First Slow Boring comment! I worked for a federal agency for 3.5 years then returned to school for an MBA and have been mostly in the private sector since. My long term partner still works at the agency I left. A few anecdotes related to this essay: (1) I had a senior civil service leader tell me they much preferred working for republicans because they brought in leaders with relevant real life (often private sector) experience and trusted the civil servants to do their jobs; (2) apparently working for this administration has been terrible, they’ve added so many levels of policy review to create more channels to say no to the types of projects the administration said they wanted to do in the first place! And as we’re often reminded in these essays - most of these DC civil servants are democrats so it’s the administrations they most agree with that they struggle to work for.
The way democrats sometimes approach regulation and process reminds of the episode of the office here Jim is making a “pro’s and con’s” list when he is running the office. Michael eventually comes in and tells him that no matter what you do someone is going to be mad at you, so just pick what you think is best and drink gin out of your coffee cup.
I’m a longtime Federal employee and I would agree that what you said about Republicans was true in the GHW Bush administration but was lacking both under his son and under Trump. It depends somewhat, of course, on where you’re working. For example, Scott Gottlieb at FDA would be an exception but Democratic FDA commissioners were similar in that way to him.
The trump administration was very different depending on which agency you worked for and the beginning when he hired lots of Bush 1 and 2 people vs the end when he’d replaced them all with barely qualified yes men.
That's exactly what happened, he waged a war but did a terrible job of it. But this is what happens when you are lazy and all you ever do is yell about things you don't like, and never actually stop playing golf to do something about them.
He did different things with different agencies. Some he put his cronies.in and gutted. Others he left alone or appointed subordinates that the career people liked.
I can't compare many agencies, but I've heard some talk from EPA employees. Under Biden they have a lot of latitude, and they had a huge budget increase a few years ago (followed by a big cut lately, owing to fighting in the House of Representatives). Trump was a bad time for them, though, with an appointed leader who disagreed with the agency's traditional mission, orders not to talk about climate change, and various political pressures that led to many high-ranking employees quitting their jobs. I don't know if the EPA was one of the worst-off agencies under Trump, but they definitely suffered in his administration.
Contrarian take: That is what SHOULD happen when the administration changes. I expect the military, the border patrol, the IRS and the EPA to follow the direction of the democratically elected leadership and not worry about their "traditional mission". They have a new boss, elected by the people, and they should either follow directions or quit.
Note: this all assumes the orders given and direction is legal.
I found reading this fascinating and it does describe different agencies being impacted differently. Having said that, "the Environmental Protection Agency lost 0.8% of its scientific workforce on average per year." A 3.2% decrease in scientific workforce over a 4 year period doesn't seem that dramatic...?
I too work for a Federal agency and have heard 1) from seniors and 2) does happen (EPA gets a blank check to do whatever though.) One thing that apparently happened in 2018 is that Congress mandated agencies state learning goals and created another form to fill out for various agency actions.
People who can’t do implementation simple appoint more people that can. Then it just repeats as the new people with lifetime gov experience don’t have that skill set either. Leads to extremely weird rulemaking
I like businesses. They are fascinating organizations where economics, sociology, communication and engineering come together in a group of people with varied skills, education, age and experience. Each business has its own culture, but one that is fragile and ever-changing. Success requires bright ideas, leadership, teamwork, domain expertise and a little luck. A brilliant person can transform an organization; a bad leader can doom it to failure. Each business is a study in the human experience.
The anti-business trajectory of the Democratic Party has been happening for a while, but has accelerated over the past 12 years. Part of this is due to Donald Trump and the (wholly incorrect) perception that he is what passes for a businessperson. Partly due to the scars of the 2008-2009 recession and slow recovery. And partly due to the general rise of marxist-adjacent thinking among Progressives.
Regardless of the cause, though, the turn against business is a real risk for the Party. Donald Trump won't be around forever. I'm convinced that if the GOP takes a step (well, two steps) toward sanity post Trump, the business people who have defected to the Democrats will return to where they are welcomed.
Another thing the anti-trust and anti- corporation evangelizers need to reckon with is that they were actually in power for four years.
Did your agenda really lower prices for consumers? Obviously, no. We had historic inflation. Of course that’s not entirely their fault, but I think even if you assume they’re right and there are certain anti-competitive businesses that need to be sued. It is absolutely clear that that is not a totally popular agenda or something that will meaningfully lower health care prices, housing, etc.
Oh come on Ben. The antitrust reformers are fighting against decades of terrible precedent in the judiciary that has allowed absurd levels of consolidation in many of our industries. Part of the reason inflation was as bad as it was can be traced to consolidation making supply shocks worse.
Undoing 40 years of terrible policy can't be done in four years. Good lord.
Obviously not blaming Lina Khan for inflation and I understand it takes a while to fight these cases in the court system. But the central point is that those reformers believe their cause should be central to dem economic policy agenda, but it fails to meaningfully address the cost of things Americans care most about.
But you're concluding that it doesn't address the cost of things Americans care the most about based on... the fact that the results haven't shown up yet?
We haven't even really seen any meaningful breakups of big firms. Thus far, because of the uphill climb, we're mostly seeing a world where indiscriminate consolidation is being challenged (and, sometimes) prevented. But it's hard to prove a negative.
As an example - I live in Chicago, and here, other than Whole Foods and Walmart, the two dominant grocery chains are owned by Kroger and Albertsons. Kroger and Albertsons are trying to merge. This is a merger that, ten or fifteen years ago, would have sailed through without even any kind of forced divestiture. We know what large grocery chain mergers do to industry wages and consumer prices in areas where the merger effectively eliminates competition (Kroger in particular has a very documented history here). Stores close, with consumers losing options and workers losing jobs. Prices go up. Choices in products get eliminated as store brands consolidate to one generic from several and "efficiencies" result in "streamlined" inventory. Grocery prices are certainly of concern to regular people.
The FTC and DOJ are also now looking at healthcare and veterinary care rollups. I saw an article just the other day in the Atlantic complaining about the massive inflation in vet bills that have happened as a result of PE acquisitions. Antitrust enforcement here would make a very real difference.
But, even if the various parties challenging the Kroger/Albertsons merger, or the PE rollups across industries, succeed at blocking them or forcing meaningful divestiture that somehow works (that would be a first), it's not going to meaningfully show up in your data because the alternative universe where the merger happened won't be the one we're living in. We won't have that example to compare to. And so people like you will continue to say that antitrust enforcement policy is therefore irrelevant to the concerns of everyday Americans.
Current precedent under the Sherman Act etc is clearly a huge hurdle for the "new Brandeis" etc movement, but they don't seem to have a plan to solve it. So far it looks like this:
(1) Complain about antitrust law
(2) Bring cases that try to push the boundaries of antitrust law
(3) Lose those cases, bigly, creating more status quo-favoring precedent
(4) ???
(5) Change antitrust law
If they really want to change antitrust law, they will need legislation, because courts (especially now) generally dislike changing law, especially in areas like antitrust where they tend to assume that (1) Congress can fix it and (2) any changes they make may screw up the economy in ways they don't understand or anticipate.
Why was this 40 years of precedent bad? My understanding of the period is that this has been an extremely positive trend that has saved tens of millions of lives. Do you deny the existence of increasing returns to scale?
Based on the Twitter reaction I believe they’re convinced that they’re not in power. “Real anti corporationism has never been tried”. Which really speaks more to their level of delusion.
This sidesteps that inequality went down, unemployment stayed return to remarkably low levels, and growth was world leading.
Biden administration performance wasn't perfect, and it turns out voters care a lot more about inflation than the do the relationship of their wages to prices.
I think the core argument of the original piece holds, but the administration succeeded in empowering workers and growing the economy. They, and I, just overestimated how popular that would be.
I work for Meta. And despite the fact that our core product offerings are maybe a mixed bag in societal impact, it is impossible not to be impressed by the sheer competence and work ethic of the people there. It is a brute fact that a significant share of the world’s best and brightest are making apps, doing bond deals, and making decks at places like McKinsey. You can either use them or not, but what a waste to not even look.
I think in countries with more competent bureaucracies like France or Japan, 'serving your country at the highest level as a civil servant' is a really high-prestige job in a way that's just unthinkable here in the US. So I doubt it's a question of just money
I think it's arguably prestigious in the US, but only for a handful of very specific and often extremely high-level jobs that are mostly appointed rather than career civil service.
Just one step down, also a senate-confirmed position:
Who is the "Undersecretary of Transportation for Policy". (Until April 2024 it was someone named Carlos Monje)
(I don't mean to impugn Carlos in any way, we just don't know that much about various under-secretaries even though they are positions that are consider high-level enough to require Senate confirmation)
Carlos mostly gets high level jobs because he interned with the right person (Barack obama) in 06/07 and had his career in dem policy launched into the stratosphere by that.
