Miller vs Halstead and Lind: does radical centrism need more money or better institutions?

Radical centrism had two founding books in the early 2000s, and they disagree about the main problem. Ted Halstead and Michael Lind's The Radical Center (2001) says the trouble is institutional. Matthew Miller's The Two Percent Solution (2003) says the trouble is political will. Reading them side by side is the fastest way to see what a radical-centre programme has to decide, in America then and in Europe now.

Two diagnoses

Halstead and Lind look at history. Their publisher sums up the argument: America reinvented itself once as an industrial society after the Civil War and again during the New Deal, and it now has to do so a third time for the Information Age. For Halstead and Lind, institutions built for the industrial era no longer fit an information economy, and security has to be rebuilt around the individual citizen. Their proposals follow from the diagnosis. The American Prospect's 2001 review lists them: a Swiss-style requirement that everyone hold health insurance, with a safety net for those who need it; replacing the pay-as-you-go pension system with compulsory saving at 7%, government matching on a sliding scale and a means-tested floor; a $6,000 nest egg for every child; a progressive national consumption tax; restored inheritance tax; ranked voting.

Miller looks at the budget. Under Reagan and the first Bush, federal spending averaged 22% of GDP; under Clinton, 20%. He argues that 2% of national income, about $220 billion a year in 2003, would pay for health insurance for everyone, a living wage for full-time workers, strong teachers for poor children and public campaign finance, all inside a government smaller than Reagan's. The obstacle, in his telling, is that both parties are organised around ideologies and interest groups that block commonsense blends of liberal and conservative ideas. He calls the result a "solutions gap".

So one book asks what to build, and the other asks why nobody pays for it.

Where they meet and where they part

On health the two converge. New America, the think tank Halstead and Lind founded, describes the book's core idea as linking the individual's duty to buy insurance with society's duty to reorganise insurance markets through fairer rules and income-based subsidies. Miller's mandated, subsidised "Chevrolet" policy with private insurers, as Robert Kuttner describes it, is the same architecture. Both take a goal of the left and reach it through a mechanism the right trusts.

On pensions they part. Halstead and Lind want to replace the intergenerational transfer system with personal savings accounts. Miller wants to leave the old system in place, slow its growth and use the fiscal room for the uninsured and the working poor. One rebuilds the house; the other rearranges the budget.

On politics they also differ. Halstead and Lind put their hope in reforming the process, with ranked voting to open the field beyond two parties, and in a growing body of independent voters. Miller tries to persuade the existing parties, testing his ideas with senior figures from both and with his own focus groups and poll.

The left criticised both, and for similar reasons. The Prospect reviewer of The Radical Center faulted it for dismissing campaign finance reform, offering nothing to strengthen unions and being too relaxed about markets in schooling. Kuttner faulted Miller for treating gridlock as the fault of both parties equally, for subsidising employers in place of strengthening unions and for trusting vouchers. Miller, for his part, puts campaign finance at the centre of his programme, the issue the Prospect said the first book neglected.

What Europe should do with the argument

European welfare states are far larger than the American one both books describe, and that changes the weight of each diagnosis. Where public spending is already high, Miller's point that the money exists becomes a question of reallocating it, and Halstead and Lind's call for redesign gains force. Spain's social insurance, like most of the continent's, still assumes contributions from long stable employment and benefits attached to a job. Training rights and pension entitlements that follow the person from job to job are Halstead and Lind's programme translated into European terms.

At the same time, European coalition politics makes Miller's method more useful than it ever was in Washington. Coalition and minority governments are normal across much of Europe, and the reforms that last are packages where each partner wins something. Spain's pension reforms of 2021 to 2023, by the government's own account in the 2023 decree, built on the Toledo Pact consensus and on agreement with unions and employers. That is a grand bargain in everything but name.

The position that follows from reading both books is a combination. Design the institution the way Halstead and Lind would, around the individual and the economy as it is. Fund it the way Miller would, at the size of the problem, through a deal that lets each side claim its win. Then add what both books underplay: a test of delivery. Every reform should come with a body that measures whether it reached the people it was meant for, and the power to adjust it when it does not. Halstead and Lind supply the blueprint and Miller supplies the politics. The delivery test, the habit of checking and correcting in public, belongs to neither tradition and is what makes the other two worth trusting.