Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

J. Bradford Delong: Notes on Gerald Friedman: Since 2010 fiscal policy austerity has been a disaster for both Europe and the United States. But how much better could things be? How much good could be done by a restoration of a sensible fiscal policy?

I take a sensible fiscal policy to be one that, in the words of Abba Lerner, recognizes the first principle of functional finance...

Charlie Deist: Brad DeLong on Austrian Economics:

Charlie Deist: Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Bob Zadek Show.

Project Syndicate: America’s Broken Political System: Whether or not the tax bill survives the conference process and becomes law, the big news won’t change: the Anglo-Saxon model of representative government is in serious trouble. And there is no solution in sight. For some 400 years, the Anglo-Saxon governance model–exemplified by the republican semi-principality of the Netherlands, the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom, and the constitutional republic of the United States of America–was widely regarded as having hit the sweet spot of liberty, security, and prosperity. The greater the divergence from that model, historical experience seemed to confirm, the higher the likelihood of repression, insecurity, and poverty. So countries were frequently and strongly advised to emulate those institutions.

Nobody would dare offer that same advice today... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Losing friends on Twitter: What can I do here? What should I have done differently?

It is a matter of basic empirical historical fact that to a typical upper class white Virginian in the 1950s, "individual liberty" included, as principal and basic parts, the liberties:

• not to be bullied by unions into paying your workers higher wages.
• not to be forced by the federal government into integrating either state or state-funded services, or especially public accommodations.
• not to be forced to join and then taxed to pay for a Social Security program.

Empirical fact. Historical fact. A seamless web of "individual liberty". These were among its principal components.

To deny that these were (a large) part of what "individual liberty" meant to a typical upper class white Virginian in the 1950s—to claim that you need "textual evidence" proving that this was how any particular one thought, for the "belief" that this was the case is a "slender reed"—that is a truly remarkable hill to choose to die on:

And the video from October is up:

INET Edinburgh Panel: Gains from Trade: Is Comparative Advantage the Ideology of the Comparatively Advantaged?:

My notes and slides:

Ricardo's Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0QMFGpAUFCjqhdfLULfDbLE4g

Project Syndicate: Keeping US Policymaking Honest: Last month here at Berkeley I heard great optimism from the illustrious Alice Rivlin. What “technocracy” in the good sense the United States has—what respect is paid to sound analysis and empirical evidence in the making of policy—is due more to Alice Rivlin than to any other living human.

No, this is not about Martin Peretz...

2006: Madmen in the Attic...: Here Mark Thoma watches Tony Giddens in the Guardian discourse on conditions for a 'revival of sociology.' I listen for a while, and then I want to sidle quietly away before I am noticed:

Economist's View: Did Economics Crowd Out Sociology?: A call to arms, by Anthony Giddens, Commentary, The Guardian:

All you sociologists out there! All you ex-students of sociology! All of you (if there are such people) who are simply interested in sociology and its future! I'd like to hear from you. We live in a world of extraordinary change, in everyday life, family relationships, politics, communications and in global society. We are witnessing, among other things, a return of the gods, as religion re-emerges as a major force in our societies, locally and on a worldwide level.... [W]hy isn't sociology again right at the forefront of intellectual life and public debate?...

First of all, note that nine and only nine would sign on to this letter.

That is not a large number.

Second, note that they do not analyze the deficit-increasing tax bill on display, but rather something else:

Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz, and John. B. Taylor: How Tax Reform Will Lift the Economy: "In the foregoing analysis, we assumed a revenue-neutral corporate tax change...

Attracting him a very great move by http://equitablegrowth.org, I must say...

Greg Leiserson has been killing it on tax policy this late summer and fall, most notably with The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But there is lots more good stuff as well:

Information from the very sharp Eric Toder: The House Ways and Means Tax Bill Would Raise the National Debt to 123 percent of GDP by 2037: "The Tax Policy Center estimates that the House Ways and Means Committee’s version of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA)...

...over the first decade... increases the deficit by 1.7 trillion dollars.... Between 2028 and 2037, the TCJA would reduce net receipts by 1.6 trillion dollars and add 920 billion dollars in additional interest costs. Over the entire 20-year period, the combination of reduced revenues and higher interest payments would raise the federal debt held by the public by 4.2 trillion dollars...

Six Faces of Right-Wing Chain-Forging Economist James Buchanan...

Steven Teles inquired why I liked Will Wilkinson's essay How Libertarian Democracy Skepticism Infected the American Right much more than I liked Henry Farrell and Steven Teles's essays When Politics Drives Scholarship and Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them as takes on Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains http://amzn.to/2zKJygv...

