StephenKMackSD's Blog

Like Plato, Cockeyed Platonist (CP) is smitten with the serviceable abstraction, the pertinent Idea, with a capital I. He begins his latest column by introducing a book published on the internet titled “The Great Stagnation”: oh! the siren call of hypostasis, a mainstay in his intellectual lexicon; the reality, the actuality of Ideas. This set of ideas and arguments almost, with some alteration, fit like a glove and off he goes on his long and fascinating quest to make his opinion, bolstered by the convenient rhetorical platform provided by the author, Tyler Cowen, congruent with America 2011. Although CP displays a willful ignorance regarding ‘The Cold War’ as engine of American prosperity, post World War II. And with that prosperity a waning of a belief in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, as a viable political answer to the Depression, also fading in collective memory.  He is like the movie producer who purchases a book only to re-manufacture it, so as to make it unrecognizable, more readily useful to popular taste , as interpreted by said producer. Cowen posits the notion of ‘technological plateau’ as the key idea, but CP takes his starting point as a ‘shift in values’; Does CP convince or even remotely succeed? That question aside, the real news is that CP fails to even remotely touch upon, in this avalanche of speculation, theoretical modeling and elementary storytelling, is his Romance with ‘The Free Market’ and its economic reign that ended in 2008, in a near worldwide economic collapse.  That perhaps is not news or at least not worthy of commentary, it is, to be exact, not possible given CP’s ideological proclivities. Then we are entertained by a long series of literary anecdotes germinated in the fertile soil provided by Mr. Cowen, although carefully tilled by CP. It provides a much needed subject, for a man dedicated to the care and maintenance of the revelatory idea or ideas, as long as they maintain their ideological usefulness. Grandfather and grandson are featured as players in a highly foreshortened précis, (perhaps a prospective screenplay?); to contrast the economic and values imperatives of two generations of American men. Of course, it is always about men: an adventure story, a melodrama worthy of the diminutive proscenium of Television.