The Problem of Purpose: A conservative technocrat tries to engineer a better world.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: BOOKS - The Once and Future Worker - Book review

EVERY POLICY PROPOSAL is, in a direct sense, an attempt to solve a problem. Poverty, ignorance, hunger, sickness, danger, pollution--in the realm of politics, to name a problem is to call for a solution, to demand that action be taken by someone or something, which always turns out to be the government.

In his new book, The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and a former policy adviser on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, offers a slew of policy proposals, from loosening environmental regulations to reshaping collective bargaining to overhauling the process by which the federal government funds state-based poverty programs to creating new wage subsidies for low-income workers. Each of these ideas is an attempt to address a little problem, all of which add up to a much bigger problem.

Cass starts from what he has dubbed the "Working Hypothesis"--that "a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy." His primary target is "economic piety"--the prevailing notion that the organizing aspiration of politics and policy should be to promote economic growth above all. He describes his book as an attempt to reorient American politics around promoting work and the interests of workers, especially less educated workers in manufacturing jobs.

But Cass' description understates his own ambitions, for he is actually trying to solve something much bigger: the problem of purpose. "Most of the activities and achievements that give life purpose and meaning are, whether in the economic sphere or not, fundamentally acts of production," he writes. His ultimate aim, then, is to restore--or provide--a sense of meaning to American life, particularly to factory workers who lack advanced education.

The goal is noble, ambitious, and impossible. Cass, the policy wonk and campaign adviser, wants to solve this big problem the same way he wants to solve all the little problems: by carefully pulling the levers of public policy. It reflects a profound and fundamental misunderstanding of what politics can do and what it is for.

THE ONCE AND Future Worker falls into a growing niche of books examining or attempting to address working-class malaise and the widening political and economic divide between largely rural voters who lack advanced degrees and college-educated urban voters. The genre's icons are writers such as Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Charles Murray, whose book Coming Apart Cass cites to establish the brutal conditions of the American working class.

Too many, in this telling, are not married, not working, not happy, not productive. Because politicians focused on growing the economy rather than creating "a labor market in which the nation's diverse array of families and communities could support themselves," low-skilled workers have suffered. The mistake was to treat people as consumers rather than as workers. "What we have been left with," Cass writes, "is a society teetering atop eroded foundations, lacking structural integrity, and heading toward collapse." Indeed, the white working class is literally dying as a result.

In this worldview, the signal statistics--the numbers that tell you everything you need to know--come from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus...