Great essay. One addition I would offer is that this phenomenon also ties into the US becoming an equilibrium lower trust society more generally. It sucks.
The thing with Amazon and Netflix is that they seem to work pretty effectively. I have to think that's part of why people trust them. Ordering something from Amazon is easy and it shows up at your door the next day. Government, with the exception of the relatively well-trusted military, just doesn't operate with that degree of frictionless effectiveness. In many cases that's unavoidable, but I think people might trust government more if we invested some effort it making it work better.
I think Matt and others have written many times that blue states and cities governed by a majority of democrats needs to focus much more on effective governance to win elections.
I believe most people actually feel pretty good about their local government, local schools and decent about their state government. This could go with your model in terms of Tiebout Efficiency (voting with their feet).
Or alternatively related to a default people have about being much more negative about congress than their own congress person.
a lot of the time we are actually spending money on making government worse, if you care about the little details you can actually make things better without spending money. the US started doing online passport renewals only at the end of 2024 -- in many ways this is actually *cheaper* than the mail-in version, but no one ever put the effort in to make it happen until recently. and getting it to happen was needlessly difficult because the government stands in its own way all the time.
I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek this was meant, but this is largely beside the point. Erosion of trust in public institutions whose mission is, on some level, public welfare is the problem. That we might replace that with trust in corporations (whose mission is to extract maximum producer welfare even if that means reducing consumer welfare) is not comforting.
Matt mentions this to n his article. Americans trust for-profit companies, because we, the public, don’t see internal disagreements within those companies, Matt says.
Yeah, exactly. And there are lots of big, nationwide, well-known companies that people hate. Like nobody says "I have a lot of trust in Comcast." That's not because there's a lot of internal Comcast debate being aired publicly; it's because they suck.
I quit Comcast and was thrilled to do it. But looking back on it, I would say their business model is to get paid in exchange for taking all the bad press that avaricious broadcasters (ESPN/Disney in particular) actually deserve.
Not really. The primary reason is that if they don't live up to our expectations we can take our money and go elsewhere. We don't need to worry about the sausagemaking as long as they deliver.
Yeah, if every company had to go through what Sony did with the hacking incident, perceptions would be quite different. Think of how much seeing behind the curtain of the NFL hasn't exactly made Roger Goodell more respected or beloved. Football is popular, but dealing with the NFL is the price Americans pay for pro football.
Roger Goodell doesn't work for you, he works for the 31* owners. Being popularly hated and specifically personally targeted for public ire is a sign that he is taking puppetry flak and doing his job well.
The CCP was/kinda is very popular for the same reason Amazon is. If you're clear about what you are and what you aren't, and then you deliver the things you're supposed to deliver, people don't actually care that much about the ways you are bad. Whether that's free 2-day shipping of almost anything in existence or rapidly rising incomes and vastly improved public infrastructure. No one trusts American democracy because it promises things and doesn't deliver, and as the inverse of the above, people don't care about the ways in which it is *good*.
I'm not 100% sure how well this would work but I really think running on a set of 5 things that can be achieved principally through executive action could be a good idea, though in the longterm the only real way to fix this is to abolish the filibuster and make the American legislature capable of doing stuff.
I can't help but feel that this is of a piece with the broader global authoritarian project to not abolish shared reality in democracies but to so muddy the waters that the average citizen has no choice but to throw up their hands and say "well they all suck so who's to say?"
I don't know of any feasible way to fix this. It's pretty bleak.
I'm going to repost the Timothy Snyder quote I've posted here a few times in the past (with apologies).
"There's a slightly tricky thing here which I want to try to explain, which is why the Russians - or why Putin - doesn't really think he's a liar, or why they can combine lying all the time about everything with saying that we [the U.S.] are the ones who are always lying all the time about everything. You know, we lie some of the time about some things. I know few Americans who are capable of lying all the time, right? Whereas the Russian elite, and especially Russian television, that's just what they do, I mean, 24/7, five channels, wraparound reality, lying *all* the time, right? They really make some of our channels look like they're just teenagers. What Putin would say is something like this: 'We admit that we're lying all the time. And what we're trying to say is that everybody does. And so, in that sense, you're hypocrites, you're worse than us. Because you say that there's this truth thing, you say that there are values, you say that there's democracy. But we know that all of that is a lie. And we're honest enough to say that it's all a lie. And therefore we're not hypocrites, because we're always evil. And if you're always evil, you're not a hypocrite, right? And so in some sense, by being always evil, you're good, because you're consistent, you're not a hypocrite. That's where they rest. So there's a strange way in which this terrible cynicism becomes this kind of terrible naivete, where I think Putin believes just as you say, he believes that it's all cynical, it's all a conspiracy, it's all mirrors upon mirrors. But deep down inside, I think there is this notion that Russia's different, that Russia's innocent, because in Russia we don't fool ourselves about all of this *stuff*. And it's very hard to break that down, because that does become a kind of closed system. So that's tempting, right? It's tempting if you're a postmodernist on the left, because you're like, 'Yeah, I've always been challenging truth, and the structures. And here are these guys who tell me that it's really *all* a lie. So well, that's kind of attractive, that's kind of seductive. And then if you're on the right, you can say, 'Oh look, these guys have proven that if you have an army, and oligarchs, you can basically abolish truth and make the status quo permanent. And I like the status quo, because I happen to have some wealth myself.' And so it's an even stronger magnetic pull for the American right. 'Oh we can do things that way. We can do things the way Putin has done them.' And Trump just pulled the lid off of that and celebrated it and said, 'Yeah this is of course what I'm doing.'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRiDdvG-BDc
This is why treating "hypocrisy" as the worst kind of wrong is a path straight to nihilism. The most failsafe way to avoid being a hypocrite is to have no principles. A person who sincerely believes in good principles but fails to live up to them merits praise for the good principles and judgment (in appropriate circumstances) for the wrongful behavior, not condemnation as a hypocrite.
I had already hated Ralph Nader because of 2000, but once I learned that his entire career was about destroying American dynamism and stealing the future from young people via the boomer litigationist movement I started to conceive of him as one of the most malign figures in that entire era of American politics.
Of course, Nader would ping-pong back and forth between arguing that there was no difference between Gore and Bush and arguing that it was actually a good thing that Bush was worse. There's a constituency for the latter type of argument too that's only grown since 2000, which makes things even more difficult. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/11/ralph-the-leninist.html
I am optimistic about this. Part of why we are in this situation is that Trump 1 was perceived as pretty good and normal by the average voter, and the only thing that was *ab*normal was how much everyone in the media was acting like the sky was falling and the President was the most evil man alive. Now, if you actually paid attention, you would have known Trump 1 was, in fact, pretty bad. But normal people mostly care about like, macroeconomic outcomes, national security, etc. And all of that was basically fine under Trump 1 until the pandemic, and no one blamed him for that. And so they thought, wow, the elites are turning on this guy and making him out to be awful, so he must really be pissing them off, since I *know* there's no reason to be this upset or worried. And this is coming off 8 years of Obama which were pretty good, most people liked him by the end of his term, and so people thought if Trump was really so awful he should at least be noticeably worse than this president everyone thought was so good at the job.
With Trump 2 we are seeing more and more people come to the realization that actually Orange Man Bad. Meanwhile the elites are actually *less* lockstep on criticizing him. The leftist non-politics-knowers like the celebrities and so on that waffled in 2024 because of Gaza are seeing what's happening with ICE and thinking oh shit, this guy is pretty awful. The median voters are seeing high prices, low hiring, inflation continuing despite rates being elevated, etc.
this is accelerationism (see the comment above about Nader occasionally saying it was good Bush won *because* he was worse) and accelerationism is an intellectually appealing idea that's just never true. Anywhere. Ever.
It is so difficult, though. I had a really hard time convincing a well-educated friend last night that some influencer is wildly incorrect in her video about how the 2030 census is collecting private information so the government can steal our identity or some such. The influencer's video was based on a supposed "test census" she received. But I am 99% sure she received an American Community Survey questionnaire, not a test decennial census questionnaire. The questions the influencer was complaining about were the same as the ones on the ACS, and the ACS site explains why they ask them. Also, the 2030 census is scheduled to only be tested in Huntsville and Spartanburg - an issue that lots of data people are complaining about - and the influencer is in Minnesota. I finally did convince my friend that this couldn't be the test census, but it took a long time. So how do we get our friends to stop sharing nonsense?
Sorry for the long tangential screed, but this librarian is despondent over the sudden and unexplained closure of the CIA World Fact Book last week (it is SO heavily used by students and researchers at all levels), and now it seems ACS may not long for this world, and perhaps people will stop responding to the census at all. It is all so discouraging. There is so much nonsense out there that it is hard to focus on the real threats.
Just so you know a guy name Simon Wilison downloaded the entire archive of the world factbook's most recent update and made it available publicly on his github... I don't think Substack will let me put the link directly, but if you google for "simonw github world factbook" you should find it.
Thanks. Yes, I think it is going to the Internet Archive, too. Alas, that is just a static moment in time, and the information will be out of date next year. Maybe the entire infrastructure that put this together won't be dismantled, and we can get it up and running again.
90% of people do not have the ability to discern, with confidence, what is nonsense and what isn't. And the other 10% would mostly rather be doing other things. I don't think people ever really could, but thanks to social media they now encounter disinformation much more readily, and they don't trust the sources that provide actual information (or, increasingly, they just find them boring relative to infinite scroll short form video).
And even if that 90% are forced to admit that a factual claim was mistaken, that becomes "not the point" because of Gaza or Epstein or Drag Queen Story Hour. Even if there's no proof of COVID vaccines causing crazy side effects, Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend still had his balls explode on the eve of his wedding.
100% agree. In fact it’s even worse because most people seem to view correcting falsehoods are more transgressive than spreading them. But… what’s the alternative? I think it behoves one to at least try to correct falsehoods occasionally.
Yeah, I can't disagree with that. But it does feel pretty futile. And say you go through the back and forth, you walk someone through sources, you address their responses, and they finally relent and say okay, I shouldn't have shared that. They are just gonna do the same shit with the next piece of disinformation that feels compelling to them. Maybe they pause for a second, remembering the time they were misled and corrected. But at the end of the day they want to be a good conscientious person, and a lot of people from "their side" really care about this issue, and isn't it crazy what they said in this TikTok?? Giving up and disengaging is the best option for me. But I don't begrudge people who want to fight an unwinnable war, given that the cause is just.
I like to imagine if enough of us tried the norms would change. Obviously hasn’t worked so far! But the costs of public policy being based on an increasingly inaccurate fact base are so high I guess I feel one has to try a little bit.
It's Brandolini's law all the way down. I feel lucky to have family I mostly agree with politically, but my very intelligent dad will still send fake resist lib stories with me from obviously bogus sites. Do I really want to expend effort correcting him when we broadly agree about the big picture?
I agree, but it really takes an expert hand and good social skills. I read this extremely insightful observation a few days ago, in the comments on ACX, talking about adjacent issues:
> groups can lie to each other about things that aren't that important to them. Moreover, what's literally said doesn't always matter as much as what's implied. If you and I are lifelong friends, say, with a history of chatting, there are things I could say that would appear false to an outsider, but you know what I really mean, what I'm really trying to say, and it'd be a reaffirmation of friendship. What I literally said doesn't matter. It might piss off outsiders, and *that's* what matters.
Those are very important constraints to keep in mind, on how people receive corrections.
Yeah in my experience it’s rarely worth it to try. My day-to-day life is mostly filled with resistance libs. When I’ve advocated for things like reclaiming patriotism/the flag, people…do not agree. At this point I try to focus on other topics.
That’s one reason I spend too much time in this comments section! I am thinking of giving it up for lent - I am not observant but retain a weird affinity for rituals of self-denial, and I’m not sure I can pull it off (which makes me want to try).
I have often wanted to see what a poll would look like if you asked Dems, "would you rather live in a demoracy under Trump, or a dictatorship under Biden (or AOC or Sanders)"
And asked Republicans "would you rather live in a democracy under Biden or a dictatorship under Trump?"
The internet is the common denominator. If we aren’t willing to do something about our information environment, we might as well throw up our hands and wait for authoritarianism.
Folks say this, the "lower trust society" bit, but I don't think most of the people saying it spend a lot of time in genuinely low-trust societies.
I ended up purchasing progressively more and more expensive and capable locks for bikes when I lived in Beijing, and still had 2 stolen and one destroyed in the course of a theft. Now, one of my kids' bikes has sat out behind our house in plain view of the alleyway, which sees ~30 people walk down it daily, since maybe June? Still there. Same for various gardening tools that live out there permanently.
When I had shit delivered in China, which is (largely rightfully) regarded as a low-crime culture, it would get stolen out of the hallway outside our apartment, probably by someone living on the floor, if someone wasn't there to open the door to a delivery guy.
I have had 1 package stolen here in a decade.
This is not a fancy area, it's a working-to-middle-class one, too.
Conspiracism about governing elites doesn't equate to a low-trust society.
Indeed: on one hand, I can walk into any restaurant in my Western Massachusetts town and leave with a random takeout order. No one will so much as ask me my name or phone number, yet I've never had to go hungry because someone took one of my orders (mistakenly or otherwise).
On the other hand, just two hours away, in New York City, I have to hail a Duane Reade employee just to buy razor blades.
I would wager that even the places where these things are "common" are comparing to a baseline of the places in the US where they are rare.
There are essentially no places in China where I could leave a cell phone out and have it returned. I had three stolen in the time I was there, including having left one on a bench in a high-end (sale price per unit topped $2M) gated residential community where I was living at the time.
But when I accidentally left mine at the local playground in my, again, not wealthy neighborhood, I came back to it sitting in the exact same place, except someone had put it in a ziploc because it was drizzling.
There are absolutely areas of the US where shit gets stolen more frequently but I think the data bears out that the only places globally with fewer such areas are Japan, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Singapore, with Germany, Britain, and maybe France and N. Italy running on par.
As regards *one another,* the United States is an extremely high-trust society. Even the South is well above the global median, and I think we're all clear that it's precisely Southern norms infecting Northern cities that make them less safe and trusting.
Ironically, I once left my debit card in an ATM in China and couldn't figure out where I left it. Once I realized what I had done and went back to the same bank a couple of days later, I found out someone thankfully turned the card into the bank and it was waiting for me. I once had the same thing happen with a book bag I left in a bar.
While I was there I don't think I once successfully recovered an item more valuable than a glass tea bottle that I had left anywhere outside my own apartment or my research group's office on-campus.
Also had the whole "hit and run by unlicensed motor-scooter" thing happen 2-3 times as a pedestrian or on a bike, and got hit by a car that ran a red light who then tried to accost me for payment.
That's fair! I will just say that, of the countries you mentioned, I've spent a fair bit of time in Switzerland (and a little in Japan) and my subjective experience of "is my stuff safe" is pretty drastically different there. But I agree the US is relatively high trust compared to most of the world.
There is a reason that I listed it among the places that are even better, but I'm given to understand that most of the rest of the developed world is, at best, a peer to us in this regard. I certainly hear/heard British and German colleagues in places like Birmingham or Darby or suburban Munich bitching about the same things that coworkers and friends in pleasant but less trusting neighborhoods in Philly do.
Packages were pretty regularly stolen at the condo building where I used to live, in the suburbs of DC. I switched to using package holding services as much as possible. There's a reason why Amazon Lockers are popular!
I can't speak directly to the prevalence of bike theft, because I never learned to ride one -- in large part because the bike I had as a kid was stolen and my parents never bought me another one.
Seems like no correlation between areas with relatively high levels of package theft and areas with relatively high levels of believing in nonsense about politics though.
Agreed, although the residents of that building did believe a lot of nonsense (no relevance to this discussion, I'm just still bitter that we turned down an offer from Sprint to put a cell tower on the building because people were worried it would cause brain cancer)
I’ve had multiple bikes stolen in DC over the years, most recently (a year and a half ago) while locked to a rack on Connecticut Avenue, next to a sidewalk cafe, during the day. It was a cheap and uncool bike too.
Probably just that (1) it's victimless because amazon will eat the cost and (2) they need it more than the recipient. I'm reminded of this story from a few years back.
The half-life of a package on the front porch in our gentrifying neighborhood in New Orleans is about 90 seconds. Other delivery arrangements must be made. (That said, we moved Uptown a few months ago, and have not yet had a package theft.)
Yep, shortly after I moved to my current house (near Colfax in Denver), I did some hedge trimming on a Saturday with a manual hedge trimmer. When it got too hot and sunny in the late afternoon, I stopped and left the trimmer sitting by my front door because I planned on starting again the next morning and figured that it would be safe there (about 50' feet from the sidewalk). Nope, gone when I went out the next day.
I left a miter saw out on sawhorses overnight for four days running while doing a project here in Philly, FFS. We've had one package stolen in a decade. Even though our gardening tools live outside, only one spade has ever been taken from the garden a few years ago.
My parents have had change stolen from unlocked cars once and two packages taken, all probably by bored teenagers, in the 25 years they've lived in their suburban neighborhood.
Based on how everyone describes the rest of the country I am never leaving the NE US again.
Come to the Upper Midwest, we have donuts. But you need to use a knife to cut away half of whatever is left of the last donut. You must never take the final crumb of Zeno's Donut.
I live in the Denver exurbs and I've never had anything stolen. My city had some catalytic converter thefts a few years ago, but the police caught the guys responsible and it stopped instantly once they were arrested.
I feel the high vs low trust concept is over indexed and oversimplified. It combines too many different concepts and tries to drop them onto a continuum.
Why? In particular, is that not rather in conflict with this site's long-standing concern about the harmful effects of sports betting, given that, per Gambling Insider, a plurality (39%) of Polymarket's revenue comes from gambling - sorry, 'predicting' - on sports. (This is even more obvious at other prediction markets, where 85% of Kalshi's revenue comes from sports).
I'd add that it is epistemically bad to use prediction market odds as an indicator of the likelihood of a particular thing happening, and is in particular obviously inferior to the disciplined approach to making predictions that this site has previously advocated.
To offer a little more information about this, Polymarket & Substack created some kind of tool where people can embed Polymarket odds in a post rather than screenshotting or whatever. In order to promote this new functionality, they offered some Substack writers money to try using the embed.
There's no editorial strings attached or anything, and making reference to midterm odds seems like a very normal thing for me to do so I sad yes.
As I think people know, advertising has been a traditional part of the media revenue model for a very long time and to the extent that publications are able to attract advertising support it is possible to do more editorial work at a lower price for readers. I don't want to do anything intrusive or that would change the basic nature of our articles but this seemed like a very light lift that would have gone totally unnoticed if not disclosed (but of course I wouldn't do it without disclosure) and that is part of a strategy to help us delivering value to our members.
