratic imagination". In both this and the following essay, I begin to try to reconcile the practice of social art from my "pragmatic liberal" perspective, with elements of the classical liberal theory underlying demand revealing. In their current form (in the four essays presented here), the reflections have been largely written for self, family and friends, including (as indicated earlier) my "natural daughters" (The relation to Goethe's 1802 drama, "The Natural Daughter" will be made clear later). The third essay is, in particular, a reflection "on self", suggesting how it drives the idea and the political economy underlying it.
The essays are also aimed at a community of scholars and for broader social consumption when I finally gain or take my freedom from the Practice of "Star Wars" politics of the sort described in the third essay. I write these essays particularly for my daughters (and others) who I do not want to regard me as Luke Skywalker did his father (Darth Vader) as an "unformed human being" in the method by which I have practiced the social art and lived a large part of my human existence. As I was writing this in July, 1995, I had just seen the end of the "Star Wars" trilogy and had also seen and read Moyers and Campbell talking about the "Star Wars" myth. I was reminded of the only genuinely funny, and mythical speech I ever gave, in early 1981, to a group of policy students and professors at Duke University called "Regulatory Star Wars" (extracts from which are reproduced in the following essay). The rest of the work can be regarded, in part, as a means of remedying "the problems" (of alienation really) set forth in that speech.
The Act of drawing together "unformed work" also speaks to the state of American society. As a bureaucrat, I take "Star Wars" precautions against terrorist acts. The work, written for self, family and friends, appears as Esq.7 on my home and office computer, in case of terrorist acts, the risks of which I usually denigrate.(2)
Recently, however, my eldest daughter, traveling to Japan, narrowly missed such an Act, so I take more precautions. I have intended to separate these essays into several pieces (Books), variously titled The Practice of Social Art (PSA), The Political Economy of Mobility (PEM) and A Philosophy of Hope (PH).
If the title had not already been appropriated by a great French linguist, and more recently by David Friedman is his excellent economics text and increasingly popular book, I might have called the collection "The Practice of Everyday Life".
The first book, as well as the essay here, is essentially about the advancement of the idea (demand revealing) in terms of politics (voting rules and collective decision procedures) and the possibilities for improving the practice of politics through integration of the demand revealing process with existing decision procedures. With the exception of Chapter 5, most of this work has been relegated to Chapter 5 and the appendices to this volume of essays. The essays contained here are then about a kind of social constructivism (or social deconstruction) as well as personal deconstruction and reconstruction.
Deconstruction, both personal and social, focuses on the resistance which impede the development and advancement of the idea and form "the narrative" underlying the idea.
A. A Political Economy of Hope
Social and personal deconstruction can move one towards defining a political economy of Hope, which I hope can capture "the democratic imagination". I seek to do so in my "Confessions of A Tertium Quid and the Spirit of (17)98" in the following essay.
In this essay, I suggest that citizens and scientists engage in the practice of social art in a way that links moral philosophy, "positive" social science, and rational social art (according to an early division of the social sciences described in the first essay and which is the basically the stuff of "pragmatic liberalism" as has been practiced in America. The process of deconstruction can also fundamentally change the way we think about the practice of social art in a postmodern, contemporary world. The essays set the stage for how social art can be used to help construct a political economy of Hope. Writings about hope are generally consigned to the philosophical or religious bookshelves and sometimes reach to politics, but rarely into the "dismal science" of economics.
My reflections are, in part, an appeal to the "social sciences" through a psychological narrative or "rewriting of self" supporting the appeal. The three essays seek to advance the performance of a "rational" social art, construct a vision for more "successful" performance of that art into the next millennium, and suggest what kind of "psychological deconstruction" as well as social "deconstructive" critique may be useful or helpful in the performance of this task.
The science of economics does not normally admit such questions or such a type of inquiry. This is relegated to political philosophy or "policy science". In discussing the approach with those I have interacted with in "the art of policy" over the years, I am then asked "What kind of political philosophy is this?" It depends, as I often suggest to students and co-workers, and it changes with the times. Having returned to the domestic bureaucracy or civil service in Washington, D. C. in late 1988, I have often had the opportunity to instruct students (interns or other new co-workers) in dealing with public policy problems in the sphere (transportation) in which I work. Wondering perhaps if my style has any "moral virtue", they often inquire directly about my own political philosophy to which I sometimes reply. "I'm a libertarian socialist". That is a set of code words often used by anarchists, but now more and more by respectable Greens and libertarians. But they (Alice figuratively) would say; That's impossible, isn't it? To which I usually reply: "Yes, but only in reality. In reality, I am a political romantic idealist, a Tertium Quid, a "pragmatic, moderate liberal her esthetician", and sometimes even a "trompisatuer" (a double personality).
As this work tries to show, there is no fundamental contradiction in the philosophy of incentive-compatible libertarian socialism, although there may be in political reality. In reality, one looks at politics as the art of the possible, where I behave like a Quid (discussed in the following essay, defined in Webster's as something to be chewed, not swallowed) and sometimes like a trompisatuer. I have tried to keep in mind what is possible in advocating an approach to institutional design built upon the modern theory of incentive compatibility which is a means of better taking account of individual preferences in making social choices. (For readers with no knowledge of incentive compatibility and demand revealing, the basic concepts are presented in one of the early essays in Volume II, entitled "The New Incentive Mechanisms" (Clarke, 1980). The previous essay presented some simple examples of application to intergovernmental decision making.
For students of philosophy, of politics and the concrete realities of economics, the policy sciences, and "heresthetics", I have written these essays in order to stimulate greater interest in the art of incentive compatible institutional design -- the practice of a more rational "social art", if you will. I propose an approach to design that will explain a lot of contradictions, a lot which I have worked out in my own character and mind over the last 8 years.
In drawing together and sharing fragments that I had written over the years, I began to learn, more seriously than heretofore, a lot about my character in relation to society. The work reflects a strong desire to create more workable communities and more "user friendly" networks among them. Often I use the metaphors of Utopian literature -- for example the Utopian communities or phalantrasties of someone like Charles Fourier. By background and historical accident, I am not much of a social architect and am often guided more by the spirit of a Bestiat who eschewed the efforts of the system builders while constructing his own "economic harmonies". This work demonstrates how the two conflicting philosophies might be reconciled, and how, as I tried to demonstrate in my 1980 book, how capitalism and socialism could be reconciled within the framework of modern representative democracy.
By way of background, I had started my working career (around 1965) working on the economics of new towns and became a fan of sorts of Ebenezer Howard's "garden cities". I did not realize then what these communities would become some 30 years later as I now explore modern sociological criticisms of the economic and political realities that have transpired in these communities during the intervening years. During that early career, I also tried the economics of building new airports (indeed a third international airport for Chicago about 8 miles out in Lake Michigan during the late 1960s). During my subsequent working in State Government in Illinois, I was instrumental in not having the Lake Airport built, and of avoiding the building of any airport for some 30 more years. During the time I was working on "new towns" and a "new airport", I discovered demand revelation, the implementation of which is largely the subject of this book.
To try to demonstrate how a single idea puts capitalism, and socialism, and liberal democracy together and has relevance for the planning and management of communities and of networks (i. e. of roads and airports), one runs the risk of appearing to be infected with a certain degree of "monomania", a possibility I alluded to in the first chapter of the earlier book on demand revealing (chapter 1). This is, in part, the confessions of a "monomaniac". There is something often comical or tragic about the belief that a single idea can cure the world's ills. If I did not pursue this work sensibly, it could likely rank among one of the good tragicomedies of our time, but still have enough entertainment value to win some kind of prize in such a competition. Maybe it could be bowdlerized by others to compete in the new millennial competitions and called something like the 21st century public accountant or public administrator and sell some (if not much less) than the sales of the 21st Century stockbroker (a book I have recently seen on the shelves across the street from the White House). Since the successful implementation of demand revealing also depends on "successful" accountancy, these essays are really in fact about the 21st century public accountant. Perhaps Allysa (one of Needleman's protagonists in "Money and the Meaning of Life" (circa 1990) will be transformed into Lin Shevek late in the first century of the new Millennium.
As a serious piece of work, trying to avert tragedy or comedy, I am seeking to prepare a serious piece of utopian scholarship that induces the use of demand revealing decision techniques in the practice of governing institutions. During this millennium, we have seen about 500 years of serious utopian scholarship and I want to influence the work of the next 500 years in ways that will bear more fruit in terms of practical application. The work is a serious attempt at selling the "pivotal mechanism" or "Clarke tax" mechanism as a method of organizing collective activity and achieving a future that might otherwise continue to be regarded as Utopian, instead of a philosophy (and way of implementing it) of the "here and now".
Manuel and Manuel (1979) in writing about the "Utopian propensity" noted that paradoxically the great Utopians have been great realists. "They have an extraordinary comprehension of the time and place in which they are writing and deliver themselves of powerful reflections on socioeconomic, scientific and emotional conditions and their meaning in history... without taking leave of reality, utopians have performed symbolic acts to dramatize their break with the present". I maintain that the truly great Utopian writers (More and Turgot, for example) were "utopian realists" in the sense of Giddens (1990).
I conceived of the book in December, 1987 in a house on a mountaintop next to the French embassy in Port au Prince Haiti. My cook had returned from the elections of November 27 with a story that he had seen at least 5 people killed (machine gunned) at the polls. I was then seething with a militant (utopian) optimism which I briefly describe below. For a fleeting moment, I became overwhelmed by Chiliast feelings and released these feelings (as I often do) through writing.
While imprisoned in my chateau over the course of a few weeks, I had conceived of this work which I had entitled "Sketches" (or Esquisse) after Condercet's last work. I wanted to provide a sketch of sorts involving about 25 years of "reflections on political economy" followed by a second part of the book which suggested directions for a "rehabilitation of the political economy". Over the succeeding years, the work took a more modest direction and was entitled "A Political Economy of Mobility" (now carrying a subtitle "The Practice of Everyday Life" (See chapter 5).
In reconstructing and seriously pursuing this work during the intervening eight years (having worked out an application to management of the Nation's air travel system), I decided that I would like to try somehow to become an apostle of change. (If not an active agent of change, then I wish to try to stimulate such agents). Change is a word that creates deep conflicts, even moral ones, for myself and society. In my spiritual development, I constantly hear that it is the single greatest ingredient of "progress". The other ingredient is "living in the moment", which when taken together with change, has often struck me as problematic, if not a contradiction. In any case, the idea of change over much of the last year became a sort of intellectual and spiritual pursuit of sorts in which I integrated my ideas for practical application of demand revealing under the broad rubric of "mobility policy" and linked these to the philosophers of the enlightenment, mainly the Baron Turgot, the great "progressivist" and apostle of change in the ancien regime. (Turgot was Louis XVI's Comptroller General or finance minister during 1774-75 on the eve of the American Revolution). How I work this out in my attempt to find myself as an agent of change appears in the first of the essays, entitled "Waiting for Turgot". It is also reconciled there in terms of the "stay awhile" of the Faust legend (see the second essay) which drives the spirit, and much of the content, of the work.
I would call this an activist program of change which sets the stage for an American re-evolution to "recapture the spirit of (17)98". I suggest a Tugovian program that decentralizes Federal spending down two layers (administrative regions and States)), showing also how citizens could complete the process of decentralization. As a first step, I suggest an experiment in fiscal federalism oriented towards Federal transportation expenditures.
In 1995, with some time remaining to work on ways of recapturing the "spirit of '98 before the bicentennial, this is a work in progress, consisting of what appears here and my work to implement demand revealing in aviation management institutions. It is tied to the kind of intellectual calling I espouse in the first essay and which my work on applications of demand revealing tries to illustrate. This involves a "contemporary approach" to the practice of social art, in a manner foreshadowed by Turgot and carried forward in the work of Condercet.
In reality, of course, one must put the pursuit of the rational social art in some perspective. The poet and philosopher Goethe during the early 1800s was fascinated with the ideas of the physiocrats (of Turgot, Adam Smith and others) as well as the ideas of Condercet as carried forth by Saint Simon and others into the theory and practice of modern socialism.
