It’s Time for a Hybrid Economy

America used to be a nation of practical people. The challenges of the untamed New World demanded practical solutions. The US Constitution itself, with its tripartite balancing act, was a practical approach to governing. But with prosperity and middle age, has come an American sense of self-righteous entitlement in which we have convinced ourselves we’re the arbiters of higher truths. It’s time we climb down off our pulpits and get back to our practical roots.

For the past 30 years or so, the engineering of our economy has been driven by a utopian style ideology of perfectly unfettered free markets. Alan Greenspan, in his testimony before the United Sates congress, said it clearly enough, “I made policy decisions based on an ideology I believed to be true.”

His ideologically driven social engineering, and it was social engineering, was part of a free market fundamentalism that included deconstructing market regulatory instruments, eliminating regulatory tools for managing international trade, flattening progressive taxation policies, and unweaving social safety nets. But the world never stands up to salute our utopian ideas, whatever they might be.

The the ideology of free-market fundamentalism has now served up the same disastrous results as religious fundamentalism, Marxism, and Socialism. To quote from Greenspan’s testimony once again, “My ideology proved wrong”. To which I might all reply, “Sooner or later, all ideologies are proven wrong.”

With ideology like that it’s no wonder that U.S. Automakers were unable to envision practical solutions to their headlong race to self-destruction. A most excellent example was their failure to pursue hybrid vehicles.

Hybrid cars are the antithesis of “true”, but they are practical. Instead of waiting for utopian solutions like hydrogen fuel cells and cold fusion, Japanese engineers designed cars that mixed and matched existing technologies in ways that maximized their best characteristics and minimized their worst. The result was to create a solution that makes things better in the here and now. Simply put, the hybrid car is a practical solution to the practical problems caused by the excessive burning of fossil fuels. Once the problem was acknowledged, all engineers needed to do was to combine well known technologies such as internal combustion engines, electric motors, batteries, new low weight materials, and palatable esthetics, into an optimized whole that does the job of transporting people, cheaper, quieter, cleaner, and funner. What’s more, once on the road toward optimizing the synthesis of these technologies, they are well on the way to learning more, inventing more, and continuously improving their solutions. Now it’s time for Americans to dump the self-righteous ideological stuff to get back to their practical nature. It’s time to create a hybrid economy.

To create our hybrid economy, we must dispense with ideology and consider the practical problems and challenges inherent in human economic activity. We must acknowledge that we live in a complex, dangerous, and challenging world that will not tolerate superstitious ideological solutions and slap-dash methods.