While I do get the sentiment of having higher-competence people in the bureaucracy, I think that there really is something to the idea that you want your best and your brightest out producing stuff, growing the economy, not regulating stuff.
Take all the complaints that people have about smart people going into finance and (very arguably!) not producing anything of value, and apply that to government as well. And law!
The government produces the conditions for growth. Agglomeration economics only work if you can get people to places where they have certainty that everything is going to work well underneath them.
My perspective may be considered unconventional, but I respectfully disagree. First, it's important to note that most bureaucrats, particularly those in rank and file positions, earn a decent living when you factor in their pensions.
Secondly, while I may not have held a traditional bureaucratic role, my extensive experience in government has led me to question the necessity of the 'best and brightest' in such positions. Bureaucracies are designed to execute standardized processes with unwavering fidelity, not to harness the potential of the most brilliant minds. This is not a sinister agenda but rather a commitment to ethical and consistent rule application.
When you start changing the rules on institutions in massive and unexpected ways (what brilliant people do---think early Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.), it just messes everything up for the people who adhere to those rules. Being a risk-taking, potentially rule-bending/breaking, brilliant person is not a plus in this environment. What is important is being conscientious, ethical, and consistent.
From my vantage point, the prevalence of 'Great Idea Faries' in our system is a concern. Individuals like Lina Khan, who I would categorize as such, can be problematic in roles like anti-trust, where consistency is critical.
I saw this personally when I worked with Barrack Obama's DOJ Civil Rights Division (edit - I do not mean to imply that I worked for them...I was with an agency they were focusing on and had to work with them in the process). The DOJ wanted to somehow outsource (this is my belief, not a proven fact) improved policing and figure out how to address really tough issues in policing. To accomplish this, they used novel legal theories to re-envision the 1994 Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
They realized that, instead of focusing on police agencies that were out of control and behaving unconstitutionally (which was what was done initially), they could use the authority to create ambiguities that they believed would positively influence police agencies to behave in a way they thought best (again, this is my belief not a proven fact). They could also get agencies to develop solutions to the tough problems that could be employed elsewhere (this statement is more of fact as Jonathan Smith of the DOJ said as much in an interview).
To accomplish this, they went after some agencies that were problematic but also started going after agencies that were functional but had issues (think mental health, racial issues, etc.) to try and get them to "solve" these problems.
Here's a good overview of the issue - https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/11/13/forced-reforms-mixed-results/. Note this is a fairly balanced article from a liberal outlet. It does not say the ideas were wrong (although I think today, we can look back at the lack of success and say that, at a minimum, things got worse after adopting these ideas).
Ultimately, it's crucial to let bureaucrats focus on consistency and incremental change, as they are less likely to do the unintentional harm caused by 'brilliant' bureaucrats. Instead, we should encourage brilliant minds to work on solving health issues or building the economy, where their unconventional approaches can be harnessed positively.
The revolving door creates a huge subsidy to government workers. If we eliminate it, we either need to dramatically increase pay or simply have significantly less qualified people. A great trial lawyer with the Department of Justice makes $100,000 a year - a great trial lawyer at a private firm makes more than a $1,000,000 a year. Great trial lawyers will work at the Department of Justice because it is both prestigious and also they know they can make a lot of money in the private sector later on.
I just don't think it is politically feasible to raise government salaries ten fold.
You could consider it a societal failing that the best and brightest are making apps and doing bond deals rather than doing basic science and advising public policy.
That said, the first-order effect of hiring them to advise public policy would be in the right direction.
I don't know the second-order effect. More regulatory capture because interested parties are working in regulation? Less, because former app makers are less conflicted than current ones? More competence in policy because it's being made by people who know the industry? I'd be interested in historical case studies.
The dirty secret of basic science is that it’s a lottery: plenty of highly talented scientists go their whole careers without making any meaningful contribution to their discipline. I too work at Meta and my boss is an ex-physicist from a top program. She described her brief stint as a working physicist as “trying to shrink confidence intervals in high energy particle experiments” - I did not get the sense for a second that she was motivated by money to leave physics, but rather the meaninglessness of the work as well as the toxic culture of physics itself (where everyone is just constantly hustling for grant money).
As for “advising about public policy” I’m not sure why we need more people advising about public policy than just implementing it optimally - which is, functionally, what “doing bond deals” constitutes in a capitalist economy.
You make a good point that it’s possible for the structure of academic science to either be poorly structured generally or for things like empirical high energy physics (especially) or really anything requiring grant money (generally) to be more capital- than labor-constrained under current margins, and that someone has to actually “do the work” of capitalism.
TR’s point is that “moving the boundaries of human knowledge forward” is a collective advancement that seems intuitively like a noble use of tremendous intellect, whereas building social media apps…isn’t. The issue with the “financialization” of the economy is a perception that unlike either academic science (or various engineering disciplines like ChemE or Aerospace), certain industries can absorb the best and brightest without producing commensurate societal rewards. Eventually you get into zero- or negative-sum forms of competition like optimizing for sub-millisecond trading strategies (clearly totally divorced from any actual belief in accurate pricing information) and the like.
I can’t tell you what the optimal number of quants or app developer *is* and the burden of proof is generally on those who want to do so, but you don’t have to be a Marxist ideologue to think that, e.g., throwing tremendous mechanical aptitude into the pointless status competition catered to by the Swiss Watch industry is kind of a waste of engineering talent.
agreed. I'm an economist/MBA/CPA and I really don't like most financial innovation. We need to shrink the size of the financial sector back to 1970's levels, and get rid of a lot of that innovation.
>that the best and brightest are making apps and doing bond deals rather than doing basic science and advising public policy
I think a good chunk of America's elite intellectual talent also went into medicine, FWIW. Some of the the smartest people in this country are now MDs. I'd count that as closer to your goal than 'making apps and doing bond deals'
It would probably be better for the country if a few more of the best and brightest went into medicine, but the AMA has fought hard to cap the number of doctors and make sure residents have the most horrible working conditions imaginable which is driving smart, capable people away.
As someone who works closely with physicians and medical students AND is a patient myself, I will be a bit contrarian and argue that our medical schools/residency programs over-prioritize intellectual firepower and under-prioritize the character/personality traits we need in our doctors. The med schools and residency programs prioritize test scores and grades in (sometimes unnecessary) undergrad basic sciences courses because it's easiest on the admissions end to go off these stats and because having high average MCAT scores in their admits makes them look good. Then the med students with the highest test scores all go into specialties like dermatology and orthopedic surgery instead of primary care and pediatrics because the money is what appeals to them. The students at the selective med school I work at spend inordinate amounts of time on research so they can rack up publications for their residency applications, which I'd argue would be better spent taking care of their mental and physical health and getting adequate sleep so they can be at their best when they're at clinic.
I've never had an encounter with a healthcare provider where I walked away thinking "wow I was so impressed by what a genius they were." I *have* walked away thinking "I was pleasantly surprised that this person listened to me and explained things thoroughly."
I graduated in the top quarter of my class from a top ten law school, and yet I never got an offer from a big firm. My speech impediment probably played a big role. That experience makes me question how much opportunity businesses really create. If you check all the boxes, there will be good opportunities, but relatively few people check all the boxes. Most didn’t go to the best schools or didn’t get excellent grades or have some sort of disability or don’t want to work their fingers to the bone.
I’m willing to defer somewhat to industry because it’s really good at making stuff, but I’m not sure industry is that good at distributing opportunity broadly and deeply.
This lacks perspective: businesses create opportunity in an uneven, path-dependent way. Matching people to positions is an extremely hard problem, and whole industries screw it up plenty often, but if you think businesses aren't "good at distributing opportunity broadly and deeply", then you should step back, look at the big picture, and ask yourself whether your standards are realistic.
Consider the emergence of the tech industry. When I was growing up (let's call it the nineties), being introverted or nonconforming (in any number of directions) imposed severe limitations on your job prospects. Because of the specific, historically-contingent way that division of labor developed in the tech industry, it now provides millions of people that match those descriptions with excellent livelihoods, tens of thousands of people with preposterous wealth, and an additional long tail of less attractive but useful employment.
But it excludes even more people.
Thankfully, there are other industries!
I don't mean that the state of things is _optimal_: hiring heuristics are often very bad and a big firm probably would have been lucky to have you. Arbitrage is a thing. But you've got to consider global manufacturers and strange, tiny passion projects; farmer's co-ops and popup art vendors; shipping companies and publishers; life coaches and corner stores; printer's shops and … I'm sure you get the picture. The failure of a narrow segment of a single industry is a misleading way to assess the social value of businesses as a whole.
I am sorry that you experienced this, tho admittedly as a fellow swimmer of these waters, the structure and organization of a BigLaw firm is fundamentally a lot weirder than the typical Fortune 500 public company.
That’s really surprising to me. I am sorry that happened to you but it is a very unusual experience. Top quartile grads (well, 1L grades actually) from top ten schools usually have no trouble lining up Big Law summer associate jobs.