But Goethe, for one, interpreted and practiced the implementation of ideas reasonably. In this context, I am a moderate liberal her esthetician. As Goethe observed towards the end of his life (in conversations with Eckerman) and in speaking about the English and Swiss utilitarians (Bentham and Dumont), "Dumont, you see, is a moderate liberal, as all reasonable people are, or should be. I myself am one, as I have tried to practice all my life."
The reconciliation of the practice of social art with the political theory (centering on the demand revealing process) that I espouse in this work reflects, at bottom, the spirit of Goethe's philosophy and "stay awhile" approach to the art of public administration, reflected also in a kind of spiritual conservatism described in the following section of this essay.
The art of public administration, however, is not ideology free, nor are the ethical foundations of ideas on implementing demand revealing that are espoused in these several essays.
Ethical Foundations of Demand Revealing: Since about 1977, I have been absorbed by ethical features of the demand revealing process (see Clarke, 1977) which I have described in a Forward to the Practice as follows:
The book (particularly Part III) is about the "ethical" foundations of the demand revealing process, which has strong normative content. Around 1977, in a short article on "some aspects" of the demand revealing process, I defended it in Benthamite terms (i. e. cost avoidance relative to existing institutions). It was to my mind, in the lexicon of Bentham, a means of providing "security" (against the tyranny of the majority) and achieving political economy in the sense of the "expenses" of the State.
Twenty years later, my thoughts on the evolution of the idea had evolved into a social philosophy about change and about the processes of "concretizing utopia" in the sense of personal striving, involving both self and society. This is a set of philosophical reflections on advancement of ideas in the liberal-humanitarian style of Turgot and Condercet. But this style can be compared and contrasted with other styles -- Chiliaistic (or radical anarchistic), conservative or socialist-communist. (See Mannheim, 1936). Part II, or the second essay (here), sets forth these philosophical reflections in the context of several approaches towards "concretizing utopia" utilizing a philosophy (or principles) of Hope (Bloch, 1986). The way in which this is done tests the potential success or failure of what I espouse, determining whether incentive compatibility improves the "prospects of scientific politics" (Mannheim, 1936), responding to "design faults" in the system that we become aware of as a result of modernism, through practice of a kind of "utopian realism" (Giddens, 1990).
The tensions in these philosophic reflections obviously bear on the composition of the book and its underlying ideology. I do not pretend that a work on the practice of social art will be free of ideology, though my rendition of it may be more explicit (about the underlying ideology) than others. Perhaps more than anything, however, I seek to present "the Practice" in a form that will be useful and stimulating to practitioners both outside of and inside the United States.
When the work began in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in late 1987, it was filled with a much more passionate, if militant optimism, that may have resembled Condercet's last work (Esquisse). I was briefly infected with a combination of liberation theology and disgust, bordering on Chiliaism. Almost a decade later, it is more reflective, less passionate and more guided by the bourgeois liberalism of the practicing American economist. The more passionate liberal optimism has been relegated to a final Book III or third essay (for self, family and friends, so that I can enjoy a meaningful dialogue with social scientists or practitioners of public policy in the United States, somewhat free of the "militant optimism" that still infects the philosophic foundations of this work. The "optimism" has been at least turned inward and is strongly conditioned by the American Ethos and the possibilities facing the moderate liberal practice of political economy in the United States today.
What is different from the directions taken in my work up to 1980 and now can perhaps be understood in the epilogue to this book. Happy Valley (borrowed from Foldvary, 1995) is enjoying a birth of an "anticipatory consciousness" (embedded in hope) that results from participation in the shaping of community decisions, work and living experiences, and the network of systems (communications, transportation) that extend beyond the territorial boundaries of Happy Valley. What is happening in Happy Valley at the beginning of the new millennium is concrete and the mechanisms used for collective decisions do not appear all that different from what its residents have become accustomed to using in the past. I describe the content of this in the third essay, entitled "Road From Richmond".
If you asked the average resident: "Where are you going?", he or she might reply: "Nowhere, we're now here". The residents of Happy Valley are living in the moment, in the true "Stay Awhile" of the here and now. This is the moment (Faust, Part I) for which the protagonist will gladly sell his soul.
Living in the moment in the archaic theories of public economics, and translating these into public policy is both an exciting and daunting task. I began to find a philosophy of hope (the "stay awhile" philosophy) alternating between transportation regulatory management responsibilities on which I worked and the Flower (Happy?) Valley where I lived over the last 15 years, interspersed with living in an autocracy (Morocco) and Haiti (then an anarchy or kleptocracy). I began to see a link (or have a vision) between community building, transportation (road and airport projects) and consequent voyages to Erehwon (nowhere) which are communicated in this work. I continue to believe Ereh (here) can be "won" (now) in the "anticipatory consciousness" and "stay awhile" of the lived moment of the here and now.
In the way of two concluding notes, this work (in its current form) was inspired around 1993 by a short paper by Gordon Tullock which he presented at the Henry Simons Society and later at the Mont Pelerin Society, entitled "Consent?" Professor Tullock and I share a common interest in community governance (whether on Sunshine Mountain or Flower (Happy) Valley and transportation networks as well as the various paths to Erehwon in "a world where our options are limited and Erehwon is nowhere."
As background of what is basically a (conservative?) utopian, pragmatic liberal tract, the work is colored by the "red dawning" of the anticipatory consciousness" . It leads to the more serious and I hope scholarly Practice which is covered in red, white and blue. These used to cover the material that I wrote (Private Enterprise, Urban Policy) or oversaw the preparation of in the Agency for International Development during the early 1980s. I aspired at some future time to write my own red, white and blue tract (or tracts). Therefore, Part I of the Practice is covered in red to represent the "red dawning" of the revolutionary consciousness, This is then translated into the more conservative white of practical application and cold rational analysis. The eventual blue of evening is a philosophy of hope, and hopefully of wisdom. After perhaps about 250 years (1750-2000) of education, I am hoping for self and society that we are moving into the "blue of wisdom".
As made clear, however, in the following essay, entitled "Road From Richmond", there are some interesting problems of integrating all this into National or local (State) politics at the close of the 20th Century in America. The white of "cold rational analysis" is also mixed with the conservative ideology (temporality), which in many respects reflects a philosophy I also represent, while seeking the cool blue of wisdom.
The work stops short of theology. I was at the initial writing in the middle of the 6th step in the modern self help programs where one is "entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character". (In all truth, I find myself often returning to the 4th step, where I undertake a thorough and searching moral inventory). In this process , I have found that "Hope" is a means of dealing with anxiety and despair which is a key ingredient in self-help. Hope, of course, reaches beyond narrow self help and can actually lead one to anticipate "intended changes" leading one towards a more virtuous existence. In the parlance of the self-help program, it is progress, not perfection. Hope, of course, is generally considered a theological (or Christian) virtue "which only deals with good things and only those which lie in the future, and which pertain to the man that cherishes the hope" (Augustine). It must be integrated with the other Christian virtues (faith and charity). A Marxist scholar who infects this work, Ernst Bloch, interpreted Hope in terms of a self transforming Utopia that has been described by theologians as embodying an atheistic philosophy of hope. To me, Bloch is more an interpreter of Goethe and often a reluctant interpreter of Marx. In any case, I offer in this work an approach to a philosophy of hope which is less social constuctivist and is more pragmatic and skeptical and where Marx and Christ, particularly their interpreters, continue to have no Monopoly on Hope. In the words of Wilhelm Miester, I am progressing as I write these essays and complete these works. In rewriting myself, I am "progressing as I write and writing as I progress". The work is a product of thinking and doing and doing and thinking, which is the sum of all wisdom". (Goethe). Wilhelm Meister (apprentice) was of course a long way from the philosophy expressed in the Wanderings and even further yet from the wisdom expressed in the second part of Faust. The apprentice was simply a story of a cultivated man trying to maintain himself as a complete individual in the face of the modern "rational culture".
There are no easy answers about how one proceeds. An approach which I have been using starts with a confessional or expiation of guilt by a self-perceived "representative architect" of such a culture. The approach, reflected in these essays, may be helpful to others in progressing and gaining wisdom, individually and collectively, in ways that lead towards a the pursuit more virtuous existence and actual "happiness".
I am told by an early, if friendly, critic of this work that the appeal to Continental (French-German) philosophy, with a smattering of Continental "socialism", is, or will prove to be, in fact, rather unappealing, particularly the old-style philosophy which brought us our modern difficulties. The appeal to Ernst Bloch, a Marxist, albeit an interpreter of Goethe's humanism, will prove to be even less appealing. Therefore, I apologize for these seeming appeals in the efforts to give American political economy more external appeal while suggesting also the appeal of the classical spirit. In this regard, I have a lot to say in the essays to follow about the life and times of Richard Y. Ely, a progressive American economist and the anti-hero of these essays. As the work progresses, it becomes gradually more American, at least in terms of a self-generated apologia for American economics as personified by Richard Ely, who is in part a reflection of myself who must deal with my own devils. Only recently did I discover that Ely's first two important works were "French-German Socialism" (1883) and "Henry George and the Beginnings of Revolutionary Socialism in the United States", Chapter 2 of American Socialism (1885).
In terms of Ernst Bloch, I discovered late in the development of these essays an Americanized version of a philosophy of Hope, entitled "The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit" by Frederick Turner. As I suggest in the third essay, Bloch and Turner (romantic and classical) complement each other well, though each is driven (as was Ely) to find devils in contrasting ideologies, a defect that I seek to avoid, or amend in the development of this work. Self-promotion, of course, infects almost all work, including my own. It needs to be looked at critically in terms of any work which purports to offer advancement in the pursuit of a "rational social art", which is the principal subject of these essays.
Before preceding at a somewhat personal level into the thoughts that drive the conception of this work, I would say that my thought represents a blend of the liberal humanitarian ideology and a kind of "spiritual conservatism" that I recently discovered in the Encyclopedia Britannica (Socioeconomic Movements). There Peter DeVierck (in the section conservatism) gives a excellent rendition of how Goethe's philosophy drove some of American conservatism early in this century (in the work of Irving Babbitt and others). My father was a student of French literary criticism, and Babbitt was the premier American scholar in this field. Towards the end of his life (around 1830), Goethe urged a mature synthesis between a conservative framework and liberal goals:
The genuine liberal tries to achieve as much good as he can with the available means to which he is limited; but he would not use fire and sword to annihilate the often inevitable wrongs. Making progress at a judicious pace, he strives to remove society's deficiencies gradually without at the same time destroying an equal amount of good by violent measures. In this ever-imperfect world he contents himself with what is good until time and circumstances favor his attaining something better.
And Vierck also observed Goethe's naturalist and humanistic philosophy in "Nature and Art" (1802) which expressed Goethe's conservative and classic stress on voluntary submission to law: "Only in self-restriction does the master reveal himself. And only law can give us liberty". Goethe's political drama, "The Natural Daughter" (1803) reflected his hostility to the French Revolution, radicalism and mass movements. Much quoted by classicists, such as the United States' Irving Babbitt, was Goethe's definition: "The classical I call the healthy and the romantic the diseased." Yet the Faust drama (Part I, 1808, Part II, 1832) retained the liberal minded stress of his younger days on constant change, "constant striving" as salvation. His most unique achievement consisted of his being, so to speak, self-invented. By sheer strength of character, he remolded his naturally revolutionary and romantic temperament into what the world accepted as a conservative and classical temperament.
NOTE TO THE READER: More professionally inclined readers might now wish to skip to the third essay as what follows are clearly more personal reflections on achieving a "Goethean" synthesis. In seeking this synthesis, I am trying to blend a political economy of change with a political economy of hope and also of memory. Towards this end, the following extension of chapter 2 of the Practice amounts to an essay (mostly prepared in January-February, 1995) which basically led me toward the writing of the Practice. Much (or most) will eventually be relegated to Book III on a personal deconstruction relevant to "understanding the narrative" supporting the advancement of the idea (demand revealing) or material which should be expurgated to the archives. However, the material may help to communicate what is going into a "political economy of change" and a "political economy of memory and hope" and helps to explain the ethical/philosophical underpinnings of Chapters 3 through 6 in the Practice, as well as in the concluding essay here. The paragraphs are NOT indented, except where the work enters into the direct subject matter of the Practice, so readers can skip the philosophical or personal writing if interested solely in "reform propositions" or "political thought".