As a paid subscriber, I would prefer that I (and other paid subscribers) am the one paying you, not Polymarket. Maybe there should be a free version of the article with the Polymarket ad and a paid version without it
As a paid subscriber, I don't really care. Matt has a right to make money however he wants. The purpose of this newsletter is to make a living off his takes and it wouldn't feel right for us to limit that.
All I ask is that he's transparent about it and indicates how much it may or may not impact his thinking. If I ever think he sold out I'll just unsubscribe.
Frankly I would be more concerned about speaking fees, which I assume are much more lucrative and we know much less about.
Yeah I’ve never really understood the speaking fees = corruption take. Just because someone pays you for your thoughts doesn’t mean they have influence over your ideas.
If you financially benefit from maintaining a positive relationship with group X that pays you a speaking fee that incentivizes you to produce work that maintains that relationship.
The trouble is there have been some highly publicized examples of people getting speaking gigs as a reward or payoff. Those examples stick in people's minds even though most of the time that's not how it works.
This happens because:
1) human nature draws us toward believing everything is some sort of secret corrupt scheme, and
2) It's a lot of work to discern the truth and we're all pretty lazy.
It depends on whether the fee is because they want to hear what you have to say or whether it is a purchase of later favors.
Plus when your fee gets high enough it becomes the case that you may only be talking to a small segment of the population.
This is why Hillary Clinton should have either just not had presidential ambitions if she wanted to make a ton of money, or lowered her fee if she did. Those people thought they were clearly buying influence (see also NBC hiring Chelsea when she was completely unqualified) just like people who did business with the Trump family or Hunter Biden did.
If an organization is paying you very generous fees for speaking it would give the appearance of you as a commentator being less willing to criticize that organization.
It does somewhat depend on the circumstances—if it were a current officeholder, it could look like a payoff. I would think there would be restrictions on that, but on people who are between jobs or retired from public office it would seem like just a gig. I think the big problem people have is that someone is getting big bucks for what looks like a very easy gig. In fact, the whole “revolving door” thing is based on the idea that it is corrupt for a politician to work for pay after they leave office.
I recommend the recent podcast from Ezra Klein with Anand Giridharadas. It might provide some insight as to why the speaker circuit definitely has sinister potential. They aren’t just paying you for your ideas. They are paying for access.
Suppose someone tells you they got $100,000 for speeches to the American Petroleum Institute last year. Wouldn't you want to know that when you are considering their opinions about energy policy, and consider it a potentially strong signal of bias?
There are an awful lot of conflict-of-interest policies and laws that are premised on an understanding that these relationships can warp judgment and that once a person is conflicted it can be very difficult - or essentially impossible - to know why they take the positions they do. Which is why you avoid the conflict.
"Matt has a right to make money however he wants. The purpose of this newsletter is to make a living off his takes and it wouldn't feel right for us to limit that."
Get the bag, but for Matt.
Anytime we start talking about "has the right" we are diving into nonsense conversation.
It "wouldn't feel right" for us to limit how Matt maximizes his income but there is no moral valiance to how he decides to make money?
Matt has written(and podcasted about) how tech workers should work on something more beneficial to society than Facebook. He also does pretty well for himself financial, he can consider the morality of his income streams.
Yeah, the saying that goes something like, "consider the feelings of others before your own rights and the rights of others before your own feelings" rings true here
FFS, it’s not like we’re being forced to watch a 30 second video praising Polymarket. Matt has explained what the payment is for, it’s not like something shady is going on. Of course the fact that Polymarket exists in its current form is evidence of the cultural corruption that is enabled by the attitudes Matt describes in today’s post.
To be clear, I give Matt the benefit the doubt that there's nothing "shady" going on. I simply think it was a bad decision, for multiple reasons. Reasonable people can disagree
I don't think I understand your perspective. If your view was 'Polymarket is fine, prediction markets are fine, let adults make their own choices' that would be a consistent opinion. But instead you seem to think both that its existence 'in its current form is evidence of the cultural corruption that is enabled by [etc]' and also that it's fine to receive a benefit-in-kind from them.
Maybe not "shady" viz direct MY financial interest, but undeniably "sleazy" given Polymarket's business model and wildly hypocritical given MY's stance on the corrosive impact of online gambling as a way of life.
I think actually calling it a “sponsorship,” intended as a disclosure, made it sound worse. This is more like “promotional consideration,” and really accepting Polymarket as an authority without consideration is no better. The real problem is that we look to Polymarket instead of polling.
My issue is entirely related to Polymarket's business model, not MY's. I would object to tobacco "promotional consideration" too, because it would mean MY is taking money to promote tobacco products to me while I am paying him for his takes. (MY does direct promotion of candidates and political causes all the time, which doesn't bug me.) The fact that Polymarket's sports-betting dependent business model is being whitewashed by presenting their promotional material in the form of a political psuedo-poll does not make it better for me.
I’m not too concerned if it’s just giving him access to the display of their data. I’d be more concerned if it were more like an actual ad with less actual benefit.
Well I appreciate the disclosure in the post and the clarity of that post (so thank you). I still don't like it as a decision though; you should consider that the posts that have been created on here about the harms of the explosion of gambling in public life have actually been very persuasive! And at the end of the day the purpose is, ultimately, to guide people towards using platforms to do more gambling.
It's your house and your rules. But in the spirit of another piece of advice on here, about trying to live your morals to some extent, I don't think this was a great choice.
Yeah this is less about "corruption" or "shady influence" and more just "polymarket and kalshi are about smuggling gambling under the rug, they create horrible incentives for powerful people, so don't even do above-board business with them"
I appreciate the disclosure, both here and the original footnote. Your transparency about the economics of your Substack has always been something I admired.
It’s a little unnerving to get to the bottom of a post by an author who has not traditionally published sponsored content and find out that the post has a sponsor.
I would respectfully suggest that sponsored posts are a bigger change than you may have thought, and deserve more prominent discussion.
1. I have no problem with prediction markets generally, or with Polymarket specifically. In general, I think they're good things, though their devolution into "sports betting with extra steps" is disappointing.
2. I appreciate the disclosure in the article, but it was quite jarring and uninformative. My response upon seeing it was, "WTF does THAT mean?"
3. I also appreciate the discussion in the comments, but if you're going to start accepting payments for things like this (ie, changing your revenue model), that seems like a topic to fill your readers in on prior to the choice, perhaps in an evening discussion thread.
4. This seems like a particularly odd model for sponsorship. Do you get paid per link you embed? Per view ("impression"?) of the "ad"? Is it click-through-based? Some of these models are more pernicious (in terms of their editorial effect) than others.
This seems like something done almost on a whim, and experimentation is one of the valuable aspects of a format like Substack. But ultimately you've just managed to create a huge distraction from an otherwise-very-interesting post.
I've been a subscriber since the start and I personally hate this. I'm 100% in for getting your bag, and I'd be fine with 99.9% of brand sponsorships, but polymarket sponsorship in my hierarchy of brand affinity is similar in repulsiveness to me as to sponsorships by marlboro cigarettes.
1. I find prediction market odds useful context for claims about expectations for the future.
2. I don’t mind SB getting paid to embed Polymarket odds.
3. I appreciate the disclosure but would prefer it to be more salient. Maybe a banner over the embed. A footnote feels buried, especially for a new feature.
4. I think it would be good practice to backup the claim that other markets agree with some specific markets and numbers. If the sponsorship forbids this, that seems bad.
Substack used to let me read footnotes as a popup by touching them. But that functionality no longer exists and footnotes work like endnotes on paper, so I basically don’t read them in context any more.
I think this may be a Substack bug. I can still see them by hovering over them on my desktop browser, but in my mobile browser they do nothing.
The best type of footnote display are the ones where you click it and it expands the footnote out right after the number, and collapses with another click. I first remember seeing that at FiveThirtyEight when it moved to Disney.
Yeah, this is only on mobile. But 95+% of my reading is on mobile browser (because the app is worse, and I'm usually doing my Substack reading either in bed or in the gym).
Just want to add to the chorus that I would have quite liked this to be both a lot clearer (what does "sponsoring" mean? and is it the whole post or just the embedded tool?) and more prominent than a footnote. I'm not sure how I feel about the act of taking the sponsorship money—like some other readers I have a big "ick" factor with these prediction markets, but I trust that merely embedding a tool doesn't exert any editorial influence—but I'd feel a lot better about a decision like this if something like "embed sponsored by Polymarket" were in a caption under the embed itself, with a footnote laying out more of the information you've provided in the comments.
You clearly have a subscription to Silver Bulletin and have a good professional working relationship with Nate Silver. I don't understand why you wouldn't just link to his substack especially since his prediction model is almost certainly more accurate than Polymarket.
Also, Polymarket has some real shadiness directly related to the Trump administration! Remember that huge Polymarket bet regarding the capture of Maduro? Just a lot of "smoke" that Polymarket is actually directly involved with the Trump corruption you describe.
Look I don't actually think Polymarket somehow bribed you to make this post the way it is. In fact, I think your post does a pretty good job of explaining that the public has not only way way too expansive of a definition regarding the word "corruption" but way way too often ascribes corrupt motives for particular policy decisions when the real answer is often much more banal normal politics. But do you no think there is something kind of ironic that in a post basically decrying the public's perception of what counts as corruption, the post is sponsored by an entity that has direct ties to very real Trump corruption?
Fair point about Silver and Polymarket. Still, I think I'm solid ground in saying that at the very least there are links polls or substacks or even news articles he could have linked to that I think have some more methodological soundness. I think Polymarket is reasonably accurate, but it is skewed by "whale" betting and when there are other sources that are even more accurate why not link to them.
Is that his attitude? I don't think I've seen that advocated in those terms. And I don't think that's a good attitude, primarily for moral reasons but if you find that unpersuasive I'd point out that that's the type of mentality that leads people to have to later explain 'your business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein' etc.
I am 100% confident Matt has used that quote, at least partially in earnest. I actually only know the quote from him (which is why I bastardized it -- I think it's "I'll take any motherfucker's money if he's giving it away."). I believe he used it in a slightly different context (politicians taking donations from any source; Matt expressed disagreement with the whole symbolic refusal and return of donations shtick).
However, because he routinely deletes his tweets, I have no hard evidence for you. Just inadmissible hearsay. Sorry!
And it sounds like what he "gave up" was exceedingly minor. If he takes that money and gives even $50 to GiveWell, you genuinely think the world has become a worse place as a result of his decision?
If that is actually his position then he should state it clearly, so people can unsubscribe from the blog of a moral monster who purports to offer policy advice grounded in concern for the general welfare, not the best way to score "dumb money".
If you are stupid enough to bet on Maduro being captured and someone with insider knowledge takes your money from you, then too bad. Corruption is one thing, but being a stupid sucker is an entirely different thing.
Matt, I don't personally object to the sponsorship (although I will say that your disclosure was so lowkey that I thought you were joking), but I would genuinely prefer that you bump up the cost of our subscriptions instead of doing SponCon just because the latter hands such an *EASY* attack line to your opponents. I'm 100% serious that this one instance is going to get thrown in your face on Twitter (or whatever succeeds it) for literally decades.
Yeah I would appreciate more transparency about when things are sponsored content. I thought it was ironic to note, in a post about how people generally aren’t on the take, that there is actually a sponsor for this post!
Especially when the ‘sponsored content’ isn’t integral to the article. It would have been easy enough to find plenty of “who do you expect to win the Senate” sources that could be given a quick cite to make this point, pick one or two, and then move on.
Well we hope and think it isn't integral! This is the whole problem with this sort of thing - and where the post does frankly mirror the public concern to be honest - is that now there's some doubt introduced over to what extent we're reading the author's opinions versus the sponsor's, what the editorial process here involves, etc.
I wouldn’t say it meets the formal definition of corruption at all, but it was an ironic enough snap association before reasoned consideration in the context of the article.
Especially since one of MY's main goals in recent years have been trying to get people to his left to become more moderate. If you write something about the perception of widespread corruption being mistaken, then have it be the first of your posts to have a gambling sponsorship, you've poisoned your own well. Nobody you need to persuade will be persuaded regardless of the strength of your argument. This is the type of behavior MY would rightly criticize the left for with "Do Democrats even really want to win?"
I did think about making that argument but to my mind it's not corrupt if there's a disclaimer acknowledging the relationship (yes) and if the content/direction of the post has not been dictated or pushed by the sponsor (presumably not?).
I do think it's immoral to take money from prediction markets though, even if not corrupt.
No, it's not remotely corrupt. Matt disclosed the sponsorship and there's no reason to think from the content of the article that Polymarket paid him to say anything Matt doesn't believe, given that 99.9% of the article has nothing to do with betting markets. If the content of the article was "betting markets should not be regulated" that would be more plausibly corrupt, and really only truly corrupt if Matt didn't believe it but was only saying it for the money.
The sponsorship by Polymarket rubbed me the wrong way.
First, I have no problem with sponsored content in principle. But it should be clear that it’s sponsored content from the top. The disclosure should not be buried in a footnote.
Second, SB has written several articles about dangers of gambling. It seems hypocritical to be sponsored by a company that turns literally everything into a gambling opportunity.
Third, the response here in the comments makes it seem like you are doing this as a favor to your readers to keep the cost low. It’s not a favor to us. One of the reasons people may choose to pay for content instead of consuming free content is a desire not to be reading sponsored content. If SB is planning to substantively change its funding model, it should inform the readers.
Fourth, it is not true that sponsorships can have absolutely zero effect on editorial decisions. Not to mention that Polymarket is not politically neutral. Sometimes the effect is negligible, but one should not pretend like there’s no influence.
Finally, and most importantly, MY is a highly influential politics and policy commenter whose writing has the power to substantially influence political decisions in Washington and elsewhere. Like the sorts of things people bet on with Polymarket. It seems like a huge conflict of interest. This isn’t Simplisafe or ExpressVPN.
I don’t really think it’s accurate to say the post is sponsored by Polymarket. It’s more that Matt received income for embedding the graphic and making readers aware of Polymarket which really isn’t much different from traditional advertising.
I don’t think Polymarket is in the business of generating revenue from graphic embeds, so I can’t imagine this is the case.
Basically as I understand it he could have created some other graphic or put out a link to some other site and gotten no money, or used Polymarket’s data and got money.
It also happens that going with Polymarket is easier for him because they created a widget, so he might have chosen to do that anyways even with no compensation.
I’m glad Matt explained further in the comments and this doesn’t really bother me.
>I'd add that it is epistemically bad to use prediction market odds as an indicator of the likelihood of a particular thing happening,
This seems like a really large and most likely false claim. Prediction markets have well-established credibility when the markets are deep and liquid, and I have to assume a big election market like this one easily clears the bar for both.
There have been a number of posts on here trying to take seriously the task of making predictions, and none of them have been 'outsource it to "the wisdom of crowds"' that I can recall. Are prediction markets more accurate than an average punter? Probably! But they do not contain more 'information' than a genuine expert (ie, our host, on this topic) possesses.
In principle prediction markets can aggregate the information possessed by many experts; this is the main reason for prediction markets as I understand it. If an expert became convinced the prediction market was far off, the expert could make a lot of money (assuming a deep and liquid market) by betting in such a way that would also tend to correct the prediction being implicitly made by the prediction market. My understanding is that in practice prediction markets have tended to make better predictions than almost all individual experts.
It's a shame about making sports betting easier, and I think one could make an argument that that's bad enough to oppose the expansion of prediction markets, but in principle that's simply orthogonal to the question of epistemic badness.
My point in the OP really refers to the history of this newsletter. One of the very first posts was about trying to be more disciplined about doing predictions, taking them seriously as an intellectual exercise, etc. I don't believe 'linking to Polymarket' is an example of that.
I inferred "post" as the screenshot of the Senate odds coming from Polymarket, not this entire article, but Matt or The Management are free to clarify.
I would think that was very bad, in that case. Given that readers of this site have been given articles on multiple occasions pointing out the harm's of the gambling explosion, those same readers should not be a captive audience for some native advertising of new wares.
I want to register my annoyance at the commentariat for the reactions here. For a typically very economically literate crowd, you all have sure missed the memo on prediction markets. Which have been an aspiration - more like a pipe dream - of an influential segment of the profession for many years. Precisely because they are epistemically better, in theory, than alternative forms of prediction.
Now they're finally getting off the ground and starting to see some cultural traction. They try to do some marketing to demonstrate the actual, legitimate use case (not the sports gambling), and Matt reasonably agrees. And you all react like, I don't know, your favorite band sold out?
Prediction markets are good, I hope they succeed, and Matt should keep using them. Leaving free marketing money on the table if necessary, to satisfy his ridiculous readers.
On the sports gambling: the dereliction of regulatory duty that allows them to offer sports gambling in contravention of state law is shameful. And will hopefully be fixed by a... less-corrupt? future Congress.
The idea that you have to be so happy for the existence of something that contains little better information than a model or a bookie's odds that you can just wait out the tidal wave of unlicensed gambling is one you're welcome to have but I'm not going to share. Even if they are marginally more accurate they provide no social benefit.
If you have a model that's better than the prediction market, you use your model to make money until the market adjusts to match your model. That's the mechanism, that's why it is epistemically better. It's a sort of meta model that integrates information from all models (and other sources).
I bet if you think about for five minutes you could come up with lots of socially beneficial use cases for very accurate predictions? Once you accept the logic that you can in fact get accurate predictions. Most objections are just "I don't think it would work." Try it and find out!
For a SB case, how about: which of these potential candidates would have the best chance of winning the election, conditional on running & winning the primary? Figure out who to contribute to, or who to recruit. But there's also like, which are the most promising potential R&D investments in [field]? What is going to happen in [geopolitical situation]? And many more.
None of those things are exogenous to the existence of the market itself. If Democrats can use a prediction market to determine who is more likely to defeat a Republican, then Republicans can do the same, and assuming there is any effect at all it would net no difference.
Prediction markets do not uncover deep truths; at best they price markets more efficiently than bookmakers do, but this is not a social good.
Polymarket makes at least 40% of revenues off sports betting. If you believe that ubiquitous sports betting is bad for society, then you are entitled to complain when a blog you pay for takes their sports betting money to promote them to you. Trying to turn this into a story about the heroic triumph of "prediction markets" realizing the lifelong dream of right-thinking economists is absurd. Convince Polymarket to drop sports betting, then come back here to pitch that story.
Having the prediction market company sponsor a political commentator, who has potential influence on policymakers and thus on the kinds of things people bet on using the prediction market seems a bit circular.
It’s also worth taking seriously the framing that concentrated benefits and diffuse cost policies are a form of corruption. Arguably the highest priority for the Biden administration was featherbedding and giveaways to his union buddies. I would argue that’s certainly a form of corruption even if it isn’t as corrosive as selling pardons.
This isn't at all about sports though. Would you refrain from visiting Las Vegas because they have sports gambling?
