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No, my argument, which I have been bleating about for years, is that no one is capable of producing real arguments, at least of the sort people mean when they say "neoliberal policy wonk". People have this image in their head of Leslie Knope mic dropping a 5" binder full of colorful tabs and highlighted text that covers an entire policy field. I've been looking for 20 years and no one in the real world actually does that. The people I've known who think they can do that are all just putting in enough effort to impress the teacher, scoring some rhetorical cheap shots, and then slowly getting jaded. Look at us here. Whole community full of smart autistic nerds addicted to political discussions.
Whither policy wonking?
We get essays and explainers and effort-posts, but the closest thing to policy wonking is Gendal-khan's posts on California housing issues, and even those are mostly updates on ballot initiatives rather than thorough, systematic wonk-papers on the housing industry/regulatory regime as a whole. Where are the "I know everything about trains" type posts laying out a sensible, state level energy policy? Anyone have an expansive-yet-granular solution for healthcare?
Does anyone have a spare effortpost covering a policy at the level of understanding, skill and insight that matches what we see on Friday threads about 4X games?
The difference, IMO, is that a 4X game is human-level comprehensible, and policy fields are generally not. It would probably take multiple life-times just to thoroughly understand the electrical infrastructure of a single mid-sized state. Working groups throw dozens of people and thousands of man hours into papers that are such pointless slop that no one ever bothers to read much less reference them. No one turns them into policy successes, no one has victories to celebrate and point to as justification.
The most relevant on we've seen was freaking Project 2025, and it was just a collection of essays with lines like "The Secretary should initiate a HUD task force consisting of politically appointed personnel to identify and reverse all actions taken by the Biden Administration to advance progressive ideology.". Anyone want to call that a triumph of wonkery? Point to a superior neoliberal version?
Because if you can, I would love to see it. I am not like this because I think policy nerds are gay and stupid and deserve swirlies. I say things like that post because I've been looking for 20 years and all I see in the policy wonk department is posers. If a bunch of neoliberals and progressives want to start posting detailed, wonky effortposts to own the chuds and make us all look like uneducated fools, then that sounds utterly amazing. Thank you! I'd ask what took them so long and where they've been hiding, but I'll be too busy devouring the insight porn and stirring my long-dormant technocratic urges from their deep slumber.
But until then, I'll keep pointing out that the wonks aren't wonking. They just produce boondoggles like California High Speed Rail and "affordable healthcare" and Covid lockdown. This matters when their claims to wonkish-mastery are being used to justify an increase in their political power, when they seem to have about as much relation to their fictional counterparts as Chuunibyou 8th graders do to Naruto.
To be fair, outside of professional political science related fields finding someone able to have enough information to have a deep level conversation more than a sixth grade level of research. Most people have other things they spend the majority of their time on and at best they read a few articles a week.
I’d be perfectly interested in creating a case for some liberal policies that I differ with you guys on. But keep in mind that because I have a regular day job that im not really a wonk.
And all the actual wonks are busy writing white papers for CRS and the Rand Corporation, not shitposting on a Silicon Valley Harry Potter fan fiction enthusiast’s forum.
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If you paid me a bunch of money I'd write one for you. But producing these is a full time job so you'd have to employe me in lieu of my current job.
Exactly (I can't comment on the "no one reads them" part). Effort posts on that level of "basically actually government policy" are epic undertakings that 0 people on the Motte will do for free, as it's an actual job.
The best you'll get here is effort posts, which I guess you don't find good enough?
I was pretty happy with mine the other week explaining that why even if adding people to a city brings down average income, it's still accretive to overall city value/GDP/wealth.
Really? It wasn't a bad post, but it was hardly a really good one. It was a few "I think that [blanks]" and first-thought guesses. (Edit: Nevermind, I found the post before the one I was looking at, which is actually a solid bit better. That's the sort of post I come here for... it's just not what people mean when they talk about policy wonkery.) I've put ten times that effort into posts explaining how armor scales in World of Warcraft, which is much simpler because it only involves 2-3 fully understood numbers.
