Jonah, I’ll have to look at Jonathan Chait’s piece, but this is very interesting territory indeed, and, yes, a lot of it is to do with globalization (Larry Summers had a good piece on this in the FT yesterday). It appears fairly obvious to me that a key debate coming down the pike is how to manage/deal with the negative effects of globalization in this country. Is it just a question of providing some additional social ‘cushioning’, or is it going to be necessary to throw some sand into the gears of globalization to at least buy some time (if that’s even possible)?

One thing that is clear is that every government has an obligation to its own people not make matters worse than they have to be. One example of how some governments (including this one) are currently doing just that is the depression of wages by mass immigration. As you recognize, there are all sorts of reasons not to treat labor as just as another commodity, but that doesn’t mean that, *economically speaking*, labour is not a commodity. Import labor, and the price of labor (wages) will fall. The folks at the Wall Street Journal can argue to the contrary all they want, but to think otherwise is, I’m afraid, at best wishful thinking, at worse delusional.

On a related topic, I’ve seen plenty of interesting commentary on the way that more and more ‘life risk’ (what a phrase…) is now being transferred to the individual. This can be good, and can be bad (it depends), but the transition can more often than not be very difficult indeed. We’re seeing that now with the collapse of corporate ‘social security’ in the US (to take one example, the shuttering of a large number of pension plans, partly as a result of the consequences of globalization). Quite what one does about it is very hard to say, but if big government (let alone the grotesqueries of compassionate conservatism) is not the answer, nor is it enough to shout “market”, “401k”, declare victory for the investor class and go home.

More questions here than answers, I fear…