Mark Koyama: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?/span>

The Malthusian Epoch and Its End

The agrarian age Malthusian epoch in human economic-demographic history had three principal driving characteristics:

1. Technological and organizational advance was slow and stable relative to movements in population.

2. Standards of living wer near "subsistence", in that increases in living standards produced increases in population growth, and decreases in living standards declines.

3. Resources were important, inasmuch as average productivity declined with increasing population, adjusting for the state of technology and organization.

Note to Self: Where Does the Use of "Takers" as in "Makers and Takers" and "A Nation of Takers" Come From?: It appears to come from right-wing loon and goldbug Edmund Contoski:

INET Edinburgh Comparative Advantage Panel

Panel: Gains from Trade: Is Comparative Advantage the Ideology of the Comparatively Advantaged?:

Ricardo's Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0QMFGpAUFCjqhdfLULfDbLE4g

Ricardo believes in labor value prices because capital flows to put people to work wherever those things can be made with the fewest workers. This poses a problem for Ricardo: The LTV tells him that capitalist production should take place according to absolute advantage, with those living in countries with no absolute advantage left in subsistence agriculture.

Melissa S. Kearney: How Should Governments Address Inequality?: "In 2014, an unusual book topped bestseller lists around the world: Capital in the Twenty-first Century...

...an 816-page scholarly tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty that examined the massive increase in the proportion of income and wealth accruing to the world’s richest people. Drawing on an unprecedented amount of historical economic data from 20 countries, Piketty showed that wealth concentration had returned to a peak not seen since the early twentieth century. Today in the United States, the top one percent of households earn around 20 percent of the nation’s income, a dramatic change from the middle of the twentieth century, when income was spread more evenly and the top one percent’s share hovered at around ten percent. Piketty predicted that without corrective action, the trend toward ever more concentrated income and wealth would continue, and so he called for a global tax on wealth. 

Live at Project Syndicate: Politics in the Way of Progress https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/populist-politics-block-development-goals-by-j--bradford-delong-2017-10: BERKELEY – There are 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to tackle problems including poverty, hunger, disease, inequality, climate change, ecological degradation, and many others in between. Clearly, 17 is too many. As Frederick the Great supposedly said, “He who defends everything defends nothing.” Similarly, those who emphasize everything emphasize nothing.

This points to the problem of forging goals through consensus: they can end up being a wish list for everything short of heaven on Earth. But, to be effective, goals should operate like turnpikes, which allow you to make progress toward a specific destination much faster than if you had taken the scenic route. The purpose of consensus building, then, should be to get us to the on-ramp, after which it becomes harder to make a wrong turn or reverse course... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Let me put a spotlight on the very sharp Brink Lindsey here...

Brink Lindsey believes utopia is in our grasp. Our problems today are, he thinks, at their root problems about the creation of truly human identities that people can embrace.

This is a remarkable shift.

Previous human societies have had very different problems:

The Robert Heinlein Wars, Part MDCCLXIV http://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/12/the_robert_hein.html: John Scalzi watches as Dave Itzkoff begins another round of the Heinlein Wars:

Whatever: NYT Review Fallout: There's been some interesting commentary and discussion following Dave Itzkoff's NYT Book Review piece on me and my books, so I thought I'd post links to some of them I've found, for the edification of Whatever readers. In no particular order: Instapundit notes the piece, and has some thoughts on the idea of [Robert Heinlein's novel] Starship Troopers being fascist, roping in Spider Robinson to rebut that claim...

I would dispute Scalzi's claim that either Glenn Reynolds or Spider Robinson has "thoughts" on this issue. I would characterize them as having "reflexes."

I think I had some "thoughts" on this issue some 10^8 seconds ago:

The Starship Troopers novel I originally read in the early 1970s had four layers:

Weekend Reading: David Sessions: The Rise of the Thought Leader: "How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual... https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual

Should-Read: Anton Howes: Why study Economic History?: "What is Economic History? It is about asking some of the biggest and most interesting questions imaginable... https://medium.com/@antonhowes/why-study-economic-history-ef747767be25

Kindly General Lee, meet kindly Comrade Vladimir:

If the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly is not your Kronstadt, there is something profoundly wrong with you

"For a certain kind of leftist hipster or wannabe hipster, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet six o'clock on that October afternoon in 1917...

Suggestions?...

:-)

Should-Read: Nancy MacLean: DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT'S STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA http://amzn.to/2voi3qD: "As 1956 drew to a close, Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., the president of the University of Virginia, feared...

