How Do You Say ‘Economic Security’?
By THEODORE R. MARMOR and JERRY L. MASHAW
NYT
IN the face of nothing but bad economic news, Americans often take heart in remembering that we have been here before — during the Great Depression, when conditions were far worse than they are today — and we survived.
But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.
This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.
Turn back the clock to June 1934. Millions of Americans are out of work, losing their homes and facing more of the same. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responds by creating the Committee on Economic Security. To Congress, he stresses that he places “the security of the men, women and children of the nation first.” All Americans, he emphasizes, “want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours.”
(More here.)
NYT
IN the face of nothing but bad economic news, Americans often take heart in remembering that we have been here before — during the Great Depression, when conditions were far worse than they are today — and we survived.
But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.
This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.
Turn back the clock to June 1934. Millions of Americans are out of work, losing their homes and facing more of the same. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responds by creating the Committee on Economic Security. To Congress, he stresses that he places “the security of the men, women and children of the nation first.” All Americans, he emphasizes, “want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours.”
(More here.)
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