Planning Decisions, Inc.

THE BOTTOM LINE FROM CHUCK LAWTON

Economic Development and Political Dogma

Published Saturday November 24, 2007

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt
from any intellectual influence,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
~ John Maynard Keynes

The critical turning point in James Joyce’s masterpiece Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is captured in an exchange between the novel’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, and his schoolmate Cranley. Shocked at Stephen’s apparent rejection of his Catholic faith, Cranley exclaims, “You mean you’re going to become a Protestant?”

Exasperated with his chum’s failure to grasp his point, Stephen replies, “I said I had lost my faith, not my self respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent.”

I’m reminded of this little exchange every time I go to Augusta and some unexpectedly stilted dialogue awakens me to the fact that I’m back in the tiresome world of sharply defined ideological boundaries, of Democrats versus Republicans, developers versus environmentalists, conservatives versus liberals, in the all pervasive, incense laden atmosphere of dogma.

As a policy analyst, my job is to gather fact and organize evidence to try to answer questions, to try to produce insight. Since this predisposition is my natural state of mind, I’m brought up short when I encounter those for whom it is not. I need to slap my face and flip a mental switch when I enter the world of ideological certainty, the world of acolytes to one or another of the competing versions of “the one true faith,” the world where fact and evidence are seen not as the building blocks of an as yet unclear conclusion, but rather as ammunition to “prove” the “truth” of one dogma and the “mistakes” of another.

“OK,” you say. “So what? Deal with it. That’s the way it is in the ‘real’ world. Practical men (and women) have underlying intellectual positions and tend to interpret facts in ways that support them.”

True enough. Dogmatic blinders are another fact I have to accept and come to understand. I need to remind myself to review a checklist of defunct economists and those they enslave before I enter the Statehouse. But another fact that seems obvious to those of us not part of the inner sanctums of dogmatic discussion is that much of the general public is increasingly removed from that debate and increasingly put off by the manner of its conduct. Poll after poll shows that people are fed up with partisan bickering. Whose side you’re on, which “church” you’re in, is less important than who you are, what you stand for and how you propose to solve real problems.

Voters are less interested in whether a particular program is a Democratic solution or a Republican solution, a liberal solution or a conservative solution, than in if it’s a workable solution they can understand. They’re more interested in uniting around an effort to solve a problem than in bickering about why the other guy’s solution is wrong.

The reason this changing backdrop to the political process is important for Maine is because, as I argued last week, our best hope for economic prosperity depends on reformulating our development goals. And reformulating our goals can best be accomplished if we drop our blind allegiance to old “solutions.” It’s not that our old solutions were “wrong”, or that the other guy’s were “better.” It’s not that we have to join another church or accept a competing dogma. Rather, it’s that we need to see the problem differently.

If, as I contend, keeping and attracting people is our fundamental problem, and if, as I have argued, that where and how we live is our fundamental competitive advantage, then all our problems—land use regulation, government organization, tax policy, health care, education reform—must be seen through that lens. And all of our proposed solutions must be evaluated not by how well they conform to the old dogmas but by how well they embrace this new reality of the global competition for people.

COMMENTARY

Very well done.