...second Brown v. Board of Education ruling, calling for the dismantling of segregation in public schools with “all deliberate speed.” In Virginia, outraged state officials responded with legislation to force the closure of any school that planned to comply.... Darden... could barely stand to contemplate the damage.... Even the name of this plan, “massive resistance,” made his gentlemanly Virginia sound like Mississippi. On his desk was a proposal, written by the... chair of the economics department... James McGill Buchanan [who] liked to call himself a Tennessee country boy. But Darden knew better....

Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: After World War I: Weber: Marxism, liberalism, and what we will here call "nationalism"—just to be polite... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/lecture-notes-f.html

• We've talked about Marxism...
• We've talked about classical liberalism...
• We haven't talked about "nationalism"...

We read Norman Angell: We did not read Max Weber: nationalism as social-darwinist doctrine:

Hoisted from 2013: Apropos of David Glasner http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/09/should-read-in-which-david-glasner-argues-that-john-maynard-keynes-passed-up-a-very-valuable-opportunity-to-preach-about.html and John Maynard Keynes's:

Now "in the long run" this is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again...

2013: Why Did Keynes Write "In the Long Run We Are All Dead"? Weblogging http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/05/niall-ferguson-is-wrong-to-say-that-he-is-doubly-stupid-why-did-keynes-write-in-the-long-run-we-are-all-dead-weblogging.html: "Niall Ferguson:

Project Syndicate: Supply-Side Amnesia: While in the White House, Feldstein waged a persuasive but lonely bureaucratic campaign against the Reagan administration’s 1981 income-tax cuts, arguing that they had been too big, and would prove economically painful if not corrected.... If Feldstein’s warning had been heeded in 1982-84, America would be stronger and happier today. I was thus dismayed at his recent expression of optimism that under today’s Republican-led Congress, “a tax reform serving to increase capital formation and growth will be enacted,” while arguing that “any resulting increase in the budget deficit will be only temporary”... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

If I were you, if I were trying to understand Washington, DC today, I would hold tight to four points:

Live from "My Kronstadt was the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly": WTF, Tony Barber?! The "masses" did not "seize the initiative" in 1917. The Bolshevik Faction of the RSDP did. The "masses" were, as Lenin said, vacillating, and needed to be led by the halter and driven by the knout:

Let's give the mic first to Comrade Ulyanov:

Vladimir Lenin: The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htm: "The Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks formed a bloc during the whole period of the revolution from February to October 1917...

• Gavin Wright: Review of "Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development": https://eh.net/book_reviews/slaverys-capitalism-a-new-history-of-american-economic-development/

• Stephanie McCurry: Slavery and economics http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/slavery-economics/

Hoisted from the Archives: More Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging for 2007's Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend! http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/01/more_dred_scott.html: Mark Graber has gotten himself to the right of John C. Calhoun. This is a position painful and ludicrous for a twenty-first-century American legal academic to assume.

It is a position so painful and ludicrous that it should induce any twenty-first-century American academic to undertake an agonizing reappraisal—particularly over Martin Luther King holiday weekend. But Mark Graber doesn't. Let's turn the mike over to him:

Worth Highlighting:

• A Historical Document: Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal Predicts the Failure of Clintonomics: One evasion in Ken Auletta's piece on the Wall Street Journal stands out: his quoting without comment of Norman Pearlstine's claim that Paul Gigot “was a first-rate reporter...”. He was not. http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/a-historical--1.html

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/universities-in-the-age-of-trump-by-j--bradford-delong-2017-07: Let me take a break in this column from our usual economics to worry about our institutions: What have we to say—to hope and fear—about the role and the future of the independent—ideologically and intellectually—university?

When I read this by David Glasner, I wonder whether the shift in Hayek's beliefs between the 1930s and the 1980s was an improvement. In the 1930s, he believed in big depressions—"secondary deflation"—as a way of breaking "nominal rigidities", which I understand as the power of labor to resist being forced to accept declines in real wage rates. By the 1980s, he seemed to believe in shooting people like me in soccer stadiums, and throwing them out of helicopters into the South Atlantic. See: Pinochet, Augusto

David Glasner: Hayek, Deflation and Nihilism: "Hayek argued that... neutral money was... constant total spending (MV)... https://uneasymoney.com/2017/07/23/hayek-deflation-and-nihilism/

...Once the downturn started to accelerate, causing aggregate spending to decline by 50% between 1929 and 1933, Hayek, totally disregarding his own neutral-money criterion, uttered not a single word in protest of a monetary policy that was in flagrant violation of his own neutral money criterion. On the contrary, Hayek wrote an impassioned defense of the insane gold accumulation policy of the Bank of France, which along with the US Federal Reserve was chiefly responsible for the decline in aggregate spending.... Hayek’s policy advice was... relentlessly pro-deflation. Why did Hayek offer policy advice so blatantly contradicted by his own neutral-money criterion?...

