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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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