Notes for Book III (from "Waiting for Turgot"), some of which will be incorporated into The Practice of Social Art: A Political Economy of Memory and Hope (PMH -- Book III).
One can usefully skip the following (if it has not already been exorcized or if you do not particularly think it is useful to see economics as storytelling, the way economists shape their tales in ways that reflect their own background and interests. See Diana Strassman, Challenge, Jan. - Feb. 1995. This was a real exercise for me that may also help the reader appreciate the political philosophy set forth in the third essay, "Road From Richmond".
A much more important function of storytelling, for me, involves the changes it brings in a individual. It changes the nature of their family relations, their material (economic) activities
and social and religious conceptions. My particular objective when I started was the product of a "moral inventory" that is suggested by modern "self help" programs (i.e. the well known 4th Step). (My particular program is called "Overachiever's Anonymous, and it has a large "cult" following in Washington, D. C.) I also wanted to provide a better "ethical" framework for the demand revealing process than one based on raw "utilitarian ethics" (see Clarke, 1977).
It would have seemed ludicrous in my "past life" to fuse the two activities -- the objective and the subjective, at least in such an overt and transparent way. But I quickly found this was what the world around me had been doing for about thirty years. At my request, a colleague mailed me one of my current favorite essays on "postwar social thought", entitled "Modern, Anti, Post and Neo" (cite New Left Review (article by Jeffrey Alexander, 1995, pages 61-101). It helped me see at least 30 years of apprenticeship at each level of government -- from City to the international sphere in a new light. My strong modernist orientation had been shaken by the antimodernist and postmodern culture -- even physically in the Streets of Chicago in the summer of 1968, also an event in which my Faustian modern "Airport in the Lake" had died, and even my fancy estimates of travel time savings to domestic and international businessmen were not to save the project.
No matter, I could always find "new waves" and "new projects" to ride. A friend who had worked with me in the "Airport in the Lake" crowd told me later, as he worked with me while I was fighting against the Airport that this "riding the latest wave" might be an unfortunate character trait. Nevertheless, this 4th step inventory started to uncover some of these traits.
There is no doubt that at least with my skills as a "trompisateur", I survived the anti/post modern period, which largely for me dated from about 1968 to 1989. Then, I saw myself as part of what Alexander perceives the neo-modern revival. Why not seize the opportunity and help shape the future? I had a conversation with two of the "smartest people in Washington", one of them myself (a bad joke that I will put into some perspective later). I was going to Russia to help establish a "modern" system of Fiscal Federalism supported by a neo-modern neo-classical tax system. What greater honor to be bestowed on a "rational endogenous public choice economist". The recruiters were looking for a top flight Chicago economist who spoke Russian. No matter that one did not exist. Then the "Agency" would take the Chicago economist and I was quite adequate. To the "modernist", language and culture make little difference, translators make the cost of communicating a little higher, and one goes merrily along, purveying one's wares.
The following is sort of a short story about this dilemma. I was trying to learn to "script myself" and write my future, not having learned some of the lessens that perhaps I am learning better, some eighteen months later. But I am learning to write as I progress and I progress as I write.
As usual I held a conversation. In my journal notes, it was a somewhat stilted one. But this one was funny. I was writing as if a revolution (the French revolution) had not even happened. It takes place intertemporally as if the characters were not separated by space and time. In my journal of early 1995, it is a conversation (which I imagine could have happened around 1775) between Condercet and Turgot, it takes place also with the later Goethe (poet, scientist, and public administrator) and includes Bestiat (who lived much later), who is a legislator. The spirit captures some of the essence of the "political romanticism joined to "utopian realism" discussed in the following section.
I was trying to explain to myself (and potentially to others) why I had to put romance back into my work. I was thinking back to the period (around 1979-80 when I published my first book (on demand revealing). I read or heard somewhere about a statement by James Buchanan -- one of my "postmodern" economic heroes -- saying that "public choice" has (is) taking the romance out of politics. (This is quoted, in fact, by Karen Vaughn, one of Buchanan's students, in her Southern Economics Association Presidential address (SEJ, April 1996, lead article).
Now, about 15 years later, I was rengaging in "political romanticism", hopefully in a manner that would lead me to be smashed by future critics, if I was even so lucky to have such critics. (My work in fact might come to little, when I expected much, the expectations being part of my "vaulting ambition").
The next relevant section of my journal goes on to describe the sources of this "political romanticism" and why I find it compelling, despite the risks. It is interspersed with "private" and "public" sections -- i. e. sections on private lives (nonindented) and "indented" public thoughts (not I hope to be interpreted as public lies and private truths, to quote the title of a recently popular public policy book).
A prefatory note on the private essays-
Let me state my intentions upfront. These essays reflect a flow of self and collective awareness. They are not intended as posthumous essays, though I later point to where they can be found. I have every intention of living a full and active material, political and spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic life (though the mix seems to be changing a lot). The essays have been a stimulus for "the flow" of such an active, creative life.
The work in progress has an expressionist, stream of consciousness quality that might be likened to that of Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), the "encyclopedist of "utopia" and "hope" (see his three volume Principles of Hope (1986, 1995, paperback). I am not a philosophical encyclopedist but a political economist trying to, as Bloch would wish, "concretize utopia". I try to do this in the world of public finance and regulation, perhaps much in the way a little known, or largely forgotten, political economist, Adam Muller (1779-1829), tried to do in the midst of the conservative reaction of early 19th century Europe. Muller may now be remembered, if for no other reason than his philosophy is revived (at least in my mind) in Francis Fukuyama's latest book, entitled Trust (1995).
Both Bloch (gently) and Muller (rather brutally) were attacked early in this century by the likes of Karl Mannheim and Carl Schmitt, the latter who has been variously called the "Hobbes of our Age" and "the godfather of Nazism". I surely do not want to be attacked for political romanticism (as Muller was attacked by Schmitt in a 1919 book, published the same year as Bloch's "Spirit of Utopia") which carries the title Political Romanticism (1919,1986) and where one type of political romanticism seems at war with that of long dead rivals (i. e. Muller). Schmitt, who became the central legal scholar of the Weimer Republic had to buttress the historical romanticism of the Catholic Center Party against other types of political romanticism.
As it stands, the work in progress here is largely about "a philosophy and a political economy of hope" which I have written for self, family, friends and my own "invisible college" (which includes friends and critics, the latter who I first count as friends). Adam Muller wanted only friends as he constructed the modern, "organic state" for Prince Metternich, and the reader will quickly grasp that (I) "You are not Adam Muller. The work is saved on floppies and hard disks as Esq .7 (dated Summer, 1996). It incorporates and supplements "The Practice of Social Art", a book in process which is guided by this philosophy, one which expresses both hope and memory. What follows is a Forward to several essays, including much of Part 1 of the "Practice". I then pick up the main text of this essay entitled "Waiting for Turgot: The Making of A Public Economist", followed by an essay entitled "Road From Richmond: Confessions of A Geoist". Two other essays in this collection, "An American Romance" and "From Romance to Reality" pick up from the Practice, describing some ways in which this philosophy could help shape our political economy in the years to come.
These essays on contemporary political economy are followed in Part two (under construction) by several essays on "the demand revealing process (two of which have been previously published) with a new essay which deals with the relation of demand revealing to the contemporary political economy within "a strict theory of politics" associated with the efficiacy of collective choice procedures.
I have also intended these essays as a vehicle for better promoting the demand revealing idea and they are directed at a scholarly community that may often be unsympathetic to "the rational choice" method, within which demand revealing was originally constructed. To reach this objective, I will have to finally construct "the Practice" which is somewhat down the road (as I do not want to disseminate beyond the limited group of friendly readers and selected critics to whom I will send these essays). There is also, of course, a latent "political activist" motivation here as well. In my "activist" fantasies, I would want to be a fine journalist like A. J. Nock who wrote books on Jefferson, George, The State, and even Rabelais. I would like to print some of these, if I had the resources, in a "self publishing" form around 1997 or 1998, in the Jeffersonian spirit of '98 and or as part of the spirited Georgist revival now going on close to the 100th anniversary of the death of Henry George (1897).
If I lacked resources, and upon my retirement from the "national service", maybe I could find some support from a neo-Jefferson or Georgist institution. In the attempt to not lose any potential supporters and not embarrass friends or family, I have separated the more public (indented paragraphs) from the private (nonindented) ones in the remainder of this and the following essay. These private thoughts are laid out in a somewhat raw form and then would be abstracted into appropriate political philosophy if I chose the "self publishing" or "vanity publishing" route prior to completing the Practice. (I later looked on this "lost soul" outlook as a rather striking personal defect -- something I should try to remedy, without giving way to my "vaulting ambition").
Let me now turn to the Forward where legal scholarship in late 20th Century America presents a friendly criticism of my "politically romantic" work. (See the essay in Volume II, entitled "Some Aspects of the Demand Revealing Process" and the discussion which follows about the "optimistic strand" (read Utopian) of modern public choice.
I pick up on these tensions between the romantic and the classical from something that might be called "trial drafts of Hawthorne's unfinished romance". It shows, at bottom, I have been and perhaps always will be a political romantic, while perhaps always trying to suppress it. What if, I as an economist years from now, if I gave into "vaulting ambition", was to be a subject of a book like Schmidt's rendition of Adam Muller, called Political Romanticism.
This is an adventure that I have written, in the first instance, for my "natural daughters". For some time it has retained the characteristics of a thinly (mostly undisguised) autobiography written by Edward Coverdale, who very much resembles Miles Coverdale in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. Like one of Hawthorne's other characters, Edward Coverdale goes to England and then returns to join in the parade of American democracy in the next century.
Let me outline some aspects of the dream by my protagonist (self) who I call Edward Coverdale (and who represents the "I" in the nonindented sections which follow). In June, 1995, I envisioned my "several books" as an exercise in "postmodern" or contemporary political economy (all of which may seem somewhat pretentious). Up until around 1990 (when the Cold War was ending), the "cold war of my mind" rejected most postmodernists as basically nonpragmatic, much as does Richard Posner in Overcoming Law. In any case, this work takes a idea (demand revealing) and tries to concretize the idea (eventually at some length as in the a prospective book on a political economy of mobility, relating largely to institutions that influence air travel, including worldwide travel and tourism) as well as embodied it into a philosophy of hope that is more in the realm of art and poetry than a deep philosophical discourse.
The following reflects a discourse (largely with myself) on how all this came together during early 1995 in an original essay, called "Waiting for Turgot" (a great French "budget director" or Comptroller-General of France shortly before the Revolution). Turgot's earlier Sorboniques (1750) to me set the society and the world on a path which reflected the best of the "progressivist" traditions in the Practice of the Social Art.
At the beginning of Chapter 2 of the Practice (in "conversations with Condercet"), I spoke of Turgot's vision of always "extending the limits of knowledge". What does this mean in light of two centuries of reaction to modernist, enlightenment thinking. Since Turgot (and Condercet's) time, societies (and individuals within them) have looked somewhat skeptically at the "progressivist" view of history. The unilinear progression of truth and extending the limits of knowledge must confront the issue of how truth speaks to power, if you will. As I extended this work (the limits of knowledge, if you will), I went through a personal kind of deconstruction, a kind of "rewriting or scripting of self". Book III, basically written for family and friends, describes what this process has been about. If the ideas and practices I wanted to advocate in the early books begin to have influence in the near or even the far off future, I leave to my daughters as to whether this book (or parts thereof) should be published (perhaps on December 26, 2000). Otherwise, I ask them to archive the philosophy of hope in the hopes it will have relevance in a more distant time, perhaps December 26, 2100 (one hundred years later). This decision has a lot to do with the coming shape of politics and social art during the next millennium. (It is also a defensive measure against the modern Farmer Generals who form the basic power structure of the State and I would not want to provide ammunition they can use against the spirit and content of this work. Perhaps it might at some point work in favor of the work). However, at this point, the notes are about personal choices in advancing the work, about "moving forward" (hope) and "not backward" (memory).
