laxam
1yr ago
Senator Warren, while better known for a hilarious incident involving a genetics testing kit, is also a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Policy.
And an absolute inveterate powermonger. She's the type of progressive who would have sided with the original technocrats more than a century ago: She believes wholeheartedly in the unlimited good that smart, well-educated, well-intentioned people can do when given as much power as they want to accomplish that good.
When designing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, her bill intentionally placed it in the Federal Reserve -- which is self-funding -- so that Congress could not ever defund it. This was also the bill that created an appointed administrator for the CFPB who could not be removed by subsequent Presidents, something that was struck down as unconstitutional.
If she's involved with this, it is not a benign change.
For a decade now the Conservative party has thought the way to victory is by tacking ever closer to the middle (actually center left) in order to get the all important 36-37% of the national vote.
It sometimes surprises me how infrequently Canadian elections produce a popular vote majority government and just how small popular vote minorities can be and still win enough seats to form feasible minority or even outright majority governments.
People complain a lot about how undemocratic outcomes in the US are related to the Senate and the Electoral College but it's shockingly common across the democratic world to have governing majorities in parliaments elected by popular vote minorities -- even very small ones! Relatively few countries seem to consistently product popular vote majority coalitions, like Germany, although some countries like Israel or the Netherlands have a habit of building coalitions that are just under 50% of the popular vote.
laxam
1yr ago
It's just crazy to me because of the way the majority party in the British Parliament has more or less unlimited power to do whatever it wants, without limit outside expectations of facing election, and yet you can get quite substantial majorities with <40% of the overall vote. Democracy truly is a cultural institution there. There are no safeguards and yet they do OK.
In the US, if we had multiple parties like the 2.5 parties in the UK, more popular vote minority control of the House would happen, probably (something that's actually rather rare in American history; when it does happen, it does indeed tend to produce a minority House, but never less than a 40% vote share), although perhaps not quite to the same degree. Third parties in American history have tended to be geographic or regional parties, which limits the damage they can do to the two main parties.
The Senate, of course, has nothing to do with the national popular vote. The relationship between the Senate winner and the popular vote is mostly mediated by whether the class of Senators up for election includes a California Senator or not. Who wins the Senate or how the Senate composition ends up being determined is going to be a total wild card in this scenario, I think.
The Presidency would be interesting. The Electoral College has an absolute majority requirement, with the alternative being a contingent election in the House. Since the House votes by states and not by member, this would leave the outcome more or less entirely divorced from the national popular vote. Believe it or not, this is how the Framers originally saw Presidential elections going most of the time, with the EC failing to find a majority and the election being forced to the House, except when a 'man of national renown' (read, at the time of the Philadelphia Convention: Washington) had the charisma, fame, and respect to garner an outright EC majority. Partisan politics ensured this never happened but, if you moved to more than two parties, it would become more common, I think.
laxam
1yr ago
The last two years has proven this completely wrong: Biden ripped a multi-decade bandaid off and bottomed out America's credibility with the image of Afghans falling off landing gear, while Putin has stuck to his guns no matter what in Ukraine rather than take the L. A year later America and NATO's credibility is at an all time high, with valuable prospects joining the US centric alliance for the first time in years. Putin, meanwhile, has cratered Russian credibility just a year later, losing control of his near-abroad and failing to project strength. This sequence of events suggests that credibility probably does not exist as a useful concept, or that if it does it is so mercurial that expending significant costs to obtain it is foolish.
This argument makes no sense whatsoever. A meaningful story is trivial to tell here and it's a bit baffling that you think this sequence of events supports your case:
The US Government abandoned a long term project in a disastrous way that seemed to be driven by an isolationist urge in the American public and political class. This damaged the 'credibility' of the US government in its foreign commitments, leading a foreign leader to believe the US government would not seriously interfere in any near-abroad interventions the foreign leader made. An estimation of American WILL tanked American credibility, which led to a foreign crisis.
Then, this same foreign leader wildly overestimated his own material capability to execute on the intervention he planned. The failure of the initial plan tanks this foreign leader's credibility (other actors have to believe you not only that you have the WILL to intervene but the CAPABILITY). This leads to the American government and its allies happily doubling down on opposition to the intervention.
