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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 We can't even get the Jones act repealed which is straightforwardly and obviously harmful.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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