The notes began in early 1995 as a deliberation on the personal choices (and constraints) and about how I could best develop Book I (The Practice of Social Art) and Book II (A Political Economy of Mobility). I call it (the notes to myself) " Edward Coverdale's Notes for Buckingham: Why England?" (changing the name slightly from the University I had in mind).
Coverdale's Notes for Buckingham: Why England?
This starts out as a sort of confessional, Augustine style. Not being a Catholic, I started out in 1994 trying a reconstruction of self and most recently in deciding on a course. A year of reading in all the social sciences, and in modern " deconstruction" (also a psychological one), I decided that I would seek to be a visiting scholar at an English University, Buckingham and then teach and write about public policy in an American university. The University of Buckingham It had been suggested to me by a professor friend as perhaps a good place to go to write what I call a "concrete utopia" which is the foundation of The Practice of Social Art (PSA) and A Political Economy of Mobility (PEM), subtitled "The Practice of Everyday Life".
I wanted the work in England on the political economy of mobility to be the heart of my next book along with a part that addressed the land question, a much more difficult thing to write. This would not be so difficult if I decided to make the rest of the contemplated book a treatment of resource allocational question from the usual American perspective, or at least the dominant neoclassical perspective which I call NCE. But I had decided that the rest of my life was going to be devoted to speaking and writing "the truth" as best I knew it. The problem was how to do so in a manner that spoke truth to power and led to "success" not "failure".
I had been the day before at the local "political economy" bookstore on H st. (adjoining the World Bank) and a little book about the "Corruption of Economics" flew into my hands. I suppose it revealed what I already knew basically but about which I had a lot of denial because I am a reconciler like Henry George and a person trained in the NCE tradition which according to the author of the portion I read organized a 'fantastical' plot against George near the end of the last century.
My work on mobility policy was basically going to be something that took "georgian political economy" as I viewed it perhaps 100 years later and reconcile it with the NCE upsetting only a few applecarts along the way. Perhaps the domestic airlines would be a little difficult but I had already beat them in ways that greatly advanced their own good (at least in my view) during the mid - 1970's and felt that I could also engineer something comparable of the supply side 20 years later. They would end up paying for the landing rights they used at congested airports and perhaps also for some of the noise externalities created by airplanes. Although I had always denigrated the "noise" problem, I had spent a year on P St. near Georgetown University under one of the main flight paths entering and leaving Washington's National Airport. In many other ways, I also became involved in the "ecology" of Washington, D. C. and in many ways the book is a reflection of Mercier-like thinking of the Washington (like his Paris) that might exist some 500 years hence in "L'An 2440".
But what if I succeeded in doing something like this? Would it help to sustain the larger goals? Or would I just be a footnote in public policy (I have not even been given that for airline and trucking deregulation, and have tried to take the credit only in little speeches that I gave standing in for more important figures during the last significant "political revolutionary" year (1981)). It was a year when even my immediate superior was afraid to leave Washington and another figure (his boss) who was to become another important figure asked me to stand in and I delivered a rather vitriolic history on "regulatory star wars" which is part (along with this) of my autobiographical sketches.
I wanted my daughters years later to know why it was that their father had not won a Nobel Prize even though he clearly thought he might or could have deserved one. The authors of "A Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics" (Albert and Hahnel) apparently agreed when they noted in 1990:
"We do not intend this as a criticism of Groves et. al. we see no reason why societies heavily endowed with graduates of higher education should not enjoy the luxury of intellectual labor that includes a role for those with a special talent for formal abstract theorizing. We merely point out that there was no rush of economists with a more political 'bent' to promote the theorists of incentive-compatibility for Nobel consideration!" (Albert and Hahnel, p417 footnote 4).
I once thought that perhaps we could do a better job of "promoting ourselves. However, given the "political" bent of American economics one could also understand that the course that I am taking here in my "scripting of self" will not win me a Nobel prize, even if deserving. It might gain a Pulitzer Prize, if that becomes what I am seeking. In a visit with my thesis chairman (George Stigler, a Nobel Laureate) in the Fall of 1977 to learn what I needed to do to complete my dissertation, Stigler advised me what I should do and said perhaps jokingly, "you'll probably win a Nob.. (eh) a Pulitzer prize".
Years later, when I was reading about "Sociobiology" or rather the autobiography of its author (Wilson, 1994) entitled Naturalist, I began to feel comfortable about the "naturalistic" course I was setting and targeted on a kind of inquiry that may fit into the line of inquiry that was being encouraged at the University I was thinking about applying to which is what my work in the "new institutional economics" and public choice/public finance had been all about.
But I was talking about a striking new direction in public finance -- abandoning, intellectually, the entire NCE determined American tax system for one constructed among neo georgian lines. At a practical level, and unless one pursues this course carefully, this is a possible recipe for rejection and failure. Yet, also, it led me to confront a fundamental conflict whether I was "going to Russia" to become a purveyor of the NCE dominated tax system. The decision was No. In this case, I was making a "practical" decision.
In thinking about sending this epistle to some of my correspondents to at least get a reality or p. c. or "political noncorrectness" check on my direction, I realized that the setting I was seeking was the only way that I would really have any good chance of succeeding.
What Is Success?
My formal writings and addresses started with a valedictory address at Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, Va. in 1958. The speech often called by my friends and family a the best ever given for that school, perhaps because my life was measured like the son of a Richmond school superintendent who work like me in the field of applied public choice also appeared to be a success, even though the Prime Minister I call him (a former Secretary of the Treasury, for whom I worked as a special assistant, in some difficult days, often wondered why the other person constantly went down rather than up in the bureaucracy. Social criticism, of course, is simply not an easy occupation and certainly doesn't breed success in the American political bureaucracy. I'm sure the Prime Minister knew the answer to his own question.
The Prime Minister is of course appointed by the President and the Prime Minister to whom I refer -- a Turgovian kind of man, and a model to which I refer later (not knowing if he shared any of my own admiration for A. Turgot) was for a fleeting moment in the late summer of 1974 one of the three leading candidates to be the first appointed President in American history. President Ford was appointed instead and I became an adept of sorts in the small counter bureaucracy that I had imagined when I made contributions to the Prime Minister's "Reflections on Political Economy" in December 1993. This is the annual Richard Ely Lecture named after a man I will talk about later in this introduction. Twenty one years later the Prime Minister appeared at the same lecture again, delivering much the same in the way of reflections but a much more targeted "bottom line" on the integration of trade questions, the IMF and the World Bank. The Prime Minister had become an even more important Minister of sorts during the Reagan years, and one of I perhaps most admired of all those on the political landscape. I include his memoir (thank you note) along with President Nixon's last Christmas card on my office wall.
In subsequent years, after the carriage of NCE-- Chicago style into the deregulation of transport (airlines and trucking), I wrote a first book on the central idea (the pivotal or Clarke tax mechanism) which is the central theme also of this book. However, the idea is tied to my own reflections about what it would take to make civil servants behave more like Hegelian civil servants in the idealistic Hegelian traditions (where they also eschew worship of "the State"). For this reason, this book (Book III) is also about the civil service and was originally intended as a separate book that had been tentatively titled "Civil Servants, Civil Societies". I had been (I felt) the founder of a counter bureaucracy at the top of the U. S. "national service", designed to control regulation using modern cost-benefit analysis, which is the principle tool of NCE.
In 1981, I anticipated a lot of what was to come in terms of the sharp criticism of NCE practice in two speeches that I performed as a stand in. My speeches of which I recall only four (the valedictory, the speeches of 1981 and another during the 1980's for my father in Richmond for the retired teachers along with my history teacher who had agreed that myself, and the other individual who had worked for the Prime Minister, were successful. These speeches might strike the reader as disturbing and funny, which they were intended to be at the time. I thought I was right and that I was speaking the truth, taking a chance not to be caught (because if they had been used to publically embarrass the institution where I worked, I would have been finished). I show these speeches to few people today although they foreshadow much of which is to come.
The first of the 1981 speeches was entitled "Regulatory Star Wars: OMB, EPA and Democracy" which also had the subtitle "How will the President Dispose of EPA's Garbage Truck Noise Rule. In my life I was to be plagued by noise rules (see later) and in this introduction to my book (future work) I am plagued by a counterpart which seems to be another metaphor of government over regulation -- the rule or policy of the Federal Highway Administration to require metric conversion of highway signs. Like the garbage truck noise rule, metrification of highway signs became a metaphor which stimulated and energized this work, hopefully in a more constructive and balanced direction.
Clearly, at that time (January, 1981) I was tired of being the garbage man and felt that there was more to life than the other heroes and heroines of the institution I had created than disposing of silly rules like the noise rule or (in the present context) of finding solutions to the metrification dilemma. But as I will argue, this is an important part of life that can set the stage for higher forms of progress, which I elaborate upon in what follows.
The second speech (February, 1981) is also funny except that it was given not to students but to a more respectful professional audience of academic intellectuals, and businessmen. It was about regulatory reform and where it would be going in the new Republican Administration. I was playing the unaccustomed role of "political bureaucrat" foretelling the future.
The third of these essays sets forth some excerpts, particularly from the second speech, which was entitled on "Wealth Redistribution in the Large and Small", a comment on Harrison and Portney's "Regulatory Reform in the Large and Small". (February 1981). As I look back on these speeches some 15 years later, I find that growth and change has led to a much different view of the world and how I should go about presenting my ideas to the world. This is the heart of chapter 5 (of Book I) and obviously the last chapter in the short-run to be written.
Here, at this point in time, I find myself 14 (or seven Congressional elections later) in much the same, if not a radically different, kind of discourse. What I was foretelling in early 1981 was a moratorium on regulation. This was followed 11 years later with another moratorium and the House of Representatives had just passed a third moratorium. Given all the other changes I saw myself with a very good chance of inserting the pivotal mechanism in a garb that I had pushed rather far during the two years following the two speeches but which had floundered during the period of my worldwide travels from 1983 to 1988. I had ended up in a revolution in Haiti, during June through December 1987, also in the massacre of Haitian voters in November 1987 playing the role of the American economist stationed in Haiti for what everyone believed was a renaissance of NCE economics in solving problems in that country. I saw on television the other night Minister Delatour, the Chicago trained Finance Minister who I was supposed to be aiding.
It was during that period that I started on this, my second book, that was laid aside in the succeeding years as I came back to the "oversight" of regulation. I didn't have many books and the ones I had (Henry George, Edward Belamy's Looking Backward and the Manuel's Utopian Thought in the Western World got me going on what would eventually I hope (Esperanto -- one who hopes) be called Esquisse after the last work of the Marquis de Condercet.
I an only in the act of trying to become a philosopher of history, in the context of trying to provide a more adequate "narrative" of my work. In doing this, I am mainly trying to fit this work into a philosophy of history that is concerned with Progress and Justice, where a politics of memory informs a politics of hope. Probably the greatest work along such lines is Condercet's Esquisse. I have tried to express this in the research prospectus in the section on What is Mobility Policy? This traces the work back to Turgot's sketches in the Sorboniques of 1750. Of all the great men whose philosophy I espouse, Turgot is at the forefront because I feel so much like him and would wish to be like him as an apostle of change. I am enigmatic for many reasons like him. He began the kind of progressivism I foresee for the next century and millennium.
If my youngest daughter prepares a sketch of the kind I told her about in discussing my work and a sketch to include in my work (even if posthumous, it would be like the one described on Turgot (in Manuels' Utopian Thought, which she saw me reading while she was studying painting in her visit of February, 1995. Turgot above all had my most valued attitude, one of (stoic) equanimity. Upon his dismissal after the Edicts of 1776: "If he was outraged by the betrayal of the King, there is no report of his indignation. The slightly skeptical smile continued to hover above his lips; it is preserved in Ducreaux's pastel in the Chateau de Lantheil." The papers of this man have also reveled no secret. If I have them then they are locked (Mark Twain like in a vault to be opened on December 26, 2100 if at that day someone with the permission of my grandchildren wanted to look backward over a history of the last 117 years as did the character in my favorite Utopian novel, "Looking Backward". For Bellamy the period was December 1887 to the year 2000 when I expect Esquisse (renamed the Practice) will be published as one of the many millennial works of that year. (I subsequently backed off from this idea, when I evaluated the competition facing me and the cacophony of works under which mine would no doubt be buried).
