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The Conscience of a Progressive: Education, Economics, and Inequality
'Prof. Klees' book is a must read for anyone interested in politics, economics, and education today. During the latter part of the 20th century, in far too many countries we have witnessed an unconscionable and steady shift to the right by liberals and social democratic parties resulting in a neoliberal consensus. Prof Klees' critique from a progressive perspective is extremely timely as it contributes to a necessary strategic reflection on how to rebuild a truly progressive movement.' General Secretary, Education International, the global teachers' union
The Conscience of a Progressive begins where Senator Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) and Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) leave off. Prof. Klees draws on 45 years of work around the world as an economist and international educator to paint a detailed picture of conservative, liberal, and progressive views on a wide range of current social issues. He takes an in-depth look at his education, economics, poverty and inequality, international development, and capitalism. He examines major social problems like health care, the climate crisis, and war. Throughout the book, Prof. Klees tries to give a fair and careful depiction of how conservatives and liberals see these issues, whilst focusing on critiques by progressives, and on the alternatives they offer.
The Conscience of a Progressive begins where Senator Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) and Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) leave off. Prof. Klees draws on 45 years of work around the world as an economist and international educator to paint a detailed picture of conservative, liberal, and progressive views on a wide range of current social issues. He takes an in-depth look at his education, economics, poverty and inequality, international development, and capitalism. He examines major social problems like health care, the climate crisis, and war. Throughout the book, Prof. Klees tries to give a fair and careful depiction of how conservatives and liberals see these issues, whilst focusing on critiques by progressives, and on the alternatives they offer.
- GenresPolitics
216 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2020
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December 5, 2020
As someone who grew up in a ‘Goldwater Conservative’ household and read Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative while in 7th grade (during the 1964 campaign) but who has spent his entire adult life somewhere on the liberal – progressive continuum, I devoured this book in one weekend, finding it very helpful in clarifying both my own perspective on today’s social and political world (and the path I’ve traveled to get here) as well as that of others.
There are several reasons to read this book:
1. To better understand the political labels (and the movements they represent) of our time, explained not simplistically, but thoroughly, and yet in a very clear, accessible style. At the same time, you may well come to better understand where you come down personally, and where you feel comfortable on the liberal – progressive spectrum.
Klees lays out the labeling framework quite clearly in Chapter 1, identifying various permutations of “conservative,” “liberal,” and “progressive” (along with variations and alternatives like “neoconservatives” and “neoliberals”). He clarifies early on that he does not use the terms liberal and progressive interchangeably, as some do. When the astute and accomplished wordsmiths on the right succeeded in making “liberal” a dirty word, many on the left began to adopt “progressive” as a more palatable alternative label. That is not how Klees uses the term. He lays this out very clearly in Chapter 1: “Most fundamentally, liberals see the problems we face as simply wrongheaded policies. Instead, most fundamentally, progressives see most social problems as built into the very structures of our economic and social systems.” In other words, while liberals may see any particular example of inequality as a system failure – fixable by tweaking the system with a new policy or program -progressives see it as the result of the system’s very success at producing and maintaining inequality.
“Perhaps foremost among them is that progressives look at our social problems not as failures of our social systems but more as logical consequences of their successful functioning. For example, a free market, capitalist economic structure, by its very nature, despite material progress for some, yields a country, ours, and a world of widespread poverty and inequality.”
2. To brush up on your arguments for critiquing mainstream economics or capitalism and their inherent problems - or simply to gain an initial such understanding.
For example, if you want a fairly succinct, but thorough debunking of conventional (“neoclassical”) economic theory, and its essential building block, “efficiency,” Chapter 4 has it for you. If you want a thorough and honest critique of capitalism that both recognizes its strengths – “capitalism has directed considerable human energy and creativity into the design, production, and marketing of goods and services leading to considerable material wealth for some. It has also proved much better at delivering goods and services than a command economy, as in the former Soviet Union” – and its failures – “There is nothing efficient about a world where more than half the population is marginalized, with many having very insecure lives, often barely surviving,” you’ll find that here, along with a discussion of alternatives.
