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Government run grocery stores and slopulism
I am not an American and don't live in NYC, but I've recently been thinking about the news of there being government run grocery stores in NYC. In my mind, NYC is in at least one way a heart of capitalism in the world, so this at least has some symbolic significance. On a more serious note, I find it interesting what the idea that government-run grocery stores would fix anything reveals about its thinkers.
If you speak to most people, even very intelligent ones, they tend to have narrative-driven models of reality. For example, if you go on Reddit, talk to a co-worker or whatever about health insurance companies or grocery stores, they'll often make these entities responsible for high prices for groceries or healthcare, claiming greed, manipulation and dishonesty in some fashion.
While it is absolutely true that these entities operate out of greed and not e.g. compassion, if one looks at the claims, they are often weak at best. Both grocery stores and health insurance companies have rather low margins (typically 1-3% of net margin for grocery stores, 2-5% for health insurers) in most places. The idea that the only thing preventing us from a post-scarcity, food and healthcare-too-cheap-to-meter society are somehow corporations made up of morally abhorrent people seems to quite attractive to a lot of people.
While both grocery stores and health insurance companies do have plenty of issues, my personal view is that they act in as kind of stand-ins for people's rage; between choosing to believe that either:
a. Healthcare is an enormously and ever-more expensive thing in most of the world, with 15-20% of GDP (!) going to healthcare in the US and usually >10% in most developed nations, because people's expectations of healthcare service are ever-rising and people believe that healthcare is a "human right" and the fact that it's such an expensive thing and requires a lot of staff (health services are the number 1 employer in a lot of US states now) means that when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that. Similarly with grocery stores; food is actually cheaper than ever as measured by % of people's income being spent on it
b. There are evil people colluding to drive up the prices of essential goods
most people choose b.)
Even most smart people! I have some very sharp colleagues who are economically extremely illiterate and I work in quantitative finance, a field where one would hope people understand things about supply and demand.
And this extends to the right as well! Most populists-right movements have been exerting more, not less, command upon the economy; even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go.
I think this sort of feel-good, narrative-driven politics is ultimately an issue simply because reality is not narrative-driven; the progression to the modern world has broadly shown that in a lot of cases, reality is random, cruel, senseless, not governed by human-compatible narratively satisfying laws. There isn't necessarily a cabal; a lot of things are driven by emergent phenomena.
However, the "grocery stores are not evil camp" tends to have shitty marketing (perhaps due to not thinking in terms of attractive narratives itself too much) and loses to people like Zoran Mamdani. Indeed, that is broadly the story of populism and demagoguery, which seems to recently have gained a lot of ground in a lot of places in the world. Maybe the internet and especially things like TikTok makes small soundbites do better these days.
The human brain didn't evolve to be so smart for understanding complex emergent behaviors, it's just a fortunate part that our intelligence also allows us to do that. But it's still really hard for us to figure this out, especially from first principles.
Some form of mercantilism or similar systems was basically the default idealogy for very long periods of time across many civilizations, breaking out of that mindset and into free market capitalism was genuinely groundbreaking. Even now the biggest nation in the world, China, is still idealogically controlled by anti market leaders who were dragged into some semblance of proper economics by what might as well have been sheer luck. If not for Deng Xiaoping's market reforms breaking open some of the idea trap they'd likely still be extremely poor.
The Big Bad Evil Who Deserves All The Blame is common everywhere, in all societies. Whether it be the witches who cursed your son to be weird (now understood as autistic), or The Man who controls government and the economy keeping you from being more than a fast food employee, or the Jews conspiring behind doors or 9/11 being an inside job or the secret labs that must have intentionally released dangerous pathogens, everything bad gets pinned on the evil shadow figures because the idea that nature or complex systems like that can just do that is somehow even more terrifying.
Ironically it can even be the people who are trying to help you that become the Boogeyman. Whether it be the Jewish merchants who were blamed for the high prices in black neighborhoods that the other stores refused to even touch (the same way that all "price gouging" complaints work) or foreign aid workers with conspiracies alleging they're responsible for the disaster they're providing aid for, they become the face of the great evil because they're the only face around to blame.
In the same way strongman populism is like the reverse. If Evil Authority is responsible for all the bad in the world, then Good Authority must be able to do all the good. You don't need a person with sound policies that consider those yucky tradeoffs as real, you need a powerful fighter who exposes the illuminati and beats them up.
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