In looking back on what is success, there was a lot of Christian sentiment (Victorian sentiment with the likes of Matthew Arnold and Henry Ward Beecher and I remember best the lines (I think from Beecher) that seem to have carried me through many years. I wanted to plant, trees, write a book and have sons. The pursuit of equality in the last hundred years had made me quite happy having daughters, and I envision progression in a family like one of my favorite 20th century novelists (who helped me find Goethe). The novel was the first by Mann, Buddenbrooks, which showed the progress in a family from materialism (commercial life) to politics and to art. I have daughters who I see as inclined to both of the latter. For my oldest daughter, much of this work is really dedicated because I am seeking to define politics and the "practice of social art". The central theme is a "mobility policy" for the next century in which she can participate and be involved. I am taking the world's largest industry and showing how it can be a test bed for everything else. As I have been taught by some of my past mentors I start with the frontier of growth which is mobility policy and link this to the frontier of deterioration, much as did Henry George in the last century, in his Progress and Poverty.
Even before a former wife told me about a new bestseller in the international politics section (not just the new age section) of the bookstore adjoining the White House (it is called Spiritual Politics), I knew about karma, a practice which is practiced by those colleagues in the house where I live. It is live and let live, or what goes around, comes around, or shit on the road and smell flies upon your return. The Corruption of Economics, about which I talk more later in this essay is not karma as I practice it. But it is written by a first class economist and is most disturbing, even if I take it with an enigmatic Turgot-like half smile. How could NCE be corrupted; it was like reading a short book passed around by the LaRouche crowd almost a decade ago with a picture of Milton Friedman, entitled "Milton Friedman is a Fascist" which goes on to attack the University of Chicago as some Austrian-Hapsburg plot now being run out of the annual meetings of the Mont Perlian Society where I was invited by Dr. To once but begged out of because of the expense of traveling by air from Morocco to Northern Italy. (as shown later I am entering into a project to cut these expenses).
But the corruption strikes at more than just a belief I once had that George had missed some important fundamental elements of political economy. Students learn certain truths, with certainty and faith that the professors or masters have presented accurately the truths about subjects which would be much too difficult to figure out on one's own. My own, sometimes celebrated attempt to challenge one of the truths got me into a lot of difficulty, until it was learned later that I had the truth about motivating truth telling behavior. In the case of the Corruption, I was shocked by the enormity of the misapplication of the truth and how it can be bent ever so subtlety to carry out a stratagem against an idea that is wining too many adherents.
What I do in the way of discourse in now dealing with this shock is an important element in my proposal to Buckingham in which I take the basic ideas elaborated in Book I and suggest how they may be further developed in the context of international aviation relations (thus addressing the "infamous" U. S. vs. Heathrow problem). But for reasons elaborated here, perhaps I'm not ready to do this. Nevertheless, it sets a direction for work that if it doesn't succeed initially, it may succeed in years to come. I may have a Winnacott Paper in the meantime (the product of several months at Buckingham). Airline and transportation deregulation took from 1957 when first proposed to 1980 to reach full fruition.
There are notes like these that are very similar that have been collected under "memoirs" (1992 in particular as well as early 1993) when I was trying to jump start this work and to sustain myself in a thorough inquiry and portrayal of using the pivotal mechanism to solve the "airport problem" which has become a central metaphor of this work. Along with the picture of Turgot, I want a little sketch which accompanies a working paper on the airport problem, a little professorial man with a good number of pens in his pocket, tie askew and looking somewhat disheveled, with a sign entitled "Free the Airports".
A little more on the spirit of all this, which my colleague rejected as just not appropriate for jump starting a Mobility Policy Institute or a Mobility Policy Review. My once former wife in a letter from Seattle in November had encouraged me to read "Spiritual Politics" (and a few other associated readings) and the note follows as part of an introduction to what I see myself doing. As much as anything else, it tries to communicate what one would do to change politics, if one did not find refuge in a scholarly community, but fearing there one would also again find the Corruption of Economics. This is followed by a section on "Choices" in a letter to Buckingham.
Coverdale on "Rational" Social Art In An Irrational World
How does one talk meaningfully about "changing politics". As mentioned earlier, this book was conceived in the midst of the last Haitian uprising of November, 1987. As the American A. I. D. economist stationed in Port-au-Prince, I contemplated my life's work and the future (not being exactly certain I had one, given the circumstances. My predecessor called regularly from Washington during those harrowing days, promising military intervention, the last thing I wanted with the Ton-Ton Macoutes shooting outside of my house. I was infected with Chiliasm, as I expressed earlier. I relieved that by starting my Esquisse.
Seven years later, in late 1994, I was told that it had been rumored (through my father's "housekeeper" that I was dying of a dread disease (perhaps a rumor that I had contracted AIDs in A. I. D. because I had lived in Haiti and although quite untrue, I asked what I would have done if it were true). I conceived of this piece of reconstruction after a short conversation with an eminent economist (my evaluation of him) who told me he (the economist) was about to publish Volume I of his "Reconstruction of Political Economy", a Hegalian reconstruction if you will. I decided then I wanted to keep at work on my own, if somewhat more limited reconstruction or rehabilitation.
Nevertheless, in spite of my more modest approach, I decided that I too wanted to help reconstruct political economy and that an idea I had invented, known as the "pivotal" mechanism, or "Clarke tax" (sometimes even the butt of economists' jokes) had a key role to play in my version of the reconstruction.
It was at a time, shortly after the Congressional elections of November, 1994, that the United States seemed to be going through a political reconstruction (or deconstruction if you will) and a colleague and I began to put together a small two person Institute and Review, called the Mobility Policy Institute and the Mobility Policy Review. Although, for reasons elaborated later, the Institute and the Review, will not necessarily ever really exist in actuality, they provide a useful metaphor for the kind of science and social art that is espoused in this work. It should be clear that I am a political romantic and what flows from this has its good and bad qualities, particularly where the romantic is mixed with self-interest. Remarks on the Institute (which follows) convey a sense of what I am talking about.
By way of example, the following is what I initially conceived the Institute to be doing:
"Objectives:
The Institute is a self-funded society of friends who take active, outer steps in the world that reflect our understanding of the inner causes of events. Begun in late 1994, we have worked on 15 steps (suggested by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson in their 1994 book Spiritual Politics) to lend a new direction to politics. We and they use a whole systems or "holistic" approach that brings together all constituents in building new solutions together. Our work reflects the efforts of practical people trying to define practical solutions to practical problems, each following an inner light. We appeal to Transformational Leaders to help us all better define and shed that light.
We work from common material and share and disseminate our ideas. During the last year we have been working from Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government using, as a fulcrum, policy issues affecting transportation (including worldwide travel and tourism).
Our central focus is institutional design, applying principles of mechanism design. Mechanism design permits the parties in a social (collective) interaction to better take account of each other's preferences in shaping collective decisions. In our first working paper, we have taken a potentially lively topic relating to the long-head objectives of most recent Administrations to foster sound approaches to devolution and Federalism. We look in particular at the challenges presented in a new law that calls for innovation in balancing national and localized interests in our Federalism.
How We Work
We try to demonstrate the broad relevance of our ideas in a specific area of National and subnational/international transportation policies. Our specific focus is transportation regulation -- how to design better, smarter, and more "optimum" regulation at these various levels of government in a manner that responds to the interconnectedness of people , places and things. We believe that better, smarter, and more "optimum" regulation can be achieved through effective mechanism design.
The Institute does not offer anything startlingly new in a vast (economic) literature of mechanism design that has evolved over the last quarter of a century. However, we do suggest some novel ways to practically implement these mechanisms in ways that are complementary to existing voting and negotiations techniques. We use one mechanism, called the "pivotal" mechanism, because it is perhaps the best known of the universe of mechanisms that can be applied to the problems we want to solve. The mechanism says simply that every person (or pivotal unit) can change a social outcome to what that person wants by paying a sum equal to the social cost to others of making the change. By setting up the mechanism, one would rarely have to calculate the sum (of money or karma or any other medium of exchange), yet the mechanism drives collective choices towards social outcomes that are likely to be superior to those chosen in its absence.
The solutions that are arrived at are, to the extent feasible and desirable, "win-win". While the exact procedures may be initially difficult for the individual citizen to understand (a problem), they can be quickly grasped by representatives. In order to advance understanding we also suggest experimentation, along the lines first suggested by those who advanced their use in the early 1980's for intragovernmental decision making. A first step is to use the new laboratory of change that has been constructed in the current Administration.
A working paper (which appears in one of the Chapters in Volume II), entitled "A Political Economy of Mobility" outlines a possible approach to the "win-win" solutions we envision. It is not surprising that a society of friends that has spent much of their life "stuck in traffic" would look to "win-win" solutions to this problem.
We work on these problems also because they are fun. We think of institutional design as an art form. We hope to engage social scientists and policy makers in this art form of institutional design. This can be as fun and satisfying as graphic design, furniture design or any other artistic activity. Carried into the real world of (intergovernmental/international) political economy and activity, it can also be controversial and mysterious, possibly regarded even as irrelevant (which doesn't always inhibit the production of good art).
To take the mystery out of our artistic endeavor and to communicate its relevance to the problems of today, let's start with an apocryphal story of how it all began - a discussion between scientists (one political) and an economist of how to grow the world's largest industry -- travel and tourism (as opposed to opening a can on the island). The economist ends up saying "Well, let's assume a can opener".
In our proposal, we assume that certain decision procedures can be implemented within the decision procedures that characterize the current State. One does not know how exactly the State is going to behave in response. We appeal to its Leaders because the mechanisms for decision seem to fit into a widely shared set of objectives, a kind of Divine Plan, without exactly knowing how. This is the spirit in which we have undertaken this work, as a kind of spiritual politics." (End of Quote)
With my colleague, I quickly rejected "spiritual politics" as an overt objective, but it does infect, to a great extent, the dimensions of this work. This kind of politics has also helped me shape some useful new dimensions and to see my work in its historical contexts. I elaborate further in the third of these essays, entitled "Road From Richmond" with a particular reference to "spiritual politics" and "freemasonry".
In late summer of 1997, at the Geoist conference, I met a man that actually practices what I believed the "mobility policy institute" should be doing. I will elaborate in the forthcoming "Road from Richmond: (a mini-treatise on "environmental policy" which may have to await my departure from the formal "national service".
Since I am going to give a version of these essays to a former close colleague writing her own book on the "how to do it" of transformation leadership, I can only say that the current forms of "spiritual politics and the organizations that practice it (listed at the back of McLaughlin and Davidson's book remind me of the communities that grow out of the utopian socialist movements that I discuss at some length (at least in the context of Proudhoun and Fourier in the first essay). The problem is that nothing is accomplished until you can connect the movement to the centers of power. Roberto Unger's Knowledge and Power (1975) expresses the problem quite well. See also his recent trilogy of the late 1980s, Politics.
I found myself wanting to move in this direction. After I retired I thought of having a newsletter called the Mobility Policy Review, modeled after a favorite one (called "Telecommunications Policy Review") I enjoyed in the early 1980s, edited weekly by a bureaucratic acquaintance. He had to stop the newsletter when he became too influential.
In terms of a larger effort on "mobility policy", I conceived of this work as something worth working on for perhaps another 30 years where I would then (around 2025) reach or exceed the age of now 86 year old father. It would be a working model of my chosen field of endeavor -- public expenditure and regulation -- that could be integrated into the Ethos or Culture of my society at any point in time. Around 1990, applied to "Aviation Development", I called it an E-procedure, using the "pivotal" mechanism as an evolutionary procedure of sorts to deal with problems that had concerned me for almost 15 years and looking forward, could occupy me for another 30 years.
The E procedure is borrowed from Esperanto, the language of hope -- "Esperanto, par specila instumento" or "One who Hopes, with a special instrument".
Esquisse (in the form of Books I - III) is the rest of my life's work, past and future, with respect to which I am arranging with my daughters to a plan of sorts for determining their disposition. While some of this is captured in the body of this work (1996 and up to the end of this millennium), some of the rest will likely be set aside (Mark Twain like) for any reader interested in it for December 26, 2100. Much of this is personal reminiscences for my family (which would remain otherwise unread) and some of the intervening portion is for students of political economy that might find uses for it in other cultures in other times -- at least for the next 105 years or so.
