If you’re in the New York area and a fan of bridges, great journalism and interesting discussion, come see me converse with the masterful Gay Talese, about the 50th anniversary re-publication of his classic, The Bridge, about the construction of the Verrazano. It’s Monday, Nov. 6, at 6:30 pm, in Greenwich Village. Click here for info. 

Okay, check out this quote about economics. Then guess who wrote it and when.

“It simply made no sense to us. There were no immutable ‘laws’ – or damned few – about it. Economics was not a ‘science’ at all; it was fruitless to treat it as such, and to study it as a special, exclusive field. It was all mixed up with politics, with sociology, with geography and a good many other things. Clearly the ‘economic laws’ of competition were a fantastic delusion, merely an elaborate effort to justify things as they were by the invention of supposedly unchangeable forces which men mustn’t attempt to interfere with. It seemed to us as much of a hoax as the medieval scholars’ explanation of kingly authority as something derived from God. The system did not work, and if it did not work in America it certainly would not work anywhere.”

Was it Ha-Joon Chang, a noted member of those forging what I would call new economics, who recognize that the only economics are political economics, and that economics is a constructed set of conditions, not natural or human laws? Was it best-selling Thomas Picketty, the noted French economist, who has said his true admiration is for historians and sociologists, not contemporary economists, whose perspective tends to be so narrow? Was it Nassim Taleb, who in is influential book “The Black Swan” satirized economists as having “physics envy” in thinking their discipline a natural science that colud be captured by equations? Was it me, in my last book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, where I also railed against the incorrect tendency to view economics as a science?

None of the above. It was Eric Sevareid, the once famous newscaster who began as one of Edward R. Murrow’s boy in wartime London and France, and ended up on the CBS evening news in the 1960s and 1970s. He was describing realizations he and fellow students came to in the early 1930s while undergraduates at the University of Minnesota. The actual quotes are from Sevareid’s amazing memoir, published in 1946, Not So Wild A Dream, which leads the reader from his childhood, through his epic canoe trip as a teenager, then his experiences in the Great Depression, and finally his amazing experiences and insights in World War II. It’s a wonderful, fascinating book, that I came across by accident and am so glad now I took the trouble to read all 500 or so pages of it.

The quote about economics is all the more impressive in that it’s just a minor side note to a book that is largely about World War II and the great events there.

I remember Sevareid. He would deliver his craggy essays at the end of the evening news with Walter Cronkite in the 1960s and 1970s. Even as a child and later teenager, I was struck by them. How wonderful that CBS news featured him, and how telling that it would be unthinkable today.

His 1946 book, his only major work, was written mostly about and just after concluding his amazing wartime experiences as a foreign correspondent. Sevareid was almost everywhere it mattered. He was in France when the German tanks rumbled through the French fields and eventually into Paris; he was in London during the blitz; and he was in China during the American-Chinese-English campaign against the Japanese. In 1943 and 1944 he was in Italy during the American push up the boot, and then he was with the American army on D-day and afterward pushing up through France. He not only survived, he delivered some of the most astute judgments I have read about individuals and groups, including nationalities, that I have read anywhere.

Looking over the slide show here in this morning’s New York Times, I was struck by how similar the aesthetic was to the Greentree estate of the Whitney family on Long Island.  I had the good fortune to spend a few days there earlier this year, and I wrote about it for a column here in Governing. Of course, there are reasons not to be surprised about the similarities of the two estates. Both the Mellons and the Whitneys were/are extremely wealthy families that loved the rural life and were really into horses. They must have known each other. Were they friends or enemies?

Being a Virginian by birth, I have some affinity for the Mellons. I read Paul Mellon’s autobiography shortly after it came out in 1992, and I was struck by his good nature and honesty. He and others in his family had excellent taste, and to that family we owe the National Gallery in Washington DC, as well as the Virginia Museum in Richmond. It’s Paul Mellon’s wife, Bunny Mellon, who has just died at age 103 and who is leaving the estate that the Times is profiling. Her husband’s role as a collector and patron of the arts seems curiously underplayed in the story. I may go by Sotheby’s during the 10 days starting on Nov. 10th and take a look at some of the stuff.