Just because a platform makes money off of sports gambling doesn't mean that prediction markets of other topics don't provide meaningful projections of public sentiment. The fact that people are wagering money on the odds of the Democrats winning the Senate provides immensely more information about public sentiment than any public opinion poll could.
1. It had to feel good for Matt to be able to work in a swipe at RDP, Matt Stoller, and others who are similar after all the feuding he's done with them on Twitter. And that upper right hand tweet from the RDP is hilariously pathetic: admitting they don't know who's funding something they don't like, therefore they must guess that it's someone rich and powerful that they also don't like!
2. Also, I'm surprised there weren't any questions asked about lobbying and campaign finance, because those are areas that people regularly think are corrupt, even though they also implicate some of the most core First Amendment protections out there.
3. "Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades." How about *ever*? I don't know who else could come close. The Grant administration tolerated a lot of corruption, but Grant himself didn't flaunt in it like Trump does.
4. Finally, those who go full cynical on politicians should consider their own agency, famously mocked as follows:
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality.
They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.
Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans.
So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.”
1. The issue with campaign finance, donor access, lobbying, etc... is not that it necessarily indicates corruption but that it deeply muddies the waters and destroys the information environment surrounding corruption. To the average voter, who is not us and doesn't want to spend the time we do gathering information about the state of the world, if much of Congress were pocketing money directly in exchange for votes for or against various measures, the data about election spending and donations would look similar, the headlines about Congress would look similar, and the outcomes would look similar. The information environment is so opaque that folks can simply attribute politicians doing things they don't like to corruption, and it's hard to disprove convincingly when the optics are so terrible because everyone is doing this.
2. To the extent that we do have actual corruption or a quid pro quo, it's almost certainly to be found in the pipeline *from* politics *to* the private sector. Virtually the entire governing class becomes multi-millionaires within a few years of retirement, and virtually all of them do it by lobbying or providing insight on government relations to private industry. It's almost impossible to prove or disprove how this affects their decisions about specific regulatory measures while in office, but it seems that if they're too rigorous, they cut off the lucrative post-Congress-gig pipeline.
So on #2, I think it’s an incredibly small percentage of people that are able to go from a career in government to becoming a multi-millionaire, and most of who do so become that rich through media, not lobbying. As a thought experiment, who is worth more: John Boehner or Joe Scarborough? Kurt Schrader or George Stephaopoulos?
Many former members and staff are lobbyists, but nobody who’s waiting in the hallway on the 6th floor of the Longworth House Office Building to meet with a 25-year-old staffer is a multi-millionaire who isn’t worried about their next paycheck. That’s a working stiff right there.
I don't think the American public (nor I) have an understanding of "working stiff" that encompasses "makes half a million a year because of power they once held"
I take an expansive view: short of the self-employed (like our illustrious SB host), or executives who make most of their money in stock options, anyone who gets a paycheck is a working stiff in some regard. I'll even include sports athletes who make most of their money via paycheck, not endorsement deals, as working stiffs. Reasonable people can disagree with me, not a hill I need to die on.
Not trying to get into a "$XXX isn't really rich" discourse, but someone making $500,000 (let's ballpark that at $350,000 after taxes) is incredibly well-off but isn't going to become a multi-millionaire without a couple years of a real ascetic existence.
I think it's inaccurate to say that "virtually the entire governing class becomes multi-millionaires within a few years of retirement." My quibbles are on two points: 1) "becoming" is a very passive way of describing it. They work for that money, performing a task that someone (or some company) with more money finds valuable, and 2) "multi-millionaire" is an exaggeration of how rich you can get lobbying as a former Member/staffer.
"but someone making $500,000 (let's ballpark that at $350,000 after taxes) is incredibly well-off but isn't going to become a multi-millionaire without a couple years of a real ascetic existence."
Are we using different definitions of multi-millionaire? Cause if you make 350k *after taxes* and don't become a multi-millionaire, you are doing something deeply wrong.
This reminds me that it always baffles me when people scoff at lottery winnings that would be about this amount. I don't think a lot of folks have a good comprehension for how long it takes to make this much money at median incomes.
I was going with a cultural/vibes-based definition of "rich enough to stop working without a step-down in lifestyle". I wasn't including things like retirement accounts, home values, etc. Even if you could accumulate a nest egg of $3 million in cash or cash-equivalents, you'd spend down that pretty quickly given the lifestyle you're trying to maintain.
John Boehner probably has less money than Joe Scarborough, but it's also a better gig. He just lobbies for MMJ interests without the hassle of preparing a daily morning show. I guess it depends how much you want to be in the public eye.
I don’t think that the US has ever had a president as personally corrupt as Trump is, but at the whole-administration level, it was a huge problem for most post-Lincoln Gilded Age admins. (And the “normal” process for dispensing political offices then was so transparently transactional that we’d consider it extremely corrupt by our own standards).
Re (2) my guess is that many voters think ~any kind of campaign fundraising besides small dollar donations is corrupt per se? That's just a hunch though
I actually think that can be reasonable with regard to contributions--I was thinking more expenditures from both campaigning and lobbying. It's also why I think the contribution vs. expenditure bright line that SCOTUS drew in Buckley v. Valeo is very sound.
There are some people who simply cannot fathom putting some concept above themselves. They are bewildered by concepts like community or religion or civic duty. They cannot imagine it for themselves, and are completely convinced every one else who acts like it is also lying.
Somehow, the American political system has filtered out these people from the very highest levels of power, or at least filtered out people who cannot pretend not to be one of these people. Until now.
Grant himself didn't personally benefit from that corruption. He was too trusting of people in his administration and let them do whatever they wanted.
Maybe Harding? I always got the sense he was very much up there. And with an expansive view of corruption (but one the public probably agrees with :P) Nixon has to be up there given all the bad stuff he did
Trump tried to steal an election, LBJ (to my understanding) actually did. Not for the White House (Chicago shenanigans in 1960 aside), but the Democratic primary when he first entered the Senate
Harding kicking the bucket soon after getting elected limits what he might have been capable of, which may always remain a mystery. I too thought the same thing about Nixon, but that would belie the whole point of this article, as your parenthetical implies.
Is it the most corrupt administration in world history? Putin might technically have more dosh but Russia was never a particularly rich country; there's far more to plunder in the United States.
Maybe in dollar terms, since it's the largest economy in world history.
But you can't even really conceptualize "corruption" in a country where you have a "l'etat c'est moi" style dictator or monarch. How can a leader be "corrupt" if the system of government says that he owns everything in the country and is morally entitled to do whatever he wants?
See, e.g., Zaire under Mobutu, where Mobutu would have armored cars sent to the central bank periodically to pick up pallets of cash for his personal use.
Possibly, but the Roman Empire was tiny compared to the modern United States and just one of our Big Tech rich asshole probably wields more actual power than said emperor (minus an army). The difference of scale as compared to ancient times is mind boggling.
I could mention that Amazon supposedly employs about six times the personnel that Trajan's legions did. I'm not sure about the cost that equip them similarly would be.
U.N., you got problem with that? You know what you should do? You should sanction me. Sanction me with your army. Oh! wait a minute! You don't have an army! So I guess that means you need to shut the fuck up! That's what I would do if I don't have an army, I would shut the fuck up. Shut, the, fuck, up!
I'm not sure what your quote is from, but it immediately reminded me of Les Grossman in "Tropic Thunder":
I don't know what kind of pan-Pacific bullshit power play you're trying to pull here, but Asia, Jack, is my territory. So whatever you're thinking, you'd better think again! Otherwise I'm gonna have to head down there and I will rain down an un-Godly fucking firestorm upon you! You're gonna have to call the fucking United Nations and get a fucking binding resolution to keep me from fucking destroying you. I'm talking scorched earth, motherfucker! I will massacre you! I WILL FUCK YOU UP!
> I think a less generous but more accurate take would be that because voters do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties involved in assessing policy problems, they wrongly conclude that everything they don’t like reflects corruption or self-interested behavior from elected officials.
This idea can extend beyond just elected officials and governments.
People do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties involved in:
- delivering anything under the sun to you in a day or two
- getting a drug molecule to bind tightly with a specific protein and not any of the hundreds of similar proteins
- how many seeds to plant and how much fertilizer to spray to optimize crop output down to the inch
- orchestrating a global web of liability through reinsurance
- positioning a rig on an ocean surface and drilling 20,000 feet into rock floor
They'd say a small prayer to big tech/pharma/ag/insurance/oil instead of considering them "corrupt".
This column was so good, *because it focused on a core mechanism of politics that is usually ignored*. Some points:
1. In response to Neeraj, it’s not just that “People do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties in [much of modern life]”: it’s that high school and college students and newspaper readers are mostly not informed by teachers and journalists! Journalists at least have the excuse that they need to give readers what they want. Teachers are supposed to give students what they need.
2. I read Slow Boring and The Argument daily. The columns are consistently excellent and as consistently butt up against the limits of the column form. I urge Matt in particular to stop doubling down on variations of the column form (the evening dispatches, interns who write columns of their own), and look how to convey important truths that need other mechanisms of expression. His playing with LLMs to explore DC crime stats is a good example: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2021761056696123439
3. One technique Matt could adopt is to step up from his regular linking of old columns to making a structure of them, as Ben Thompson does. Today’s column should be a central pillar of Matt’s model of politics, as “aggregation theory” is for Thompson’s model of Internet businesses.
The "wrongly conclude that everything they don’t like reflects corruption or self-interested behavior" part often extends beyond just elected officials and governments as well. I live in LA, and whenever there's an argument about a new multi-unit housing development on Nextdoor (which happens frequently), almost invariably a commenter who's against the development will accuse a commenter who's in favor of it of having financial ties to developers (without evidence). One such actual quote:
"All your responses are very pro development. It’s reasonable for people to believe your account is a plant. There’s no possible way a reasonable person and a resident of this community could possibly believe that the proliferation of these ill-conceived , multi-story, mega developments will benefit anyone but the developers..."
The US has very high pay scales for "elites" in private industry (physicians, lawyers, business managers, top software engineers etc) and comparatively modest pay caps for government employees. For instance, the linked pay scale is for Washington, DC, a high cost-of-living city. Grades 5-7 are entry level for college graduates, and 11 for a PhD. Even for middle management (e.g. division manager of an agency) at the top of the pay scale, the scale tops out below 200k. Cabinet secretaries and the like are on the Executive Schedule, which goes modestly higher, but there aren't many of them.
The salaries are not *bad,* federal employees get middle-class income and (traditionally, not including politically disfavored agencies in 2025) good stability. But if you want regulating business, finance, chemistry, healthcare, Silicon Valley, etc. to attract the same people who work in these industries -- they'd all be taking big pay cuts even at Grade 15.
I've heard some other countries (Singapore, maybe France) with a reputation for good bureaucrats have higher ceilings on the pay scale and a larger merit-based component, so the public sector is more competitive with the private sector for workers with skills highly valued in industry.
There's a bit of it in the USA as well -- the Securities and Exchange Commission has a special pay scale with higher ceilings than the General Schedule, with more room for performance-based pay. I think this is because the SEC needs employees who understand finance, so their outside option is especially lucrative. https://www.sec.gov/about/careers-securities-exchange-commission/compensation-overview
You're right and that's what I was alluding to. The other option is to regulate the too big to fail private entities and let the creative destruction happen in smaller private companies.
Unions give workers the ability, in many cases, to enforce quality standards and resist pressure to provide inferior service so that the owners can profit. Our local nurses union has been on this issue, against hospital management, for years. The patients and the staff both benefit in an asymmetrical information environment, and the taxpayers who are spending money on medical services via state programs get more for their money.
That's the same as any other group of people. Should we bust up NGOs, corporations, and trade groups?
Unions are frequently leeches on society and often so corrupt they don't even benefit their own members. But that's not a hard-and-fast rule that requires busting of all unions.
Maybe secret congress can agree on automation over unionization and people won't notice until Unions are demanding degrowth, putting them firmly in the 'unpopular' camp. One can only dream.
All social programs that help people are corruption. If you make people's lives better using taxpayer money, then those people will want to vote for you, and you'll stay in power. The only way to not be corrupt is to keep money in the hands of the people who already have it.
This is a good point -- e.g. voting for anything is going to involve appropriations and specific policy winners. But I feel like there is a category difference between say, voting for a good infrastructure project that benefits the winning contract bidder, than voting to give everyone in constiuency X free money because they're a powerful political bloc.
I don't think we're especially far apart in our views given that I also don't support giving money to the Teamsters. But I don't think it's a category difference, it's a continuous spectrum, and it isn't a good thing to be on the extreme "no giving money to anyone" end of that spectrum in the name of anticorruption - that end of the spectrum is bad and we should reject any argument that tends to support it.
Yeah I think you've convinced me. I was bothered by Trump buying off farmers who were hit by his tariffs and I'm bothered by giving Teamsters free money because they've historically voted for Dems. But I guess as long as these things are passed as law in our democratic system (although there was no up-or-down vote on "bail out the Teamsters") I guess it's fair game.
Yea, I have an incredibly dubious view of Congress and this is basically where it resides. The primary modus operandi of Congress people is to maintain their own station by using taxpayer dollars to buy votes. This is the fundamental corruption of the system.
A bit meta but why are Americans so convinced corruption is endemic? Having lived in an actual very corrupt third world country the idea just seems completely ridiculous.
If corruption was an actual problem then someone could do an Operation Blazing Furnace to put hundreds of competitors in prison and solidify power.... Which always happens in every actually corrupt country but never happens in America.
"What would the world look like if this were true?" is a powerful heuristic that people don't use often enough.
Two common reasons people believe that corruption is endemic:
- It's a ready-made, psychologically compelling and plausible explanation for events they can't otherwise explain. (This is Neeraj's point elsewhere in the comments.)
- Closely related phenomenon are true! Aot of successful politicians get into the business for self-aggrandizement. I think channeling ambition into constructive pursuits is even a perk of representative government, but it can look quite unsavory.
It’s more comforting to believe that the world isn’t exactly the way you want it to be because of corruption than because there are hard trade offs with no easy answers. It’s a more mild version of the same impulse that draws people into conspiracy theories.
You also get to feel savvy and self righteous toward people in power, which feels good.
I also think there’s a really strong negativity bias in US media, more so than in other countries, that exacerbates this (I believe this has been shown in academic research).
For the same reason that voters think that 2.7% inflation is a catastrophe and they're mad as hell about it and refuse to take it any longer. In November 1984, with an inflation rate of 4.1%, it was morning in America and that glorious economic situation led Reagan to winning 49 states.
I listen to this podcast called Central Air by Josh Barro, Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss. They have an episode on affordability where they discuss this.
I think another good example of this is the campaign tactic of linking your opponent's behavior to campaign contributions. Democrats routinely would talk about checks from the NRA to Republicans and that's why they oppose "popular" gun control measures. The oil and gas industry is another common corruption source. In reality we know that a significant share of Americans value their guns, affiliate with the GOP, and the NRA endorsement is a reflection of Republicans trying to pander to gun voters, not buying them off. But it sounds corrupt-y!
I remember a presentation I saw in college that basically us tax policy is set to favor the median campaign donor, in a more authentic democracy we would tax the rich much more.
I think a lot of liberals have residual
sentiments like this—that the public at large has broadly good and liberal views and deviation is driven by rich people controlling the political system. This isn’t typical corruption. It’s also not really true (anymore, if it ever was). Working class voters have become a lot more fiscally conservative and remained very conservative on cultural politics. But I think liberals still like to use the “money in politics” thing as an argument instead of conceding the electorate is conservative.
Corrupt isn’t the right word necessarily, but anyone who has a job knows that someone giving you money makes you beholden to them.
When I am at work, I say and do things that are directly influenced by the fact my employer gives me money and I would like that to continue.
By allowing people to give monetary contributions to politicians, we are creating politicians who are beholden to their most important donors. That’s not nothing.
I think most people look at "the dollars in are much larger than what we get for it" and think of the difference as "corruption." On that score why wouldn't a typical person see left and right as equally corrupt? I think it was one of the Noah's (Smith or Timothy) who pointed out that a typical voter faced, with 3x higher cost of building in New York vs. Paris, asks "Who's getting the difference?" The left has 2 more disadvantages here: 1) most progressives I know think of almost all profit as "corruption;" and 2) educated people tend to define "corruption" in process-oriented terms, which cuts against the results-oriented intuition above, and also works to the benefit of educated people who more adeptly articulate and work within rule-based processes.
I think this comment is making an excellent point. If NY construction firms are 3x what a comparable Paris firm to drill a subway tunnel how is this not corruption? Clearly someone is getting rich on graft or outdated rules and regulations that allow them to fleece the government. Maybe others here don't think this is corruption but it feels that way to me.
Why is it "Clearly someone is getting rich on graft ..." as opposed to "NY has many more constituencies with legitimate interests that get to be served."
As a purely hypothetical example, what if construction is going to happen near a school, and a local politician says my constituents don't want this construction to have any adverse effect on their kids schooling, so before construction you need to build new drop off lanes to route traffic differently, and you need to upgrade the HVAC system of the school to maintain air quality, and put in thicker windows to reduce noise. These are legitimate concerns, not graft and corruption, it's what their constituents genuinely want to have happen, but they sure as hell increase costs, and are the kinds of things that a system with many veto points ends up with.
What that points to is not a process ripe with corruption, but a process that needs to be rigorously reformed to learn to force tradeoffs and focus on results. This is the heart of what Ezra Klein wrote in his Abundance book.
Yeah, I was too simplistic and hyperbolic with my comment. Even if no one is "getting rich" they are employing more people than is necessary for the outcome (outdated rules and regulations from my original comment). There was a NYTimes expose a couple years ago that talked about all the union rules requiring unnecessary staff. Here's a quick breakdown:
- Mandatory "Nippers" & Tenders: Rules require specific workers to watch material being moved and separate staff ("hog house tenders") to supervise break rooms.
- Automatic Machine Operators: Despite modern automation, union rules often mandate that generators, elevators, and other equipment have dedicated human operators.
- Standby Personnel: Rules frequently require standby electricians, plumbers, and mechanics to be on-site constantly, even if not needed.
- Oilers for Cranes: A relic of the past, unions require an "oiler" to be present for crane operations, a role largely obsolete.
- Redundant Crews: An extra person is often required to be present for tasks such as concrete pumping, steam fitting, and sheet metal work.
This may not be corruption, but it sure feels like that to me and I bet it does to most New Yorkers. And I bet you this is the tip of the iceberg, you don't get to 3x costs without being incredibly wasteful.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone is even getting rich, it’s just a nickel and diming of society. For example, a law mandating two person crews on subways isn’t making the MTA conductors rich (it’s a decent gig I guess but they’re still just working, and they could probably get different jobs elsewhere) but it is making everyone in New York poorer.
The answer is "the construction guys, designers, and consultants," while also being partly rooted in a bunch of small-bore corruption/rent-seeking that adds up and is impossible to explain concisely to the electorate.
