Loosely speaking, "social democracy" is when you redistribute wealth via government, and "corporatism" is when you have the government force companies to take better care of their workers.
Now, these two approaches aren't mutually exclusive...
But there are some important trade-offs between the two!
The biggest downside of corporatism is that since it bases welfare on work, it's easy for people to fall through the cracks. Those cracks then have to be patched up, with things like SSDI, child care tax credits, Medicare, etc.
But social democracy might simply be politically impossible. It has proven VERY hard to get Americans to vote for a Europe-style welfare state.
Corporatism might be a viable alternative.
Enthusiasm for corporatist welfare policies on the left seems to be rising. These include:
* higher minimum wage
* co-determination
* penalizing companies for paying low wages
* reform of the financial system to encourage real business investment
Meanwhile, though universal health care is still probably the left's #1 policy goal, the ultimate welfare state idea - Universal Basic Income - appears to have lost the battle of ideas within the left. At least for now.
Fortunately, corporatism also has a pretty big silver lining for those who care about economic growth. It gives the government an incentive to help businesses innovate, export, and expand, and makes high taxes less attractive as a policy tool.
"Corporatism" is an ugly-sounding name, and we probably need a better one. But the basic idea of using companies as society's main vehicle for social equality is not nearly as far-fetched as it might sound.
(end)
Ultimately, I think we may just have to call corporatism "progressivism". People will confuse it with social progressivism, but in fact the two probably go together better than they did in the past, so it's OK.
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2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special.
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.
There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings.
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".
This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development.
1/Here's something I've been wondering about recently: How did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?
With every other technological revolution, we anticipated it well in advance, and as a result we were the first -- or one of the first -- to take advantage of it.
2/The U.S. invented the computer, the internet, and modern AI. On all three of those, we were (or are) the leading nation. We talked ad infinitum about the benefits of those digital technologies long before they became a reality, allowing us to shape their eventual use.
3/We did the Human Genome Project. We invented mRNA vaccines. We did most of the research that drove down the costs of solar power. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House more than 30 years before it became economical.