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The daycare situation is a perfect example of what is wrong with Canada. The government got involved by subsidizing demand and restricting supply, so it all became worse. When the subsidy program was created, the conditions to receive the subsidy for the daycares entailed capping employee compensation. Demand exploded because prices fell by half and then half again, but supply was constrained by labour availability so much that today there are 15% fewer daycare spots than in 2019. So it is as you say, a windfall if you get a spot, but much worse than before if you can't. Statscan had a report in 2022 which admittedly was still a Pandemic year that 8% of kids aged 0-5 were waiting for a spot to open. Thats 200,000+ kids.
This is why I'm so suspicious of technocrats. They consistently do this.
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.
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.
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.
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