The ever-increasing moralization of politics is another important factor contributing to this, at least on the left.
Politics always intersects with ethical concerns, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that politics is also inescapably about reconciling people’s self-interest.
Society has to allocate some zero-sum resources by answering prosaic questions like “which company will we hire to remove trash?” but also “who gets to run things?” Politics is a way to resolve those questions without violence, to create a temporary social equilibrium and enable normal institutional functioning.
In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War and civil rights era, moral questions justly became the focus of US politics. The modern American left won decisive victories, changing our society and our view of politics. The social justice movement is the apotheosis of this, treating politics as an exclusively moral activity.
But most contemporary left-of-center discourse operates on the same premise. That's why Ezra Klein's critics attack his motivations in those RDP tweets. They know no one is going to stand up for him by saying "Silicon valley figures are eager to see environmental rules waived in the name of more AI, and who can blame them?" Even zoning fights and other technocratic arguments tend to be narrated in moral terms rather than as conflicts over interests and incentives. (I am not immune.)
When politics is viewed as an exclusively moral activity, disagreements can only be due to bad character. The obvious corollary is that those disagreements are self-serving defections against the common good and, therefore, corrupt.
(The right-wing has its own distinct form of this, but I can't do it justice in a short comment focused on intra-factional conflict on the left.)
“Which company will collect the trash?” is not a zero sum thing, unless all the companies bidding are exactly equally good at it and bid the same price! The point of a market is that most things *aren’t* zero sum. Even if there are winners and losers when purchase orders shift, if it’s done right, the total is generally increasing.
“If there’s one thing I learned in college philosophy classes all those years ago, it’s that words are somewhat arbitrary and people can use language however they want as long as we understand each other.”
It seems as if latter part of this deal is quickly eroding everywhere, as I have lamented here before. But today I’m having trouble with this post, even though I think its thesis is correct and important. I (and apparently others as well) am confused about the Polymarket footnote. Is SB doing sponsored content now? If so, it should be less opaque (and honestly I am disappointed). Another nitpicking example: Trump did not *earn* hundreds of millions in the UAE deal—this is what corruption *is.*
Even more annoying than "genuine disagreement is corruption" is "tradeoffs don't exist." The public's takeaway from the DOGE fiasco, to the extent they even realize zero cuts occurred, isn't that there aren't magical obvious trillion dollar cuts to make in the federal budget, it's that the elites got to them too.
This is kind of what I'm worried about about Donald Trump becoming unpopular. If the biggest reason he's unpopular is that voters were expecting prices to return to 2019 levels, I don't know what to do about that. I mean Trump certainly acted like he could, so that's on him, but if refusal to press the giant "magically fix everything" button that doesn't exist is "corruption," I don't know what lessons that gives us.
I guess the positive way to spin this is that Trump's failure to press the "magically fix everything" button will make it very difficult for the next Republican candidate to promise to press the "magically fix everything" button, which in turn will give the Democrat the ability to win while not promising to press the "magically fix everything" button but instead making more reasonable promises that he can at least partly deliver on. But that will only work in 2028. In 2032, the Republicans will be able to go right back to promising to press the "magically fix everything" button.
Isn’t it obvious that the work hour tracking idea is in response to Biden’s incapacity?
I also think you’re misunderstanding the elite opinion idea. Voters regard the job of the politician as to represent the will of the people in decisionmaking. If that politician acts contrary to their preferences, that’s corruption in the sense of violating (what they think) is the principal-agent relationship. Voters don’t care as much as you do whether the motivation is financial, or ideological, or political (in the sense that Biden not cracking down on illegal immigration was because he perceived a segment of his coalition to be preferring loose borders, not because he was bribed.)
I have not read this Stealth Democracy book, but especially given that it was written in 2002, I’d like to see how they address the claim that people love the Fed because the Fed is simply the most effective part of the government. Pre-financial crisis, I think that was uncontroversial.
"Voters regard the job of the politician as to represent the will of the people in decisionmaking. If that politician acts contrary to their preferences, that’s corruption in the sense of violating (what they think) is the principal-agent relationship."
Maybe. But if a politician said "instead of thinking for myself, I just decide my positions on issues by calling up my favorite pollster and doing what he says" do you think people would view that positively? I'm skeptical.
The other problem here is that individual voters within a constituency have tons of disagreements with each other, thus it's very easy to try to argue that politicians aren't actually representing their individual will, even if the politician ends up in line with the collective will.
To steelman the expansive view of corruption: the complaint is not “politicians are earnestly trying to do their very best for their constituents, even if they sometimes disagree with their majority opinions”. It’s that “politicians are optimizing for something totally different than either the best interests or preferences of their constituents”.
Saying “well they are not being directly bribed, they are instead focused on party fundraising, ruthlessly maintaining a grip on their office, and making elite friends and future employers happy” doesn’t really answer that objection. I myself feel this way, and think people are correct to look down on most of what politicians do, even as shilling personal meme coins is worse!
I highly doubt that; Matt used the "pollster" in his hypothetical example because Matt believes in the technical art of accurate polling (it exists, I agree) but I think most voters would say pollsters are corrupt! I think -- based on my own conversations with regular people who don't follow politics so much -- is that they often think there is the right and moral thing to do (which often corresponds to what they think of an issue). So a politician who is explaining his decision to do the wrong thing by referring to polls is also corrupt!
I think it’s more fundamentally about real and perceived dishonesty. Saying you’re going to do something to get votes and then not doing that. Or politicians who have to appear more left or right wing to win a primary and then move to the center to try to win a general.
Politicians also have a very bad habit of over promising on a campaign and under-delivering in office.
This is the contradiction: voters think Congress is corrupt, but at the same time, think that bipartisan bills all of (corrupt) Congress agrees on are the best kind of bills!
A slight majority of Americans are paid hourly, and plenty of salaried workers have to log and track their working hours for billing or budget purposes. It’s not hard to extrapolate to “If I have to fill out a timesheet, they should, too”.
When I was at Texas A&M there were constant rumblings about the legislature wanting to institute a policy where professors had to log their hours in the office. I can see that before the pandemic, some people might have thought that time in office was time working and time out of office was time not working, but it’s been ages since that was true for professors, and most white collar jobs have transitioned away from that in recent years.
"Isn’t it obvious that the work hour tracking idea is in response to Biden’s incapacity?"
I'm pretty sure that goes back decades or more. Snark about congressional recesses has been a thing since the 1980s at least (I can remember hearing jokes about it when I was a kid), and I'm sure long before that too.
I wonder how many in the general population realize that someone who edited the Law Review while at Yale Law School and is getting paid $175,000 or whatever 15 years later to be Congressman or Senator is getting laughably underpaid compared to people they academically outperformed in the private sector. They're not just in government for the pension because it's a steady job, there just has to be something else in it for them.
It's an interesting facet of our society that there is so little transparency among anyone about how much people earn. Many companies even have strict rules that purport to prohibit their employees from disclosing their salaries.
The result is predictable, that in the absence of disclosure most people are going to be very wrong on their own position among their peers and among society writ large.
The Congressional salary of $174,000 puts someone in roughly the top 20% of household or 10% of individual income, which is pretty high. But there are about 134 million households in the US, so that means roughly 26 million households make more than that, and as you say, if we want very smart and capable people in Congress we should at least realize what they would probably be earning if they pursued anything outside of government.
“First-year associates at top "Big Law" firms in major U.S. markets generally receive a standard base salary of $225,000 as of 2025, often supplemented by bonuses. This, known as the Cravath scale, is standard in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C..”
Meanwhile 45 year olds who edited the law review at Harvard and clerked for Supreme Court justices are pulling down $175k.
I am kind of sympathetic to the voters here tbh. It seems like in a democracy political representatives should represent their constituencies.
But I constantly see political people plotting to see if they can enact their own views instead; they seem to view public opinion as a constraint to be managed rather than a North Star to be followed. A politician working for his/her own ideology rather than his/her constituents does seem like a form of betrayal/corruption IMO - a principle-agent problem.
Truman retired to a small house and got by on his army pension. Now federal elected officials live in an entirely different world than most Americans, financially. That has to be part of it. Before the 70s we were not governed exclusively by the affluent. People of modest means were able to serve in Congress. And not get rich there either.
President Obama is a good example. I'd rate him the cleanest President since I was old enough to vote (early 90s). But his net worth/income went from middle-class to $50 million plus between his election as a state senator and today.
He also has been one of the most famous people in the world for almost two decades now. It would be extremely odd if he hadn't gained wealth from that, just given how the media industry works today.
True, but that made them single digit millionaires. The major boost came post Presidency from very lucrative media contracts. The deal with Netflix alone is supposed to be in 10s of millions. TBC, I don’t think this is an example of corruption but their star power.
Truman's post-presidency was an exception in those days, too, as was his background.
But I'm not sure what you want exactly - people from modest means to rise to the presidency? Well we have that already with guys like Clinton and Obama. JD Vance wasn't born with a silver spoon, neither was OAC, Bernie Sanders, and the list goes on
Do you want people with "regular careers" to become president? Presidents have always come with political careers or successful careers in other spheres. Truman was a judge and a senator and before that a successful military officer. That's not way different from modern presidents, who were either in politics, successful in private careers or both.
On the other hand fdr, both bushes and jfk all came from elite families. Not sure how you’d classify teddy roosevelt and trump who’s families were well off but perhaps not “elite.” But about half the presidents since 1900 might be classified as some level of silver spoon type, which is pretty disproportionate if we consider those are all probably in the top .5% or top .1% of family wealth
Maybe since 1900. But what about since 1945? Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden -- I count only JFK, Trump and the Bushes as coming from elite families. Four out of 14.
I'm not sure I asserted that I want anything in particular. I offered a possible explanation for why the public feels Washington is corrupt. It probably would be a good thing if holding office wasn't an automatic ticket to riches. But I don't claim to have the answers.
A huge part of caros lbj book is that he was committed to not dying poor like his dad. Corruption has always been a big part of our political story at least back to Tammany hall in the later 19th century, the whole progressive movement was intended as a reaction to the patronage system, which is really a form of corruption,
Not to pile on, but I wanted to post this earlier and my phone wasn't cooperating. Paul Campos is well to the left of Matt, but has written quite a bit about Truman's corruption:
On the other hand, Martha Washington was one of the wealthiest women in America when she got married to George. Multiple early presidents were slave owners with sizeable plantations.
I don’t want to “both sides” Trump’s corruption, but Democrats’ hands are not THAT much cleaner. Democrat run places like Chicago, the West Coast, etc have massive, blatant corruption. And I am skeptical that the Clinton Foundation’s primary purpose is truly global poverty reduction versus being a wealth and influence laundering organization for the Clintons.
I'm not sure if you're kidding there. People like Armand Domalewski and Noah Smith (i.e., center-left) routinely gripe about the amount of money San Francisco spends on various programs administered by NGOs that don't actually seem to produce any results or produce results that are at a fraction of what you'd reasonably think should have been accomplished for the amount of money spent.
I don't think "corruption" in most people's view is limited to benefits directly being paid to politicians, but includes politicians awarding government contracts to individuals and organizations who subsequently donate to the politician's campaigns.
People have social and ideological interests in addition to financial interests, and using public resources to fulfill your own social or ideological interest is still corrupt.
It depends on the scale we are using. Trump is more corrupt, but some of the stories out of Chicago, Portland, etc are pretty mindblowing. In many ways Democrat corruption is more entrenched while Trump is taking a "après moi, le déluge" approach where he is grabbing as much as he can without (seemingly) much thought to what comes next.
You can use whatever scale you like. Also, I understand the Chicago type examples but I'm thinking about national scale stuff here, not local or state.
I'll start. I think Obama was maybe 1-2 at most, Biden was 3 or 4 (mostly from Hunter), the Clintons were maybe 5-7, and Trump is about a 22.
Obama seems on point. I'd rank Biden at 5-6, Clinton's at 12-13, and Trump at 22 for what we know and probably a 50 for what we will discover once he is out of office.
But I also don't think you can leave out the local stuff. Matt has made the point about education that Democratic and Republican states both have poor results, but at least Republican's don't spend nearly as much on it. I think this idea translates to many other things and is generally viewed by the public as corruption where Democrats are spending lots of money with favored groups and getting very little out of it.
The education stuff takes us back to the core problem that we all have different definitions of what's corruption. I'm not a fan teachers unions to the point where I'd say they may be a net negative to society, and maybe even by a large margin. But I don't think of this sort of routine political patronage as corruption, especially in this case because a lot of dems mistakenly but sincerely believe they're supporting something good for society.
Agree that there are different levels of corruption, where you have very direct quid pro quo that Trump is doing enormously (selling pardons, UAE & Qatar stuff, suing companies who settle to get beneficial business rulings, etc. etc.) and then more grey area corruption.
But I think its a slippery slope when we start saying that "dem's mistakenly, but sincerely believe they're supporting something good for society" because "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Sounds like a problem of definition. Trump and his inner circle are surely much richer from corruption than any individual grafting off the single-party west coast states, but the total amount of money siphoned off taxpayers in the latter must be a lot more.
Great essay. One addition I would offer is that this phenomenon also ties into the US becoming an equilibrium lower trust society more generally. It sucks.
Americans trust things! Amazon, Netflix, to name a few
The thing with Amazon and Netflix is that they seem to work pretty effectively. I have to think that's part of why people trust them. Ordering something from Amazon is easy and it shows up at your door the next day. Government, with the exception of the relatively well-trusted military, just doesn't operate with that degree of frictionless effectiveness. In many cases that's unavoidable, but I think people might trust government more if we invested some effort it making it work better.
I think Matt and others have written many times that blue states and cities governed by a majority of democrats needs to focus much more on effective governance to win elections.
Very much agreed here. If you want to be trusted with power in big things, first prove your ability with smaller things.
As long as there's a captive tax base, what's the incentive to improve?
CA only started making some changes because people started voting with their feet. Also, Newsom has Presidential ambitions.
I believe most people actually feel pretty good about their local government, local schools and decent about their state government. This could go with your model in terms of Tiebout Efficiency (voting with their feet).
Or alternatively related to a default people have about being much more negative about congress than their own congress person.
yes the problem is that it's underinvested let's spend even more money
a lot of the time we are actually spending money on making government worse, if you care about the little details you can actually make things better without spending money. the US started doing online passport renewals only at the end of 2024 -- in many ways this is actually *cheaper* than the mail-in version, but no one ever put the effort in to make it happen until recently. and getting it to happen was needlessly difficult because the government stands in its own way all the time.
I don't believe I said "invest money"
I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek this was meant, but this is largely beside the point. Erosion of trust in public institutions whose mission is, on some level, public welfare is the problem. That we might replace that with trust in corporations (whose mission is to extract maximum producer welfare even if that means reducing consumer welfare) is not comforting.
Lack of transparency is why people trust things. If they see how the sausage is made, they want to become vegetarians.
Matt mentions this to n his article. Americans trust for-profit companies, because we, the public, don’t see internal disagreements within those companies, Matt says.
I think the trust is conditional. Companies that delivery cost effective goods or services are trusted.
On the other hand many businesses (see used car salesman), don't have that trust.
Yeah, exactly. And there are lots of big, nationwide, well-known companies that people hate. Like nobody says "I have a lot of trust in Comcast." That's not because there's a lot of internal Comcast debate being aired publicly; it's because they suck.
I quit Comcast and was thrilled to do it. But looking back on it, I would say their business model is to get paid in exchange for taking all the bad press that avaricious broadcasters (ESPN/Disney in particular) actually deserve.
Not really. The primary reason is that if they don't live up to our expectations we can take our money and go elsewhere. We don't need to worry about the sausagemaking as long as they deliver.
Yeah, if every company had to go through what Sony did with the hacking incident, perceptions would be quite different. Think of how much seeing behind the curtain of the NFL hasn't exactly made Roger Goodell more respected or beloved. Football is popular, but dealing with the NFL is the price Americans pay for pro football.
Roger Goodell doesn't work for you, he works for the 31* owners. Being popularly hated and specifically personally targeted for public ire is a sign that he is taking puppetry flak and doing his job well.
The CCP was/kinda is very popular for the same reason Amazon is. If you're clear about what you are and what you aren't, and then you deliver the things you're supposed to deliver, people don't actually care that much about the ways you are bad. Whether that's free 2-day shipping of almost anything in existence or rapidly rising incomes and vastly improved public infrastructure. No one trusts American democracy because it promises things and doesn't deliver, and as the inverse of the above, people don't care about the ways in which it is *good*.
I'm not 100% sure how well this would work but I really think running on a set of 5 things that can be achieved principally through executive action could be a good idea, though in the longterm the only real way to fix this is to abolish the filibuster and make the American legislature capable of doing stuff.
We don’t have a great record for either “don’t steal your neighbor’s Amazon package” or “pay for your own Netflix account” though.
I used to trust Amazon, but they're now well down an enshitification path.
I can't help but feel that this is of a piece with the broader global authoritarian project to not abolish shared reality in democracies but to so muddy the waters that the average citizen has no choice but to throw up their hands and say "well they all suck so who's to say?"
I don't know of any feasible way to fix this. It's pretty bleak.
I'm going to repost the Timothy Snyder quote I've posted here a few times in the past (with apologies).
"There's a slightly tricky thing here which I want to try to explain, which is why the Russians - or why Putin - doesn't really think he's a liar, or why they can combine lying all the time about everything with saying that we [the U.S.] are the ones who are always lying all the time about everything. You know, we lie some of the time about some things. I know few Americans who are capable of lying all the time, right? Whereas the Russian elite, and especially Russian television, that's just what they do, I mean, 24/7, five channels, wraparound reality, lying *all* the time, right? They really make some of our channels look like they're just teenagers. What Putin would say is something like this: 'We admit that we're lying all the time. And what we're trying to say is that everybody does. And so, in that sense, you're hypocrites, you're worse than us. Because you say that there's this truth thing, you say that there are values, you say that there's democracy. But we know that all of that is a lie. And we're honest enough to say that it's all a lie. And therefore we're not hypocrites, because we're always evil. And if you're always evil, you're not a hypocrite, right? And so in some sense, by being always evil, you're good, because you're consistent, you're not a hypocrite. That's where they rest. So there's a strange way in which this terrible cynicism becomes this kind of terrible naivete, where I think Putin believes just as you say, he believes that it's all cynical, it's all a conspiracy, it's all mirrors upon mirrors. But deep down inside, I think there is this notion that Russia's different, that Russia's innocent, because in Russia we don't fool ourselves about all of this *stuff*. And it's very hard to break that down, because that does become a kind of closed system. So that's tempting, right? It's tempting if you're a postmodernist on the left, because you're like, 'Yeah, I've always been challenging truth, and the structures. And here are these guys who tell me that it's really *all* a lie. So well, that's kind of attractive, that's kind of seductive. And then if you're on the right, you can say, 'Oh look, these guys have proven that if you have an army, and oligarchs, you can basically abolish truth and make the status quo permanent. And I like the status quo, because I happen to have some wealth myself.' And so it's an even stronger magnetic pull for the American right. 'Oh we can do things that way. We can do things the way Putin has done them.' And Trump just pulled the lid off of that and celebrated it and said, 'Yeah this is of course what I'm doing.'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRiDdvG-BDc
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” undefeated
This is why treating "hypocrisy" as the worst kind of wrong is a path straight to nihilism. The most failsafe way to avoid being a hypocrite is to have no principles. A person who sincerely believes in good principles but fails to live up to them merits praise for the good principles and judgment (in appropriate circumstances) for the wrongful behavior, not condemnation as a hypocrite.
It's a lesson that has to be relearned every generation. There was supposedly no difference between Al Gore and W per Ralph Nader.
I had already hated Ralph Nader because of 2000, but once I learned that his entire career was about destroying American dynamism and stealing the future from young people via the boomer litigationist movement I started to conceive of him as one of the most malign figures in that entire era of American politics.
I was already able to see bits and pieces at that when I was at my hippie college. Let's just say that I wasn't very popular in seeing that...
Of course, Nader would ping-pong back and forth between arguing that there was no difference between Gore and Bush and arguing that it was actually a good thing that Bush was worse. There's a constituency for the latter type of argument too that's only grown since 2000, which makes things even more difficult. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/11/ralph-the-leninist.html
Birney Or Bust 1844!
I am optimistic about this. Part of why we are in this situation is that Trump 1 was perceived as pretty good and normal by the average voter, and the only thing that was *ab*normal was how much everyone in the media was acting like the sky was falling and the President was the most evil man alive. Now, if you actually paid attention, you would have known Trump 1 was, in fact, pretty bad. But normal people mostly care about like, macroeconomic outcomes, national security, etc. And all of that was basically fine under Trump 1 until the pandemic, and no one blamed him for that. And so they thought, wow, the elites are turning on this guy and making him out to be awful, so he must really be pissing them off, since I *know* there's no reason to be this upset or worried. And this is coming off 8 years of Obama which were pretty good, most people liked him by the end of his term, and so people thought if Trump was really so awful he should at least be noticeably worse than this president everyone thought was so good at the job.
With Trump 2 we are seeing more and more people come to the realization that actually Orange Man Bad. Meanwhile the elites are actually *less* lockstep on criticizing him. The leftist non-politics-knowers like the celebrities and so on that waffled in 2024 because of Gaza are seeing what's happening with ICE and thinking oh shit, this guy is pretty awful. The median voters are seeing high prices, low hiring, inflation continuing despite rates being elevated, etc.
I really, really hope you’re right…
this is accelerationism (see the comment above about Nader occasionally saying it was good Bush won *because* he was worse) and accelerationism is an intellectually appealing idea that's just never true. Anywhere. Ever.
Social stigma can help, and something we can all contribute to. Just Say No to friends sharing nonsense.
It is so difficult, though. I had a really hard time convincing a well-educated friend last night that some influencer is wildly incorrect in her video about how the 2030 census is collecting private information so the government can steal our identity or some such. The influencer's video was based on a supposed "test census" she received. But I am 99% sure she received an American Community Survey questionnaire, not a test decennial census questionnaire. The questions the influencer was complaining about were the same as the ones on the ACS, and the ACS site explains why they ask them. Also, the 2030 census is scheduled to only be tested in Huntsville and Spartanburg - an issue that lots of data people are complaining about - and the influencer is in Minnesota. I finally did convince my friend that this couldn't be the test census, but it took a long time. So how do we get our friends to stop sharing nonsense?
Sorry for the long tangential screed, but this librarian is despondent over the sudden and unexplained closure of the CIA World Fact Book last week (it is SO heavily used by students and researchers at all levels), and now it seems ACS may not long for this world, and perhaps people will stop responding to the census at all. It is all so discouraging. There is so much nonsense out there that it is hard to focus on the real threats.
Just so you know a guy name Simon Wilison downloaded the entire archive of the world factbook's most recent update and made it available publicly on his github... I don't think Substack will let me put the link directly, but if you google for "simonw github world factbook" you should find it.
Thanks. Yes, I think it is going to the Internet Archive, too. Alas, that is just a static moment in time, and the information will be out of date next year. Maybe the entire infrastructure that put this together won't be dismantled, and we can get it up and running again.
90% of people do not have the ability to discern, with confidence, what is nonsense and what isn't. And the other 10% would mostly rather be doing other things. I don't think people ever really could, but thanks to social media they now encounter disinformation much more readily, and they don't trust the sources that provide actual information (or, increasingly, they just find them boring relative to infinite scroll short form video).
And even if that 90% are forced to admit that a factual claim was mistaken, that becomes "not the point" because of Gaza or Epstein or Drag Queen Story Hour. Even if there's no proof of COVID vaccines causing crazy side effects, Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend still had his balls explode on the eve of his wedding.
100% agree. In fact it’s even worse because most people seem to view correcting falsehoods are more transgressive than spreading them. But… what’s the alternative? I think it behoves one to at least try to correct falsehoods occasionally.
Yeah, I can't disagree with that. But it does feel pretty futile. And say you go through the back and forth, you walk someone through sources, you address their responses, and they finally relent and say okay, I shouldn't have shared that. They are just gonna do the same shit with the next piece of disinformation that feels compelling to them. Maybe they pause for a second, remembering the time they were misled and corrected. But at the end of the day they want to be a good conscientious person, and a lot of people from "their side" really care about this issue, and isn't it crazy what they said in this TikTok?? Giving up and disengaging is the best option for me. But I don't begrudge people who want to fight an unwinnable war, given that the cause is just.
I like to imagine if enough of us tried the norms would change. Obviously hasn’t worked so far! But the costs of public policy being based on an increasingly inaccurate fact base are so high I guess I feel one has to try a little bit.
It's Brandolini's law all the way down. I feel lucky to have family I mostly agree with politically, but my very intelligent dad will still send fake resist lib stories with me from obviously bogus sites. Do I really want to expend effort correcting him when we broadly agree about the big picture?
I agree, but it really takes an expert hand and good social skills. I read this extremely insightful observation a few days ago, in the comments on ACX, talking about adjacent issues:
> groups can lie to each other about things that aren't that important to them. Moreover, what's literally said doesn't always matter as much as what's implied. If you and I are lifelong friends, say, with a history of chatting, there are things I could say that would appear false to an outsider, but you know what I really mean, what I'm really trying to say, and it'd be a reaffirmation of friendship. What I literally said doesn't matter. It might piss off outsiders, and *that's* what matters.
Those are very important constraints to keep in mind, on how people receive corrections.
Yeah in my experience it’s rarely worth it to try. My day-to-day life is mostly filled with resistance libs. When I’ve advocated for things like reclaiming patriotism/the flag, people…do not agree. At this point I try to focus on other topics.
That’s one reason I spend too much time in this comments section! I am thinking of giving it up for lent - I am not observant but retain a weird affinity for rituals of self-denial, and I’m not sure I can pull it off (which makes me want to try).
Do what you feel is best for you but you will be missed if you do go absent for a while.
I have often wanted to see what a poll would look like if you asked Dems, "would you rather live in a demoracy under Trump, or a dictatorship under Biden (or AOC or Sanders)"
And asked Republicans "would you rather live in a democracy under Biden or a dictatorship under Trump?"
I think the results would be pretty horrifying.
The internet is the common denominator. If we aren’t willing to do something about our information environment, we might as well throw up our hands and wait for authoritarianism.
Folks say this, the "lower trust society" bit, but I don't think most of the people saying it spend a lot of time in genuinely low-trust societies.
I ended up purchasing progressively more and more expensive and capable locks for bikes when I lived in Beijing, and still had 2 stolen and one destroyed in the course of a theft. Now, one of my kids' bikes has sat out behind our house in plain view of the alleyway, which sees ~30 people walk down it daily, since maybe June? Still there. Same for various gardening tools that live out there permanently.
When I had shit delivered in China, which is (largely rightfully) regarded as a low-crime culture, it would get stolen out of the hallway outside our apartment, probably by someone living on the floor, if someone wasn't there to open the door to a delivery guy.
I have had 1 package stolen here in a decade.
This is not a fancy area, it's a working-to-middle-class one, too.
Conspiracism about governing elites doesn't equate to a low-trust society.
I mostly agree, but there are many parts of the US where package and bike theft are quite common.
Indeed: on one hand, I can walk into any restaurant in my Western Massachusetts town and leave with a random takeout order. No one will so much as ask me my name or phone number, yet I've never had to go hungry because someone took one of my orders (mistakenly or otherwise).
On the other hand, just two hours away, in New York City, I have to hail a Duane Reade employee just to buy razor blades.
I would wager that even the places where these things are "common" are comparing to a baseline of the places in the US where they are rare.
There are essentially no places in China where I could leave a cell phone out and have it returned. I had three stolen in the time I was there, including having left one on a bench in a high-end (sale price per unit topped $2M) gated residential community where I was living at the time.
But when I accidentally left mine at the local playground in my, again, not wealthy neighborhood, I came back to it sitting in the exact same place, except someone had put it in a ziploc because it was drizzling.
There are absolutely areas of the US where shit gets stolen more frequently but I think the data bears out that the only places globally with fewer such areas are Japan, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Singapore, with Germany, Britain, and maybe France and N. Italy running on par.
As regards *one another,* the United States is an extremely high-trust society. Even the South is well above the global median, and I think we're all clear that it's precisely Southern norms infecting Northern cities that make them less safe and trusting.
Ironically, I once left my debit card in an ATM in China and couldn't figure out where I left it. Once I realized what I had done and went back to the same bank a couple of days later, I found out someone thankfully turned the card into the bank and it was waiting for me. I once had the same thing happen with a book bag I left in a bar.
While I was there I don't think I once successfully recovered an item more valuable than a glass tea bottle that I had left anywhere outside my own apartment or my research group's office on-campus.
Also had the whole "hit and run by unlicensed motor-scooter" thing happen 2-3 times as a pedestrian or on a bike, and got hit by a car that ran a red light who then tried to accost me for payment.
Ugh
That's fair! I will just say that, of the countries you mentioned, I've spent a fair bit of time in Switzerland (and a little in Japan) and my subjective experience of "is my stuff safe" is pretty drastically different there. But I agree the US is relatively high trust compared to most of the world.
There is a reason that I listed it among the places that are even better, but I'm given to understand that most of the rest of the developed world is, at best, a peer to us in this regard. I certainly hear/heard British and German colleagues in places like Birmingham or Darby or suburban Munich bitching about the same things that coworkers and friends in pleasant but less trusting neighborhoods in Philly do.
Common like what David describes, or common as in it happens occasionally but we hear about it a lot because there are video posts about it?
Packages were pretty regularly stolen at the condo building where I used to live, in the suburbs of DC. I switched to using package holding services as much as possible. There's a reason why Amazon Lockers are popular!
I can't speak directly to the prevalence of bike theft, because I never learned to ride one -- in large part because the bike I had as a kid was stolen and my parents never bought me another one.
Seems like no correlation between areas with relatively high levels of package theft and areas with relatively high levels of believing in nonsense about politics though.
Agreed, although the residents of that building did believe a lot of nonsense (no relevance to this discussion, I'm just still bitter that we turned down an offer from Sprint to put a cell tower on the building because people were worried it would cause brain cancer)
I’ve had multiple bikes stolen in DC over the years, most recently (a year and a half ago) while locked to a rack on Connecticut Avenue, next to a sidewalk cafe, during the day. It was a cheap and uncool bike too.
Six year old me's bike literally had training wheels, DC bike thieves don't care about cool!
I wonder what the psychology is of the thieves. Do they think that "everybody steals packages"?
Probably just that (1) it's victimless because amazon will eat the cost and (2) they need it more than the recipient. I'm reminded of this story from a few years back.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/
The half-life of a package on the front porch in our gentrifying neighborhood in New Orleans is about 90 seconds. Other delivery arrangements must be made. (That said, we moved Uptown a few months ago, and have not yet had a package theft.)
Common like David describes. You can't leave a package or bike out for a night in NYC or Boston without it getting stolen.
Yep, shortly after I moved to my current house (near Colfax in Denver), I did some hedge trimming on a Saturday with a manual hedge trimmer. When it got too hot and sunny in the late afternoon, I stopped and left the trimmer sitting by my front door because I planned on starting again the next morning and figured that it would be safe there (about 50' feet from the sidewalk). Nope, gone when I went out the next day.
For people not familiar with Denver, we should clarify that Colfax Avenue has a reputation for homelessness, drug use, auto break-ins, and so on.
I left a miter saw out on sawhorses overnight for four days running while doing a project here in Philly, FFS. We've had one package stolen in a decade. Even though our gardening tools live outside, only one spade has ever been taken from the garden a few years ago.
My parents have had change stolen from unlocked cars once and two packages taken, all probably by bored teenagers, in the 25 years they've lived in their suburban neighborhood.
Based on how everyone describes the rest of the country I am never leaving the NE US again.
Come to the Upper Midwest, we have donuts. But you need to use a knife to cut away half of whatever is left of the last donut. You must never take the final crumb of Zeno's Donut.
Lol. Yes, your and my very-German forbears have some common roots. We also have Quaker ones to supplement, just like New England has its Puritan ones.
I've seen the last piece of pizza slivered to death at non-student events at Notre Dame, and N. Indiana is not really fully "Upper Midwest."
I live in the Denver exurbs and I've never had anything stolen. My city had some catalytic converter thefts a few years ago, but the police caught the guys responsible and it stopped instantly once they were arrested.
I feel the high vs low trust concept is over indexed and oversimplified. It combines too many different concepts and tries to drop them onto a continuum.
'Polymarket is sponsoring this post'
Why? In particular, is that not rather in conflict with this site's long-standing concern about the harmful effects of sports betting, given that, per Gambling Insider, a plurality (39%) of Polymarket's revenue comes from gambling - sorry, 'predicting' - on sports. (This is even more obvious at other prediction markets, where 85% of Kalshi's revenue comes from sports).
I'd add that it is epistemically bad to use prediction market odds as an indicator of the likelihood of a particular thing happening, and is in particular obviously inferior to the disciplined approach to making predictions that this site has previously advocated.
To offer a little more information about this, Polymarket & Substack created some kind of tool where people can embed Polymarket odds in a post rather than screenshotting or whatever. In order to promote this new functionality, they offered some Substack writers money to try using the embed.
There's no editorial strings attached or anything, and making reference to midterm odds seems like a very normal thing for me to do so I sad yes.
As I think people know, advertising has been a traditional part of the media revenue model for a very long time and to the extent that publications are able to attract advertising support it is possible to do more editorial work at a lower price for readers. I don't want to do anything intrusive or that would change the basic nature of our articles but this seemed like a very light lift that would have gone totally unnoticed if not disclosed (but of course I wouldn't do it without disclosure) and that is part of a strategy to help us delivering value to our members.
The reactions to this on a post about people unfairly assuming corruption is too on the nose lol
I don't know that I would call it corruption but I think it makes sense to judge a publication for what they advertise.
CarbonWaster top level post is raising the question of if this advertiser is in line with the values Matt has espoused.
There are bad practices that are not corruption.
That's actually why I sincerely thought the footnote was a joke when I saw it.
As a paid subscriber, I would prefer that I (and other paid subscribers) am the one paying you, not Polymarket. Maybe there should be a free version of the article with the Polymarket ad and a paid version without it
As a paid subscriber, I don't really care. Matt has a right to make money however he wants. The purpose of this newsletter is to make a living off his takes and it wouldn't feel right for us to limit that.
All I ask is that he's transparent about it and indicates how much it may or may not impact his thinking. If I ever think he sold out I'll just unsubscribe.
Frankly I would be more concerned about speaking fees, which I assume are much more lucrative and we know much less about.
I'm not even concerned about speaking fees, either. I wish someone could pay me a ton of money to say things in front of them.
Yeah I’ve never really understood the speaking fees = corruption take. Just because someone pays you for your thoughts doesn’t mean they have influence over your ideas.
If you're a skilled enough speaker, you can influence *them*!
Do you actually not understand the concern?
If you financially benefit from maintaining a positive relationship with group X that pays you a speaking fee that incentivizes you to produce work that maintains that relationship.
Do you think Goldman Sachs is still just as interested in Hillary Clinton's speechmaking abilities as they were in the 2010s? Why or why not?
The trouble is there have been some highly publicized examples of people getting speaking gigs as a reward or payoff. Those examples stick in people's minds even though most of the time that's not how it works.
This happens because:
1) human nature draws us toward believing everything is some sort of secret corrupt scheme, and
2) It's a lot of work to discern the truth and we're all pretty lazy.
It depends on whether the fee is because they want to hear what you have to say or whether it is a purchase of later favors.
Plus when your fee gets high enough it becomes the case that you may only be talking to a small segment of the population.
This is why Hillary Clinton should have either just not had presidential ambitions if she wanted to make a ton of money, or lowered her fee if she did. Those people thought they were clearly buying influence (see also NBC hiring Chelsea when she was completely unqualified) just like people who did business with the Trump family or Hunter Biden did.
I mean, the alternative explanation is that people really love listening to speeches, which I think has certain plausibility shortcomings.
If an organization is paying you very generous fees for speaking it would give the appearance of you as a commentator being less willing to criticize that organization.
It does somewhat depend on the circumstances—if it were a current officeholder, it could look like a payoff. I would think there would be restrictions on that, but on people who are between jobs or retired from public office it would seem like just a gig. I think the big problem people have is that someone is getting big bucks for what looks like a very easy gig. In fact, the whole “revolving door” thing is based on the idea that it is corrupt for a politician to work for pay after they leave office.
I recommend the recent podcast from Ezra Klein with Anand Giridharadas. It might provide some insight as to why the speaker circuit definitely has sinister potential. They aren’t just paying you for your ideas. They are paying for access.
You could say that someone is being rewarded for having the “right” views and that they adopted these views in order to attract such rewards
Truly?
Suppose someone tells you they got $100,000 for speeches to the American Petroleum Institute last year. Wouldn't you want to know that when you are considering their opinions about energy policy, and consider it a potentially strong signal of bias?
There are an awful lot of conflict-of-interest policies and laws that are premised on an understanding that these relationships can warp judgment and that once a person is conflicted it can be very difficult - or essentially impossible - to know why they take the positions they do. Which is why you avoid the conflict.
"Matt has a right to make money however he wants. The purpose of this newsletter is to make a living off his takes and it wouldn't feel right for us to limit that."
Get the bag, but for Matt.
Anytime we start talking about "has the right" we are diving into nonsense conversation.
It "wouldn't feel right" for us to limit how Matt maximizes his income but there is no moral valiance to how he decides to make money?