The puzzle about just how and why the brain eater ate Clive Crook's brain—how it was that, starting about a decade ago, one of the most interesting (and intelligent) of the Tories simply lost his grip on reality—remains, to me at least, a mystery.

Here I am hoisting from one of the first full-blown signs of it in 2007.

A little background: By 2008 the brain-eating was overwhelming. For example we had Clive Crook on the "huge success" of the nomination of Sarah Palin—meaning, that is, that she was highly qualified to be Vice President and would attract lots of new votes to the McCain-Palin ticket:

Clive Crook (2008): Democrats must learn some respect: "The problem in my view is less Mr Obama and more the attitudes of the claque of official and unofficial supporters that surrounds him... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/09/democrats-must-learn-some-respect/8803/

John Maynard Keynes: John Maynard Keynes was brought up a classical liberal and a classical economist. He believed in free trade, economic progress, cultural uplift, and political reason. He then found himself working for the British Treasury during World War I, unable to stop what he thought were disastrous post-World War I political decisions. He then found himself watching as the classical economic mechanisms he had been taught to admire all fell apart.

He then picked himself up.

After World War I Keynes used what power he had to—don't laugh—try to restore civilization.

Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: Europe's Post-World War I Crisis Through the Lens of the Life of John Maynard Keynes http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/lecture-notes-f.html?asset_id=6a00e551f08003883400e552211a228833: World War I makes it impossible to be a liberal believer in progress, peace, rationality, equilibrium, the benevolence of the market, the triumph of reasoned discussion, et cetera.

So what do you do?

The answer is "managerialism." Muddling through. Trying desperately to somehow cobble together something like pre-WWI liberalism—to make it true in practice even though it isn't true in theory, and to do so somehow.

Hence Keynes.

The night watchman state that supports the fully-developed market economy is one of the most strange and significant historical development in political economy. Any analysis of it requires that one view hit in perspective—that one examine other the other alternative forms that state power and authority can and do take and have taken.

And the greatest sociologist-political scientist-historian of our age analyzing such things is James C. Scott. I have often wished that I had a reading list on Scott-stuff to hand. And I wish somebody would construct an annotated one:

Here are my thoughts:

China and Economic Growth: Hoisted from the Archives (What I Am Thinking About Right Now Department) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/china-and-econo.html: Hoisted from the archives: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/china_and_econo.html: A somewhat different take on Ben Friedman's Moral Consequences of Economic Growth than the review I wrote for Harvard Magazine. Written for Caijing:

Hoisted from 2007: Arnold Kling vs. Brad DeLong on the New Deal http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/02/arnold_kling_vs.html: UPDATE: Bruce Bartlett writes:

I just read your WSJ piece and you make one mistake. If Hoover had been re-elected in 1932, Ogden Mills would have been Treasury secretary, not Andrew Mellon. Mills became secretary on Feb. 13, 1932.

Fallen to Linkrot: Arnold Kling vs. Brad DeLong on the New Deal at the Wall Street Journal's website.

Here are my first drafts for the exercise:

Introduction to: After Piketty: The Research Program Starting from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century http://delong.typepad.com/2016-08-31-piketty-volume-intro_hb052516.pdf

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an astonishing, surprise bestseller.

Its enormous mass audience speaks to the urgency with which so many wish to hear about and participate in the political-economic conversation regarding this Second Gilded Age in which we in the Global North now find ourselves enmeshed.1 C21’s English-language translator Art Goldhammer reports (this volume) that there are now 2.2 million copies of the book scattered around the globe in 30 different languages. Those 2.2 million copies cannot and should not but have an impact. They ought to shift the spirit of the age into another, different channel: post-Piketty, the public-intellectual debate over inequality, economic policy, and equitable growth ought to focus differently. We have assembled our authors and edited their papers to highlight what we, at least, believe economists should study After Piketty as they use the book to trigger more of a focus on what is relevant and important.

Link to: After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality

Read MOAR

I think the answer is "probably". I think he is probably not feigning. I think he probably has no clue of what goes down at the Finland Station.

