Whoever it is they cart in to write on The Economists blog had some interesting comments about American politics:
My response, which I’d stand by this year, is that once you live in a rich democracy, it’s pretty much all gravy. The fights over income inequality, national health insurance, immigration policy, and so forth, all take place within a remarkably narrow range of national well-being, compared to the variance that currently exists around the globe. A big government health care system may cause your happiness to vary by a percent or so from this mean (which direction depends on your political persuasion), but it will not bring you within a few orders of magnitude of a peasant farmer living on the edge of starvation in Darfur. This brings me a certain equanimity when watching the successive presidents deliver their speeches.
This sort of cosmopolitan, we’ve solved all those problems conservatism is what eats at the soul of libertarianish writers like our The Economist fellow here. As a privileged member of an elite international news organization, the price of Gas in Kalamazoo, or the state of schooling in Indianola, Mississippi is a conceptual thing.
Political victory or defeat for this person means the recalculation of some utility functions due to a change in marginal happiness. Politics is worth a fighting effort, but change isn’t going to create anything beyond either annoyance or the abeyance of such.
The writer brings up the mass of third-world folks who doubtlessly could use some relief from a difficult life. But we are talking about the value of political action among ourselves in our society and nation. All the more conondrous to the homeless, to inner-city children, to the rural poor, to migrant workers, to the uninsured, and the like to be told that their struggles “all take place within a remarkably narrow range of national well-being” when they bite the tail end of that distribution.
Political argument may sometimes be foolish, but political apathy is much more deadly to our spirit.
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