Matt has written(and podcasted about) how tech workers should work on something more beneficial to society than Facebook. He also does pretty well for himself financial, he can consider the morality of his income streams.
Yeah, the saying that goes something like, "consider the feelings of others before your own rights and the rights of others before your own feelings" rings true here
MattY has to pay for DoorDash somehow.
FFS, it’s not like we’re being forced to watch a 30 second video praising Polymarket. Matt has explained what the payment is for, it’s not like something shady is going on. Of course the fact that Polymarket exists in its current form is evidence of the cultural corruption that is enabled by the attitudes Matt describes in today’s post.
To be clear, I give Matt the benefit the doubt that there's nothing "shady" going on. I simply think it was a bad decision, for multiple reasons. Reasonable people can disagree
I don't think I understand your perspective. If your view was 'Polymarket is fine, prediction markets are fine, let adults make their own choices' that would be a consistent opinion. But instead you seem to think both that its existence 'in its current form is evidence of the cultural corruption that is enabled by [etc]' and also that it's fine to receive a benefit-in-kind from them.
Is there no dissonance between those two views?
Maybe not "shady" viz direct MY financial interest, but undeniably "sleazy" given Polymarket's business model and wildly hypocritical given MY's stance on the corrosive impact of online gambling as a way of life.
I think actually calling it a “sponsorship,” intended as a disclosure, made it sound worse. This is more like “promotional consideration,” and really accepting Polymarket as an authority without consideration is no better. The real problem is that we look to Polymarket instead of polling.
My issue is entirely related to Polymarket's business model, not MY's. I would object to tobacco "promotional consideration" too, because it would mean MY is taking money to promote tobacco products to me while I am paying him for his takes. (MY does direct promotion of candidates and political causes all the time, which doesn't bug me.) The fact that Polymarket's sports-betting dependent business model is being whitewashed by presenting their promotional material in the form of a political psuedo-poll does not make it better for me.
I’m not too concerned if it’s just giving him access to the display of their data. I’d be more concerned if it were more like an actual ad with less actual benefit.
Well I appreciate the disclosure in the post and the clarity of that post (so thank you). I still don't like it as a decision though; you should consider that the posts that have been created on here about the harms of the explosion of gambling in public life have actually been very persuasive! And at the end of the day the purpose is, ultimately, to guide people towards using platforms to do more gambling.
It's your house and your rules. But in the spirit of another piece of advice on here, about trying to live your morals to some extent, I don't think this was a great choice.
Yeah this is less about "corruption" or "shady influence" and more just "polymarket and kalshi are about smuggling gambling under the rug, they create horrible incentives for powerful people, so don't even do above-board business with them"
I kinda don't like this boss!
I appreciate the disclosure, both here and the original footnote. Your transparency about the economics of your Substack has always been something I admired.
It’s a little unnerving to get to the bottom of a post by an author who has not traditionally published sponsored content and find out that the post has a sponsor.
I would respectfully suggest that sponsored posts are a bigger change than you may have thought, and deserve more prominent discussion.
1. I have no problem with prediction markets generally, or with Polymarket specifically. In general, I think they're good things, though their devolution into "sports betting with extra steps" is disappointing.
2. I appreciate the disclosure in the article, but it was quite jarring and uninformative. My response upon seeing it was, "WTF does THAT mean?"
3. I also appreciate the discussion in the comments, but if you're going to start accepting payments for things like this (ie, changing your revenue model), that seems like a topic to fill your readers in on prior to the choice, perhaps in an evening discussion thread.
4. This seems like a particularly odd model for sponsorship. Do you get paid per link you embed? Per view ("impression"?) of the "ad"? Is it click-through-based? Some of these models are more pernicious (in terms of their editorial effect) than others.
This seems like something done almost on a whim, and experimentation is one of the valuable aspects of a format like Substack. But ultimately you've just managed to create a huge distraction from an otherwise-very-interesting post.
I've been a subscriber since the start and I personally hate this. I'm 100% in for getting your bag, and I'd be fine with 99.9% of brand sponsorships, but polymarket sponsorship in my hierarchy of brand affinity is similar in repulsiveness to me as to sponsorships by marlboro cigarettes.
This feels like the time Slow Boring wanted to do bundling with Hanania.
I assumed you made this decision to provoke a meta-debate on whether Matt Yglesias is, in fact, corrupt and under what definition of corruption.
1. I find prediction market odds useful context for claims about expectations for the future.
2. I don’t mind SB getting paid to embed Polymarket odds.
3. I appreciate the disclosure but would prefer it to be more salient. Maybe a banner over the embed. A footnote feels buried, especially for a new feature.
4. I think it would be good practice to backup the claim that other markets agree with some specific markets and numbers. If the sponsorship forbids this, that seems bad.
Substack used to let me read footnotes as a popup by touching them. But that functionality no longer exists and footnotes work like endnotes on paper, so I basically don’t read them in context any more.
I think this may be a Substack bug. I can still see them by hovering over them on my desktop browser, but in my mobile browser they do nothing.
The best type of footnote display are the ones where you click it and it expands the footnote out right after the number, and collapses with another click. I first remember seeing that at FiveThirtyEight when it moved to Disney.
Yeah, this is only on mobile. But 95+% of my reading is on mobile browser (because the app is worse, and I'm usually doing my Substack reading either in bed or in the gym).
I use desktop but have the same issue if I am reading it in the email instead of clicking through.
The app really is terrible.
The functionality still exists, it works very erratically though. (Bit of an embarrassment for Substack, IMO.)
This was a strange post to pick for the first time you availed yourself of that convenience and revenue.
Just want to add to the chorus that I would have quite liked this to be both a lot clearer (what does "sponsoring" mean? and is it the whole post or just the embedded tool?) and more prominent than a footnote. I'm not sure how I feel about the act of taking the sponsorship money—like some other readers I have a big "ick" factor with these prediction markets, but I trust that merely embedding a tool doesn't exert any editorial influence—but I'd feel a lot better about a decision like this if something like "embed sponsored by Polymarket" were in a caption under the embed itself, with a footnote laying out more of the information you've provided in the comments.
You clearly have a subscription to Silver Bulletin and have a good professional working relationship with Nate Silver. I don't understand why you wouldn't just link to his substack especially since his prediction model is almost certainly more accurate than Polymarket.
Also, Polymarket has some real shadiness directly related to the Trump administration! Remember that huge Polymarket bet regarding the capture of Maduro? Just a lot of "smoke" that Polymarket is actually directly involved with the Trump corruption you describe.
Look I don't actually think Polymarket somehow bribed you to make this post the way it is. In fact, I think your post does a pretty good job of explaining that the public has not only way way too expansive of a definition regarding the word "corruption" but way way too often ascribes corrupt motives for particular policy decisions when the real answer is often much more banal normal politics. But do you no think there is something kind of ironic that in a post basically decrying the public's perception of what counts as corruption, the post is sponsored by an entity that has direct ties to very real Trump corruption?
Nate doesn't have Senate odds up yet. And in any case, Nate also has done some consulting with Polymarket.
Fair point about Silver and Polymarket. Still, I think I'm solid ground in saying that at the very least there are links polls or substacks or even news articles he could have linked to that I think have some more methodological soundness. I think Polymarket is reasonably accurate, but it is skewed by "whale" betting and when there are other sources that are even more accurate why not link to them.
Matt's attitude is that people should take any mother fucker's money who's dumb enough to give it away. I have no problem with that.
Is that his attitude? I don't think I've seen that advocated in those terms. And I don't think that's a good attitude, primarily for moral reasons but if you find that unpersuasive I'd point out that that's the type of mentality that leads people to have to later explain 'your business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein' etc.
I am 100% confident Matt has used that quote, at least partially in earnest. I actually only know the quote from him (which is why I bastardized it -- I think it's "I'll take any motherfucker's money if he's giving it away."). I believe he used it in a slightly different context (politicians taking donations from any source; Matt expressed disagreement with the whole symbolic refusal and return of donations shtick).
However, because he routinely deletes his tweets, I have no hard evidence for you. Just inadmissible hearsay. Sorry!
I appreciate the response.
It's not being given away though, it is being exchanged.
And it sounds like what he "gave up" was exceedingly minor. If he takes that money and gives even $50 to GiveWell, you genuinely think the world has become a worse place as a result of his decision?
What he gave up was promoting a gambling site.
It would depend on how effective the advertisement is at getting people to gamble more.
I'm familiar with the "earning to give" but it is worth noting that it seems contrary to Matt's view of tech workers working on social media products.
You mean, his subscribers?
If that is actually his position then he should state it clearly, so people can unsubscribe from the blog of a moral monster who purports to offer policy advice grounded in concern for the general welfare, not the best way to score "dumb money".
If you are stupid enough to bet on Maduro being captured and someone with insider knowledge takes your money from you, then too bad. Corruption is one thing, but being a stupid sucker is an entirely different thing.
Oh, cool, ads in my paid subscription. That's definitely an improvement for me, the paying customer.
This is the type of decision that will make me unsubscribe if it continues.
Thanks for the clarification, Matt. And I have no problem with this.
Matt, I don't personally object to the sponsorship (although I will say that your disclosure was so lowkey that I thought you were joking), but I would genuinely prefer that you bump up the cost of our subscriptions instead of doing SponCon just because the latter hands such an *EASY* attack line to your opponents. I'm 100% serious that this one instance is going to get thrown in your face on Twitter (or whatever succeeds it) for literally decades.
Yeah I would appreciate more transparency about when things are sponsored content. I thought it was ironic to note, in a post about how people generally aren’t on the take, that there is actually a sponsor for this post!
Especially when the ‘sponsored content’ isn’t integral to the article. It would have been easy enough to find plenty of “who do you expect to win the Senate” sources that could be given a quick cite to make this point, pick one or two, and then move on.
Well we hope and think it isn't integral! This is the whole problem with this sort of thing - and where the post does frankly mirror the public concern to be honest - is that now there's some doubt introduced over to what extent we're reading the author's opinions versus the sponsor's, what the editorial process here involves, etc.
Or just used Polymarket and not taken the money!
Is this… corruption?
That ironic thought crossed my mind when I read that disclaimer. The sponsorship undermines an otherwise thought-provoking piece.
I think it proves his point. You don't like his decision and now think of it as corruption, although in all likelihood it has nothing to do with it .
I wouldn’t say it meets the formal definition of corruption at all, but it was an ironic enough snap association before reasoned consideration in the context of the article.
This was possibly the worst possible article to start this with.
"Americans think everyone is fat", brought to you by Doritos. "Tone deaf" is the kindest possible description.
Especially since one of MY's main goals in recent years have been trying to get people to his left to become more moderate. If you write something about the perception of widespread corruption being mistaken, then have it be the first of your posts to have a gambling sponsorship, you've poisoned your own well. Nobody you need to persuade will be persuaded regardless of the strength of your argument. This is the type of behavior MY would rightly criticize the left for with "Do Democrats even really want to win?"
Or maybe the best one to start this with.
Which is why I thought it was a joke when I read it!
I did think about making that argument but to my mind it's not corrupt if there's a disclaimer acknowledging the relationship (yes) and if the content/direction of the post has not been dictated or pushed by the sponsor (presumably not?).
I do think it's immoral to take money from prediction markets though, even if not corrupt.
No, it's not remotely corrupt. Matt disclosed the sponsorship and there's no reason to think from the content of the article that Polymarket paid him to say anything Matt doesn't believe, given that 99.9% of the article has nothing to do with betting markets. If the content of the article was "betting markets should not be regulated" that would be more plausibly corrupt, and really only truly corrupt if Matt didn't believe it but was only saying it for the money.
The sponsorship by Polymarket rubbed me the wrong way.
First, I have no problem with sponsored content in principle. But it should be clear that it’s sponsored content from the top. The disclosure should not be buried in a footnote.
Second, SB has written several articles about dangers of gambling. It seems hypocritical to be sponsored by a company that turns literally everything into a gambling opportunity.
Third, the response here in the comments makes it seem like you are doing this as a favor to your readers to keep the cost low. It’s not a favor to us. One of the reasons people may choose to pay for content instead of consuming free content is a desire not to be reading sponsored content. If SB is planning to substantively change its funding model, it should inform the readers.
Fourth, it is not true that sponsorships can have absolutely zero effect on editorial decisions. Not to mention that Polymarket is not politically neutral. Sometimes the effect is negligible, but one should not pretend like there’s no influence.
Finally, and most importantly, MY is a highly influential politics and policy commenter whose writing has the power to substantially influence political decisions in Washington and elsewhere. Like the sorts of things people bet on with Polymarket. It seems like a huge conflict of interest. This isn’t Simplisafe or ExpressVPN.
That caught my eye, too. I was unaware that entire articles (posts) are paid for by third parties. That's what is known as an advertorial, isn't it?
I doubt that's what Matt meant.
I don’t really think it’s accurate to say the post is sponsored by Polymarket. It’s more that Matt received income for embedding the graphic and making readers aware of Polymarket which really isn’t much different from traditional advertising.
I *think* it’s actually not even that - it’s just that Polymarket is letting him embed the graphic for free in a way that would usually cost money.
I don’t think Polymarket is in the business of generating revenue from graphic embeds, so I can’t imagine this is the case.
Basically as I understand it he could have created some other graphic or put out a link to some other site and gotten no money, or used Polymarket’s data and got money.
It also happens that going with Polymarket is easier for him because they created a widget, so he might have chosen to do that anyways even with no compensation.
I’m glad Matt explained further in the comments and this doesn’t really bother me.
Putting everything else aside for the moment,
>I'd add that it is epistemically bad to use prediction market odds as an indicator of the likelihood of a particular thing happening,
This seems like a really large and most likely false claim. Prediction markets have well-established credibility when the markets are deep and liquid, and I have to assume a big election market like this one easily clears the bar for both.
Yes, there is extensive data at https://calibration.city/ and you can see that markets are well calibrated across many dimensions.
There have been a number of posts on here trying to take seriously the task of making predictions, and none of them have been 'outsource it to "the wisdom of crowds"' that I can recall. Are prediction markets more accurate than an average punter? Probably! But they do not contain more 'information' than a genuine expert (ie, our host, on this topic) possesses.
In principle prediction markets can aggregate the information possessed by many experts; this is the main reason for prediction markets as I understand it. If an expert became convinced the prediction market was far off, the expert could make a lot of money (assuming a deep and liquid market) by betting in such a way that would also tend to correct the prediction being implicitly made by the prediction market. My understanding is that in practice prediction markets have tended to make better predictions than almost all individual experts.
It's a shame about making sports betting easier, and I think one could make an argument that that's bad enough to oppose the expansion of prediction markets, but in principle that's simply orthogonal to the question of epistemic badness.
I agree it's orthogonal.
My point in the OP really refers to the history of this newsletter. One of the very first posts was about trying to be more disciplined about doing predictions, taking them seriously as an intellectual exercise, etc. I don't believe 'linking to Polymarket' is an example of that.
I inferred "post" as the screenshot of the Senate odds coming from Polymarket, not this entire article, but Matt or The Management are free to clarify.
That seems like a weird use of the word 'sponsoring', but yes it would be great to get some clarity on this.
My guess is they wanted arm article showing their analytical data product. The footnote suggests this.
I would think that was very bad, in that case. Given that readers of this site have been given articles on multiple occasions pointing out the harm's of the gambling explosion, those same readers should not be a captive audience for some native advertising of new wares.
I want to register my annoyance at the commentariat for the reactions here. For a typically very economically literate crowd, you all have sure missed the memo on prediction markets. Which have been an aspiration - more like a pipe dream - of an influential segment of the profession for many years. Precisely because they are epistemically better, in theory, than alternative forms of prediction.
Now they're finally getting off the ground and starting to see some cultural traction. They try to do some marketing to demonstrate the actual, legitimate use case (not the sports gambling), and Matt reasonably agrees. And you all react like, I don't know, your favorite band sold out?
Prediction markets are good, I hope they succeed, and Matt should keep using them. Leaving free marketing money on the table if necessary, to satisfy his ridiculous readers.
On the sports gambling: the dereliction of regulatory duty that allows them to offer sports gambling in contravention of state law is shameful. And will hopefully be fixed by a... less-corrupt? future Congress.
The idea that you have to be so happy for the existence of something that contains little better information than a model or a bookie's odds that you can just wait out the tidal wave of unlicensed gambling is one you're welcome to have but I'm not going to share. Even if they are marginally more accurate they provide no social benefit.
If you have a model that's better than the prediction market, you use your model to make money until the market adjusts to match your model. That's the mechanism, that's why it is epistemically better. It's a sort of meta model that integrates information from all models (and other sources).
I bet if you think about for five minutes you could come up with lots of socially beneficial use cases for very accurate predictions? Once you accept the logic that you can in fact get accurate predictions. Most objections are just "I don't think it would work." Try it and find out!
For a SB case, how about: which of these potential candidates would have the best chance of winning the election, conditional on running & winning the primary? Figure out who to contribute to, or who to recruit. But there's also like, which are the most promising potential R&D investments in [field]? What is going to happen in [geopolitical situation]? And many more.
None of those things are exogenous to the existence of the market itself. If Democrats can use a prediction market to determine who is more likely to defeat a Republican, then Republicans can do the same, and assuming there is any effect at all it would net no difference.
Prediction markets do not uncover deep truths; at best they price markets more efficiently than bookmakers do, but this is not a social good.
I mean, just to use your own example: wouldn't that have saved us from Hillary vs. Trump?
Polymarket makes at least 40% of revenues off sports betting. If you believe that ubiquitous sports betting is bad for society, then you are entitled to complain when a blog you pay for takes their sports betting money to promote them to you. Trying to turn this into a story about the heroic triumph of "prediction markets" realizing the lifelong dream of right-thinking economists is absurd. Convince Polymarket to drop sports betting, then come back here to pitch that story.
Having the prediction market company sponsor a political commentator, who has potential influence on policymakers and thus on the kinds of things people bet on using the prediction market seems a bit circular.
I legitimately thought that footer was a joke
It’s also worth taking seriously the framing that concentrated benefits and diffuse cost policies are a form of corruption. Arguably the highest priority for the Biden administration was featherbedding and giveaways to his union buddies. I would argue that’s certainly a form of corruption even if it isn’t as corrosive as selling pardons.
This isn't at all about sports though. Would you refrain from visiting Las Vegas because they have sports gambling?
Just because a platform makes money off of sports gambling doesn't mean that prediction markets of other topics don't provide meaningful projections of public sentiment. The fact that people are wagering money on the odds of the Democrats winning the Senate provides immensely more information about public sentiment than any public opinion poll could.
'immensely more information'
They do not provide 'immensely more information'.