Were you interviewing only for a smaller market or something?
No, I interviewed for DC, Richmond and Baltimore. I was offered zero summer associateships.
If I hadn’t had the opportunity to start my own practice, I probably would have wound up with some law adjacent job for a big company, but I was rather particular about wanted to be a lawyer.
The legal profession is extremely elitist, especially when it comes to Big Law and tech firms. I went to a small law school in Florida and work for a largish software company as an in house counsel and basically only got the job because the company is headquartered in Europe. They don't care as much about pedigree in the way that US companies and especially tech firms do. Meanwhile, during the my job search I was told numerous times by internal and external recruiters that "we love your experience negotiating complex technology agreements" however since you didn't graduate from a top law school the general counsel won't even look at your resume. Similarly, I have friends who have done M&A for boutique firms for years and won't even get a sniff from Big Law since they didn't graduate from a top 14 school. I get that hiring is an imperfect science but it was still an extremely frustrating experience.
The big businesses are fully staffed. Thus they create opportunity. If there were 2x as many of those big businesses then they would be forced to hire candidates less close to their ideal. (I can't believe the largely-Lefty guy here is lecturing the largely-Righty on the merits of enterprise)
First point yes - at the core, businesses are owned by the shareholders and managed by the C-suite and VPs, and loyalty to employees further down is a nice to have. Few actual psychopaths who get off on firing people or making their work lives hell, but the bottom line does come first.
Second point not sure - if co-ops were the best way to compete in the current market environment we'd likely see more. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be worker-friendly changes that would make them more likely to work, though!
Healthy companies recognize that loyalty to employees is just a different way to represent/describe institutional knowledge. Even a well-functioning psychopath would do his or her best to retain effective employees. Meanwhile, a well-functioning saint would still eventually jettison ineffective ones.
I don't think Hellkitty is interested in this, and would gladly live in a world where all firms across the board performed worse, but wealth distribution were more equitable.
I am not sure they have thoroughly thought through just how badly the quality of life decreases in such a world would be, but I could be wrong. Maybe they don't care.
There's more nuance to this question than you (or GP, to be fair) consider. If we measure "quality of life" (as we seem to be) as "GDP increases", then... Yeah, you may be right. That's easy to measure - but you're also in danger of falling into the "metric becomes the target" territory, and losing track of other important things.
"More people have less trouble making rent", or "fewer people fear losing everything if they have a medical emergency" are also quality of life indicators, but aren't exactly easy to measure, so they tend to get get left out of our economic evaluations.
Now, would re-structuring business regulations to encourage co-ops lower GDP? Maybe. Would they improve those more nebulous markers? I dunno! I'd still like to see co-ops be more feasible, because a) lots of people who work in them say they're pretty happy, and lots of people who work for conventional businesses think they'd be more happy in co-ops, and enabling "the pursuit of happiness" is a good thing, and b) I think economies as a whole are more robust if more than one corporate model is viable - even if easily-measured short-term metrics may not go up as quickly.
(Please note that these arguments aren't to do with "wealth distribution". In this context, I think it's another short-term metric that's easy to measure, and so gets more attention than it probably deserves.)
No, I'm making the claim that an economy run entirely by coops will have far worse quality of life (like, communist levels of of QOL), not because "number no go up" but because capitalist markets tend to lead to lots more innovation.
This is mostly because it is the best system that exists in terms of efficiently allocating capital, which generally tends to lead to better outcomes.
"I think economies as a whole are more robust if more than one corporate model is viable - even if easily-measured short-term metrics may not go up as quickly."
Sure. My argument was against the straw man economy that Hellkitty proposed where *all* the corporations are co ops, which is the exact opposite of "more than one corporate model".
"Largely" is doing a lot, there. Corporate structures revolve around Delaware state law, and the Delaware court system. If those make co-ops difficult to form / administer, then (regardless of their other merits) they're at a disadvantage.
To be fair, my "if" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph: I'm not familiar enough with corporate law to have an informed opinion about the hows and wherefores. I'm only pointing out that "well, go ahead and form a co-op then" (which, I recognize, you didn't quite say) is a lazy take.
"Corporate structures revolve around Delaware state law, and the Delaware court system." This is not required. They can incorporate in Vermont if they want!
This could be a nice addendum to the top comment on the Sunday grab bag - in addition to what happens to the GOP if Trump loses again, what cracks/fissures get exposed within the Democratic party?
Without the threat of Trump, will Harris feel any need to actually implement and live up to the policies she is campaigning on? Or will she try to ban fracking anyway?
I think there’s been a faction of the Democratic Party that has used Trump's unpopularity to push their own unpopular ideas, or "expand the Overton Window" as they would frame it. Bit, faced with an actually sane opponent they may have to get more serious.
So, I guess it could go either way. That said as long as fracking is a thing in PA, my guess is that one is closed.
Something interesting is how Harris has mostly avoided the "Trump's threat to democracy" message for the first couple weeks of her successful campaign rollout. I suspect there's a curious thing behind this; does the leftist or the centrist side of the Democratic party benefit more from "Trump is a threat to democracy."
It seems hard to say for sure; if you convince suburban swing voters you're fundamentally more respectable and small-c conservative, you might get away with more on policy they might actually dislike. But if you say Trump is a threat to democracy, that should make it easier to say no to various interest groups with progressive demands. It depends who the reference point is.
At any rate, Harris has talked about it a lot less than Biden. That's interesting and I haven't heard a convincing theory for if that change is here to stay.
I don’t think that Harris ever actually had a strong ideological commitment to banning fracking, and sitting presidents have a solid incentive not to seek a ban (they know the voters will be unhappy if their gas prices and heating bills go up.)
"To a certain extent, I think this is just a pretty classic example principle-agent problem. When you’re uncertain about a person’s actual motivations, you’ll be more inclined to look for costly signals of commitment"
What signals would voters have from Harris to understand what strong ideological commitments she has that will lead her to follow through or not?
*You could generalize this question beyond Harris, but she seems the most relevant right now.
That’s a reasonable question. I think there are four major useful signals which voters can use to evaluate elected officials:
1: Long-term positioning history. In general, politicians are more likely to actually believe arguments that they’ve embraced over long periods of time.
2: Resource use and policy prioritization in office.
3: Leaked details from private conversations and correspondence.
4: Personal material interests.
In Harris’s specific case, I think the best-evidenced core commitments are a: policy items in the “entire Democratic Party agrees on this” bucket, and b: seeing “punishing malefactors-at-scale through prosecution and litigation” as a key lever for improving society. Overall, though, she seems to be relatively ideologically flexible, in both good (focuses on actionable stuff, willing to change her mind iin the face of new evidence) and bad (opportunistically changing positions when doing so might help her advance) ways.
I think it’s reasonable for voters to have some degree of distrust in Harris in situations where her ambition might conflict with what they want— this is one of my own biggest reservations about her (and also why her bid to win the “progressive” lane in the 2020 primary fell flat.)
To the extent that “ban fracking” was just her scrambling to the deranged center of gravity of the Democratic primary debate in 2019, I don’t expect her to go back to that. The upshot being, I don’t think anyone knows what to actually expect of her, and I find myself bemused that Matt isn’t mad that the press isn’t covering the Harris policy platform (I get why he isn’t in reality).
> I find myself bemused that Matt isn’t mad that the press isn’t covering the Harris policy platform
Yes, this is pretty funny, that after the months of complaining about under-coverage of second Trump administration's policy consequences, he's been mum about Harris just kind of essentially vibing the campaign without even bothering with pro forma policy pages on her website.
This is basically just an issue of progressives making assumptions. They don't seem to understand that there are many people that work in the corporate world that believe in a strong safety net (hello I'm one of them!) and making that safety net stronger is important to us! There are also lots of right wing public high school teachers and sanitation workers. It's not mutually exclusive to hold the position that strengthening Social Security and Medicare is important but it's also important to repeal the Jones Act or make it easier to build energy infrastructure.
Progressives in position of influence seemingly don't understand that one's choice of career or place of employment doesn't perfectly align with their political beliefs!
Yep. This is part of my ongoing series, "how the Democrats can be the 60% party rather than the 50% + 1 party." I keep hearing the take that voters are economics progressive and socially conservative, which I think is taking one data points way too far. The successful triangulators (Bill Clinton) moderated on economics too. The Democrats have an agenda that involves spending, so that moderation isn't going to be "agree to cut taxes for rich people," because then they'll just end up with exploding deficits. What they CAN do is focus on streamlining regulation. This can be accompanied by some anti-big government rhetoric.
This is why the left self immolating over omnicausing and the GOP self immolating over fealty to Trump provides an opportunity for Democrats to reframe themselves as pro-growth pro-prosperity.
