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What if we had a ‘hear the other side’ cwr every few weeks? I want more neoliberals policy wonks in here. Tariffs are on pretty bad footing and nobody’s taken a crack at it. Economic arguments for high immigration etc. Theres been a lot of bad faith posting lately and we’ve been taking the bait.
The problem is that these low-key aren't real. It's more "Aaron Sorkin aesthetic" than anything intellectually rigorous. They're about as capable of conjuring policy wonkery as goth kids are of summoning demons - and the internal experiences are probably isomorphic.
This is as bad as the OP. "My enemies are incapable of producing real arguments."
You're on a roll lately, and not in a good direction. That probably applies to the Motte in general, but if you cannot even conceive of having worthwhile discussions with people whose politics are different from yours, you are in the wrong place.
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.
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.
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