Which is my entire point. I can casually drop an authoritative essay on that topic because it is simple, if not intuitive. "Is it good or bad when poor people move to a city?" is a much, much, MUCH more complicated question, to the extent that no one even seems to try to answer it in a definitive manner.
Back to your earlier point, I shouldn't need to pay you a bunch of money because Left Inc already has tens of billions of dollars slushing around ten thousand NGOs and Think Tanks, and I very much notice that all of that produces approximately nothing that anyone wants to point to as a rigorous policy wonk argument.
If I were wrong here, people wouldn't be writing "I think" first thought replies, they'd just be linking me to Neoliberal Project 2026 or whatever. If I were wrong here, we wouldn't need a 50 person team and a billion in funding and ten years to produce something uselessly mediocre for any purpose but partisan propaganda.
Why would they even need to though? We can't even get the Jones act repealed which is straightforwardly and obviously harmful. What is a long detailed report, which I'm sure does exist written by lobbying consultants and never posted publicly because no one would read them, going to do if we can't even get the "don't even use your ridiculously efficient internal waterways for shipping so that a handful of special interest companies and unions can rent seek" act taken down?
Our problems aren't usually about what a rational governing body would do, they're about politics, they're about handouts and elections. We know rent control doesn't work, we're going to do it anyways in new york, how much more abundance agenda ink should we spill pointlessly on the ground?
Holy crap, dude. From "I'm a neoliberal policy wonk" to "there's no point in actually doing any policy wonking" in seven hours. Was there an "Out-Cynic @The_Nybbler Speedrun Any%" challenge I missed?
You just seem to have this strange idea about how politics works or is discussed in public. You are demanding the output of like lobbying firms, the groups that produce huge detailed reports for legislation but you want it to occupy the space of policy debate forums. It doesn't make any sense. Making the detailed plan about which specific regulations to cut/modify or how tax credits programs should be designed happens after you have some agreement what your goal and what the problem is. This debate happens amongst groups of analysts and lawyers employed in think tanks or lobbying firms where agreement on these topics have already been reached.
The discussions in these places are on topics like how the ITC tax credits inducing renewable energy build out by large banks have mostly been successful in getting renewable energy built out but there is a problem where these banks reach a tax capacity where they can't consume any more tax credits because their tax burden isn't high enough. A few years back the concept of a tax credit transfer was introduced and is getting some uptake but because the developers and syndicators on these deals need a guarantee that someone will be buying the tax credits the transfers are hard to set up because the institutional investors need to find companies with big and importantly reliable tax burdens to buy the credits which are hard to sell even at 95 cents on the dollar. and on and on and on.
But very little of this discussion even really needs to hit the public that is still debating whether climate change is a fake Chinese hoax or whatever.
I was literally saying that this wasn't going to happen?
And I've never seen it hit a place like here, outside of one poster who is really into California housing policy. I've never even seen such a thing linked.
I guess I have this strange idea that if you have a very well researched argument for a position that you support, then you ought to release it to convince people. Apparently this is silly?
There's a type error here I think. When you're doing this kind of well researched work it's to make a bill that works well. It'd be like advertising a piece of software based on how the codebase is organized. At best you'd advertise it as faster or reliable. Public debate is on a whole different level of analysis. An effort post on a policy wonk subject will have the policy wonk providing both the argument and any nuanced pushback because the proponents are just going to ooh and ah and detractors object to the whole project no matter its design.
A policy wonk might have an advantage in a debate about whether their policy should be implemented because they can effectively rebut incorrect characterizations of it but that's a small part of debate, especially in a place like this where many/most disagreements are much much more broad than what the best way to deal with tax capacity of ITC credit consuming firms.
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Oh I see what you're saying. Yeah fair enough I guess, that is definitely true.