At the Finland Station, you see, elections are fine only as long as they produce socialist results. When push comes to shove, it is indeed the case at the Finland Station that, as Lenin wrote: "Every direct or indirect attempt to consider the question of the [election] from a formal, legal point of view, within the framework of ordinary bourgeois democracy and disregarding the class struggle and civil war, would be a betrayal..." Sunkar can see this not as the act of "crazed demons", and instead choose—and it is a choice—to see Lenin and company as "well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis". But on-the-ground really-existing "ordinary bourgeois democracy" is and always has been of little value to Lenin's flavor of socialists.

Weekend Reading: Aristotle: Politics: Property and Wealth: "Let us first speak of master and slave, looking to the needs of practical life and also seeking to attain some better theory of their relation than exists at present... http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html

Time to hoist this again, and think about it some more, for the very sharp Neville Morley reports from 1600 Pylos & Sphacteria Avenue:

Neville Morley: 1600 Pylos & Sphacteria Avenue: "Here we are again, with a new article on ‘Why everyone in the White House is reading Thucydides’... https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/06/22/1600-pylos-sphacteria-avenue/

Hoisted from the Archives: How Supply-Side Economics Trickled Down... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/how_supplyside_.html: Bruce Bartlett's piece on supply-side economics:

How Supply-Side Economics Trickled Down - New York Times: AS one who was present at the creation of “supply-side economics” back in the 1970s, I think it is long past time that the phrase be put to rest. It did its job, creating a new consensus among economists on how to look at the national economy. But today it has become a frequently misleading and meaningless buzzword that gets in the way of good economic policy...

sparked an interesting and useful debate at Mark Thoma's Economist's View (which I previously noted).

Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: FoucaultAlthusserDerridaJameson http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/foucaultalthuss.html: In comments and elsewhere, those with a sharp distaste for cultural studies "theory" in moral philosophy see it as one undifferentiated reactionary mass: FoucaultAlthusserDerridaJameson.

I want to draw some distinctions:

Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: Still, I think, true today. Thus I continue to hoist my neoliberal freak flag here: Is It Really Harder to Make the Case for Free Trade These Days? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/is_it_really_ha.html: Paul Krugman wonders if it is harder to make the case for free trade these days. There are more losers from trade liberalization, he thinks, and it is much less clear that the losers are in some sense "undeserving".

I wrote http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/must-read-two-points-diversity-and-finding-truth-in-the-sense-of-rough-consensus-and-running-code-where-i-think-larry.html: "Two points (diversity and finding truth in the sense of rough consensus and running code) where I think Larry Summers is 100% correct. One point (Charles Murray) where I think Larry is broadly right but that things are more complicated. And one point (sensitivity training) where I think Larry Summers is more wrong than right. But more on that anon. Definitely worth reading."

This is the "anon":

(1 & 2) The two points where I think Larry is 100% correct are:

The highlight of last week's JEF-APARC Conference at Stanford https://www.jef.or.jp for me was getting to sit next to Frank Fukuyama https://fukuyama.stanford.edu, whom I had never met before.

Hoisted from June 4, 2007: Neil Henry vs. Jay Rosen Future-of-Journalism Smackdown! http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/neil_henry_vs_j_1.html: "Excuse me, I need to worship my idol a bit more... There... That's better...

Leon Trotsky's Not-Entirely-Reliable-Narrator View of Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/02/daily-economic-history-leon-trotskys-not-entirely-reliable-narrator-view-of-lenins-new-economic-policy-of-the-1920s.html: "With the bourgeois economists we no longer anything to quarrel over...

...Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earths surface--not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership, were to collapse--which we firmly hope will not happen--there would remain an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.

I do not believe that the very sharp Branko Milanovic ever studied George Kennan's "Long Telegram": his 8000-word message in 1946 back from Moscow, where he was then U.S. ambassador, to the State Department in Washington.

In Kennan's view, what was required was containment. And, indeed, containment was the keystone, indeed the whole arch, of U.S. policy from 1946 all the way up to 1989. Remember that really-existing socialism—Soviet communism—is attractive only to those who do not have to live under it. Remember to keep the competition on the economic, personal freedom, and ideological levels, using force only to preserve post-WWII boundaries and limits. Remember that we have the better system—in choosing leaders, in deciding on policies, in guiding economic growth. And if, when the competition is carried out on the economic, personal freedom, and ideological levels, it turns out that we do not have the better system? Then, as Kennan wrote:

The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States... [which] need only measure up to its own best traditions.... Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this.... The thoughtful observer... will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society...