Building Bridges: The new Glenn Hubbard-Robert Reich tag team.

• Author: Delong, J. Bradford

In the history of modernity, the real sea change came in 1870, with what the Nobel laureate economist Simon Kuznets called "Modern Economic Growth." Since then, humanity's technological capabilities have roughly doubled every thirty-five years or so, revolutionizing the economy with each generation, and then revolutionizing it again with the next one.

Combined with the market economy and modern capitalism, technological progress has given rise to extraordinarily efficient new ways of making old and new things. But if your life was centered around making old things the old way, you learned the hard way what Joseph Schumpeter meant when he called modern capitalism "the perennial gale of creative destruction." Moreover, in a market society, the technological forces driving the "destruction" tend to be amplified, because property rights are the only things that matter, and some property rights turn out to be more valuable than others. This naturally creates social and political tensions. People generally believe that they should have more, and more varied, rights than merely those conferred by property ownership. As such, there is prevailing disillusionment with the message of the past few decades, which has amounted to: "The market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market."

Now comes The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption's Wake, by the thoughtful ex-neoliberal economist Glenn Hubbard. A chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, Hubbard reflects on what has happened to the U.S. economy since he started studying economics back in 1977. Since then, "technological change and globalization have magnified the market value of my skills and...[those of other] professionals. Meanwhile, the closure of Youngstown's integrated steel mills did not lead to moonshot efforts toward the preparation and reconnection of many workers and communities for the changing economy."

Hubbard closes with a vision of the better road not taken: "Imagine if bold support for community colleges and training would match the preparation and reconnection of the G.I. Bill as America was encouraging global integration. Imagine if leadership ... moved political debate toward economic participation ... Imagine mass flourishing."

Reading this, my memory flashes back not to 1977 but to 1993. I am in the White House Roosevelt Room, and the voice I hear is not Glenn Hubbard's but then-Secretary of...