More gossip, before I leave the subject. Paul Mellon’s father was Andrew Mellon, who was treasury secretary in the 1920s and a big player in the financial world. You can see him as a character, not so flatteringly portrayed, on Boardwalk Empire. Escaping his father’s desire for him to go into banking was a big turning point and crisis in Paul Mellon’s life, which he speaks of in his autobiography.

I used to cover former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, and I didn’t think he would ever corrupt himself for money. A jury thought differently last week. Here’s my memories and views of him in this Governing column.

Who creates corporations? Where do they come from? Who controls and sets their rights and responsibilities, and sets their very makeup?

I would like the usually astute Eduardo Porter to answer these questions, as he rereads his own essay, this essay from this morning’s New York Times. His essay is about corporations, and whether they can or should attempt to pay attention to anyone besides their shareholders and their quarterly profit statements. He concludes by essentially saying that while it sounds nice, we venture into murky territory in asking corporations to pay attention to anyone beside their shareholders. If want to have good things like more equitable pay for workers, we should turn to government.

Porter is ignoring that governments create corporations, and thus government can set the charters of corporations any way they want. If we the people so chose, we could require that corporations have double boards, they way Germany does, and have labor representations on them. We could require that they pay attention to their externalities and the communities they reside in, and we could define what that means. We could give corporations expiration dates, sunset provisions if you will, and require them to reapply for their charters, which would give lawmakers a chance to see how they performed. “We” could do all sorts of things. But the first step is realizing that “we” have that power.

It’s a sad gap in an essay that starts off well. Porter has some great history that put some flesh on the bones of corporations’ behavior over the last century. But in what seems to me squishy Times fashion, he edges away from his own evidence and ends up quoting a law professor, Margaret Blair of Vanderbilt University, who should know better, that it is unrealistic to expect corporations behavior to change because the “ethic of shareholder value is too strong.”

Leaving aside what the word “ethic” is doing in here, a law professor should certainly know that it’s not about culture or ethics; it’s about law. If laws require corporations to pay attention to things beside shareholder value, they will. And it’s in our power to do that.

I talk about this in more depth in two chapters of my latest book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, which came out in paperback this year. I  also touch on the issue in this op-ed in The New York Times proposing national corporations, and in this one in Bloomberg View that say why capitalism and business are by definition allies, not enemies.

Maybe I’m misreading Porter. Maybe when he says citizens should turn to government, he means they should start looking at rewriting the rules of corporations. But I don’t think so, because he is a good writer, and if he had meant that, it would have been clear.

If Porter wanted to broaden his focus to other countries,  he would see – or he probably already knows – that other countries, particularly Germany, do a better job addressing social problems precisely because they do require corporations to care about them.

This Times piece by Jad Mouawad , a very good one, about the rise of Dubai fascinates me because it illustrates something I talk about in all three of my books: that cities are political enterprises first. The are not “natural.” They don’t arise in some sort of organic way, a small group of settlers on the banks of a river engaging in a bit of trade and so forth. That’s a myth. The story of Dubai reminds me of the story of New Amsterdam (now a city called New York), which only existed in the mid 1600s because the Dutch West India Corporation decided to settle and invest in this money-losing operation for a half century because it decided, for strategic reasons, that it was worthwhile.  Or of my native city of Norfolk, Va, which King Charles II commanded to be set up and have trade go through it, so the tobacco planters could less easily escape taxation. That Norfolk had a great natural harbor probably figured into Charles II’s decision, but it’s not like the city arose on its own there. It needed a king to command it into existence.

As for Dubai, there’s no reason for a city to arise in the middle of a desert. You have to hand it to Dubai’s leaders. They saw an opportunity – air travel as a tool for inventing a city – and so subsidized it heavily for a few decades. Now they are reaping their harvest.

This is basically a book review, so get ready.