In the end, Klees notes that “what distinguishes progressives from liberals and neoliberals is that progressives raise questions about world system structures like capitalism.”
***The great feat of neoclassical economics has been to convince people that there is a vantage point to view society, separable from concerns with equity and distribution.*** "This vantage point, defined as efficiency, supposedly allows one to see if the system, or society as a whole, is better off, such that decisions to produce a particular array of goods and services could be made in the interests of everybody, irrespective of how little one had, thus separating efficiency decisions from equity ones. However, if prices are not defined according to the exact dictates of perfect competition [which they are clearly not, as Klees has already explained], then private profitability tells us nothing about the comparative social advantages and the consequent “efficiency” of producing, let’s say, more yachts for rich people instead of more rice and beans for poor people. Similarly, to argue that the allocation of resources can be “efficient” even if half the world is starving to death is absurd, but that is exactly what neoclassical economics says.”
The author helps us understand why conservatives (or “neoliberals”) and even some liberals don’t see poverty as a problem to be solved, but at best a “necessary incentive to ensure effort, innovation, and creativity”, and at worst (for them) something to be tweaked with specific measures, not structural change. He points out that even when their own logic is used to explain that extreme poverty and inequality is not economically “efficient” they are not swayed: He uses the example of Lester Thurow, who pointed out in his book The Zero-Sum Society that at the time he wrote the book, 1980, the ratio of CEO to a typical worker’s pay was 25:1, but when you calculated it for just white males it turned out to be just 7:1. Thurow argued that if 7:1 was sufficient incentive for white males to work hard in order to succeed, then the gap between 7:1 and 25:1 was certainly unnecessary and therefore inefficient. Klees adds, true to the general theme of his book, that it also reveals the structural racism and sexism of the labor market.
3. To get a good, solid, global understanding of how the political, social and economic structures shape and maintain a world full of inequality, and how those structures guarantee that education systems around the world can do very little to change any of how that all works (without structural change). The author’s extensive and deeply-grounded work with education systems and social movements around the globe make the chapters on international education and development especially strong.
It seems to me that Klees’ major contribution with this book is to bring the discussion and understanding of how conservatives, liberals, and progressives understand the world, and how they approach improving it, into our current context, resetting it squarely in the 2020s. Too much discussion on the left still gets hung up on neo-Marxist/New Left debates of fifty years ago, “Is it class? Or is it race?” etc. In his Chapter 9, “Intersections”, Klees makes clear that “Understanding a progressive perspective in today’s world requires an understanding of how progressives view forms of marginalization, *other than economic*,” (emphasis added) and goes on to discuss what he sees as the confluence, concurrence, and overlap between a long list of modern critical perspectives (from dependency theory to critical pedagogy). He then specifically lays out what it means to analyze our social world from the perspectives of gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability.
There are several reasons to read this book:
1. To better understand the political labels (and the movements they represent) of our time, explained not simplistically, but thoroughly, and yet in a very clear, accessible style. At the same time, you may well come to better understand where you come down personally, and where you feel comfortable on the liberal – progressive spectrum.
Klees lays out the labeling framework quite clearly in Chapter 1, identifying various permutations of “conservative,” “liberal,” and “progressive” (along with variations and alternatives like “neoconservatives” and “neoliberals”). He clarifies early on that he does not use the terms liberal and progressive interchangeably, as some do. When the astute and accomplished wordsmiths on the right succeeded in making “liberal” a dirty word, many on the left began to adopt “progressive” as a more palatable alternative label. That is not how Klees uses the term. He lays this out very clearly in Chapter 1: “Most fundamentally, liberals see the problems we face as simply wrongheaded policies. Instead, most fundamentally, progressives see most social problems as built into the very structures of our economic and social systems.” In other words, while liberals may see any particular example of inequality as a system failure – fixable by tweaking the system with a new policy or program -progressives see it as the result of the system’s very success at producing and maintaining inequality.