In part to counter anger, frustration and Chiliastic impulses, I began these futuristic essays in my lonely Chateau in Port-au-Prince in November and December, 1987, I sat like the Marquis de Condercet virtually imprisoned. Along with his last book Esquisse, I had Henry George's Progress and Poverty and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
Condercet is now viewed as a hero (by modernists and futurists) and as an anti-hero by political romantics who believe that modernist ethics are a negation of feeling (Berlin, 1990). Both Condercet's book and the others I mentioned are today regarded as utopian or visionary. Besides being viewed by some as the world's greatest futurist, Condercet stimulated modern interest in social choice procedures and our project is a modern day "Projet Girondin" which was a project in fiscal federalism. Links to George and Bellamy, who are widely regarded as those who stimulated the progressive movement in the 1900's are explored in the following, third essay. I happened to be writing on the same day 100 years later than the character in Bellamy's Looking Backward and it seemed appropriate to remember him too as one of the spiritual fathers of this work.
Esquisse: Reflections on Political Economy.
In beginning this work in early 1995, I contemplated the world around me and what message(s) I wanted to communicate to that world. I picked up the threads from the "Haitian" book of 1987, which I had also titled "Esquisse" (Sketches).
I started with certain fragments of the message I wanted to communicate -- papers like "demand revealing reconsidered" and "the demand revealing governance of enterprise" as well as this "reconstruction", a portion on mobility or transportation policy which had occupied me from 1988, the earlier work being dated May 1987.
Section goes here on how all this is like Saint-Simon's Esquissee (1802), published 100 years after his death (in 1925) and who probably also had "conversations" with Turgot.
Conversation With Turgot.
In the not unusual mode of "I'm standing on the shoulders of giants", I selected the most incorruptible of them all (Turgot) and thought of myself as a Frenchman leaving French Court around the time of the French Revolution. I wondered what a man like Turgot of today would say about this work.
Perhaps he would advise me to consult with others -- perhaps Condercet, Bestiat, and Goethe. After the consultations, he might advise that I go and do some preparatory work even though some of the experiments that are suggested as a program of research could be undertaken most immediately, particularly those under the rubric of mobility policy. But Turgot did not have to struggle with constituent assemblies. One could have letters drafted by one's friends to the Vice President and in the current climate perhaps win friends in the modern assemblies.
As I reached my mid fifties, I began to have fears of death -- if possibly misplaced ones, perhaps reflecting really the fears of my father. So too, most of the heroes which fill some of these pages died in their mid to late fifties -- Henry George, Turgot, Condercet (Turgot at 54, six years after his demise at court where he spent much time trying to determine cheap ways to reproduce the written word, via communications).
I had somewhat more time at 55 to take my fragments collected since my last work (Clarke 1980) and to try to communicate their relevance. In my head, I held a discourse with Condercet and also with Bestait. My work had already had much "success" through the work of adepts somewhat like them. I wanted though to put together this work so that I would be more than a footnote in textbooks or history. Even if my idea got five pages in textbooks, I wanted five pages in the history of ideas or perhaps an entry in the next Palgrave Dictionary 50 or 100 years hence.
Not being a modern Condercet or Bestait or even a "ranking" economist, I decided to follow the path of a great "sociobologist" who knows something about his strengths and weaknesses and if I cannot win a Nobel Prize with this work (for reasons that will become more obvious, I could win a Pulitzer Prize. Depending on the configuration of, and one's success in controlling one's own "vaulting ambition", one could seek either type of prize -- more appropriately, given the style of this work, the latter. I call this Stigler's Joke, albeit a kindly one.
In any case, at the age of 55, a federal "civil servant" faces choices and this is about my "choices" in where to take this work. I am looking for advice from my friends and mentors.
In a letter to Buckingham which constitutes much that follows, I posed the nature of my dilemma. Again a private letter to myself where I try to explain the choices to myself.
Why England?
I thought of England (the home of my ancestors) and decided to target my initial research proposal on a new "international" university north of London who one of the adepts I admired had suggested to me.
Away from the pressures of Washington, I could at least bring together the piece on mobility policy and its relation to international aviation relations, of which I had already sketched the part on aviation development domestically.
My other choices were Moscow (or Kiev) or to remain in Washington. I had been actively recruited for the past year to do taxation and fiscal federalism in Russia or the Ukraine. I had avoided it not as much from fear of change but from logistical problems in settling my marital affairs and taking care of my 86 year old father in Richmond, Va.
As regards Russia or the Ukraine, I was dissatisfied with purveying the old NCE taxation policy that I complained about in the introduction -- the so called "corruption of economics". I had surfaced my conflicts in a question to Dr. G about the famous "American economists' letter to Gorbachav" of 1990 (on land taxation) and received an explosive, if gentle and negative reaction. My mentor about change had advised, you as a counterweight might be good for Russia but Russia may not be good for you. I had tried foreign assistance in A. I. D. for several years and know a lot about the realities. I would not likely be happy, for reasons elaborated in this book, the American system of "compulsory taxation" nor the current system of fiscal federalism.
But maybe I was taking too narrow a view of the choices. At the AEA meetings, I had run into Dr. O who had his own A. I. D. supported project. I had promised to send him a vitae , but had delayed it for nine months while I dealt with my choices and constraints and the present realities.
In Washington, after more than 20 years, I know a lot about the present realities. There is a lot of excitement about change and I can spend time contemplating and becoming excited about my own "Projet Girondin" of the kind that occupied Condercet shortly before his death (probably at the hands of the Jacobins). I expressed that fear too about the Jacobins in the author's introduction to my 1980 book. My mentor had advised correctly that if you pursue that beyond the most limited contexts of your current assignment, you will be destroyed. As a surefooted Capricon with a love of the English weather, I would just "think about England".
Should I present this to a "discussion group" (the only group I belong to is the Henry Simons Society, started by Dr. To). The mobility policy part could be probably endorsed but the Land Policy part would likely be denounced, not as wrong but just as irrelevant. As Dr. Tu has said, "no one knows how to get there".
And Henry Simons, who I very much admire, was the intellectual father of American NCE taxation.
As a final choice, I could try a sequel to my book which describes a Fourierian "phalsantery". Perhaps I could continue to do the work that I do and occupy time in a fantasy world that shows how demand revealing works in a community of slightly more than 1600 persons who use the method for collective decision making. I was almost driven to such a sequel as part of that work, but it does make up another kind of option.
The wise Turgot surveyed the entire "historical picture of the progress of the human mind" which had sparked Condercet's "Esquisse" (sketch) and his "Vie of Turgot" (1785).
Turgot viewed the entire landscape of policy that I addressed under the political economy and noted:
first in a brilliant apercu about change:
"Before we have learned that things are in a given situation, they have already been altered several times. Thus we always become aware of events when it is too late, and politics has to foresee the present so to speak." (Turgot was a real her esthetician and, no doubt, in the world of today he would be a well regarded hermeneutician).
Turgot also advised me to look more deeply not only into the recesses of self but also to the relation of self and society.
One can also look at all of this in a new deconstructionist light which is what the "scripting of self is all about". How does all this fit into the sociology of knowledge? As Derrida (1976) has suggested, the "human world, owing especially to its being bathed in language is so ambiguous, complex, and heretogeneous that any attempt to capture it and hold it steady, as if it were a physical object or thing is simply not possible, The idea of capturing the world, perhaps like my models of the French enlightenment, may be judged impossible in the classical style. One doesn't even try to say it all and if one does not have the words to say it all then all we can do is speak and write, in the hope of moving towards that promised land of the truth.
What much that I want to say outside the work that I define in my research proposal is not about political economy. It is rather about the scripting of self that leads one into an intellectual calling. It is a process by which people reinterpret the meaning and significance of past experience in a way that destines them to be free. An example of such work is Mark Freeman's "Rewriting the Self" and one of the Chapters in his book about Jill Conway, a president of Smith College who describes a development experience in going from the grassslands of Australia, and to England, becoming a historian and becoming the President of Smith College. I have contemplated the purchase of Conway's book "Road From Coorain" which I had wanted to give to my eldest daughter when she journeyed to Japan this summer because it expresses much that I have learned in dealing with the past, with guilt, and becoming free. It is one of the best books I have uncovered about change, reinventing oneself, and of going forward and not backwards.
An author of "My Brilliant Career" knew something about channeling ambition and dealing with conflicts between duty and ambition.
The process in which I have been engaged also permits one to become a better combattant in the world of ideas, rather than a mere footnote in the textbooks. The scripting of self is about character, the building of hope and courage in building and communicating truth.
This brings me to the heart of the matter -- my work, its relation to Henry George and Richard Ely. I suggested in my first book (Clarke 1980) in a two page aside the link between the "pivotal mechanism" or Clarke tax and the single tax. There I suggested that the goal of public expenditure theory was the collection or appropriation of all rent and then I attempted to demonstrate this in Chapter 6 in terms of an initial sketch of the demand revealing governance of community. In 1985, Professor Tideman developed the idea in much more detail in an article entitled "Efficient Provision of Local Public Goods Without Compulsory Taxation". Tideman (1985) recognizes that "networks" of communications, of transportation, and of the advance of knowledge, and in later work (of the use of planetary resources) falls outside the rubric of efficient local provision and this is largely what my rendition of "mobility policy" is all about. Having communicated "the remedy" for governance of these networks, one could then retreat to a Fourierian phalanstery governing it by demand revealing means. Almost all known objections to demand revealing governance would be resolved as I am suggesting in a more recent version of demand revealing reconsidered. Even the bias towards wealth is resolved by using hours of work in community service in the Fouriarian type community. Tideman actually describes such a small scale experiment in using the demand revealing process for governing a college fraternity. There was no success in using it for governing a condominium development.
Real estate developers are not dumb. My first job as a graduate student was working for the Real Estate Research Corporation (RERC) in Chicago in the mid 1960s. The first Fourierian experiment was about to begin in Rumania when a wealthy nobleman was willing to donate land, but the adjoining landowners rose against the project. Manuel (1979) on Fourier: The Burgeoning of Instinct". If not landowners, what about the intellectual community, say the National Science Foundation using taxpayer funds to support such a project. Stories could be told about the scientific community within the government when they found themselves supporting even intragovernmental applications of the approach in the area of communications. I treat the issue of experimentation with demand revealing at some length in Books I and II of this work.
Through my travels and some of my writings, I have been as much as anything a student of "power" relations in society, as well as the flow of ideas through the intellectual establishment and how these are translated into social action. As much as anything I have been fascinated by the NCE paradigm, as embodied by Chicago economics and how it has influenced worldwide economic and development policy. Much of this has been for the good where a powerful case for some policy is built, such as the deregulation of much of the transport sector in the United States, where I found myself as the personal envoy of such a policy. I found myself avoiding pitfalls in areas where I thought the knowledge was inadequate (such as deregulation of banking), and sometimes making mistakes where I thought there was adequate knowledge or I knew a lot but not enough like repealing fair trade laws in the 1970's or the application of certain antitrust laws. I find myself as a sort of charactiture in a book by a Presidential speechwriter (Jack Casselry) when he has no one to turn to except me to interpret presidential policies on application of new antitrust laws and policies -- to make a determination on whether a speech by the President is good "republican" antitrust policy, and I was a mere civil servant.
I have often dreamed of myself as aspiring to be the ultimate "Hegalian civil servant" and this work is basically intended to educate a new class in the universities and those who find actualization in the civil service to appreciate the world view portrayed herein, one aimed at a true societal "devolution". One must begin by squarely confronting error. To this end I resurrect the history of the NCE's stratagems against George. Gaffney's work is a telling indictment that needs to be read by all. Gaffney starts by saying that at first he did not believe all this, even though as I, he and I had suspected it.
I came to suspect it when I was working for RERC around 1966 and the Douglas Commission had published its famous report calling for a thorough study of and taxation. I learned a little from Anthony Downs and also from reading about Paul Douglas, a Chicago economics professor in his early days, about the background of all this. This story is developed somewhat more fully in my vignette on intellectual history which accompanies the Chapter on Aviation Development.
One will now find the flavor of some of the above in what is to follow: I have not decided what, if any at all, role it should or would play in a reflections on political economy near the end of this century. A separate set of notes (yet untyped also supplements the above which also talks about this in a related milieu). Each year over the past three years (since 1992), I have prepared these reflections between the months of December and January), and at some point they become integrated with the work itself, or as in Wilson's Naturalist, separate. But they are critical to understanding deconstruction, before one attempts serious reflections or a reconstruction. This is the kind of criticism that I might suggest to another reconstuctionist, although when I mentioned "what about post-modernism". He immediately replied that he simply ignored them. Maybe this is useful, though for me it has been critical in discovering truth before trying to talk meaningfully about social change.
Memoirs are often written late in life as a form of expost justification. I write them in the process of shaping a work, that is intended to stimulate discovery and the advancement of knowledge. While it may seem a self serving attempt to create a new paradigm, I hope it is eventually viewed as something different. Thee matrices of development set a historical context that is important.
This is at bottom an attempt to explain all this to my family. Was my life devoted largely to bringing home money from the exercise of power as a regulatory policeman to protect mobility (or even as was often the case to restrict it with overzealous regulation which I was unable to do much to restrict). Or how did what I did fit into the reconstructionist's Pascalian theory of health and safety regulation? Was my work just rambling memoirs like this with a concentration on "Clarke Taxes and Airport Slots" where the raw material filled voluminous files. A fellow graduate student said I was like the character in Barth's "The Floating Opera" as my rooms were filled with yellow pages as I delved into the cost allocations for a water pollution project in Lake Michigan which brought about the discovery of the Clarke tax. Then my life seemed to revolve around the airport which I was hired by RERC to justify from an economic point of view and which became a metaphor of sorts for much of this work.
Two economists of a more radical bent (authors of the Quiet Revolution) who talk a lot about incentive compatible mechanisms in their renditions of future forms of governance also focus on an airport in their somewhat utopian "looking forward" so I am not alone in this focus and it helps to bring the subject matter into concrete reality. It makes the "tires hit the road" so to speak in the world of policy making. In the work to follow we are talking about actual policymaking in terms of processes that could be implemented almost immediately. Since they may not in fact be easily implemented, the fact warrants some investigation and may lead itself to discoveries about why things are as they are. This would be a useful form of discovery even if the processes I envision are not implemented.
Around 1977, I applied much as I am doing today to an English University to the Smithsonian Institution and won a year's fellowship to study and write about the demand revealing process. This work is really a completion of what I would like to have done. What I in fact did was to complete a Chicago dissertation (Part I of my book, reinserting a paragraph on Austrian economics which professor Stigler suggested I remove in the actual dissertation. In addition, I wrote an overview about a "new synthesis" entitled "The New Incentive Mechanisms; Capitalism, Socialism, and Henry George" and then wrote a Part II on "The Information Problem" -- sort of in the vein of Heyek's two divisions of economics. If individuals don't know their own preferences, how would demand revealing institutions evolve so as to best represent the unknown preferences. This was really about politics as I now understand it which is about how preferences are discovered. I then went into a fairly detailed treatment of a demand revealing phalanstery which over the years has become my contribution to utopian literature and is entitled "The demand revealing governance of a community".
In between the work that I have done (including all the fragments collected between my last published work (1983) and a recent small paper with Drs. Brough and Tideman on "Airport Noise and Congestion" is the two part reconstruction that I hope will complement the reconstruction of the political economist of whom I earlier spoke. I had discovered demand revelation as a result of tirelessly studying his work which to my mind really became the first of the new voting processes structured on incentive compatible lines and became hopeful when, while not totally endorsing my work, when no one else had done it and I was frantically searching for at least one endorsement (other than my adviser Professor Tol who was powerless to advance my work in face of the opposition from the Chicago Business School), he at least gave me all the conditions under which the process would be "Pareto Optimal". I copied these into a footnote in my first article on demand revealing and this helped in endless ways to protect my work from obscurity when the Empire (of econometricians) struck, so to speak. Now to proceed beyond the babble in the life of Dr. C, this is the plan of the book, the first chapter in Part I and which is the heart of it in terms of the field of inquiry I want to advance -- which myself and a political science colleague (Mr. C) called "Mobility Policy".
As we discussed it, I would do much of the political economy of mobility and Mr. C would do everything else. Our Institute was largely fictional and I used it largely as a figurative way of respectably advancing my ideas in particularly restrictive circumstances where I found myself. Censorship in the current real world is of a more subtle kind than that suffered by by favorite French philosophes.
People might say I should spend more effort fighting the insnities of the current system rather than trying to "reconstruct" transportation, communications or environmental policy. However, I do what I am supposed to do and simply have my dreams (My own views or dreams in relation to the present reality of "regulatory management" are best expressed in Chapter 5 unexpurgated (the third of these essays) which is a spirted defense of my personal views and the practical experiences underpinning them -- about 15 years after "Regulatory Star Wars", I am a much more mature and mellowed individual.
In any case, my first and second book (about implementation of the demand revealing process) start out with the observation of Professors Tideman and Tullock (1976) that the DR process could be used to determine the federal budget. Having received an endorsement of sorts in the early agencies to present the demand revealing approach as a possible means of budget resource allocation among Federal agencies, I found myself exploring the use of the tool for making decisions involving "distributive programs" (as opposed to means-tested redistributive programs). In this exercise, which forms an important part of the fourth essay in this collection, I treat the applicability of the approach in the various domains of budget policy, particularly in programs affecting transportation as well as land, natural resourses and the environment.
Although I was successful in eliciting support for an exploration in the budgeting of information technology, I failed in an effort to apply this tool to aviation enterprise management. In this context, I intend to build upon the research proposal that Dr. T and I constructed back in 1991. This proposal was not accepted because of "other resource priorities". Euphemistically put, their are cycles in the priorities the National Government might give this kind of thing depending on the condition of the author's own "networks" (not functioning particularly well at the time). For reasons elaborated in the proposal, I could accomplish a lot in studying the British model of "peak load pricing", privatization and ATC/airport governance using the British model.
Following the ideas of Tideman, I also develop an approach towards dealing with land, environment and natural resources which may appear in some ways to be divorced in many respects modern day neo-georgism though the latter is of course inherent in "Airport Congestion and Noise". To call all this "georgist" might kill it prematurely. My style is to try to follow the truth but not to stir unnecessary opposition. Why stir up landowners and mortgage bankers when I'll have enough problems with domestic and international airlines who, as in the case of airline deregulation, I think I'm promoting their long run interests (though short-run they don't always perceive it that way).
In this context, the "airport slots" problem whether at the four congested airports or "Heathrow and the other British airports" becomes my metaphor, focusing on an intense investigation of the "how to do it" of the pivotal mechanism or in this case, compensated incentive compatibility. The research proposal should be understood in this context. Like a "biologist", I am studying something that seems "antlike" in terms of the general world order or the larger order in the spatial/temporal world that Turgot conceived, but it presages more to come in terms of a "political" sociobiology of sorts.
My mother for many years worked for three entomologists in the Department of Agriculture in Richmond, Va. So I'm always fascinated by the life of an entomologist. In terms of his "sociobiology" and life and work as a "naturalist", I see Wilson's work in terms of a Turgovian world view. For example, Turgot's etymologie in the IXth volume of the Encyclopedie and which later became much that Condercet carried forward in the Esquisse. This is recorded at the beginning of the research proposal called " A Political Economy of Mobility".
I am in the process of asking a friend, a writer and journalist, how best to edit some of these "raw" thoughts into a piece, that if it ever became public, would not damage my cause. He knows, for example, "mortgage bankers" and that I am in the process of "becoming" something very different from Professor Ely. How do I separate the private from the public, something I constantly inquire about with another mentor who sees public and private lives as quite separate. They are usually separate except when one is rising into a very high level of spiritual consciousness, in which case the exposure of the two together can lead others to believe one is a crank or lunatic. This was perhaps best captured by Turgot himself in the quote from the MS in his archives presented earlier in this essay.
Turgot (and his friend Condercet) enjoyed the "pleasures of foretelling the future" and today both (at least Condercet) are heroes in the eyes of the futurists while their optimism is skeptically received in other quarters. J. Coates in an 1994 issue of Technological and Social Change (the futurist journal) named Condercet as the world's greatest futurist. Condercet is largely known to economists through his analyses of probabilities and his study of voting, so (if properly recognized) he might be regarded also as the world's greatest futurist and social scientist (particularly in the realm of political science and sociology).
What follows in the remaining essays (and in my prospective Books I and II) is a kind of "Projet Girondin" that I hope would capture the attention of technologists and of many in the social sciences as well as policy makers. If it does not succeed, it might capture the imagination of "policy scientists" (professors and their students) who become excited by and wish to practice "the social art" which is what the larger book is about. In the meantime I proceed on the path of personal growth and change, and resolution of internal conflicts (personal ones) which would allow me to proceed with this work.
What follows which is unexpurgated and only for family and friends (my daughters and a few others including my mentors) and the Clarke archives.
First on the Mobility Policy Institute (and Review) and Professor Ely. I did the somewhat pedestrian work which is capsulized in a "research prospectus on mobility policy: international aviation" with the idea of using it as a vehicle for new ways of looking at transportation policy problems. Ely-like, I could work to construct an "institution" and attach it somewhere (like Ely did to the University of Wisconsin). He called it a part of the University.
As I plan my departure from the "national service, I thought that maybe even I could attach the Institute to a "reinvented government" (evil or self promtion lurks in the minds of all people). Maybe I'll be an adjunct because the Institute could make quite a lot of money (as did Ely) who then speculated and then lost in all as mentioned above. I don't want the fate of Ely even though the name is sort of worshipped I guess when all the world's economists gather each year (as they did recently in Washington) where I attended as a non paying, non-member guest. Perhaps I will now just simply join the Association which requires that I pay an annual fee and reveal my fields. I finally did and had only to reveal two fields which in the typology involving hundreds of subfields were "publically provided goods" and "transportation systems". Originally, I thought maybe of having three: Collective choice, social justice and mobility policy, the latter of which does not currently exist in the typology. Also, except for mobility policy, the first two are preempted by an economist I admire and whose work I freefully plagiarize. I don't pretend to be an expert on collective choice and social justice, though I have spent a good while studying these in trying to implement demand revealing. My success in doing so will be measured in the remainder of this book which will be measured (I hope) from the standpoint of art, science and the practice of public administration. (See my discussion, in the third of these essays, of Binswanger's "Magic and Money" and Needleman "Money and the Meaning of Life").
In any case, during the early morning of February 27, 1995 I concluded these notes and began to write the introduction to my research prospectus about reinventing government in the area of mobility policy which I hoped to "carry to England".
Perhaps I'll never, of course, go to England. Like my present wife, I've learned how to have constructive dreams -- real world dreams about change. It is remarkable that a man, like myself, who was always seeking change for everyone but himself, would in the spirit of Turgot adopt a philosophy of change for himself and for society. Architects of change must of course realize that there are a vast array of other personality types, whether these be the 16 on the modern Meyer-Briggs (where I am the architect) or the 810 uncovered by Fourier.
In putting this altogether in a way that the different personality types become agents of change, a certain artfulness is demanded. This is also a skill that I am learning in reaching out as the books that a former wife has taught me -- popular books like spiritual politics, where the spirit of what is talked about can be grounded in reality. A close friend who has helped me to construct "mobility policy" and who is an ultimate geo-realist" dismisses much of what is said in this (having constructed a real world Institute of Peace). But as a set of marketing skills in constructive social change I see what my former wife is really talking about.
This is more than anything else a set of private notes for my wives (former ones) as I enter the Turgovian stage of my life. (In Road From Richmond, however, it finally appears to be quite different in nature), as I explain to a former Professor why I do not want to go to Russia to further my Turgovian quest). I think I can have my daughters read this, perhaps my first former wife and eventually my second (former) wife when the marriage is dissolved. I have written the ultimate dissolution contract which if anything should, if I worked hard on it, become famous in the "family law' of the late 20th and into the 21st century. My geo-realist friend wanted me to write and book on this and go on the lecture circuits throughout the country. My writer friend could have helped me translate it into action and living words and he could have also become rich and famous. (Instead, my wife's lawyer gets paid several thousand dollars "interpreting the work" -- reminds me of a French sketch on the bathroom walls of my former home entitled "Justice".