A tricky thing about Democrats reframing themselves in contrast to leftists is that leftists are within the Democratic tent, and tend to define it for people who consider themselves moderate or conservative. The leftists are loud and attention-grabbing, they are active online, the media likes to report on them, and these are the most conspicuous things about left-of-center American politics. We don't have a separate "left" party, just the Democrats, so the institutional structure is not conducive to public contrasts. If you're not a leftist, the Democrats are the left.
The thing is that much of the “left” wing of the coalition has not been under the tent but rather free-riding. Those that are under the tent have relied on moral suasion to push Democratic policy stances. The loss of moral position and popularity means that this part of the Democratic coalition has been disempowered.
In addition, businesses are one of the few social structures where one can regularly interact with people from across the political spectrum. I wish more people got to have this experience to understand that the other side isn't that scary.
the vast majority of working Americans work for businesses. Anybody who doesn't understand their experience doesn't understand American society.
That said, having respectful and constructive political discussions with co-workers has become much harder over the last ~decade. There always seems to be one person, from whatever side, ranting by repeating half-baked memes, which puts a chill on all political discourse.
Like you, I think that market mechanisms are necessary for making a complex economy work, that commerce is good, and that generalized hostility to business is counterproductive for political parties in mixed-economy countries like ours. (And I also work in the private sector, in finance.)
All that said, I think that you’re probably underplaying the rational case for viewing business leaders with a baseline degree of suspicion. As Adam Smith might note, markets are useful mechanisms for harnessing avarice for pro-social purposes— alchemizing personal vice into societal virtue. Unfortunately, there are plenty of traits that most of us (correctly) regard as pathological that correlate with success in business— including avarice, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. (See evidence like the society-wide studies referenced in this HBR piece— https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-bad-guys-win-at-work ). Donald Trump manifests those traits particularly strongly, but business leaders in general are quite a bit more like him in that particular respect than the general population is. The greater business community, in turn, is highly tolerant of both individual psychopathology (feting man-children like Trump or ghoulish psychopaths like Peter Thiel) and professional misconduct (see: the Chamber of Commerce literally selecting the CEO of a pyramid scheme as its leader.)
Overall, I think that if they want to maintain their prestige, business leaders should be more willing to aggressively “Sister Souljah” their more questionable colleagues and enforce basic behavioral norms.
John - what do you think is the ideal primary accountability mechanism for regulatory agencies?
To caricature somewhat, liberals want to there to be none and conservatives want there to be accountability to the executive.
In the absence of other methods, I agree that accountability to the executive and, indirectly, to citizens through elections is valuable. But I've really struggled in light of the Chevron case to decide what else is best. The current combination of laws, executive direction, public comment on rules, and sometimes litigation is insufficient and has enabled tremendous bloat. But it also isn't a disaster. Shifting accountability to the courts may help, but I can't figure out how it works at scale in practice.
I have a friend who audits manufacturing plants for the EPA. Every opinion he writes has to be pre-vetted with lawyers because most firms sue to avoid findings. In my field of healthcare, suing the FDA is a suicide mission and only to be done if the company's life is on the line.
The left is hypocritical on this issue, but I think there's a deeper disagreement here than opportunistic enforcement of a made-up set of rules.
The left sincerely believes that good governance is a matter of hiring morally upstanding people and rejecting the morally depraved (rather than hiring capable people and rejecting the incapable). A central philosophical tenet on the activist left is that exposure to the profit-seeking motive in the private sector makes people *become* greedy.
To a certain extent, I think this is just a pretty classic example principle-agent problem. When you’re uncertain about a person’s actual motivations, you’ll be more inclined to look for costly signals of commitment— like forgoing income to work in academia or the nonprofit sector. You don’t need those signals quite as much when you have more trust.
You partially beat me to it. I can quickly see why Matt teased this as an article that would have a trolly headline on Twitter. And that's because Twitter is filled with tons of academics and nonprofit types who love to yell at him for various grievances.
Among those grievances is a deeply rooted belief that they view that they are working to make the world a better place, and that the way they see this should be done is not spoiled by what they see as selfish human desires. The profit seeking motive is the top one as you say, but there are also ancillary motives, with anti-discrimination and perosnal sacrifice toward environmental protection being very notable, as well as a disdain for anyone seeking power for their own personal gain.
I have a long association with the DoD and I think a lot of Biden's mid-level appointments there were a disaster. You could forget about getting a job there unless you were a minority, gay or transgendered, or a female. Nothing wrong with any of those groups as appointees but the ones they chose had no experience in the defense industry, and the taxpayer took the hit for that. How? Because the entrenched career people got a free pass to continue to pursue their own wasteful and inefficient ways of doing business because Biden's cadre just didn't know enough to challenge them in setting policy or even in group meetings. It's not a problem to hire people from various historically underrepresented minorities but they have to know something about where they're going to be effective.
The two Biden DoD appointments I'm most familiar with (senate confirmed but no one that normies would ever have heard of) we're both straight white men. They both had experience in or around the DOD. They both seemed pretty normal in comparison to other folks who've been in these jobs. FWIW, both are more competent than the equivalents that Trump appointed.
Anecdotes aren't data, but your statements don't match my experience.
Just to be clear, The biggest failure in our defense strategy right now is the inability of our defense industrial base to build the stuff the nation has decided it needs. Every ship program is years behind schedule. We have a massive shortage of air-defense missiles.
But when you look at the people at DoD who oversee industry, the most notable thing is that not one has ever worked for an industrial company. They are typically academics or former Hill staffers -- and predictably, Black or Hispanic or Trans or Gay. Those that have ANY experience in the private sector typically have worked for a small "butts in seats" government contractor. None have ever had to deal with public shareholders. Their lack of understanding of how industry really operates is stunning. I spent a lot of my time working with the military officers to help them understand these issues since there is little chance their civilian counterparts will be able to do that.
I looked at the link, and while none of those people are white guys, I didn't see anything quite as bleak as what you're describing.
Here's part of Molly Just's bio, for example:
Prior to leading C3, Ms. Just most recently served as an executive at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investor for the U.S. Intelligence and Defense Communities. In that role, she led In-Q-Tel’s strategic investment portfolio for the National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Air Force, and Space Force. Prior to joining In-Q-Tel, she was a senior management consultant and practice lead at Avascent (now Oliver Wyman) where she specialized in advising private equity firms on mergers and acquisitions in the national security sector and providing growth strategy to the major defense primes. Prior to Avascent, Ms. Just spent three years at the Department of Defense serving as a Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics.
Respectfully disagree. Advising private equity on the acquisition of defense companies may give you a view of the industry at 50,000 feet. What matters for day-to-day operations and policy is the 5,000 feet view. I respectfully submit she lacks that.
I think this is a class issue with Democrats actually, they love the consultant class types that rotate between McKinsey, private equity and VC firms, and whose expertise is being able to quickly gain a superficial understanding of a subject and make good PowerPoint presentations. The people that are trying to optimize production processes or negotiating supply chain deals are too technical and boring and don’t speak the right corporate/academic speak to have access to the halls of power.
What’s especially interesting to me is that this is an issue that the leading companies in the US - namely the tech industry - has learned to go *completely* the opposite direction. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia are at least the ones I’m familiar with and are run by their engineers, from top to bottom. No one would ever consider hiring the McKinsey slide deck brigade for anything other than layoffs, as it would be an admission of incompetence. Leaders are expected to be operators who develop strategic and leadership skills, not the other way around.
And it works, because if you’re doing anything of even mild complexity, any strategic vision that fails to take into account the technical nuances of the subject matter will fail faster than Anthony Scaramucci’s stint in the Trump administration. (This isn’t limited to tech - hospitals tend to be run by MDs; Alon Levy has made these points about rail agencies; etc)
So you are 100% right to make this distinction, and the fact that this isn’t obvious to the median democrat (who still thinks that the divide between private sector and the rest is about who’s greedy and who isn’t) says everything.
Yes, but she’s just one person. Someone with her type of experience belongs in this space even if someone else with the type of expertise you describe is also needed.
Yeah, but that's just the point. The other players with the knowledge and experience needed to address the problems I outlined above were lacking making her presence on the team unproductive. Look, any MBA in Finance can advise on M&A. But what's that going to get you in terms of making the procurement process more cost effective and efficient? You need a very specific type of industry experience and expertise to make that happen. That's where the gold is.
Managers, yes, but I wouldn’t say they had to be CEOs. We need nuts and bolts people to do a nuts and bolts job. JMTC…By the way, thanks for a good exchange.
Frankly, the Feds probably aren't paying enough to get the truly talented diverse candidates. Senior business architects and supply chain managers are extremely valuable in private industry.
>Anecdotes aren't data, but your statements don't match my experience.<
Listen pal: some us have paid good money to be able to engage in a Dem-bashing thread in this forum, so take your skepticism about unverified DEI anecdotes and put it where the sun don't shine.
I can't comment on defense, but it's widely known but little-said that the median conservative federal judge is now a significantly better writer and technician than the median liberal one, especially a median liberal Biden appointee. That's due to a combination of an allergy to private-practice lawyers and a policy of very strong diversity preferences in the Biden admin.
