I’m not getting deeply into ‘what’ a liberal is; I never have enough time to work on these things…let’s say for now that when I talk about creating a new kind of liberalism, I’m talking about acknowledging the government’s real role in creating social capital (things like knowledge, infrastructure, an educated workforce, etc.), and in a desire to have the government do something to keep poor people from starving.
Both of these are, I believe good ideas, even if they don’t get you all sweaty and breathing hard over the morality involved. We are a rich country, in part, because our workforce is better educated and healthier, and because we have first dibs on all the cool things that get invented by all the smart people here.
Once you are rich, you always have the problem of poor relatives and neighbors, who are at best jealous and at worst desperate. People who are desperate have little to lose, and tend to do things like riot and loot; the levels of force necessary to repress that tendency tend to lead to revolutions.
So, in short form, it’s my belief that one of the most useful things a society can do is to work hard to create social capital, and to work to keep the poorest and most marginal members of the society well on this side of desperation. Now as you may have noted in my earlier posts, I believe that government is not the same thing as society; that culture and tradition, and all that anthropological and sociological stuff exist prior to government, and that governmental arrangements are made on top of those deeper structures. Those allow for community- and church- based charity, for example. Or education, Or childcare.
Now there are a lot of reasons why those cultural ties are weakening in modern Western society; and a lot of back-and-forth over whether it’s a good thing or not. But I think we can take as a given that the informal structures have yielded much of their role to government.
I don’t think that necessarily a good thing, but I take it as a fact.
And I take as a fact that certain functions simply are not going to get done by voluntary associations. No one will build the large water and power infrastructures on which our society depends (see John McPhee’s great book ‘The Control of Nature’ … actually, read any of his great books, including ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’
, an early book on homemade nuclear terror). No one will create the kind of opportunity that inexpensive, excellent state universities and community colleges have created.
Which means that government has to find a way to take on these roles effectively, which I don’t believe it has done. It’s taken them on, but I don’t believe that it has been as effective as we need and want it to be; and I’ll suggest that our view of government action would be substantially different if we felt it was effective.
It is my personal observation that people’s attitudes toward government are in part ideological, in part driven by bad experiences with ineffective or actively hostile agents of government, and in biggest part a simple sense of old-fashioned Yankee search for value for the buck.
And it is the key to this whole post that I believe that a more flexible ‘4th Generation’ approach to these problems could, in places, both make these kind of activities more effective (more results for the dollar), and make them more humane, by either tying into existing social organizations or reproducing the scale and effect of these smaller social organizations.
Here are a few categories, with several links (sorry about the pdf links, but that’s all I could find) for background, and some suggestions on approach.
Infrastructure
Our society depends on a concrete infrastructure (literally!) of sewers, water supply, energy supply, roads and highways, railroads, airports, and the subsidiary facilities that make each of these work, like air traffic control.
But what if we enable the pilots to have some say in determining their routing and flight path? Then we’d have something like free flight. Here are some reviews on two good books on the subject.
Electricity nearly bankrupted California last summer, and while much of that crisis was a sham, we are facing a real structural crisis as we outgrow the generating and transmission capacity of the current systems. So what do we do? Many are arguing that we should ‘go nuclear’ in order to avoid further dependence on the Middle East’s supply of oil. But there are alternatives that make sense, as this paper points out…’negawatts’ – investing in conserving energy through retrofitting existing energy users…and ‘distributed power’ – using smaller power sources, and moving them closer to the user – the inherent lesser efficiency of the smaller generator is made up for, in part, by avoiding the losses in transmission and in the flexibility of use.
We have to do something, because the great burst of infrastructure we built during and after World War II (Thanks, Gov. ‘Pat’ Brown!) is both wearing out and simultaneously serving a far larger population than it was ever designed for.
Check out this article:

Yet the electricity debacle is a jolting reminder that California’s
failure to reinvest in itself has very real consequences. Looming fallout
from decades of disinvestment has some legislators and business
organizations urging the state to start spending big on public works
while there are budget surpluses available. The state’s Department of
Finance estimates that California will need to spend $82 billion over 10
years to shore up its aging infrastructure, though others put that figure
at more than $100 billion.
Skeptics say private-sector solutions would better serve taxpayers.
Still, the state’s power troubles vividly demonstrate the risk of inaction.

I’m not sure what has to happen, but something does…and soon.
Environment
I’ve already mentioned my view on the history of pollution in Los Angeles:

The population of Southern California has gone up by about 60% since 1970, according to the Southern California Association of Governments. Auto ownership and use has grown faster, probably about 25% more, I’ll estimate, so we’re looking at a 75% increase in vehicle-miles. We’ve probably lost a bunch of manufacturing and refining, but employment is still a whole bunch higher than it was back then.
And I remember summer days in high school when you couldn’t see the end of my West LA block for the smog. Two-a-days in the pool at school when you spent the day with “aqualung”—a chest so sore you couldn’t raise your voice.

I think that the ARB folks have actually done a pretty good job. But in any process, there comes a point where you need a tool with a sharper edge. Cars make up about 50% of the smog in most American cities, and 50% of the smog cars generate, according to this study, come from 10% of the cars.
At some point, we need to go after those cars if we want to have any meaningful effect, rather than driving the pollution from new cars down at a cost of an additional $1 – 2,000/car. It’s not unreasonable to assume that we’d be better off identifying and junking the bad cars, and depending on one’s state of charity, either giving the owners new Hyundais or bus passes.
Public health
The isolation of a cholera epidemic to a single water pump in London is what has made cities habitable in the 20th century. Concentrating this many people in this little space means we have to work very hard to make sure that plagues are not given a chance to develop or spread … or be developed or spread.
I went to college with Laurie Garrett, who was an unreconstructed Marxist, and who still seems to be kinda anti-capitalist, but has a helluva point about our collective vulnerability in modern urbanized, high transportation society.
The preservation of public health should be one of the major functions of government, and the integration of real public health (as opposed to issue-of-the-month public health) into our government’s priorities should be happening right now.
And the answer again, is to have central labs which do research and which inform the front-line doctors (we’ll talk about the health care crisis another time) and hospitals, who need to have the information and communications to figure out whether what they see is an isolated problem or not.
Education
Giant smoking hole right now. I am throwing up my hands.
Development
I believe that most people want a house in the suburbs with a fence, a car, and to have a decent job. Many people in our country, for a variety of reasons, can’t begin to figure out how to get there (hint: part of the answer is education, as above), and instead have become perpetually dependent. How to make them independent?
Here are a few hints:

Walking along the street of any low-income settlement in developing countries, one is struck by the apparent contrast of dwelling and habitat. On one side of the street is a dilapidated, single story, windowless house of tin sheets and open drains; across the street is a fine two-storied brick and concrete house with glass windows, paneled doors, and painted walls. While there are many reasons for such contrasts, one variable that repeatedly surfaces as a common denominator is the accessibility to different sources and types of credit.

From the Grameen Bank website. The Grameen bank makes ‘microloans’, which typically allow poor people to buy materials or equipment needed to set themselves up in low-level businesses, such as vending, sewing, or carpentry. They may tie the loans tightly to a group of borrowers, each of whom is responsible for the performance of their fellow borrowers. Their default rate would make Citi very proud, and they have been extremely successful in moving people from poverty to independence.
I mentioned another program a while ago:

Wilson, 36, who has a wife and two young children, brings in $800 a month making cabinets, tables and chairs for a furniture store and for neighbors. His business got a big kick six months ago when he bought a used drill press and lathe for $650. It doubled his productivity, which in turn allowed him to purchase the materials for the extension and hire a mason.

That’s what it’s all about.