This is a pretty simple expectations story and makes perfect sense within the scope of these events. Since questions of international politics aren't exactly subject to RCT experiments, that's about as good as you're going to get. Go ahead and nitpick, but the point I'm making isn't that the credibility theory is correct, it's that your refutation is no such thing.
Examples abound in failed American colonial ventures of the past decades: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Focusing on one example, the infamous "Red Line" on chemical weapons use by Assad. The Credibility part of the argument is that because Barack Obama said there would be consequences, it doesn't matter if it is in America's interest to attack Syria, the US has to attack Syria to prove that Barack Obama wasn't a liar. It punts on proving that the attack is a good idea in favor of the principle that nations must always back up their words with actions, for fear that showing weakness could be fatal to US interests.
So, Obama's step back from his red line was in 2013. Tell me, what major geopolitical event happened in 2014 where the initiating actor must have been operating under the assumption that the US would not intervene under Obama? I'll give you a hint: It's the same damned foreign leader as above.
Also, it's worth noting that Assad did indeed keep using chemical weapons over the next several years, almost like the US' threats to prevent him from doing so had no credibility as a result of Obama's stand down from his red line.
You present a narrow definition of credibility here (which I think is wrong -- credibility is reputation), knockdown your strawman, and declare victory (really, you declare victory first). I don't think your argument is particularly convincing. A reasonable theory of credibility can explain events over the last year just fine.
laxam
1yr ago
Economists realized a long time ago that models used for competition between firms don't work to model behavior within firms, and almost nobody in a firm is actually working with the goal of "make the most money for the firm".
In other words, institutions are principal-agent problems all the way down.
laxam
1yr ago
It's likely that the kinds of problems that principal-agent incentive mismatches cause can pop up very quickly once the system, whatever it was, holding it back fails. It can even be as simple as a culture change within a rapidly growing department, as it goes from being a dozen people who believe in what they're doing to a few hundred people who are there for a paycheck and career advancement.
laxam
1yr ago
I don't know anything about a consensus view, but there were definitely some famous black gangsters in New York at the time, it would be almost surprising for there to be none in Chicago.
laxam
1yr ago
Income taxes aren't slavery because they don't force you to work. A 100% land value tax really would be like confiscation of property-in-land.
Land value taxes are good because they're extremely efficient and minimize deadweight loss in the tax system (intuition: Taxing something means you have less of it because you're causing a marginal decrease in the supply of that thing, whether it's labor, capital, or consumption goods. New land is not generally produced, so taxing land value minimizes the loss from that decrease in supply).
100% land value taxes are no more just than 100% taxation on anything else and are a form of paternalism at the end of the day.
laxam
1yr ago
"We know better than you how you should use your land", is roughly analogous to, "We know better than you what you should put in your body".
laxam
1yr ago
The fact that human capital can't be easily taxed is pretty close to a grand unified theory of 21st century American politics, really.
laxam
1yr ago
Yes, assessment has always been an issue with taxation, going back into the dark mists of history. The idea is indeed to tax the value of land which, no matter how difficult the assessment, is still more efficient than other kinds of taxes as long as you're not trying to hit exactly 100% like the Georgists.
laxam
1yr ago
If the community takes on any responsibility at all for healthcare (as pretty much every government on the planet does), this isn't true. What you put into your body effects the costs the community may need to pay in the future for the support of your health.
laxam
1yr ago
The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts.
Has it?
laxam
1yr ago
Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism.
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. "
I can't think of a time where a recognizably conservative movement in the US was anti-capitalist. The WJB style populists might, in some sense, be called conservatives (them being as much a religious revival movement as a political movement) but, I think, instead they just demonstrate the difficulty of applying modern categories too closely to the past. After all, one would hardly call Grover Cleveland, whose faction WJB drove out of power in the Democratic Party, the left of the contemporary Democrats!
It was only with Reaganism (about the time when Cowen was a young lad) that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing". Perhaps there is a generational divide here.