Of the people conventional wisdom thought would get promotions to top judiciary jobs in the Biden admin, especially white/Asian men, hardly any got them. People like Vince Chhabria, Gary Feinerman (who quit after being passed over), Jesse Furman, Paul Oetken who were considered locks.
Man I just woke up, saw the headline, and assumed there were some municipalities that had banned revolving doors from apartment buildings and this was making the housing shortage worse.
"You know you have Slow Boring brain when...any figure of speech that comes from a building is construed to decry the lack of housing supply that we suffer from."
I feel like the continually turning ones are better because at least you know they are turning and they move at a predictable rate of speed. Automatic revolving doors that start cold can catch unaware, fast-walking pedestrians, who get partway into the door before it starts moving.
Totally agree with this. One thing we saw in Biden’s administration is that it’s really important to be effective and make good decisions. If inflation had been less severe or if the administration had undertaken a sincere and technocratically sound program of supply-side regulatory reform, voters would have been more pleased with the results. The failure to do this I would propose has to do with Leftist’s fascination with big ideas and revolutionary change—if we need a political revolution then why bother with doing a good job writing regulations? That’s small-potatoes after all.
Agree. And sometimes it’s just getting off your butt and acting. When we had that (fortunately short lived) baby formula shortage, there was no ideological fight- we just needed to get an emergency suspension of import regs of baby formula from places like Europe that we knew were making safe formula. The admin eventually did this but it took way longer than it should have. Don’t know what the failure was here, but this is exactly the kind of thing that “normie” voters care about.
One thing you'll find in a healthy business is a respect for people who just do something about a problem instead of having three meetings about it first. That spirit seems lacking in government sometimes.
I know it's not really the central point of the piece, but the Democrats' attitude toward student loans has long struck me as very disingenuous. While *forgiving* student loans is very controversial, I expect many Republicans would gladly get on board with a plan to *stop making new* loans. For example, create a type of loan that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, but payment is limited to something like 10% of income for 10 years, and let the free market for loans decide what schools and majors are actually worth it. If the goal is to stop young people from getting into financial ruin, why not take the easy win? To me, it seems like the better explanation is that university administrator and humanities professor positions have become a spoils system for the Left, and goal of loan forgiveness is to shift the burden of this system away from similarly left-leaning university students and on to the general tax paying public.
The better solution (which many on the right support) is to allow debt to be dischargable in bankruptcy under strict conditions (IE they are broke and projected to remain broke, not just a doctor fresh out of med school but with years of earnings in front of them).
BUT, make colleges responsible for a portion of the debt of their students. Now colleges have some skin in the game, and will have incentives to keep costs low and make sure people graduating have marketable skills.
I find it strange that the whole college/student loan tower hasn't fallen down yet. It seems massively unsustainable and wasteful. As you identify, student loans (and the idea of loan forgiveness) are basically a huge handout to universities.
It's the grad student lending in particular that has taken off with not a lot of clear marginal gains for graduates. I blame Pelosi and Bush at least as much as Biden (and I guess Trump in 2020 initial COVID aid lol) on this.
Why do you think GOP lawmakers would want to stop making new student loans? Conservative higher ed relies on those resources just as much as the rest of higher ed. And it seems to me most of the scammier online and private schools had more support from GOP lawmakers than Dems. Plus the GOP loves having taxpayer funded hippies as political targets.
Universities are generally seen as centers of power and prestige that heavily lean leftward. I would think Republicans would be eager to take a hatchet to their budgets, especially if the more left-leaning humanities departments would be hardest hit.
It's important they stress the cost of this status quo on graduate students who have frankly been misled about their career prospects even controlling for all the well-known scorn on tenure track prospects. Price signals matter a lot to people borrowing money, and distorting them changes people's choices a lot too. Ron DeSantis gave a great comment on this when he said last summer that he felt some of these students had been taken for a ride. Broadening that coalition beyond just Fox segments calling everyone at college a left-wing freak can help in getting the job done and fixing this.
I think this is fundamentally a trust -related game theory problem. It’s relatively hard to align incentives for executive branch officials post-hoc, so a hirer looking to achieve a particular set of goals will prioritize identifying goal alignment in their screening process. Avoiding the private sector (and its commensurate rewards) is a very costly signal that you’re genuinely committed to a particular political coalition and its principles, so in cases with enough uncertainty, it will tend to become a filter. Somebody like Ron Klein gets a pass precisely because he’s trusted.
The Republicans managed to solve a similar sort of coordination problem by creating the Federalist Society, which ideologically screens future would-be conservative prosecutors and judges (and forces them to make costly commitment signals) in law school. I wonder if it would be possible to use a similar mechanism to create a credible “I work in the private sector, but I’m a committed social democrat” signal.
(I made a similar point in a reply, but thought this merited top-level discussion.)
I kinda agree with that, actually, if we wanted to build out a bench with people in the industry, i think it's useful to create professional associations that show a commitment to social democratic politics.
Have Democrats had a long history of problems with people working in the private sector joining new administrations and quietly sabotaging the President's goals? I think that only makes sense in the context of factional infighting, and one of the key problems of infighting is that the costs (having less competent staffers) are borne by the coalition, while the benefits (ideological rigidity) are captured by the faction. It's a negative sum game and should be called out as such, as Matt does here.
This makes sense to me but what I don’t understand is why/how that political coalition is in power.
It seems to me like this signals loyalty to a group that compromises a minority of democrats and who lost the last primary, so why is Biden applying this filter?
I’m honestly somewhat confused by this too. Matt has complained about this situation a lot, but I think that he and other moderates should do more introspection about how it happened— it almost certainly reflects some of their faction’s weaknesses and failings. (I’m a bit more left-leaning myself, but I understand that we need to cooperate with the moderates to achieve goals, and I think that would be a lot easier if they were better at actually articulating their preferences etc.)
I have some experience with the question "How much do university professors offer to their direct reports (PhD students and post-docs) per actual hour worked compared to the private sector?", and I'd like to say "Democrats, please don't hire any professor for anything labor-related ever.". Thank you for attending my lecture on "Do as I say, not as I do.".
In other words, they pay very talented and skilled people below minimum wage, and act like academia is some enlightened, noble pursuit while "business" is morally corrupt.
It reminds me of the old Roman aristocracy who looked down on people who conducted trade while they carried on "the noble Roman tradition" of politics and war-making. Or the feudal lords who looked down on merchants and farmers and workers of any kind.
OK, so as a professor, I'm going to defend the honor of my profession.
1. I don't set the pay scales for grad students or postdocs; the university does.
2. The funding environment is brutal. The NIH funds something like 10% of grant submissions on a good day. It's just very, very hard to get research money, and I'm not complaining, because I knew that was the case when I chose to seek a faculty position, but it's just not realistic with the current funding environment for us professors to pay graduate students a lot more.
3. Personnel compensation is the single highest ongoing expense for a research lab (not counting large equipment purchases, which are one-time expenses). Pay students and postdocs more = have fewer postdocs and students = less research gets done.
4. I helped review grad student applications last year. I had to narrow down something like 50 applications to six interview slots. For all that academia pays poorly, it remains highly popular.
It's a hard problem, I guess the answer is: have a lot fewer research labs, so that the surviving ones have a higher chance to get research grants and can afford to pay their people more. That would be bad news for everyone struggling to get a grad student or postdoc or faculty position, but that's the tradeoff.
We usually agree on stuff, so I'll have to vigorously disagree here.
Points 1, 2, and 4 are correct* and it's true that the market rather than the professors set PhD and post-doc salaries. The same is true for Walmart though; if they offer higher salaries someone else will undercut them, and the profit margins in their industry aren't that great anyway. Yet, Walmart faces a level of criticism that universities don't face, and that's what I'm objecting to. Judge sectors by what they actually pay for a given set of skills!
* Point 3 is also correct, and I side with the fewer employees with better salaries here.
It… doesn’t sound like we actually disagree that much? I totally agree with you that academia shouldn’t be exempt from criticism based on “academics are pure and noble, because they don’t work for a profit, while businesspeople are evil and greedy.” Double standards are bad! I was just pointing out that there isn’t an easy solution to the problem.
The problem is that we can't decide what PhD students (and postdocs for that matter) are. Are they employees or trainees? Depends on who you ask and when! I'll make a list of some random thoughts though.
1) The cost on a grant of a PhD student is over 2x what their salary actually is. Universities are screwing us both brother.
2) While stipends and salaries increase, grants remain flat. We are already talking about shrinking our class sizes because we can't afford the same number of students anymore. The people truly suffering are those who never get a chance at a PhD in the first place.
3a) Sorry to be blunt, but most PhD students are barely worth their low salary as it is (and many less than that, but commitments have already been made and we don't like to kick people out). Many of them will get there, but it will take their entire PhD and then some. Training takes forever because science is HARD.
