By James Pethokoukis and Ryan Streeter

In recent years, the Republican party has embraced a number of mainstream progressive policy positions as part of a shift toward populism and rebranding as the party of blue-collar workers. But is eschewing dynamism really the best thing for America’s heartland? And what would a dynamic, pro-worker agenda look like? To answer those questions and more, I sat down with Ryan Streeter on a recent episode of “Political Economy.”

Ryan is a senior fellow and director of domestic policy studies here at AEI. Earlier this month, he published the essay “Dynamism as a Public Philosophy” in the winter 2022 issue of National Affairs.

Below is an abbreviated transcript
of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: When I think of dynamism, I think of an economy where
there’s a lot of churn. Is that what you mean?

Streeter:That is largely what I mean, but I
think dynamism is a larger concept than that. I think of churn like you do:
lots of firms starting, lots of firms shutting down, people getting hired,
people moving to new firms, people getting laid off — that sort of thing.
That’s a concept in the literature that’s pretty well established.

When you think of
dynamism only that way, you omit other aspects that are important to a dynamic
society which I think are important to mention. There are the rewards to
creativity, for instance, in a dynamic society. So that churn that you’re
talking about is what’s happening because people are coming up with new ideas,
people are capitalizing on those ideas, people are starting new firms, and it’s
that ideas environment that I think is especially important.

What does dynamism have to offer to the working class?

If you go to places
where there is more churn, you actually find the job satisfaction is pretty
high among the workers. On the ground when people are living in a place where
there is a lot of churn, if you’re in a firm that’s going to close, there are
options elsewhere that you can hop to. Job hopping and moving from firm to firm
is actually a pretty common way for people to move up and experience upward
mobility in America.

But there’s some
pretty interesting evidence, by combining certain labor market data and other
types of survey data, where you can understand this relationship between living
in a dynamic place and actually being happy with their job. And I think the
evidence is actually more on the side of hourly wage earners are actually
happier when they live in a place where there’s a lot of dynamic activity going
on.

There are a lot of people who want a steady job and
they would like to stay at that job. So isn’t dynamism just a somewhat nicer
way of saying constant disruption?

I think the notion of
stability in maintaining a particular job at a particular firm over time is
idealized in ways that don’t necessarily match with reality. There’s so much
about Germany that I like, and when you’re there for a short time you can’t
help but admire that phenomenon that you’re talking about: Get a job after
school, stay with it your entire career, enjoy the social insurance program
that surrounds you, don’t live far away from home, participate in local
customs. You can see why a pro-worker conservatism might kind of idealize that.

It turns out that job
satisfaction in Germany is not very high at all. This notion of stability over
time doesn’t necessarily result in greater fulfillment and a greater sense of
what’s possible, and it’s also related to the inability of an economy like
Germany’s to be particularly. If what you care about is people’s sense of
satisfaction and their happiness with their life choices, I wouldn’t look to
that as a model. I would look at a place that has a lot more dynamism. I’m
placing a lot of premium on job satisfaction, but I think that actually
matters, and that matters, as we know, for productivity as well.

The Republican party has gone away from dynamism and
now has a lot in common with mainstream progressive policy positions. How did
that happen?

I think the roots of
this move towards a national conservatism predate the Donald Trump era, but
really got put on steroids during that time. After the 2012 election, Mitt
Romney got criticized for this notion that the Republican party had focused too
much on CEOs and the elite entrepreneur class, at the expense of hourly wage
earners.

When we came to 2016,
we saw this kind of heartland working-class turnout for Donald Trump, and then
you started to see a lot of justification for what that actually meant in terms
of policy agenda items. I actually think there’s been a misinterpretation over
the last five or six years about what working-class people want. Part of the
idea, I think — not to be too politically cynical about it — is to come up with
an agenda that we think will appeal to those voters. I’ve been arguing that I’m
not even sure that’s what those voters want.

It has certainly
become popular in the world we work in of policy wonks and writers to join the
left in debating what type of social insurance structure we should have. You’ve
seen a lot of conservatives get comfortable with the idea that because life has
gotten so expensive for people, we ought to have the federal government
actually help fix that gap a little bit.

The piece concludes with a whole bunch of policy
ideas, including a summer study abroad program. Why would that be important?

There’s quite a bit of
evidence that when you are still in your formative years, when you are exposed
to something that’s fundamentally different from what you know, it has an
outsized impact on your aspirations, your personality, the kinds of things that
you think about, and maybe even what you want to do with your life.

I think you can see
the benefits of these programs when you talk to people that have been in them
or if you read some of the psych literature on this. It makes a big difference
in what people aspire to. It makes them willing to perhaps pick up and move and
pursue something that they wouldn’t have done before.

So if we want people that are more adventurous, are willing to take risks, are willing to pick up and move and to experience something that has an unknown quality to it, I think one way to start is to help younger people do that — and particularly lower-income kids whose families don’t have the resources to do that, to help them do that. So I could get behind even public spending at the school level on something like that.

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