They're too busy paying administrators to figure out the most equitable way to deliver money to the
homelessunhousedperson experiencing a lack of a structural roof temporarily but oops! we spent it all on administrator salaries.I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with The Motte but maybe my reading comprehension today sucks because I'm really tired.
Just that I don't think we can balance out the prevalence of right-wing takes with establishment wonkery, because it's mostly too difficult to actually do and in the best case, far beyond the scope of what we do here. "Our systems are too complex for us to actually understand how they work" is kind of my hobby horse, but Amadan dinged me for calling out a certain subgroup in particular, so I expanded. Because the ding wasn't entirely unfair, but also not quite where I was going with that. It's not that neoliberals or progressives are uniquely unable to produce worthwhile policy wonkery - it's that I think basically no one is, and the thing I think those groups are doing wrong is holding on to the trust that someone, somewhere, has a firm grasp on how all of this works.
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Read some political biographies. There are politicians (and staffers to politicians) who do in fact have a comprehensive and wonkish understanding of policies and regulations. No, they aren't going to produce witty unrehearsed speeches about them like the dialog on West Wing and they probably aren't writing blogs. They are doing boring unglorious work in some DC office. But such policy nerds exist. If you had as much interest in housing policy as some people have in 4X games, you'd be writing posts about it.
We may not have that quality of posting here (though I have seen some really good posts about housing policy, for example) but it's simply not true that policy nerds don't exist.
I happily don't work in policy, but I do work in an office with a bunch of people who do. Most of them are very focused on an extremely narrow part of the policy.
Without doxing myself, so using an example from outside my field, no one is an energy policy wonk. Rather, there's 15 people one who does coal emissions policy, one who does renewable credits policy, one who does energy affordability policies all across the industry. And the senior managers cover all the policies but usually at least one level of summary and rely heavily on their staff's analysis.
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Yes, I remember being told this about Obama. More to the point, I was good friends with a few of them, who now have jobs like "Director of a Department with a budget in the billions". The "witty, unrehearsed" lines was actually what they were good at - dropping sick burns on the conservative firebrands they sparred with. It was a sad and sobering day when I realized that in spite of all the years of close association, I'd never heard them talk about the policy stuff that they were supposedly getting a Masters in. Every story was actually in the form of "I took a policy discussion and made it uncomfortably personal and dared the conservative guy to look like a jerk and instead he just stopped talking. LMAO pwned!"
Neat. Is there some systematic reason why not a single one of them is writing anything for public consumption? Given the general pitch of "you should vote for us because of our mastery of policy wonkery", you'd think someone would notice the massive alpha in demonstrating an existence proof.
I don't think it's possible to meet your quality requirement as I understand it and also be even remotely consumable for the public. If it's consumable, it's going to be short, high level, and summarized.
If it's a "massive research undertaking to inform an actual laa or policy" it's going to be 100s-1000s of pages and an absolute snore fest of stats and legalese.
There's a fair bit of substacks and blogs that discuss econ/politics/infrastructure but they're short and readable, by definition
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Are there as many boring tomes as I would expect working over evidence for minor policy changes? I realize some of it is probably sensitive, but I'm not sure where I would go look for things like "the anticipated implications of banning [product] in [industry]" or "the impact of marginal tax rate changes"?
Are there policy works on the government side writing these, or are there just competing narratives in the regulatory docket comments and some judgement summary of the bureaucrats in making their final decisions?
Schoolhouse Rock didn't cover regulations or notice and comment periods.
When you actually read the Federal Register entries announcing proposed or promulgated changes, it is hard not to be awed by the sheer scope of what some guy at a desk in Washington has been up to for the last 6 months.
I looked-up a semi-random regulatory docket just for fun. Here are 60 pages from NOAA outlining the legal and factual basis for their plan to upgrade the Port of Alaska while complying with the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
For bonus hilarity, click over to the public comments tab. I assure you, this is a quite representative sample of who actually comments on these things and what they say.
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