3b) Also, their writing is total shit. I spend as much, if not more, time correcting it as I would writing it myself. This is part of the training process though, so I'm usually happy to do it.
4) The tradeoff cuts both ways. If students want to get paid more, then they will need to exhibit a *much* higher level of professionalism. None of this showing up whenever they feel like it, excuses for missing deadlines, etc. And no more classes - that's on your time, not mine.
I could go on and on, but basically it's a fiction that PhD students are underpaid. If it's not worth your time, just don't bother coming.
"I could go on and on, but basically it's a fiction that PhD students are underpaid. If it's not worth your time, just don't bother coming."
I fully agree on this. However, let's think about the CEO of a company with a reputation of being a bad employer. If she made the exact same (correct) point about low-paid employees of the company that choose to stay and not leave, she would be treated (by both media and politicians) very differently. My main point in this thread is that I view university professors not very differently from the CEO of Walmart.
I also think that it's clear if a PhD is an employee or a trainee. Research and teaching assistants do a specific job, so they are employees. The rest are not.
1) I know, and I have already mentioned that in another comment in this (admittedly long) thread. However, my view is that university professors (and especially tenured professors) have much more power to rectify this than PhDs. Professors in my department weren't really vocal about this.
2) I don't view a PhD as a human right. Fewer PhD slots are fine by me. I don't view not getting the chance to a PhD as "suffering".
3a) You are correct on this, but, again, a PhD is not a human right. Don't employ PhDs that aren't worth their salary.
3b) chatGPT will probably solve this in the not too distant future.
4) A demand for more professionalism is both fine by me, and also, in my view, a net positive for both the PhD and the professor. I said it elsewhere in this thread that now that I have graduated and get paid much more, the whole structure around me enables me to be much more productive compared to my PhD years. I get paid more, I produce more, that's a win-win.
edit: I don't want to imply that I was a great PhD student. Maybe I was the marginal one that wouldn't have been able to get a PhD if standards were higher. In that case, I'd prefer to be told, rather than be allowed to waste time on something I'm not good at.
Let me just add a distinct thought: if we count tuition, then a PhD student is probably paid roughly at the level of a recent BS grad, i.e., around $35-40k salary + $20k tuition = $55-60k. So in that sense, it seems fair.
Why count tuition? If you want to separate the work from the education, then a PhD student should be paying their own tuition. After all, they are working on a PhD instead of at Walmart because they believe it will give them better job prospects later. I could see an argument for converting most of that tuition into salary in the latter half of the program though.
Regarding (1), believe me, we've tried. The universities are not giving up the tuition for grad students anytime soon, let alone the indirects. But to be fair, that's not the students' problem either, except insofar as it means there are fewer of them.
Anyway, it would be very interesting to try to turn a PhD into a more professional job with higher pay. But I think we would have to get a lot more comfortable with reprimanding and even firing low performers. As it is, there's so much leeway and forgiveness built into the model now because they still are treated like students. It would be such a huge cultural shift to move away from this, but maybe it would be better in the long run! The way academic science is done has so many weird history-dependent artifacts that I'm not sure anyone can argue that it's optimal.
Unrelated to the main thrust of this discussion, ChatGPT and it's ilk are unlikely to produce good writing any time soon. I expect if anything LLMs will make mediocre writing even more ubiquitous.
Addendum: in accordance with the proverb "where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit," I acknowledge that I have my own biases, and that it's easy for me to say what I just said. It would have been a lot harder if I were still a PhD student, as I was, uh, a large number of years ago now. I wish you all the best in your studies.
I thought you were in Europe, but your posts sound like you're at a university in the US, am I confusing you with someone else?
I'm frustrated even though I can explain some of these things* just as I would find it normal for low-level Walmart/Amazon employees to be frustrated with their managers even though I know why their situation is the way it is.
Also, I'm European but at a US university, so that's why I might have confused you. I'm also not a PhD student anymore (I tried to change my handle some time ago, but couldn't find the setting and gave up without much trying). Things are going pretty well right now (I really appreciate your wishes though!!) on OPT. Ironically, that contributes to my frustration. I work probably literally half the time for more than four times the salary, AND I produce more, just because I'm at a much more organized environment. I would have graduated much much faster at current levels of productivity.
* I do think that some of the things universities do are indefensible (e.g., how much of research money is redirected by the university to other uses).
You can probably change your Substack handle here: https://substack.com/profile/edit -- Though changing it amidst an active conversation might confuse people.
All of that is fine but have you considered that these exact dynamics affect other industries as well? And if you have, well you’re not the target of the complaint! the targets are the professors who think capitalist corporate private sector is evil for not paying everyone more.
It's a crappy system and no one person or position is to blame for all of it. The better "glass half empty" takes on the business world would conclude the same thing and not consider a business person tainted because they participated.
But on #1 and #2 the professors do make a very comfortable living. Do they make enough that they could raise their serfs out of poverty? Sometimes, yes. You might work in the humanities, if I remember correctly. But I'm more familiar with STEM profs, who very often make huge amounts on side-businesses which they more-or-less force their serfs (sorry, I'll stop with that but of course I mean PhDs / lab techs / etc...) to work on. They could absolutely spread that money around but I've rarely seen it happen unsefifshly.
"very often make huge amounts on side-businesses which they... force their serfs... to work on"
I'm sorry, what? Yes, I'm aware that some STEM professors run spin-off biotech startups in parallel with running their labs (I frankly don't know how they do it; just running your lab is more than a full-time job). But how do they use their "serfs" to run these biotech startups? That would be a major violation of university policy! Students are paid off grants, and each grant is for doing research for the university, not going off and doing for-profit research for a startup!
I'm somewhat certain that I know students at a fancy STEM department of my university (not my department) who were also interns for their professor's company during their studies.
I'm less certain, but I think it's reasonable that once a couple of grad students have tried a couple of different things on something, their professor has a better understanding on what works and what doesn't for similar problems facing the startup.
This is surprisingly common in the sciences and engineering and is somewhat encouraged by universities who want to benefit from university-supported startups.
Long ago, one of my profs left to do a startup he had been working on while a prof, and had had grad students work on but I'm pretty sure the grad students got to go with the successful startup.
I can't speak to how this worked out from the university's standpoint(I simply don't know), but it didn't seem to me like the prof's grad students ended up exploited.
That's my impression from friends at CMU and Caltech. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the funding and staffing works, but one of my friends, for example, is always doing work that feeds into the development and marketing of his Profs company. The way he explains it, it's quite exploitive.
Simple answer to your question. They're tenured, work only part time at their ostensible full-time jobs, and take that free time to make more money on spin-off startups using cheap grad student labor.
If a company wants to hire a grad student, it will cost them over $80k/year (at least at my university). *Maybe* cheaper than fresh BS grad when benefits are factored in, but the work output will be notably lower.
To have a student work on the side for a company is possible, but the university sets up a lot of checks on it. For one, it requires another professor to step in and act as a second advisor to make sure there's no conflict of interest and that the student is still making progress on their thesis.
As far as "spreading the money around", a startup is not a "get rick quick" scheme. The investors have *very* high demands on progress (makes grant reporting look quaint), and every dime goes into growing the company. Of a few colleagues I know who sold their businesses for $100m+, only one actually appears to be rich to me. Maybe the others have their money sitting in a retirement account or something, but I think the reality is that the investors end up getting most of the gains.
Ooh, the poor little babies. They have a guaranteed job with tenure protections, and they aren't always able to monetize that into getting rich. It's all upside for them, and if it falls apart, they just go back to their tenured guaranteed job. The poor little dears.
I wasn't trying to imply they (we) are to be pitied or anything. Just that it's not the case that most founders, let alone most profs in STEM, are raking it in.
I saw the new NIAID payline (9%) and almost cried. I've submitted five proposals this summer, will submit a couple more in the next month, and ideally at least a couple more in November. All of this is not really for myself but so I can hopefully avoid laying anyone off next summer.
I think you have a misunderstanding of how coalitions work. It's a common one, one that was shared by Nick Clegg when he was in a coalition government, so it's completely understandable.
Members of the coalition do not commit not to criticise the coalition's policies. They just commit to vote for them.
The FDP routinely criticise the policies of the Scholz government in Germany. They are part of that government. They often voted for the very policies they are criticising. This isn't seen as hypocritical, they aren't expected to agree with everything done by the coalition they are part of, they are just expected to say that the things they did get were worth the things they opposed.
The only person who has to pretend to support everything done by a coalition government is the head of government. The rest of their party can and will say that these are concessions and may say they are bad policies and will argue over whether they got enough in exchange for the concessions, but the Chancellor or Prime Minister is expected to publicly support his coalition's policies.
It is just false that everyone can criticise what the government does in coalitions. Collective responsibility is a very widely discussed concept in the UK's parliamentary democracy. It is routine for people who have left the government and are asked why they have changed their message on a topic to explain that they haven't changed their view, they just gained the ability to say what they think rather have to explain the government's policy. This is necessary: what every junior minister thinks about every issue is irrelevant; what matters is what government policy is on the matter.