David Carr’s essay this week in the New York Times about the pleasures and problems of free music, and free everything else, brings to mind the new book by Jeremy Rifkin, which I got a review copy of recently. The book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things and Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (Palgrave 2014), posits that, as Carr grapples with, we are going to a society where many things can be free or close to free. Rifkin describes and identifies the big change, which is the technology that makes it essentially free to produce one more copy of so many things, whether that be music, a book, a newspaper or even things that aren’t media related. This is a game changer, in terms of conventional economics.

Rifkin, who has written books advocating socially and economically progressive ideas such as The European Dream (2004), calls this new free world “the Collaborative Commons.”

Rifkin astutely describes the weird bind we are in now, or paradox. Things are getting free, but this very process is delivering us into monopolies that have great control over our lives. It turns out that when the marginal cost of producing one more thing is zero, then the only people who can make money off of it are monopolies or semi monopolies who can be the go-to source, and thus make money selling advertising, or devices or charging for the thing that costs them nothing to make one more copy of. Thus we have Apple, Google as well as Time Warner and Comcast.

Rifkin would like us to move to a world, and think we are moving to such a world, where we have a more conscious, Collaborative Commons, where the state and its citizens “break the monopoly hold” of large companies, and set up more democratic organizations. This jibes with an issue I have written about and supported, which is the movement to  establish municipal broadband networks.

I’ve not finished the book, so this is just my thoughts as of right now, and I may add to them later with subsequent posts. But Rifkin is certainly onto something here, and he is an incredibly insightful analyst of our politics and economics. But Rifkin invents a new term, Collaborative Commons, and does not use a simple and familiar term – in fact it’s not even in the index – that describes quite well what he is talking about: Socialism.

The term Socialism generally means the state owning all or some of the essential services and infrastructure, and collaborating with citizens on these. How this term got so loaded, I don’t know. We in the United States already live in an economy that is socialistic in many ways. Libraries are socialism. So is our road system. And that’s all good. As I talk about in my own recent book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, adding some more socialism can be a good thing, whatever you call it.

Clearly there is some common thinking going on here. While Rifkin is talking about the Collaborative Commons, see my essay in In The Commons magazine that lays out my theory of socialism – although like Rifkin, I avoid using the term!

Why don’t both Rifkin and I say that we are and should be moving to a more socialistic economy, because when you can make and distribute stuff for free, it makes sense to have government be the owner and provider? Okay, maybe that doesn’t always mean the state has its name on the title. It could be encouraging say, cooperatives that own and operate say, broadband networks or retail distribution networks like Amazon. But Socialism is an old word that describes these types of setups well, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t still use it.

Ha-Joon Chang, the Cambridge economist who gave a great blurb for my last book which you can read on the back cover, has a new book out himself: Economics: The User’s Guide: A Pelican Introduction. With this book, Penguin revises a series of books on big subjects aimed at laymen. You can see a video of Ha-Joon introducing it here. Right now it’s not out yet in The United States, but it will be.

I sit here typing, and on my body I have some nice wool pants with a hounds-tooth pattern, a charcoal gray sports jacket, and in my pockets various possessions, including my ever present Iphone, that I would prefer to keep. If someone challenged me on whether I “owned” these things, I would be hard pressed to prove it. I did not keep the receipts. Luckily, that is unlikely to happen.

I also own other things that I want to keep that don’t fit into my pockets or on my body. The biggest is a condominium in Brooklyn, which, through novel legal arrangements, actually traces its roots down into the ground so that I legally own the apartment free and clear (minus the huge bank loan), as opposed to a co-op apartment in the Big Apple, where one owns a share of the entire building. If someone challenged me as to whether I actually owned my apartment, I could produce a deed (I  think) and that would show I owned it.

How? Because that deed is registered with the City of New York, which maintains a special registry for such things. These deeds are open to all to see. Curiously, if a property deed is private, there is no proof of ownership. Private property is by definition a public thing.

I go into all this because I come to the Ninth and most final and most important reason in my ongoing series Nine Reasons The Free Market is a False Concept. Property. It is not a simple subject.

