Brain Reform and The Recession

     It's sometimes said that the Studebaker Corporation failed as an auto maker because it never got over its success as the leading manufacturer of buggies and wagons.  It failed to keep up with the times and succumbed to cultural lag.
     I've always been interested in the phenomenon anthropologists call "cultural lag", for it regularly points to a major source of our societal problems.  Social lag describes a situation where the pace of change leaves behind our social institutions, patterns of behavior and even our understanding of what the problems are, causing what we do to no longer relate to what the situation really calls for.  Some social lag is inevitable, and we struggle to catch up every day. But when it becomes excessive, institutions and societies, and buggy manufacturers, crumble.  It, by the way, is the driving force behind the paradigm change that I'm always going on about.  For societies, like rubber bands, can only be bent out of shape so far by the effects of cultural lag before they snap into a new arrangement.  And that is accompanied by paradigm shift.
     Fareed Zakaria, one of the more insightful of the political columnists, gave a glimpse of the effects of lag on current congressional politics in an opinion article on January 19 in the Washington Post. First, he noted the change going on in the talk of Republican opponents to Mitt Romney.  He is portrayed as a "vulture capitalist" (Republican language, not Zakaria's) who profits from cutting jobs, hollowing out companies and paying low taxes.  They deride him instead of celebrating him as a rational market success story of driving out inefficiencies, generating productivity, and creating "a lean, mean capitalist machine."
     Zakaria points out that the traditional success story no longer works because over the past decade, job gains have been matched by job losses and the kind of investments that improve productivity and create jobs have declined 15% as a share of GDP. But, Zakaria points out, the economy is experiencing a broad-based recovery focusing on manufacturing and exports, fueling job growth and labor productivity; all this is being partially fueled by government policy under the Obama Administration encouraging investment in infrastructure, training and R&D.  Meanwhile, traditional Republicans simply talk cutting taxes and eliminating regulations and getting government out of the way.  Then Zakaria notes that the most successful economy in the current global recession is that of Germany, based in large part on the actions of the German government.  The Germans may not understand how to reform Greece, but they surely understand how to run their own country.
     Here is where Zakaria offers his glimpse into the workings of cultural lag.  He notes that Germany provides government incentives to train workers and keep them employed, while the U.S. system emphasizes employer flexibility, freedom to hire and fire and lowering wages. That may have worked 50 years ago in small towns across America, but no longer fits a country with global concerns.   In a world filled with cheap labor, rich countries like Germany and the U.S. are better off with highly skilled workers making premium products, and with a focus on long-term growth and social stability.  Government policy plays a vital role in creating such a national culture.  The bottom line is government investment in and regulation of such an environment.  Yet traditional Republicans are still focused on how to run a buggy-making plant.  Thus can cultural lag bankrupt a party.