“Perhaps foremost among them is that progressives look at our social problems not as failures of our social systems but more as logical consequences of their successful functioning. For example, a free market, capitalist economic structure, by its very nature, despite material progress for some, yields a country, ours, and a world of widespread poverty and inequality.”
2. To brush up on your arguments for critiquing mainstream economics or capitalism and their inherent problems - or simply to gain an initial such understanding.
For example, if you want a fairly succinct, but thorough debunking of conventional (“neoclassical”) economic theory, and its essential building block, “efficiency,” Chapter 4 has it for you. If you want a thorough and honest critique of capitalism that both recognizes its strengths – “capitalism has directed considerable human energy and creativity into the design, production, and marketing of goods and services leading to considerable material wealth for some. It has also proved much better at delivering goods and services than a command economy, as in the former Soviet Union” – and its failures – “There is nothing efficient about a world where more than half the population is marginalized, with many having very insecure lives, often barely surviving,” you’ll find that here, along with a discussion of alternatives.
In the end, Klees notes that “what distinguishes progressives from liberals and neoliberals is that progressives raise questions about world system structures like capitalism.”
***The great feat of neoclassical economics has been to convince people that there is a vantage point to view society, separable from concerns with equity and distribution.*** "This vantage point, defined as efficiency, supposedly allows one to see if the system, or society as a whole, is better off, such that decisions to produce a particular array of goods and services could be made in the interests of everybody, irrespective of how little one had, thus separating efficiency decisions from equity ones. However, if prices are not defined according to the exact dictates of perfect competition [which they are clearly not, as Klees has already explained], then private profitability tells us nothing about the comparative social advantages and the consequent “efficiency” of producing, let’s say, more yachts for rich people instead of more rice and beans for poor people. Similarly, to argue that the allocation of resources can be “efficient” even if half the world is starving to death is absurd, but that is exactly what neoclassical economics says.”
The author helps us understand why conservatives (or “neoliberals”) and even some liberals don’t see poverty as a problem to be solved, but at best a “necessary incentive to ensure effort, innovation, and creativity”, and at worst (for them) something to be tweaked with specific measures, not structural change. He points out that even when their own logic is used to explain that extreme poverty and inequality is not economically “efficient” they are not swayed: He uses the example of Lester Thurow, who pointed out in his book The Zero-Sum Society that at the time he wrote the book, 1980, the ratio of CEO to a typical worker’s pay was 25:1, but when you calculated it for just white males it turned out to be just 7:1. Thurow argued that if 7:1 was sufficient incentive for white males to work hard in order to succeed, then the gap between 7:1 and 25:1 was certainly unnecessary and therefore inefficient. Klees adds, true to the general theme of his book, that it also reveals the structural racism and sexism of the labor market.
3. To get a good, solid, global understanding of how the political, social and economic structures shape and maintain a world full of inequality, and how those structures guarantee that education systems around the world can do very little to change any of how that all works (without structural change). The author’s extensive and deeply-grounded work with education systems and social movements around the globe make the chapters on international education and development especially strong.
It seems to me that Klees’ major contribution with this book is to bring the discussion and understanding of how conservatives, liberals, and progressives understand the world, and how they approach improving it, into our current context, resetting it squarely in the 2020s. Too much discussion on the left still gets hung up on neo-Marxist/New Left debates of fifty years ago, “Is it class? Or is it race?” etc. In his Chapter 9, “Intersections”, Klees makes clear that “Understanding a progressive perspective in today’s world requires an understanding of how progressives view forms of marginalization, *other than economic*,” (emphasis added) and goes on to discuss what he sees as the confluence, concurrence, and overlap between a long list of modern critical perspectives (from dependency theory to critical pedagogy). He then specifically lays out what it means to analyze our social world from the perspectives of gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability.
June 24, 2021
Reviewing this book a little late because I was recently reminded how great it is! A bite-sized guide to progressive thought. However you may feel about politics, it is worth a read, and I guarantee you will find at least one thing that surprises you.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews