Thought for this Day: Getting Ahead and Behind

Monday, 13 April 2015, 9:48 am
Column: Keith Rankin

Hilary Clinton is running for US President on a platform of people "getting ahead". Andrew Little also used that "getting ahead" line frequently during Labour's primary election last year. (His rivals used the equally trite "aspiration".)

What does it mean? A commentator this morning said that Clinton wants the middle class to get ahead.

'Getting ahead' is a relativist term, as in queuing. So if you facilitate somebody getting ahead, then you are equally engineering somebody else 'getting behind'. If someone goes up a wrung on the social ladder, then someone else descends to a lower wrung. Social mobility is all very well for those getting ahead, but it necessarily requires that others get behind.

So who does Hilary Clinton want to get behind? Traditional republican voters? The upper class? Or does she want the lower class to get further behind as the middle class gets further ahead of them? A president is supposed to preside over all his or her subjects equally. Nonsensical relativistic sloganeering is contrary to the civic spirit of equity.

Maybe Hillary Clinton wants the Chinese or Japanese or French to get behind, as Americans get ahead? Is she advocating higher rates of economic growth in the USA compared to the rest of the world? Who knows what she really means? I suspect that Clinton herself doesn't even know.

'Getting ahead' is just a trite and meaningless slogan. Political leadership requires a politics of substance. That's how one candidate should get ahead of another.

ENDS

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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