Slop Boring
Four thoughts:
1. It had to feel good for Matt to be able to work in a swipe at RDP, Matt Stoller, and others who are similar after all the feuding he's done with them on Twitter. And that upper right hand tweet from the RDP is hilariously pathetic: admitting they don't know who's funding something they don't like, therefore they must guess that it's someone rich and powerful that they also don't like!
2. Also, I'm surprised there weren't any questions asked about lobbying and campaign finance, because those are areas that people regularly think are corrupt, even though they also implicate some of the most core First Amendment protections out there.
3. "Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades." How about *ever*? I don't know who else could come close. The Grant administration tolerated a lot of corruption, but Grant himself didn't flaunt in it like Trump does.
4. Finally, those who go full cynical on politicians should consider their own agency, famously mocked as follows:
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality.
They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.
Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans.
So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.”
--George Carlin
Two points:
1. The issue with campaign finance, donor access, lobbying, etc... is not that it necessarily indicates corruption but that it deeply muddies the waters and destroys the information environment surrounding corruption. To the average voter, who is not us and doesn't want to spend the time we do gathering information about the state of the world, if much of Congress were pocketing money directly in exchange for votes for or against various measures, the data about election spending and donations would look similar, the headlines about Congress would look similar, and the outcomes would look similar. The information environment is so opaque that folks can simply attribute politicians doing things they don't like to corruption, and it's hard to disprove convincingly when the optics are so terrible because everyone is doing this.
2. To the extent that we do have actual corruption or a quid pro quo, it's almost certainly to be found in the pipeline *from* politics *to* the private sector. Virtually the entire governing class becomes multi-millionaires within a few years of retirement, and virtually all of them do it by lobbying or providing insight on government relations to private industry. It's almost impossible to prove or disprove how this affects their decisions about specific regulatory measures while in office, but it seems that if they're too rigorous, they cut off the lucrative post-Congress-gig pipeline.
So on #2, I think it’s an incredibly small percentage of people that are able to go from a career in government to becoming a multi-millionaire, and most of who do so become that rich through media, not lobbying. As a thought experiment, who is worth more: John Boehner or Joe Scarborough? Kurt Schrader or George Stephaopoulos?
Many former members and staff are lobbyists, but nobody who’s waiting in the hallway on the 6th floor of the Longworth House Office Building to meet with a 25-year-old staffer is a multi-millionaire who isn’t worried about their next paycheck. That’s a working stiff right there.
I don't think the American public (nor I) have an understanding of "working stiff" that encompasses "makes half a million a year because of power they once held"
I take an expansive view: short of the self-employed (like our illustrious SB host), or executives who make most of their money in stock options, anyone who gets a paycheck is a working stiff in some regard. I'll even include sports athletes who make most of their money via paycheck, not endorsement deals, as working stiffs. Reasonable people can disagree with me, not a hill I need to die on.
Not trying to get into a "$XXX isn't really rich" discourse, but someone making $500,000 (let's ballpark that at $350,000 after taxes) is incredibly well-off but isn't going to become a multi-millionaire without a couple years of a real ascetic existence.
I think it's inaccurate to say that "virtually the entire governing class becomes multi-millionaires within a few years of retirement." My quibbles are on two points: 1) "becoming" is a very passive way of describing it. They work for that money, performing a task that someone (or some company) with more money finds valuable, and 2) "multi-millionaire" is an exaggeration of how rich you can get lobbying as a former Member/staffer.
"but someone making $500,000 (let's ballpark that at $350,000 after taxes) is incredibly well-off but isn't going to become a multi-millionaire without a couple years of a real ascetic existence."
Are we using different definitions of multi-millionaire? Cause if you make 350k *after taxes* and don't become a multi-millionaire, you are doing something deeply wrong.
This reminds me that it always baffles me when people scoff at lottery winnings that would be about this amount. I don't think a lot of folks have a good comprehension for how long it takes to make this much money at median incomes.
Probably spending too much betting sports on Polymarket*
(*Official sponsor of this comment.)
I was going with a cultural/vibes-based definition of "rich enough to stop working without a step-down in lifestyle". I wasn't including things like retirement accounts, home values, etc. Even if you could accumulate a nest egg of $3 million in cash or cash-equivalents, you'd spend down that pretty quickly given the lifestyle you're trying to maintain.
This is not a view that the public shares, and since the point is what the public thinks, it's not a view that matters.
John Boehner probably has less money than Joe Scarborough, but it's also a better gig. He just lobbies for MMJ interests without the hassle of preparing a daily morning show. I guess it depends how much you want to be in the public eye.
I don’t think that the US has ever had a president as personally corrupt as Trump is, but at the whole-administration level, it was a huge problem for most post-Lincoln Gilded Age admins. (And the “normal” process for dispensing political offices then was so transparently transactional that we’d consider it extremely corrupt by our own standards).
It's quite ironic that the guy who argued that there was a corrupt bargain ended up creating the spoils system.
And with the Gilded Age, there would have certainly been competition with Trump if The Continental Liar From The State Of Maine had won.
Re (2) my guess is that many voters think ~any kind of campaign fundraising besides small dollar donations is corrupt per se? That's just a hunch though
I actually think that can be reasonable with regard to contributions--I was thinking more expenditures from both campaigning and lobbying. It's also why I think the contribution vs. expenditure bright line that SCOTUS drew in Buckley v. Valeo is very sound.
There are some people who simply cannot fathom putting some concept above themselves. They are bewildered by concepts like community or religion or civic duty. They cannot imagine it for themselves, and are completely convinced every one else who acts like it is also lying.
Somehow, the American political system has filtered out these people from the very highest levels of power, or at least filtered out people who cannot pretend not to be one of these people. Until now.
Grant himself didn't personally benefit from that corruption. He was too trusting of people in his administration and let them do whatever they wanted.
Exactly.
Maybe Harding? I always got the sense he was very much up there. And with an expansive view of corruption (but one the public probably agrees with :P) Nixon has to be up there given all the bad stuff he did
If you go with the expansive view of corruption, LBJ is probably the winner.
Trump tried to steal an election, LBJ (to my understanding) actually did. Not for the White House (Chicago shenanigans in 1960 aside), but the Democratic primary when he first entered the Senate
Yep, Texas elections when LBJ was coming up were notoriously corrupt.
Harding kicking the bucket soon after getting elected limits what he might have been capable of, which may always remain a mystery. I too thought the same thing about Nixon, but that would belie the whole point of this article, as your parenthetical implies.
Is it the most corrupt administration in world history? Putin might technically have more dosh but Russia was never a particularly rich country; there's far more to plunder in the United States.
I dunno. Oil rich Arab countries and post colonial African countries come to mind.
Maybe in dollar terms, since it's the largest economy in world history.
But you can't even really conceptualize "corruption" in a country where you have a "l'etat c'est moi" style dictator or monarch. How can a leader be "corrupt" if the system of government says that he owns everything in the country and is morally entitled to do whatever he wants?
See, e.g., Zaire under Mobutu, where Mobutu would have armored cars sent to the central bank periodically to pick up pallets of cash for his personal use.
Didn’t someone literally win the Roman Emperorship at auction once?
Possibly, but the Roman Empire was tiny compared to the modern United States and just one of our Big Tech rich asshole probably wields more actual power than said emperor (minus an army). The difference of scale as compared to ancient times is mind boggling.
“Except for the army” is a MASSIVE caveat
I could mention that Amazon supposedly employs about six times the personnel that Trajan's legions did. I'm not sure about the cost that equip them similarly would be.
U.N., you got problem with that? You know what you should do? You should sanction me. Sanction me with your army. Oh! wait a minute! You don't have an army! So I guess that means you need to shut the fuck up! That's what I would do if I don't have an army, I would shut the fuck up. Shut, the, fuck, up!
I'm not sure what your quote is from, but it immediately reminded me of Les Grossman in "Tropic Thunder":
I don't know what kind of pan-Pacific bullshit power play you're trying to pull here, but Asia, Jack, is my territory. So whatever you're thinking, you'd better think again! Otherwise I'm gonna have to head down there and I will rain down an un-Godly fucking firestorm upon you! You're gonna have to call the fucking United Nations and get a fucking binding resolution to keep me from fucking destroying you. I'm talking scorched earth, motherfucker! I will massacre you! I WILL FUCK YOU UP!
I also doubt we've ever had a more corrupt politician than Trump. I think Matt was just being conservative.
> I think a less generous but more accurate take would be that because voters do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties involved in assessing policy problems, they wrongly conclude that everything they don’t like reflects corruption or self-interested behavior from elected officials.
This idea can extend beyond just elected officials and governments.
People do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties involved in:
- delivering anything under the sun to you in a day or two
- getting a drug molecule to bind tightly with a specific protein and not any of the hundreds of similar proteins
- how many seeds to plant and how much fertilizer to spray to optimize crop output down to the inch
- orchestrating a global web of liability through reinsurance
- positioning a rig on an ocean surface and drilling 20,000 feet into rock floor
They'd say a small prayer to big tech/pharma/ag/insurance/oil instead of considering them "corrupt".
It's a miracle a literal miracle that we're all not freezing to death in the dark while starving.
This column was so good, *because it focused on a core mechanism of politics that is usually ignored*. Some points:
1. In response to Neeraj, it’s not just that “People do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties in [much of modern life]”: it’s that high school and college students and newspaper readers are mostly not informed by teachers and journalists! Journalists at least have the excuse that they need to give readers what they want. Teachers are supposed to give students what they need.
2. I read Slow Boring and The Argument daily. The columns are consistently excellent and as consistently butt up against the limits of the column form. I urge Matt in particular to stop doubling down on variations of the column form (the evening dispatches, interns who write columns of their own), and look how to convey important truths that need other mechanisms of expression. His playing with LLMs to explore DC crime stats is a good example: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2021761056696123439
3. One technique Matt could adopt is to step up from his regular linking of old columns to making a structure of them, as Ben Thompson does. Today’s column should be a central pillar of Matt’s model of politics, as “aggregation theory” is for Thompson’s model of Internet businesses.
An unfortunate issue with Substack is it does not have an API. It would be trivially easy to write a program to generate an llms.txt grouped by topic.
https://llmstxt.org/
The "wrongly conclude that everything they don’t like reflects corruption or self-interested behavior" part often extends beyond just elected officials and governments as well. I live in LA, and whenever there's an argument about a new multi-unit housing development on Nextdoor (which happens frequently), almost invariably a commenter who's against the development will accuse a commenter who's in favor of it of having financial ties to developers (without evidence). One such actual quote:
"All your responses are very pro development. It’s reasonable for people to believe your account is a plant. There’s no possible way a reasonable person and a resident of this community could possibly believe that the proliferation of these ill-conceived , multi-story, mega developments will benefit anyone but the developers..."
Fair point but also raises the question whether the government is able to attract people smart or capable enough to regulate these activities.
The US has very high pay scales for "elites" in private industry (physicians, lawyers, business managers, top software engineers etc) and comparatively modest pay caps for government employees. For instance, the linked pay scale is for Washington, DC, a high cost-of-living city. Grades 5-7 are entry level for college graduates, and 11 for a PhD. Even for middle management (e.g. division manager of an agency) at the top of the pay scale, the scale tops out below 200k. Cabinet secretaries and the like are on the Executive Schedule, which goes modestly higher, but there aren't many of them.
The salaries are not *bad,* federal employees get middle-class income and (traditionally, not including politically disfavored agencies in 2025) good stability. But if you want regulating business, finance, chemistry, healthcare, Silicon Valley, etc. to attract the same people who work in these industries -- they'd all be taking big pay cuts even at Grade 15.
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2026/DCB.pdf
I've heard some other countries (Singapore, maybe France) with a reputation for good bureaucrats have higher ceilings on the pay scale and a larger merit-based component, so the public sector is more competitive with the private sector for workers with skills highly valued in industry.
There's a bit of it in the USA as well -- the Securities and Exchange Commission has a special pay scale with higher ceilings than the General Schedule, with more room for performance-based pay. I think this is because the SEC needs employees who understand finance, so their outside option is especially lucrative. https://www.sec.gov/about/careers-securities-exchange-commission/compensation-overview
You're right and that's what I was alluding to. The other option is to regulate the too big to fail private entities and let the creative destruction happen in smaller private companies.
Re this week’s Politix podcast, does giving taxpayer money to the Teamsters in the hopes of getting their votes count as corruption?
No. That counts as "stupidity.'
Well, let’s double down!
It's only stupid if it keeps not working! And how long could it possibly not work for?
We should have fucked them on their pensions just like we should have fucked the east coast longshoremen on automation.
If they want to support union busters, then let them. We shouldn’t waste a penny of public money to bail out their malfeasance and corruption.
We should also be union busters. Unions make our country and economy weaker.
Nope.
What is a union that produces benefits for anyone other than its members
Unions give workers the ability, in many cases, to enforce quality standards and resist pressure to provide inferior service so that the owners can profit. Our local nurses union has been on this issue, against hospital management, for years. The patients and the staff both benefit in an asymmetrical information environment, and the taxpayers who are spending money on medical services via state programs get more for their money.
Unions can also stand in opposition to quality standards (police, teachers, longshoremen, truckers, manufacturing, etc)
That's the same as any other group of people. Should we bust up NGOs, corporations, and trade groups?
Unions are frequently leeches on society and often so corrupt they don't even benefit their own members. But that's not a hard-and-fast rule that requires busting of all unions.
Corporations do make the world better by creating positive-sum interactions
There are better uses of limited political capital.
I don’t disagree. From a political perspective, my idea is electoral suicide. But it’s still right on the merits.
Maybe secret congress can agree on automation over unionization and people won't notice until Unions are demanding degrowth, putting them firmly in the 'unpopular' camp. One can only dream.
This is largely what has happened and every left populist has convinced themselves that unionization has declined due to Reagan-style anti-union laws
All social programs that help people are corruption. If you make people's lives better using taxpayer money, then those people will want to vote for you, and you'll stay in power. The only way to not be corrupt is to keep money in the hands of the people who already have it.
This is a good point -- e.g. voting for anything is going to involve appropriations and specific policy winners. But I feel like there is a category difference between say, voting for a good infrastructure project that benefits the winning contract bidder, than voting to give everyone in constiuency X free money because they're a powerful political bloc.
I don't think we're especially far apart in our views given that I also don't support giving money to the Teamsters. But I don't think it's a category difference, it's a continuous spectrum, and it isn't a good thing to be on the extreme "no giving money to anyone" end of that spectrum in the name of anticorruption - that end of the spectrum is bad and we should reject any argument that tends to support it.
Yeah I think you've convinced me. I was bothered by Trump buying off farmers who were hit by his tariffs and I'm bothered by giving Teamsters free money because they've historically voted for Dems. But I guess as long as these things are passed as law in our democratic system (although there was no up-or-down vote on "bail out the Teamsters") I guess it's fair game.
Yes. So does giving money to public unions that turn around and help elect the politicians that then give them more money
Yea, I have an incredibly dubious view of Congress and this is basically where it resides. The primary modus operandi of Congress people is to maintain their own station by using taxpayer dollars to buy votes. This is the fundamental corruption of the system.
What’s going on with that?
A bit meta but why are Americans so convinced corruption is endemic? Having lived in an actual very corrupt third world country the idea just seems completely ridiculous.
If corruption was an actual problem then someone could do an Operation Blazing Furnace to put hundreds of competitors in prison and solidify power.... Which always happens in every actually corrupt country but never happens in America.
"What would the world look like if this were true?" is a powerful heuristic that people don't use often enough.
Two common reasons people believe that corruption is endemic:
- It's a ready-made, psychologically compelling and plausible explanation for events they can't otherwise explain. (This is Neeraj's point elsewhere in the comments.)
- Closely related phenomenon are true! Aot of successful politicians get into the business for self-aggrandizement. I think channeling ambition into constructive pursuits is even a perk of representative government, but it can look quite unsavory.
It’s more comforting to believe that the world isn’t exactly the way you want it to be because of corruption than because there are hard trade offs with no easy answers. It’s a more mild version of the same impulse that draws people into conspiracy theories.
You also get to feel savvy and self righteous toward people in power, which feels good.
I also think there’s a really strong negativity bias in US media, more so than in other countries, that exacerbates this (I believe this has been shown in academic research).
For the same reason that voters think that 2.7% inflation is a catastrophe and they're mad as hell about it and refuse to take it any longer. In November 1984, with an inflation rate of 4.1%, it was morning in America and that glorious economic situation led Reagan to winning 49 states.
It's all contextual.
I listen to this podcast called Central Air by Josh Barro, Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss. They have an episode on affordability where they discuss this.
I think another good example of this is the campaign tactic of linking your opponent's behavior to campaign contributions. Democrats routinely would talk about checks from the NRA to Republicans and that's why they oppose "popular" gun control measures. The oil and gas industry is another common corruption source. In reality we know that a significant share of Americans value their guns, affiliate with the GOP, and the NRA endorsement is a reflection of Republicans trying to pander to gun voters, not buying them off. But it sounds corrupt-y!
I remember a presentation I saw in college that basically us tax policy is set to favor the median campaign donor, in a more authentic democracy we would tax the rich much more.
I think a lot of liberals have residual
sentiments like this—that the public at large has broadly good and liberal views and deviation is driven by rich people controlling the political system. This isn’t typical corruption. It’s also not really true (anymore, if it ever was). Working class voters have become a lot more fiscally conservative and remained very conservative on cultural politics. But I think liberals still like to use the “money in politics” thing as an argument instead of conceding the electorate is conservative.
Corrupt isn’t the right word necessarily, but anyone who has a job knows that someone giving you money makes you beholden to them.
When I am at work, I say and do things that are directly influenced by the fact my employer gives me money and I would like that to continue.
By allowing people to give monetary contributions to politicians, we are creating politicians who are beholden to their most important donors. That’s not nothing.
I think most people look at "the dollars in are much larger than what we get for it" and think of the difference as "corruption." On that score why wouldn't a typical person see left and right as equally corrupt? I think it was one of the Noah's (Smith or Timothy) who pointed out that a typical voter faced, with 3x higher cost of building in New York vs. Paris, asks "Who's getting the difference?" The left has 2 more disadvantages here: 1) most progressives I know think of almost all profit as "corruption;" and 2) educated people tend to define "corruption" in process-oriented terms, which cuts against the results-oriented intuition above, and also works to the benefit of educated people who more adeptly articulate and work within rule-based processes.
I think this comment is making an excellent point. If NY construction firms are 3x what a comparable Paris firm to drill a subway tunnel how is this not corruption? Clearly someone is getting rich on graft or outdated rules and regulations that allow them to fleece the government. Maybe others here don't think this is corruption but it feels that way to me.
Why is it "Clearly someone is getting rich on graft ..." as opposed to "NY has many more constituencies with legitimate interests that get to be served."
