That Used to be Us

I’ve been reading That Used to be Us, by Friedman and Mandelbaum via the Kindle app on my iPOD. The discussion that they provide has been quite engaging, although the delivery or pace with which they make their cases has been a bit ponderous for my taste. They talk about the 4 major challenges that the US currently faces, impact of globalization on the economy, impact of the IT revolution, the energy crisis and global warming, and finally the debt crisis we face. They also spend significant time discussing the 5 actions that the US has to take to deal with these issues. As I recall them, fixing our education system so that it is globally competitive, scaling back entitlements and raising taxes to deal with our debt problems, the need to invest in repairing our infrastructure such as roads and bridges, the need to develop and use no carbon forms of energy along with the global need for greater energy efficiency, and some others I forget. They discuss the need for shared sacrifice that we features of WWII, the cold war and other times in our history. They talk about our dysfunctional political system and how we got here in an insightful way (high campaign cost, perpetual fund raising which empowers special interests, and the polarization of the parties so that the middle is not engaged with wither. They talk about the war on math (fiscal fantasies embraced by each party respectively) and the war on physics (global climate change deniers).

Through out this reading I’ve been thinking about game theory (a subject discussed in our strategy class at Duke) and how the Nash equilibrium of this situation could be changed. From a game theory perspective we are in a Nash equilibrium, negative campaigning works well, overly simplified solutions are red meat to each party’s base (confirmation bias of the core supporters), compromise is not possible (the trend of wave elections for the past couple of election cycles gives each party the hope of controlling the congress and white house enabling them to push through their agendas through the legislative process. I haven’t come up with anything that works in my minds eye.

At this point I’m nearing the end of the book and they are making the case for a third party candidate. A major point is their historical analysis that although no third party candidate has gotten elected, in each case the executive winning the election has co-opted and implemented much of the third party agenda, in order to remove their threat in the next election cycle. Their argument is that the candidate needs to speak truth to the American people about the problems we face and the approaches that he/she advocates to address them. The candidate needs to confront the cliché answers of the established party core supporters and win over the middle, currently not part of the polarized current structure. They argue that the candidate will likely not win, but will positively influence the situation none-the-less. I tend to think that a third party win would be less effective than a third party loss based on their historic analysis. I’m not fully convinced, but this is a plausible way of moving to another Nash equilibrium within our political system that would allow us as a nation to focus our energies constructively on those problems we have been kicking down the road.