This is really just absolute nonsense. The association of capitalism with the American right-wing is about as old as the country itself, depending on exactly what you mean by capitalism and 'right-wing'. It's telling that the modern left thinks of the Jeffersonians as the 'conservatives' in the First Party System but really both parties in that era were pro-capitalism. The Federalists were an alliance of commercial and incipient industrial capitalists in the Atlantic port cities and the Republicans were agrarian capitalists more interested in trade and export. As you trace the lines forward, probably the only really thorough-goingly anti-capitalist sentiments you'll get are from the pro-slavery apologists like Fitzhugh but, even then, in practice the pro-slavery faction of the Democrats just wanted the same kind of export oriented commercial capitalism that the Old Republicans had. The post-Civil War Republicans were very pro-capitalism, so was the Conservative wing of the Democratic party. As the left-leaning labor wing of the Democrats developed and the various flavors of the original Progressive movement came into being you got anti-capitalism showing up again in American politics, but always invariably from the Left. Some of the more elitist strains of Progressivism are arguably more right-leaning than left but they just show useless the scale can become in the margins.
Honestly, the anti-capitalism of the New Right comes more from a deep-seated leftism at its heart. It's mostly young people who come from a youth cultural milieu that is extremely left wing (both socially and economically) and it just kind of swaps in a cultural conservatism (although one that honestly feels weirdly different from the Christian conservatism of decades ago) while maintaining the anti-market prejudices of their roots. In that way they're kind of like the original Populists, but they're not usually particularly closely related to the actual cultural roots of 19th century populism: few people who consciously identify as 'New Right' have an agrarian, Christian background and are instead usually suburban or urbanites from more-or-less de facto secular backgrounds.
laxam
1yr ago
Voluntary organization and the whole concept of a 'civil society' is actually central to classical liberal philosophy and practice.
laxam
1yr ago
Summer's argument is that the output gap at the beginning of the Biden administration was much smaller than the scale of the stimulus bill the administration was attempting to pass. It's possible to say, "We need some stimulus, but not that much, which will be inflationary".
Your second link is March 2020.
And Summers was warning about the scale of the stimulus package in February, 2021.
laxam
1yr ago
Yeah, and even the ultra-wealthy Southern plantation owners were the analogical poor cousins of European nobility, who were forced by markets and circumstances to take an unseemly level of interest in the day to day management of their farms, ie. they were rural capitalists subject to market pressures.
Their favorite pastime was even bitching about their Scottish factors.
laxam
1yr ago
I don't think anyone expected this to be different.
The point is that he did. They have like, models that let them distinguish between situations.
I don't think the stimulus is main the cause though, because the inflation has persisted long after the stimulus was spent, and a good chunk of the money was saved/invested anyway.
So, this is getting a bit into the weeds on the question, but the way to think of the relationship between fiscal stimulus and inflation is by thinking of the stimulus as just the same as anyone with a sufficiently large credit card. The path of monetary policy that achieved low, steady inflation prior to the over-sized stimulus at the beginning of the Biden administration probably looked something like slow rate hikes over the course of late 2021 and 2022 that eventually brought rates up to some point lower than they are going to end up being in our current timeline. The monetary stimulus of 2020 had been enough to prevent the lockdowns from causing serious, deep, long-lasting depression and opening up would have brought total spending back into line with the non-pandemic growth path of 2019 without the Fed having to slam on the breaks.
Then a huge amount of additional spending happened. The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.
So, it's still monetary policy causing the inflation (as only monetary policy can cause sustained inflation), but it's the stance of monetary policy being suddenly far too loose as a result of a change in the environment, rather than a change in the policy instrument. If the Fed had followed a policy path similar to its path in real life in a hypothetical world where the 2021 stimulus didn't happen or was much smaller, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder. If the Fed had appropriately offset the 2021 stimulus by moving forward and scaling tightening plans from the second half of the year or the next year to the first half of 2021, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder.
laxam
1yr ago
Newscaster English is actually a Mid-Atlantic English, not New Englander. Yankees have a definite accent (actually, several) that isn't the national homogeneous English you hear in movies and on TV.
laxam
1yr ago
The Senate realistically needs about 5-10 competent people per side to set the agenda and then they just need warm bodies.
The Senate is a bit different. The length of their terms and the rules of the chamber itself gives individual Senators a lot of independence to attempt to shape policy. The entire run of bipartisan legislation this term more or less comes down to a group of centrist/compromise oriented Senators getting fed up with leadership and creating a legislative agenda independently.
Not all Senators are actually going to be policy innovators, but a Westminster style parliamentary chamber it is not.
I mean, the original conception of what differentiates critical theory from traditional theory is exactly that it is activist.
What you're noticing is that critical theory as a social philosophy of knowledge is self-referentially inconsistent -- it has no of rejecting an application of its own principles to themselves.
More options
Context Copy link