As a purely hypothetical example, what if construction is going to happen near a school, and a local politician says my constituents don't want this construction to have any adverse effect on their kids schooling, so before construction you need to build new drop off lanes to route traffic differently, and you need to upgrade the HVAC system of the school to maintain air quality, and put in thicker windows to reduce noise. These are legitimate concerns, not graft and corruption, it's what their constituents genuinely want to have happen, but they sure as hell increase costs, and are the kinds of things that a system with many veto points ends up with.
What that points to is not a process ripe with corruption, but a process that needs to be rigorously reformed to learn to force tradeoffs and focus on results. This is the heart of what Ezra Klein wrote in his Abundance book.
Yeah, I was too simplistic and hyperbolic with my comment. Even if no one is "getting rich" they are employing more people than is necessary for the outcome (outdated rules and regulations from my original comment). There was a NYTimes expose a couple years ago that talked about all the union rules requiring unnecessary staff. Here's a quick breakdown:
- Mandatory "Nippers" & Tenders: Rules require specific workers to watch material being moved and separate staff ("hog house tenders") to supervise break rooms.
- Automatic Machine Operators: Despite modern automation, union rules often mandate that generators, elevators, and other equipment have dedicated human operators.
- Standby Personnel: Rules frequently require standby electricians, plumbers, and mechanics to be on-site constantly, even if not needed.
- Oilers for Cranes: A relic of the past, unions require an "oiler" to be present for crane operations, a role largely obsolete.
- Redundant Crews: An extra person is often required to be present for tasks such as concrete pumping, steam fitting, and sheet metal work.
This may not be corruption, but it sure feels like that to me and I bet it does to most New Yorkers. And I bet you this is the tip of the iceberg, you don't get to 3x costs without being incredibly wasteful.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone is even getting rich, it’s just a nickel and diming of society. For example, a law mandating two person crews on subways isn’t making the MTA conductors rich (it’s a decent gig I guess but they’re still just working, and they could probably get different jobs elsewhere) but it is making everyone in New York poorer.
The answer is "the construction guys, designers, and consultants," while also being partly rooted in a bunch of small-bore corruption/rent-seeking that adds up and is impossible to explain concisely to the electorate.
Yeah, there’s something here.
The ever-increasing moralization of politics is another important factor contributing to this, at least on the left.
Politics always intersects with ethical concerns, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that politics is also inescapably about reconciling people’s self-interest.
Society has to allocate some zero-sum resources by answering prosaic questions like “which company will we hire to remove trash?” but also “who gets to run things?” Politics is a way to resolve those questions without violence, to create a temporary social equilibrium and enable normal institutional functioning.
In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War and civil rights era, moral questions justly became the focus of US politics. The modern American left won decisive victories, changing our society and our view of politics. The social justice movement is the apotheosis of this, treating politics as an exclusively moral activity.
But most contemporary left-of-center discourse operates on the same premise. That's why Ezra Klein's critics attack his motivations in those RDP tweets. They know no one is going to stand up for him by saying "Silicon valley figures are eager to see environmental rules waived in the name of more AI, and who can blame them?" Even zoning fights and other technocratic arguments tend to be narrated in moral terms rather than as conflicts over interests and incentives. (I am not immune.)
When politics is viewed as an exclusively moral activity, disagreements can only be due to bad character. The obvious corollary is that those disagreements are self-serving defections against the common good and, therefore, corrupt.
(The right-wing has its own distinct form of this, but I can't do it justice in a short comment focused on intra-factional conflict on the left.)
“Which company will collect the trash?” is not a zero sum thing, unless all the companies bidding are exactly equally good at it and bid the same price! The point of a market is that most things *aren’t* zero sum. Even if there are winners and losers when purchase orders shift, if it’s done right, the total is generally increasing.
I agree with you in the broader sense, but from the narrow perspective of the contractors, there's a loser and a winner.
I can imagine *some* scenario where both understand themselves to be winners ("dodged a bullet there!"), but I think that's unusual.
“If there’s one thing I learned in college philosophy classes all those years ago, it’s that words are somewhat arbitrary and people can use language however they want as long as we understand each other.”
It seems as if latter part of this deal is quickly eroding everywhere, as I have lamented here before. But today I’m having trouble with this post, even though I think its thesis is correct and important. I (and apparently others as well) am confused about the Polymarket footnote. Is SB doing sponsored content now? If so, it should be less opaque (and honestly I am disappointed). Another nitpicking example: Trump did not *earn* hundreds of millions in the UAE deal—this is what corruption *is.*
Even more annoying than "genuine disagreement is corruption" is "tradeoffs don't exist." The public's takeaway from the DOGE fiasco, to the extent they even realize zero cuts occurred, isn't that there aren't magical obvious trillion dollar cuts to make in the federal budget, it's that the elites got to them too.
This is kind of what I'm worried about about Donald Trump becoming unpopular. If the biggest reason he's unpopular is that voters were expecting prices to return to 2019 levels, I don't know what to do about that. I mean Trump certainly acted like he could, so that's on him, but if refusal to press the giant "magically fix everything" button that doesn't exist is "corruption," I don't know what lessons that gives us.
[classroom full of highlighter-yellow cartoon children]
Press the button, Bart!
I guess the positive way to spin this is that Trump's failure to press the "magically fix everything" button will make it very difficult for the next Republican candidate to promise to press the "magically fix everything" button, which in turn will give the Democrat the ability to win while not promising to press the "magically fix everything" button but instead making more reasonable promises that he can at least partly deliver on. But that will only work in 2028. In 2032, the Republicans will be able to go right back to promising to press the "magically fix everything" button.
I HOPE the next Democrat doesn't pick up the mantle of “promise the impossible” but I'm not holding my breath.
Maybe the public will keep opposing incumbents until we have an economic crash severe enough that it leads to some deflation.
I think more plausibly that if inflation stays under 3% for a few years, people will stop perceiving it as "inflation."
Isn’t it obvious that the work hour tracking idea is in response to Biden’s incapacity?
I also think you’re misunderstanding the elite opinion idea. Voters regard the job of the politician as to represent the will of the people in decisionmaking. If that politician acts contrary to their preferences, that’s corruption in the sense of violating (what they think) is the principal-agent relationship. Voters don’t care as much as you do whether the motivation is financial, or ideological, or political (in the sense that Biden not cracking down on illegal immigration was because he perceived a segment of his coalition to be preferring loose borders, not because he was bribed.)
I have not read this Stealth Democracy book, but especially given that it was written in 2002, I’d like to see how they address the claim that people love the Fed because the Fed is simply the most effective part of the government. Pre-financial crisis, I think that was uncontroversial.
"Voters regard the job of the politician as to represent the will of the people in decisionmaking. If that politician acts contrary to their preferences, that’s corruption in the sense of violating (what they think) is the principal-agent relationship."
Maybe. But if a politician said "instead of thinking for myself, I just decide my positions on issues by calling up my favorite pollster and doing what he says" do you think people would view that positively? I'm skeptical.
The other problem here is that individual voters within a constituency have tons of disagreements with each other, thus it's very easy to try to argue that politicians aren't actually representing their individual will, even if the politician ends up in line with the collective will.
Yeah but that's just because all those other voters in the majority are corrupt.
Green Day once sung a song about that....
To steelman the expansive view of corruption: the complaint is not “politicians are earnestly trying to do their very best for their constituents, even if they sometimes disagree with their majority opinions”. It’s that “politicians are optimizing for something totally different than either the best interests or preferences of their constituents”.
Saying “well they are not being directly bribed, they are instead focused on party fundraising, ruthlessly maintaining a grip on their office, and making elite friends and future employers happy” doesn’t really answer that objection. I myself feel this way, and think people are correct to look down on most of what politicians do, even as shilling personal meme coins is worse!
You can cast anything in a negative light by phrasing it.
"I will do what my friends want rather than what my constituents want." wouldn't poll well either.
I think if they disagree with a decision, they will prefer that justification much more than “I believe in X”.
In any case, they wouldn’t call it corruption. They might call it something else, but not corruption.
I highly doubt that; Matt used the "pollster" in his hypothetical example because Matt believes in the technical art of accurate polling (it exists, I agree) but I think most voters would say pollsters are corrupt! I think -- based on my own conversations with regular people who don't follow politics so much -- is that they often think there is the right and moral thing to do (which often corresponds to what they think of an issue). So a politician who is explaining his decision to do the wrong thing by referring to polls is also corrupt!
That’s a good point, but in this scenario I think Matt is trying to gesture at a hypothetical pollster that people trusted, and I am as well.
I think it’s more fundamentally about real and perceived dishonesty. Saying you’re going to do something to get votes and then not doing that. Or politicians who have to appear more left or right wing to win a primary and then move to the center to try to win a general.
Politicians also have a very bad habit of over promising on a campaign and under-delivering in office.
This is true, but the people crying corruption believe politicians are already doing that!
They're just telling their pollster to survey the elites instead of the people.
This is the contradiction: voters think Congress is corrupt, but at the same time, think that bipartisan bills all of (corrupt) Congress agrees on are the best kind of bills!
A slight majority of Americans are paid hourly, and plenty of salaried workers have to log and track their working hours for billing or budget purposes. It’s not hard to extrapolate to “If I have to fill out a timesheet, they should, too”.
Government workers have to fill out a timesheet and time card fraud is one of the only genuinely clear cut ways to get insta fired from government
When I was at Texas A&M there were constant rumblings about the legislature wanting to institute a policy where professors had to log their hours in the office. I can see that before the pandemic, some people might have thought that time in office was time working and time out of office was time not working, but it’s been ages since that was true for professors, and most white collar jobs have transitioned away from that in recent years.
But people still want it.
In practice, you would probably just see the line item for "classified" take up a larger and larger part of what got released to the public.
"Isn’t it obvious that the work hour tracking idea is in response to Biden’s incapacity?"
I'm pretty sure that goes back decades or more. Snark about congressional recesses has been a thing since the 1980s at least (I can remember hearing jokes about it when I was a kid), and I'm sure long before that too.
Bush's vacations!
I wonder how many in the general population realize that someone who edited the Law Review while at Yale Law School and is getting paid $175,000 or whatever 15 years later to be Congressman or Senator is getting laughably underpaid compared to people they academically outperformed in the private sector. They're not just in government for the pension because it's a steady job, there just has to be something else in it for them.
It's an interesting facet of our society that there is so little transparency among anyone about how much people earn. Many companies even have strict rules that purport to prohibit their employees from disclosing their salaries.
The result is predictable, that in the absence of disclosure most people are going to be very wrong on their own position among their peers and among society writ large.
The Congressional salary of $174,000 puts someone in roughly the top 20% of household or 10% of individual income, which is pretty high. But there are about 134 million households in the US, so that means roughly 26 million households make more than that, and as you say, if we want very smart and capable people in Congress we should at least realize what they would probably be earning if they pursued anything outside of government.
Being in Congress is such a low status job that none of the members could even be considered by Jeffrey Epstein to become one of his friends.
Sure. But it should also be humbling that the majority of Americans think $175,000 is a lot of money.
$175k is a lot of money. $175k/year is a LOT of money.
“First-year associates at top "Big Law" firms in major U.S. markets generally receive a standard base salary of $225,000 as of 2025, often supplemented by bonuses. This, known as the Cravath scale, is standard in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C..”
Meanwhile 45 year olds who edited the law review at Harvard and clerked for Supreme Court justices are pulling down $175k.
You don't have to tell me. I live like a bum lol
I think you need to think in terms of jobs that pay that much and would you consider those people to be making a lot of money.
Yes, I think it's clear that we need much higher salaries for congress, and the judiciary.
I am kind of sympathetic to the voters here tbh. It seems like in a democracy political representatives should represent their constituencies.
But I constantly see political people plotting to see if they can enact their own views instead; they seem to view public opinion as a constraint to be managed rather than a North Star to be followed. A politician working for his/her own ideology rather than his/her constituents does seem like a form of betrayal/corruption IMO - a principle-agent problem.
But, the public has conflicting views, if you follow public opinion you will bankrupt the state overnight.
I agree “following the public” is hard but that’s no excuse for “ignoring the public in favor of personal ideology”.
No, the excuse for "ignoring the public in favor of personal ideology” is called "conscience."
The electorate can always fire you if they don't like your votes.
Truman retired to a small house and got by on his army pension. Now federal elected officials live in an entirely different world than most Americans, financially. That has to be part of it. Before the 70s we were not governed exclusively by the affluent. People of modest means were able to serve in Congress. And not get rich there either.
The release of Bess Truman's personal papers has led to the conclusion that Truman was netting a lot more than his army pension after the presidency: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html
Very interesting, thank you for sharing this.
President Obama is a good example. I'd rate him the cleanest President since I was old enough to vote (early 90s). But his net worth/income went from middle-class to $50 million plus between his election as a state senator and today.
I mean. He wrote multiple best-selling books, and I think his wife did, too. He's not a great example of this.
He also has been one of the most famous people in the world for almost two decades now. It would be extremely odd if he hadn't gained wealth from that, just given how the media industry works today.
True, but that made them single digit millionaires. The major boost came post Presidency from very lucrative media contracts. The deal with Netflix alone is supposed to be in 10s of millions. TBC, I don’t think this is an example of corruption but their star power.
I mean, he wrote books
Truman's post-presidency was an exception in those days, too, as was his background.
But I'm not sure what you want exactly - people from modest means to rise to the presidency? Well we have that already with guys like Clinton and Obama. JD Vance wasn't born with a silver spoon, neither was OAC, Bernie Sanders, and the list goes on
Do you want people with "regular careers" to become president? Presidents have always come with political careers or successful careers in other spheres. Truman was a judge and a senator and before that a successful military officer. That's not way different from modern presidents, who were either in politics, successful in private careers or both.
>Clinton and Obama. JD Vance wasn't born with a silver spoon, neither was OAC, Bernie Sanders, and the list goes on
Nor Biden, nor Nixon, nor Reagan, nor Eisenhower. Silver Spooners rising to the Presidency seems rather rare.
On the other hand fdr, both bushes and jfk all came from elite families. Not sure how you’d classify teddy roosevelt and trump who’s families were well off but perhaps not “elite.” But about half the presidents since 1900 might be classified as some level of silver spoon type, which is pretty disproportionate if we consider those are all probably in the top .5% or top .1% of family wealth
Maybe since 1900. But what about since 1945? Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden -- I count only JFK, Trump and the Bushes as coming from elite families. Four out of 14.
I'm not sure I asserted that I want anything in particular. I offered a possible explanation for why the public feels Washington is corrupt. It probably would be a good thing if holding office wasn't an automatic ticket to riches. But I don't claim to have the answers.
The problem is that being famous is an automatic ticket to riches now that attention has been monetized, and holding office is a ticket to fame.
A huge part of caros lbj book is that he was committed to not dying poor like his dad. Corruption has always been a big part of our political story at least back to Tammany hall in the later 19th century, the whole progressive movement was intended as a reaction to the patronage system, which is really a form of corruption,
Not to pile on, but I wanted to post this earlier and my phone wasn't cooperating. Paul Campos is well to the left of Matt, but has written quite a bit about Truman's corruption:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/07/the-truman-show-directors-cut
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-immortal-legend-of-harry-trumans-financial-rectitude
At least according to his Wikipedia page the idea of Truman retiring in poverty is significantly overstated.
Someone shared a link above that supports that, I was not aware of this https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html
On the other hand, Martha Washington was one of the wealthiest women in America when she got married to George. Multiple early presidents were slave owners with sizeable plantations.
Only the wealthy could vote, different era
Certainly there have always been wealthy Americans in prominent positions.
I don’t want to “both sides” Trump’s corruption, but Democrats’ hands are not THAT much cleaner. Democrat run places like Chicago, the West Coast, etc have massive, blatant corruption. And I am skeptical that the Clinton Foundation’s primary purpose is truly global poverty reduction versus being a wealth and influence laundering organization for the Clintons.
Hey Chicago and Illinois politicians of both parties are corrupt!
I am not sure what massive blatant corruption you are referring to on the West Coast.
Outsourcing everything to nonprofits with weak accountability.
I'm not sure if you're kidding there. People like Armand Domalewski and Noah Smith (i.e., center-left) routinely gripe about the amount of money San Francisco spends on various programs administered by NGOs that don't actually seem to produce any results or produce results that are at a fraction of what you'd reasonably think should have been accomplished for the amount of money spent.
Poor management does not = corruption.
I'd submit that it does when the poor managers keep getting awarded contracts.
Are politicians being rewarded contracts?? Again, the original claim was re "massive corruption" akin to Illinois politics. That is a rather extreme claim. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/4-of-illinois-past-10-governors-went-to-prison/
I don't think "corruption" in most people's view is limited to benefits directly being paid to politicians, but includes politicians awarding government contracts to individuals and organizations who subsequently donate to the politician's campaigns.
People have social and ideological interests in addition to financial interests, and using public resources to fulfill your own social or ideological interest is still corrupt.
massive give aways to public unions
This is a perfect example of what Matt is complaining about in this post.
On a scale of 1 to 10, what numbers would you assign to Trump corruption levels and Democrat corruption levels?
It depends on the scale we are using. Trump is more corrupt, but some of the stories out of Chicago, Portland, etc are pretty mindblowing. In many ways Democrat corruption is more entrenched while Trump is taking a "après moi, le déluge" approach where he is grabbing as much as he can without (seemingly) much thought to what comes next.
You can use whatever scale you like. Also, I understand the Chicago type examples but I'm thinking about national scale stuff here, not local or state.
I'll start. I think Obama was maybe 1-2 at most, Biden was 3 or 4 (mostly from Hunter), the Clintons were maybe 5-7, and Trump is about a 22.
Obama seems on point. I'd rank Biden at 5-6, Clinton's at 12-13, and Trump at 22 for what we know and probably a 50 for what we will discover once he is out of office.
But I also don't think you can leave out the local stuff. Matt has made the point about education that Democratic and Republican states both have poor results, but at least Republican's don't spend nearly as much on it. I think this idea translates to many other things and is generally viewed by the public as corruption where Democrats are spending lots of money with favored groups and getting very little out of it.
I don't disagree much with your rankings at all.
The education stuff takes us back to the core problem that we all have different definitions of what's corruption. I'm not a fan teachers unions to the point where I'd say they may be a net negative to society, and maybe even by a large margin. But I don't think of this sort of routine political patronage as corruption, especially in this case because a lot of dems mistakenly but sincerely believe they're supporting something good for society.
Agree that there are different levels of corruption, where you have very direct quid pro quo that Trump is doing enormously (selling pardons, UAE & Qatar stuff, suing companies who settle to get beneficial business rulings, etc. etc.) and then more grey area corruption.
But I think its a slippery slope when we start saying that "dem's mistakenly, but sincerely believe they're supporting something good for society" because "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Sounds like a problem of definition. Trump and his inner circle are surely much richer from corruption than any individual grafting off the single-party west coast states, but the total amount of money siphoned off taxpayers in the latter must be a lot more.