Washington • Do you build the economy from the top down or from the bottom up? And is the main purpose of the economy the production of things or the enhancement of life?
I can imagine immediate objections to both questions. Don’t all successful economies involve bottom-up and top-down elements? Doesn’t everybody claim to be a bottom-up person at heart? And don’t “things” (such as the laptop I am writing on) enhance “life”?
Well, sure. Almost all questions involving binary choices are flawed in some way. But these two concerns underlie the sometimes explicit, often subterranean, debates going on in the country — and, especially, in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.