This is true both of multi-party coalitions but also one-party governments where factions still exist but happen to sit within the same party.
Leftist ministers resigning from Biden's cabinet (but retaining their back-bench seats) over Gaza would have been a classic parliamentary-style political kerfuffle for exactly that reason, that would be the method of communicating their dissent.
I’d heard many times is “we won the primary but lost the staffing.”
Biden was elected, but we got a Warren-Sanders administration. Sure there was eventually pushback. But if Biden had been as firm about the border and as accommodating about fossil fuels projects at the beginning as at the end, Harris's lead would be more comfortable. [Not that he ever got etither totally right!]
Yep I'm a never Trumper that might have been willing to vote for Biden or Harris in 2024. But they did not govern in a Bill Clinton centrist style. I will be writing in somebody else. Probably Niki Haley
I know it might be ancient history, and that Matt thinks the normie narrative is wrong, but I don't know how he thinks this article can get away with dodging the spectre of Tim Geithner. Is that not the first name that pops into people's head when they think about the "revolving door" and why they hate it? Such a gigantic amount of our politics still stems from people on both sides being extremely mad about bailouts in 08-09. I get that Matt fully buys the counter-narrative where the problem was lack of stimulus, but that's an econ argument more than a politics one. Pretending the other type of anger isn't still driving events seems like a gigantic blind spot at best.
I don't follow your reference of Tim Geithner with respect to the revolving door. He worked exclusively in NGOs, government, and the NY federal reserve bank, until toping out as Treasury Secretary under Obama. [1] After that he's had an unremarkable career in private equity and likely couldn't get a government job in either party.
His support for bailouts and cooperation with the banks stemmed from his technocratic and institutionalist background. He was certainly not alone; everyone who understood and respected the weight of the crisis similarly supported these actions. Only ignorant morons opposed this, particularly the proto tea party republicans who voted against their own president and treasury secretary's proposal.
Fair to say that Geithner wasn't personally a hedge fund guy until after he left Treasury. He's just the guy who ran the Treasury when it was entirely staffed with hedge fund guys. Of course he wasn't the first, Paulson was the guy who actually worked for Goldman, but Geithner WAS the proverbial revolving door all those people were walking through at the time it pissed everybody off.
Geithner is viewed as completely captured by hedge funds and private equity. It doesn't help that he immediately cashed in upon leaving the Obama administration.
I’ve been convinced that mostly due to how fast moving the crisis was, there probably wasn’t an alternative to bailouts. BUT: there could have been a lot more accountability. I think Obama tried to address this once by saying something like: “when your neighbor’s house is burning down you want to call the fire department to protect your own, not ask if they were smoking in bed”. True, but after you put out the fire you will do an investigation and there will be consequences if the neighbor WAS smoking in bed. We could have conditioned the bailouts with, say bans on executives working in the industry for X period of time and just chose not to. And I think that would have really helped politically.
> We could have conditioned the bailouts with, say bans on executives working in the industry for X period of time and just chose not to. And I think that would have really helped politically.
Many of the executives would've rejected the funding if such conditions were attached. Notably, Paulson and Bernanke wanted every bank to take funds, even those in a relatively strong financial position, so that counterparties wouldn’t interpret some banks as being at higher risk of insolvency. That would've caused depositors (particularly institutions) to withdraw funds from perceived weak banks. So TARP funding was structured on particularly favorable terms. The CEOs recognized the logic of collective action, saw the chance for cheap funding on good terms, and they all agreed.
The collapse of Lehman is insightful to what could’ve happened. Paulson tried to engineer some acquisitions, but CEO Dick Fuld kept pushing acquirers for better terms. He really lived up to his name! He waited too long and eventually only Barclays was still at the table.. Fuld reluctantly agreed to tough terms, but the British government blocked the deal; and for good reasons.
Many more vulnerable banks would’ve gone the way of Lehman if the Federal Gov attempted to push harsh terms for accepting TARP.
Can you elaborate how you think that would play out legally and practically?
"hey company that is struggling, here's a bailout, but we need you to fire everyone at the top who knows who your business is run all at the same time"
Would you not expect them to just rotate so that one company's execs end up at another firm and vice versa?
When an industry is shrinking (which it was between 2009 and 2013 or so) those opportunities to “rotate executives” simply don’t exist. Obama had plenty of opportunity to do some real punitive investigations a few years after the bailouts were done, if he wanted to.
We're not talking about 10s of thousands of people here - or at least I hope not. This is maybe a couple hundred at most. Many/Most of them would have had severance packages built into their contracts. And usually have pretty broad networks to get other opportunities.
As for punitive investigations a few years later - can you give me an example of the law breaking you think was widespread among these executives?
You’re right it couldn’t have been everyone - but maybe some corporate officers. The point isn’t to actually take out that many people but to symbolically “encouragez les outres”. I think you could have done some kind of temporary ban for rehire amongst other SEC regulated companies. Of course they would have just gone to hedge funds or something so it’s not like the punishment would have been all that harsh but you would have shown the public that you were trying to do SOMETHING on the accountability front.
There's nothing the public likes more than public punishment that doesn't actually accomplish anything, so that a year after the punishment is done, all these articles come out about how ineffective the government's actions were.
Why not simplify things and just hand them a card that says "we think you're bad" - signed "the American people."
Elites mostly feel like they did a good job in the great recession response due to the fact a second great depression didn't occur (which was a real possibility). But IMO much of the dysfunctional nature of current developed world politics stems from the failure to get full employment.
Populists on the Left and Right had predating grievances. They used the Great Recession anger to try to get the public to support their pre-existing policies. On the Right this has resulted in renewed xenophobia. On the left it has resulted in a broad turn against the private sector.
There is a lesson for elites here on the Left and Right. If you dislike most of the populists, and I mainly do, you should recognize that prolonged unemployment brings them to power. The power-elite basically gave up on full employment as a policy goal for a decade. And that has resulted in bad public policy.
Thankfully, it appears the elites did learn that lesson. In the US our COVID response was very much we need to get full employment ASAP. And those that disagreed with that mindset were neutralized. Even if the public was angry about inflation, that anger is still way less bad than the simmering resentment of the Great Recession.
As an aside, the bias against Geithner is weird. He was a career civil servant. Heck he was the type of civil servant we should respect the most. He clearly could have made way more money in the private sector but chose public service.
I really think the "it's all about unemployment" hypothesis is overweighted. The problem was that government spending created a real estate bubble that hedge fund guys exploited to get super rich. Then when the housing bubble popped the guys who got rich inflating home prices were the first people to get pulled out of the fire by the feds and instead of home prices actually staying affordable they've been reinflated through a combination of those same shenanigans and new supply constraints. What should have happened is the real estate bubble should have stayed popped and all those guys should have lost their shirts. Similar story in Higher Ed. Massive federally financed bubbles driving the affordability crisis and making rent extractors rich. Throwing money right back at the same people getting fat on these bubbles in the name of "full employment" is not a sustainable response to populist grievance.
To some degree the huge scale of the necessary correction implies a similarly dramatic misallocation of resources in the economy and associated opportunity costs. My argument is not that we should have done nothing to mitigate the harms of the correction. It's that we threw a ton of money into preventing the correction from happening. Capitalism doesn't work when the state will hop in to socialize the loses of vested interests.
Austrian much? The economy is not a morality play.
What actually happened is that the Fed messed up and caused a severe recession which led to a financial crisis. Then it continued to keep money too tight.
It's not about morality, it's about perverse incentives. If the hedge fund guys figure out that the government is prepared to socialize their losses they will not miss an opportunity in the future to shamelessly and ruthlessly exploit that.
I don’t know much about the Washington game, but I do know that no major Biden appointee called on Biden to step aside and no one resigned to pressure him to drop out. That tells me his administration is staffed with apparatchiks who are hunting for the next job and has basically zero men of independent means who can put country first.
The idea that having "independent means" makes one more likely to put the country first is extremely over-baked. It happened to be the primary argument of Republicans for Trump at their convention, and he's never done that once.
It's still a trope without any particular evidence, Rex Tillerman had $325 million and was fired by Trump rather than quitting, for example. It doesn't even hold up in your example Janet Yellen's net worth is $20 million, Blinken's $10 million, they're old and near the end of their careers they weren't holding on to pad their pension.
There was plenty of WH leaking after the debate debacle. That tells me some of them correctly figured their boss had to go, and that providing intel was likely to be an effective way of contributing to the effort to construct a new ticket. Also, Pelosi by all accounts threatened to do it "the hard way" if Biden didn't drop out, and for all we know resignations may have been part of that (or perhaps the 25th amendment). Finally, Kamala Harris was Biden's single most important "appointee" and it seems likely that—while she quite rightly made a show of loyalty in public—she was a key, behind the scenes player.
