A "University of Chicago" Democrat

[unalove]

<p>

Starting in the early 1990s, Obama spent 12 years at the University of Chicago, mostly as a senior lecturer on constitutional law. It was a part-time job that helped him make money while he began to build his political career. But it also happened to place him inside what is arguably the intellectual center of modern American economic conservatism, the home of Milton Friedman and the laissez-faire philosophy known as the Chicago School of economics. By all accounts, Obama didn’t spend much time with Friedman’s disciples at the law school. Instead, he became friendly with another crowd: liberals who had come to think that Friedman was right about a lot, just not everything.</p>

<p>The Chicago School believes that markets — that is, millions of individuals making separate decisions — almost always function better than economies that are managed by governments. In a market system, prices adjust whenever there is a shortage or a glut, and the problem soon resolves itself. Just as important, companies constantly compete with each other, which helps bring down prices, improves the quality of goods and ultimately lifts living standards.</p>

<p>In its more extreme forms, the Chicago School’s ideas have some obvious flaws. History has shown that free markets aren’t so good at, say, preventing pollution or the issuance of fantastically unrealistic mortgages. But over the last few decades, as Europe’s regulated economies have struggled and Asia’s move toward capitalism has spurred its fabulous boom, many liberals have also come to appreciate the virtues of markets.</p>

<p>One of these liberals is Cass Sunstein, a prolific law professor who sometimes ate with Obama in the open, sunlit cafeteria off the lobby of the main building at Chicago’s law school. Over sandwiches in that cafeteria this spring, Sunstein told me that he didn’t think that Obama arrived at the law school as an old-style liberal or departed as anything like a Friedmanite. Yet Sunstein and other former Chicago colleagues I spoke with said they believed that Chicago had helped give Obama an intellectual framework for his instincts, at the least, and probably made him come to appreciate markets more.</p>

<p>Obama, when I asked him, agreed that his years surrounded by Chicago School thinking affected him. He tends to assign his motives to more intimate narratives, though, and he said that his grandmother, a high-school graduate who rose to become the vice president of a bank and was the family’s main breadwinner, had the biggest impact. “She had to think very practically about, How do you make money?” he told me. “How does the system work? That led me to have an orientation to ask hardheaded questions. During my formative years, there was still ideological competition between a social-democratic or even socialist agenda and a free-market, Milton Friedman agenda. I think it was natural for me to ask questions of both sides and maybe try to synthesize approaches.”

</p>

<p>…</p>

<p>

From the beginning, Obama has sought out academic economists, rather than lawyers or former White House aides. His first economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is a young University of Chicago professor who shares Obama’s market-oriented Democratic views. This summer, Obama added Furman, who has a more traditional background, having worked for both the Clinton administration and the Kerry campaign. But he, too, has a Ph.D. in economics, from Harvard.</p>

<p>As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets. What tends to distinguish Democratic economists is that they set out to uncover imperfections of the market and then come up with incremental, market-based solutions to these imperfections. This helps explain the Obama campaign’s interest in behavioral economics, a relatively new field that has pointed out many ways in which people make irrational, short-term decisions. To deal with one example of such myopia, Obama would require companies to automatically set aside a portion of their workers’ salary in a 401(k) plan. Any worker could override the decision — and save nothing at all or save even more — but the default would be to save.

</p>

<p>Full article:
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24Obamanomics-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=obamanomics&st=cse&scp=1[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24Obamanomics-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=obamanomics&st=cse&scp=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Part of my motives for posting this article was to demonstrate that this notion that the University of Chicago is conservative and only conservative is false. I’d like say we have a sort of “postpartisan” status, but that just sounds awfully prententious, and I’d rather just say that the political climate here is rife with complexity and is not wholly part of one “side” or another. True, Milton Friedman is given a lot of credence here, but (according to one of my friends, who’s much better read on these issues than me) not even Milty himself thought the free market was a solution to all life’s problems.</p>

[milessmiles]

<p>The article was enlightening, and flattered Obama’s command of nuance, but it was really quite convoluted, and as you mention, forwards a couple simplistic stereotypes. The NYT is really going downhill for me in general. Too much “buzzword” journalism. The article in the magazine about “post-race” Obama was one of the most insipid things I’ve ever read in the times. They also talk about Youtube constantly. It’s really annoying. Read the New Yorker/Harper’s/Atlantic Monthly.</p>

[unalove]

<p>The Economist is the mag of choice among Chicagoans, and I usually mooch back issues off of my friends instead of getting my own subscription. It’s “light reading” for one of my friends, who reads it when she’s on the elliptical.</p>

<p>When I was in high school, I read the NYT Sunday magazine religiously. I agree with you that it isn’t that great (so much of the NYT is gossip for the educated set) but when I see it, I read it. There are parts of the magazine I love-- The Ethicist, Consumed, and Lives (back column)-- and I skimmed this piece.</p>

<p>Anyway, it looks like you have great fodder for the “Question 2” about your favorite things!</p>

[komargo]

<p>unalove the truth that you left out is that if you surveyed serious economists nationwide (even those who teach in universities, which are incredibly liberal), you would find that economists think that Obama’s plans for a windfall profits tax and Obama’s hatred of free trade and his desire to make government a monolithic force in our lives are incredibly wrong. there is a reason why most serious economists aren’t, as Obama puts it, “social-democratic or even socialist.” Obama wants to be the great equalizer, but what he fails to realize is that equalizing doesn’t work (just think of “Harrison Bergeron”) and overwhelmingly restricts liberty</p>

[phuriku]

<p>

Obama’s hatred of free trade and his desire to make government a monolithic force in our lives

</p>

<p>Hahahahaha. Yeah, there’s no bias there.</p>

<p>

Obama wants to be the great equalizer, but what he fails to realize is that equalizing doesn’t work (just think of “Harrison Bergeron”) and overwhelmingly restricts liberty

</p>

<p>Equalizing everything doesn’t work, of course, but Obama’s not the extremist that you hilariously make him out to be. The United States could do with a bit more equalizing in some areas, and a bit less equalizing in others. Regardless, Obama is hardly alone in his stance on these issues.</p>

[idad]

<p>If one does not think there is some equalizing needed to be done, I suggest reading “Gang Leader for a Day” by Sudhir Venkatesh. Sudhir entered a world most do not see in pursuit of his dissertation in sociology at U of C. The book is the story of his dissertation research and it is spellbinding. Whomever is elected, there needs to be a new approach. The liberal welfare state and the conservative tax cut, trickle down state have both been demonstrated not to work.</p>

[ummy]

<p>I love The Economist! I tell all the members of my school’s Model UN club to read it. I love how each issue has articles on every region in the world. It’s refreshing to see a magazine really keep an international focus. I get so angry when I see a newspaper or magazine claim that they talk about the world, and all I see is one tiny article about China.</p>

[zoaxanthellae]

<p>Oddly enough, I always perceived UChicago as a school that would be more left-leaning.</p>

[Rudin]

<p>Obama makes me cringe. But so does McCain. </p>

<p>Screw the 2-term limit; Bill Clinton should rule until he dies.</p>

[komargo]

<p>rudin i agree with you</p>

<p>the 2 term limit can be bad because 1. it means America is changing the way it interacts with the world every 4 or 8 years and 2. a great president will have to step aside so that a bad/stupid president can follow him</p>