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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29119 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The government got involved by subsidizing demand

This is why I'm so suspicious of technocrats. They consistently do this.

This is populism. No competent technocrat would propose something so obviously at odds with basic economic theory. The problem is that programs like these are very popular. The whole point of putting technocrats in control is to avoid disasaters like this one.

Competent tecnocrats create problems that can't be solved so more technocrats need to be hired so that tey can get promoted to managing all the new technocrats creating new problems.

There is no difference between a technocrat and bureaucrat. It is the same jobs.

Technocrat is just the polite euphemism that's already taking on the tarnish that bureaucrat took on after being a euphemism for clerk.

(though clerk has more esteem now, being only used to refer to shopkeepers for so long

Understood. And famous American would-be-technocrat Elizabeth Warren champions these causes. But perhaps she is a very bad technocrat and a decent populist.

Because technocracy is really hard- Lee Kwan Yew can do it but he was once in a generation. One of that hardest things is that you can only hit one goal at a time. Liz Warren knows that if we went back to female domesticity, we could solve like 50% of the economic problems she’s worried about, and her platform makes the most sense if you assume her real goal is to raise the female labor force participation rate. Subsidizing daycare makes sense for that goal; it isn’t a child benefit it’s a subsidy for mothers to work.

I don't think technocracy is once-in-a-generation hard, I just think our democracies are optimizing for something entirely incompatible

Technocrats don't want to subsidise demand, they'd rather increase supply but the populists ensure we get demand subsidies instead.

Okay, they don't want to, but they keep doing it. What good are a bunch of technocrats if they just implement populist policies? At this point the (commonly regarded as) most thoughtful and informed would-be American technocrats are proposing wealth taxes. Warren wants to crack down on landlords not renewing leases, etc.

"There's a fire, help!"

"Quick, pour gasoline on it!"

What good are a bunch of technocrats if they just implement populist policies?

Mostly technocrats just don't get to decide policy. Positions like the Fed Chair are a rare exception. Mostly they advise and execute on behalf of politicians, who frequently ignore them because their advise is probably unpopular or operates over a time horizon that makes it undesirable to elected officials (nobody wants to implement a policy that loses them the election and that their successor gets to take credit for). The usual failing of technocrats is either than they're operating outside their subject matter expertise (see: the Soviet Union, where it turned out that engineers don't make particularly good political/economic leadership) or they're prone to galaxy-brained schemes due to overconfidence in their understanding (half the thesis of Seeing Like a State).

Warren isn't a technocrat. I'd be hard pressed to name a single elected official in the US who could be characterized as such. The technocrats are proposing things like carbon taxes, land value taxes, zoning and permitting reform, etc... And mostly getting ignored because these are unpopular.

I think Warren is a technocrat, just not one whose ideas are straightforwardly aimed at middle/working class standard of living increases; she wants to use government policy as a tool of social engineering for the kinds of things that an upper middle class Massachusetts progressive normie thinks people should be doing anyways and is disguising herself as a Bernie-style left wing populist.

See, I think this is reversed. Warren likes to adopt a professorial persona (maybe calling it a persona is unfair, given she actually has been a professor), but she is really just a lawyer (like most Members of Congress) and dresses up eat-the-rich populism in wonky clothes for the benefit of pseudointellectual liberals. Somewhat famously, she got Saez and Zucman (a pair of noted left-wing economists) to write up policy proposals for her campaign and then proceeded to ignore them when their recommendations weren't spicy enough for the audience she was courting.

Maybe we're using the world technocrat differently; to me "wants to use government policy as a tool of social engineering" isn't a distinguishing element. That could refer to almost any politician. My understanding of the term technocrat implies that they hold their position by dint of at least notional subject matter expertise. Supreme Court Justices are pretty much inherently technocrats, as is the Fed Chair. Conversely, I'm almost tempted to say an elected official can't be a technocrat, but that might be a bit too far. Nevertheless, it's rare (and even more unlikely in the specific context of Congress). It's just not how politicians win elections.

My understanding of the term technocrat implies that they hold their position by dint of at least notional subject matter expertise.

She is literally a Harvard professor?

Harvard professor of law is not a position with governmental authority (or even an advisory position) and also [insert dig at law professors here]. You could call, e.g. Larry Summer a (retired) technocrat. Not because he's an econ professor at Harvard, but because he's held governmental positions (Treasury, CEA) and was at least notionally selected for his expertise.

edit: I'm not really trying to convince you to adopt this definition of 'technocrat', just trying to lay out what I mean.

The Trudeau government has been particularly bad (or deliberately bad?) at anticipating second-order effects.

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