Robert Waldmann — Polling the Left Agenda — Finally

Click this link. Data For Progress decided to ask people about policy proposals which very serious centrists consider way too far left for America. American voters respond differently.

As should already be clear from existing polls (click and search for “fair”), there is strong support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy. At Data For Progress, they chose to emphasize the positive — four proposals with overwhelming support, but I think it is just as striking that opinion is almost equally split on a top marginal income tax rate of 90% (2% more oppose than support) and universal basic income (2% more oppose than support)....

Angry Bear

Polling the Left Agenda — Finally

Robert Waldmann | Professor of Economics at University of Rome

Dean Baker — Tony Blair, Who Brought Us the War in Iraq, Lectures on the Evils of Populism

Dean Baker illustrates the close connection among politics, policy, economics and the social fabric, showing how the globalist centrists are not only self-interested but clueless about the consequences, "populism" being a prominent one. 

The same can be said for the New Democrats in the US and the European globalist centrist leaders. 

They have no conception of historical dialectical and the inevitability of overreach calling froth its opposite to complement it. The pendulum of historical time is always swinging.

Beat the Press
Tony Blair, Who Brought Us the War in Iraq, Lectures on the Evils of Populism
Dean Baker | Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C

Ashwin Parameshwaran — Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right

Neoliberal crony capitalism is driven by a grand coalition between the pragmatic centre-left and the pragmatic centre-right. Crony capitalist policies are always justified as the pragmatic solution. The range of policy options is narrowed down to a pragmatic compromise that maximises the rent that can be extracted by special interests.

The idea of radical centrism is not just driven by vague ideas of social justice or increased competition. It is driven by ideas and concepts that lie at the heart of complex system resilience. All complex adaptive systems that successfully balance the need to maintain robustness while at the same time generating novelty and innovation utilise a similar approach....

A bimodal strategy of combining a conservative core with an aggressive periphery is common across complex adaptive systems in many different domains. It is true of the gene regulatory networks in our body which contains a conservative “kernel”. The same phenomenon has even been identified in technological systems such as the architecture of the Internet where a conservative kernel “represent(s) a stable basis on which diversity and complexity of higher-level processes can evolve”.

Stress, fragility and disorder in the periphery generates novelty and variation that enables the system to innovate and adapt to new environments. The stable core not only promotes robustness but paradoxically also promotes long-run innovation by by avoiding systemic collapse. Innovation is not opposed to robustness. In fact, the long-term ability of a system to innovate is dependent upon system robustness. But robustness does not imply stability, it simply means a stable core. The progressive agenda is consistent with creative destruction so long as we focus on a safety net, not a hammock....

 The principle of radical centrism aims to build a firewall that protects the common man from the worst impact of economic disturbances while simultaneously increasing the threat of failure at firm level. The presence of the ‘public option’ and a robust safety net is precisely what empowers us to allow incumbent firms to fail.

The safety net that protects individuals ensures robustness while the presence of a credible ‘invisible foot’ at the level of the firm boosts innovation....

The irony of the current policy debate is that policy interventions that prop up banks, asset prices and incumbent firms are viewed as the pragmatic option and polic[y] interventions focused on households are viewed as radical and therefore beyond the pale of discussion. Preventing rent-seeking is a problem that both the left and the right should be concerned with. But both the radical left and the radical right need to realise the misguided nature of many of their disagreements. A robust safety net is as important to maintaining an innovative free enterprise economy as the dismantling of entry barriers and free enterprise are to reducing inequality. 

Macroeconomic Resilience
Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right
Ashwin Parameshwaran

Interesting analysis and point of departure for discussion on changing the system through a radical centrist coalition. This is very similar to the approach I have been advancing and would support it.