I think there is a tendency, before some looking into the subject, to view property as a relatively simple thing, that can be created with an on/off switch. Let There Be Property. You own something or you don’t. But actually there are many different ways to own something, and this is particularly true with land.

In the end, property is whatever the state says it is, and with land, different states, i.e. types of government, have created many different methods of what the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and others called “land tenure.” Owning inanimate objects, like a corporation, throws you into another set of choices.

In my book The Surprising Design of Market Economies, I go into the development of property over history. Owning land in particular has been like a slowly simmering soup that has taken centuries to mature and evolve. There have been ways of tying people to land, but what we think of as a modern method of ownership is relatively new.

One thing that had to develop was standard systems of measurement. Owning something from this tree to that lake gets kind of vague, and it becomes hard to sell something that vague, particularly in what we view as a market. To have a market in land, you need very precise systems of measurement, and you needed them to universal, or at least standard within one country. This took a lot of time. Part of the adaption by Europe of the metric system in the late 18^th century was an effort to create more tradable property. The United States Congress, in its first few decades, went through a lot of effort to create common systems of measurement, which involved an obsessive appointee figuring out what exactly a yard was, and who then distributed exact, precision made versions of this to the various states so copies can be made. The great book, Measuring America by the late Andro Linklater is a text I quote frequently.

The point in all this is that there can be no markets, no capitalism as we think of, without property. And to have property, you need a state. So we should end the long conceptual divide between government and capitalism, which I wrote about here in Bloomberg View, and accept that governments make markets. And then start the public conversation about how to make them better.

As David Carr said so well in this essay a few weeks ago, television is now the opposite of a wasteland. It is instead a lovely Olmstedian park, filled with glorious wonders, shady reclines and scary but usually not too harmful caves and dark forests. It is a Golden Age, basically, for television.

In exploring this Golden Age, Carr and others usually focus on a few shows that are almost invariably “edgy.” They include the late, great The Wire, of which I am a bigger fan than anyone I wager, to lesser but still artfully done shows like Homeland, Justified, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and so on.

I’m as big a fan of naked women as anyone (I’m not a fan of graphic violence, but I’ll leave that point aside for now.) But even conceding the appeal of boobs and butts, dialogue that includes profanity and edgy subject matter, how about a shout out for the great shows on television now that are not edgy, that are not pushing boundaries, at least not in such obvious ways?

Two shows that I have been enjoying are ABC’s The Goldbergs and NBC’s Growing up Fisher. Both are mainstream network shows, so they have a greater challenge being good. They have to appeal to more people. They are family comedies. But despite these burdens, both are really good. They have appealing characters. The Goldbergs is about a big Jewish family in the 1980s, although so far their Jewishness is never mentioned. Growing up Fisher is about a family that includes a blind father, who is gutsy and fearless.

One reason I like the two shows no doubt is that both have a journalistic flavor to them. Both are essentially memoirs, because they are based on the writer/producer’s actual history. This makes it easier for them to explore real social forces and situations. (In the case of Growing up Fisher, the show is set in contemporary times – a mistake in my opinion. It doesn’t square with the show being narrated by the grown-up voice of the kid in the show.)

Enjoying these shows prompted me to think that Wholesome is the New Black. Meaning, perhaps the edgiest thing to do nowadays is not to be edgy. To explore that great middle ground, and to do so with skill.

Both shows have their faults. Interestingly, both fail in my opinion in attempting here and there to be edgy, mostly in matters sexual. Both shows feature a 11 to 12 year old boy as a central character. In both of these shows, the boy is often obsessed with the opposite sex. This provides an opportunity to get into various situations. This bugs me, because boys of that age are not obsessively into girls. They are not obsessing about boobs and butts, which is how both shows occasionally depict their protagonists. Give them two more years. I bet the shows do this because they think it will help them loop in a demographic that is sex obsessed. This may be true, but I don’t like it because it makes the shows false.

But that flaw aside, both shows are really good and worth watching. And both are evidence that today, Wholesome is the New Black.