With respect to marital dissolution, how could I ever fully explain the tensions that arose in my own "house of seven gables", of coming to Washington 20 years ago (newly married) and talking about George Washington in my sleep. I cannot blame "egalitarianism vs. privilege" but Hawthorne's novels, read again, lead me to a better understanding of what Hawthorne viewed as sin and guilt, expiation of guilt, becoming free, moving forward and changing are all about. I can xerox several pages from the H. of S. G., including "Phoebe's Good Bye" and set it aside for ninth step work.
I can look at myself as the characiture of the modern neo-classical economist, writing a 20th century egalitarian, incentive-compatible divorce contract. My wife described her lawyer as a "characiture", perhaps choosing him with "Justice"in mind. My mentor constantly reminded me about the real world, a world of feeling and irrationality. I had wanted to reduce most of divorce law to formula-based equations, much as we do for child support today. This would largely remove a great deal of discretion and irrationality. What I was trying to do with divorce law also applied to many other areas of enterprise -- transportation, the environment, health and education -- all of which fit into the spirit of '98 in the following essay, Its like a spirtual politics and a progressivism for the next century, where success will surely be measured in relative terms.
I had given an early version of this to my friend the journalist. I wrote important sections in the 50 page treatise on divorce with his (the friend's) dissolution contract and experiences in mind. It was frankly Condercetian in conception which brings me to all of the bad words or "the secrets" of my character. This is basically a part of what they call the 4th step in the rituals of the 12 step programs that have become sort of a "new age" religion in America. The perceived tyranny of these programs can lead "a snowcapped volcano" like Condercet toward death or destruction as can the vicissitudes of life in late 20th century Washington or America. I think I am (and I hope he is also) finding solace in each others company as I help 12 step him in the constructive sense of the word. I will also probably send this to my sponsor, and "the mentor" for more education about my choices. Maybe I'll buy a used Toshiba 2000 SX from my mentor at the "just" price and work with my friend on his insights after a couple of decades in observing Washington. In any case, I believe my friend "the snowcapped volcano" (described in Manuel and Manuel's Chapter 20 (Condercet: Progression to Elysium) needs the advice of his mentor Turgot, with the half smile on his face (perhaps hiding enigmatically his own torment). Perhaps my friend can write one day of the constructive revolution of sorts that is being invented here. It is sort of like the end of slavery where we did not get to the rest in ways that are gently revealed in Tideman's work.
Although I do not manipulate my friends without telling them, my friend is very pissed off by the "mortgage bankers" and I once thought he could help me put together a critical piece that would express a lot of the philosophy here with a sense of where it could go -- this is something I am reaching for in the concluding essay. I am not seeking the usual critgue of insitutions or of NCE. Both have become very popular and "critiques of NCE" are everywhere with the society becoming almost Francophone in the style of French economists who write critiques of NCE followed by often useless or naive policy presciptions (see current issue of Kyklos on European Public Choice and Economics). I mean no disrespect in this regard as the social utility of this style and method may far exceed that of the economics practiced in our own country.
As my daughters read (perhaps a somewhat expurgated version of this along with pages of the Esquisse (the real one), I am looking for a definition that I want to help them find in politics and art. They have to take a "futuristic" approach not as it has been bowdlerized by the media. They have to appreciate what equality as envisioned by Condercet (of nations, of classes, of gender, and all the rest is all about). One can find much of it in George and the second part of my prospective work. At some point, I'll seek a sketch which I will commission from my daughter. It will be the only extant portraiture of me (alone or in a group). If alone it would look more like Turgot rather than Fourier (looking like a misanthrope) contemplating a "phalanstery". Maybe it would be more like a modern Courbet with two stonebrakers and become a classic of 21st century art. Better yet, it could be more like Courbet's friend, Whistler and more appropriately a young Clarkian "Clarke's Father" to retain the spirit of the current Whistler exhibit in Washington which I recently visited with my daughters. Perhaps best of all, rather than an individual holding "Esquisse" and contemplating a "progression to elysium", it would be two or more astronauts building institutions (like I talk about in the "spiritual politics" portion of this essay, titled "esperanto, par speciala instrumento" in the language of Esperanto, which appears at the lead of the working chapter on aviation development -- the quote from esperanto is "one who hopes, with a special instrument".
But knowing nothing of the art which will be defined early in the next millenium, I don't want to second-guess or anticipate her artistic syle. I'm learning a lot from Bloch on art appreciation in his Principles of Hope. At some point in this dialogue, I had progressed to "economies of signs and space" (Lash and Urry) with its cover being a painting, entitled "Elasticity" (by the Italian futurist Booccinio). It shows a man on a wild horse, perhaps to be unseated by his "vaulting ambition". Se my fourth essay on the City of E and the "Pricing of Elasticity" (the information technologies used in the City of E). My hopes were of course that I didn't end up late in life or in the afterlife singing the tune that concluded my 1980 book -- philosopher Nelson"s Lonesome Town"
"You can buy a dream or two to last you through the years,
and the only price you pay is a heart full of tears."
In any case, as an art form , this gets at the "spirit" of what I want this work to be -- as a classic of sort in the institutional art of the 21st century and the new millennium. It would be more than just a collection of fragments if I had written nothing else where speeches like "regulatory star wars" was combined with a space station (with 1600 people in a Fourierian phalanstery) governed by the pivotal mechanism interspersed with my Greenian travelogues. "The sort of life" would be a different life indeed.
Thus begins the prospectus on my reconstruction of mobility policy (where I pose to my friend the task of suggesting an answer to a Foucautian question):
"What is Mobility Policy? (This could be a deeply serious if funny project where in 1995 an economist, a political scientist and an artist are sitting on P St. in Washington D. C. on both sides of Georgetown University writing a definition about a new school of institutional design under the rubric of Mobility Policy. It will become an Institute and a Bi-annual review. The Economist will write the political economy of it all and it will no doubt be challenged by the hired guns from those who serve the various affected interests. It would certainly create excitement. If it turned out badly, the three friends could always joke in the vein of the famous economists joke which ends with the economist saying after the scientist and engineer had tried every way to make order out of chaos "Who do you think created the chaos"? (A joke that bothered me for 20 years when I became an architect of airline deregulation but could not until now compete the "supply side" aspects of all of it. I then found my friends and Dr. Coates (famous futurist) talking about airlines (sleezeballs) run by Dr. Death (the FAA) which I oversee on regulation in the pages of Technological Forecasting and Social Change. At least the result of all this is a modest treatise on mobility policy which is my definitive piece on what should and could be done to make the American airways a nice place to fly. After six years of dreaming about it, I would have made a contribution to "reinventing government" in America with serious attention given the (Esperanto) procedure for the development of aviation.
If to my friends (if I share it beyond my closest colleague(s)) think this is the work of a lunatic, it can only be explained by the above Turgovian quote. In any case the personal piece can be titled (instead of Why Buckingham), it can be called: "Waiting For Turgot". This finally became the title of the second chapter of Book I which was followed by these and other vignettes which were drawn from personal notes during 1991-1993. They are indeed put together for a closer or more distant time -- perhaps that time (hopefully) when incentive compatible methods of collective choice begin to flower perhaps after the end of the trough of the Kondratiev cycle early in the next century. We will have seen a spate of millennial writings and much more in the way of alternative communities which will answer Putnam's (my former carpool's question in "Bowling in America". Putnam, a geo-politicist, really did not appreciate incentive compatibility, nor did the sociologists who attacked it. That of course reflected my own lack of education and presaged the work I undertook since 1980. I'm very much better prepared to sell all this to social scientists but that isn't the only audience that I had envisioned.
Waiting for Turgot is thus becoming a set of personal notes which reads sort of like the "naturalist" (Wilson's autobiography). There is of course no market except for entertaining travelogues about Washington and other places and I have a more serious purposes of advancing the idea. If Turgot, Condercet, and say Bestiat (three sort of present real world figures) were plotting a common strategy (which I have not even proposed) the autobiography would fit into all of this, so it is sort of a weapon in the arsenal (so to speak). But to me it is more useful in the early part of the next century where we have averted revolution (I hope) though Turgot embraced these (at least America's) also. I have always wondered though what he would have really thought of Condercet's final end and would it have been accepted enigmatically -- with the pained half smile. Or would one have peered into deeper recesses of emotion as in the Mona Lisa. Perhaps my daughter's work of art will answer this question as one contemplates the politics of the next millennium. I finally (and wisely) gave up on the idea of asking my daughter to directly participate in an exercise in 21st social realism. Fortunately, a good book (or art and culture) called (interestingly) The Culture of Hope by Frederick Turner, flew into my hands. So I bought it for my youngest daughter as a refreshment from Sociology and Lithography during her summer studies. Then maybe I'll give her a hopefully refined version of this chapter. She wants to go to England too in order to study English and European art and culture. We can discuss the pursuit and expression of "rational social art" in these contexts. Since she is also interested in geneology, we can also discuss some of the content of "Road From Richmond".
In concluding this essay, I acknowledge its several purposes, including motivational and transformational ones. The essay is a social deconstruction of sorts aimed at "constructive postmodern" interpretation of my work, which has become a source of motivation. It leads me at the conclusion of the following essay to suggest the broad outlines of a politics of "achieving subsidiarity" both subnationally and supernationally, in an increasingly complex and nonlinear world, one that continues to be organized hierarchically. The themes are further elaborated in Part II of the Practice and in the Political Economy of Mobility (Book II).
Constructive postmodern interpretation also extends to one's personal history. The third essay deals with some of my history, particularly as it applies to the configuration of the modern regulatory state. I call for a reform of regulation quite different from the reforms I have actively sought in the past, though I have retained an optimism that they would move in the desired direction.
The essay describes, in part, the desired direction and the nature of the underlying reforms, which will be elaborated in the concluding essay.
Having finished the above essay (largely woven together out of journal entries) in August, 1995 I contemplated how to configure the following one on politics and self, believing that a "too truthful" elaboration might harm my realization of a second career, or even starting one like my dreamed of visit/sabbatical to the University of Buckingham, followed by an appointment at some school of public policy. I would choose perhaps the _____ ____ Institute for Public Policy at the University of _____. (The choice is reflective of my thoroughgoing "pragmatic liberalism"). That is to say, the expression of any "American" political views could be somewhat (unconsciously) self-destructive. Therefore, I have mostly limited the distribution to friends and advisers, while erring mostly on the side of "truth", or my current perceptions thereof.
Letting the "public self" resurface for a moment, I was choosing two places geographically where I wanted to practice social art, linking what is known as the "new institutionalism" with the old one. My practice of "utopian realism" was aimed at the governance of international air travel arrangements where I would prepare a ______ paper to complement my work on domestic arrangements (see my first essay) and to better educate myself on the consequences of globalization in a country adapting rather well to the phenomenon at a University seeking to advance the "new institutionalism". Then I sought a place, for example, at the University of ______, which had been a focal point for the old institutionalism late in the last century. There, I wanted to become engaged with other scholars on the direction of "pragmatic liberalism" in the next century. I develop "the narrative" supporting this course in the following essay, entitled "The Road From Richmond: Confessions of A Geoist".
Draft Chapter 3, entitled "Road From Richmond: Confessions of A Geoist" is under construction. An unexpurgated version, however, is available in hard copy by request. Send an E-mail to Edward_Coverdale@hotmail.com
Footnotes
1. . In addition to Nock's autobiography, I commend readers to his Jefferson; Henry George: An Essay and Our Enemy, The State.
2. In a world of what Habarmas calls "ideal speech", I would want to lead the Unabomber to view the consequences of modernity like I do and begin to correct "design faults" in the system. However, if he read what was to follow, he might perceive a large slip between "cup and lip", between theory and practice, looking in particular at "operator faults" in the system (see Giddens, 1990). Facing the prospects of possible breakdowns in "liberal discourse" and no means of coordinating actions through incentive compatible means, I would gladly give my life but not my work, preserved as
Geo.3 on these computers.