At the end of the day it took Democrats all of three weeks to prevail upon the president to resign, once they got going. Not bad.
"At the end of the day it took Democrats all of three weeks to prevail upon the president to resign, once they got going. Not bad."
I agree with most of your post, but will respond with we only knew it took three weeks when it hit the public in the debate. Its uncertain how long Biden has been struggling like this and his administration spent the last year threatening to knife any competitors.
Disagree. As a former service member, it's not the job of staff to make public comments about their boss, it's their job to follow all lawful orders. We don't know what was going on behind the scenes with the staff. You could be right and they could all be yes-men but I don't think their lack of public dissent is the best measure.
Matt nearly makes this point in the final paragraph but I think to a certain audience, democrats’ recent hostility to enterprise evinces how much of a facade the “democracy is in the balance” message really is. For the longest time, almost no one in democratic party officialdom was *acting* like they believe this to be the case. Not just in initially nominating an 82 year old nominee but in using the democracy threat to throttle dissent and push a highly doctrinally progressive agenda and browbeat moderates to get in line or else. A party that truly thought the consequences of losing was the end of the republic would make *more* concessions to influential actors in the economy and people who disagreed with its policy agenda, not less!
1. The Hillary's speeches problem. Basically if a politician surrounds themself with very rich people, the opportunities and attempts at bribery will become more common.
2. The policy giveaway problem. One big reason, for instance, that all the things Matt now admits were mistakes in our trade policy happened is because "New Democrats"/DLC types listened too much to rich people who advised them.
The other thing I would say is what I would specifically like more Dems to do is hire people who have working class backgrounds and went to state schools or spent time as an ordinary wage earner. Hiring a bunch of Harvard professors and nonprofit types with Yale degrees gives you just as elite a group of advisors as hiring corporate titans. What you really want to do is look for some people who actually experienced what it meant to not be privileged and elite.
I want to live an America that gives ample and abundant opportunities to working class wage earning workers, but do you seriously want a local SEIU member running important parts of the Treasury or Fed? Top university credentials are not a perfect proxy for capability or intelligence but at a certain point the aversion to them at all becomes a desire against qualified expertise.
1. I absolutely want at least one former union shop steward somewhere in the economic policy apparatus of the federal government. Probably more than one.
2. There are tons of people who went to state schools or HBCU's who understand economics perfectly well. Hiring from Harvard just bakes elite preference into the government, and creates this massive unhealthy competition for Harvard admissions. And it is massively discriminatory against marginalized groups.
So yeah, we should be looking away from the Ivy League when staffing the government.
Why? Dilan clearly isn't proposing that we select a shop steward at random from somewhere, "for representation", or anything like that. Experience as a non-management employee, however, somewhere in an appointee's background (and even if they've later gone on to get an <egads!> Ivy-league degree) seems like it'd be an unambiguous advantage, politically, even if in no other way. (I don't think that'd be the only advantage.)
Yeah, I look at unions with extreme skepticism but as long as it's not
1) a "quota"/"representation" hire
2) combined with _never_ having business people
having that perspective in a group can be valuable for making better decisions, given that a lot of people _do_ belong to unions.
(I would want the person to no _longer_ be in the union, for the same conflict of interest reasons that I don't want a current business owner there - but this is "former union shop steward"
Agree with all you say. I wouldn't care about union or not, either - and I'd vastly prefer to have someone (union or not) recently off the shop / store / restaurant floor than someone who's spent the last twenty years in union leadership. The point is to have someone who thinks through these issues from the point of view of the "little guy", which seems sadly lacking at the moment.
The best trick the Ivy League ever pulled off was convincing people that the range of human accomplishment is greater than it is. Ivy League grads are just not that much smarter or harder working than the rest of us.
Importantly, they absolutely aren't smarter or harder working than people who graduate near the top of a state school or HBCU class. Indeed, given that a lot of people get into the Ivy League despite dubious academic merit because their parents are wealthy, a lot of them are probably dumber and lazier. At that state school or HBCU, you are likely to run into the people with "Ivy League smarts" who had a kid or a husband and couldn't move to Cambridge or New Haven for school. Or had to work to pay tuition and could only attend night classes. Etc. I went to school with a number of these people. Some of them were extremely smart.
We have a system that basically reproduces privilege, generation after generation. And it does it through the Ivy League. The anti-elite party, the Democrats, should be aware of it and should actively be creating disincentives for Ivy League strivers.
At the mid/lower levels, one of the issues today is the simple result of (a) gov systems are very outdated, so (b) every agency is going through modernization projects at every level, but while (c) technology begets capability, (d) with no private sector experience no one in public sector has the right experience to modernize their office. So a lot of the working level detail is handed to outside firms. So you end up with (e) senior consultants having often far more working knowledge of agencies than their own staff, esp if they’re less than 5y into a role
There needs to be a revitalization of the Fed workforce, which was one of Bidens #1 goals in the PMA that no one really talks about. Goal #2 was improving gov CX which has failed miserably due to A-D above. It’s a deeper problem that at the cabinet level.
Having seen how difficult tech overhauls can be even in the private sector, I am sympathetic to how much of a nightmare it must be in government, with all the additional constraints it faces. Maintaining the technological infrastructure of an organisation with $5-6 trillion of expenditures and millions of employees while navigating elections every two years is genuinely an extremely tough problem.
The original sin of gov systems was making everything agency-specific on-prem requirements. Instantly in a world of no interoperability, special snowflake status for every little thing. The best thing we could do would be to elevate the CIO and CDO to cabinet level positions with purview over all civilian agencies.
I find Federal agencies have much more capable staff than States, often more capable project management than in private sector (sometimes they are contractors though as you mention, it's sad that our gov has to hire contractors to work both sides of a project so frequently)
Sure in general I agree but when it comes time to get down to technical detail they are often far worse because they believe they cannot use commercial products, they’re the state dept or USPTO, they must have something special they don’t even really understand
First Slow Boring comment! I worked for a federal agency for 3.5 years then returned to school for an MBA and have been mostly in the private sector since. My long term partner still works at the agency I left. A few anecdotes related to this essay: (1) I had a senior civil service leader tell me they much preferred working for republicans because they brought in leaders with relevant real life (often private sector) experience and trusted the civil servants to do their jobs; (2) apparently working for this administration has been terrible, they’ve added so many levels of policy review to create more channels to say no to the types of projects the administration said they wanted to do in the first place! And as we’re often reminded in these essays - most of these DC civil servants are democrats so it’s the administrations they most agree with that they struggle to work for.
The way democrats sometimes approach regulation and process reminds of the episode of the office here Jim is making a “pro’s and con’s” list when he is running the office. Michael eventually comes in and tells him that no matter what you do someone is going to be mad at you, so just pick what you think is best and drink gin out of your coffee cup.
This is a very good first Slow Boring comment! Welcome!
I’m a longtime Federal employee and I would agree that what you said about Republicans was true in the GHW Bush administration but was lacking both under his son and under Trump. It depends somewhat, of course, on where you’re working. For example, Scott Gottlieb at FDA would be an exception but Democratic FDA commissioners were similar in that way to him.
> trusted the civil servants to do their jobs
I'm utterly confused - didn't the Trump admin. wage a war against the civil service? Are these people talking about Bush?
The trump administration was very different depending on which agency you worked for and the beginning when he hired lots of Bush 1 and 2 people vs the end when he’d replaced them all with barely qualified yes men.
If he was waging war on the civil service, he did a terrible job. The number of civil service workers increased during his presidency.
That's exactly what happened, he waged a war but did a terrible job of it. But this is what happens when you are lazy and all you ever do is yell about things you don't like, and never actually stop playing golf to do something about them.
I call that complaining, not waging war.
He did different things with different agencies. Some he put his cronies.in and gutted. Others he left alone or appointed subordinates that the career people liked.
Which ones do you think he gutted the most?
I can't compare many agencies, but I've heard some talk from EPA employees. Under Biden they have a lot of latitude, and they had a huge budget increase a few years ago (followed by a big cut lately, owing to fighting in the House of Representatives). Trump was a bad time for them, though, with an appointed leader who disagreed with the agency's traditional mission, orders not to talk about climate change, and various political pressures that led to many high-ranking employees quitting their jobs. I don't know if the EPA was one of the worst-off agencies under Trump, but they definitely suffered in his administration.
Contrarian take: That is what SHOULD happen when the administration changes. I expect the military, the border patrol, the IRS and the EPA to follow the direction of the democratically elected leadership and not worry about their "traditional mission". They have a new boss, elected by the people, and they should either follow directions or quit.
Note: this all assumes the orders given and direction is legal.
Feels like that would create a lot of problems as people wouldn't be able to count on stable regulations, enforcement, and services.
https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/the-federal-workforce-and-the-trump-administration/
I found reading this fascinating and it does describe different agencies being impacted differently. Having said that, "the Environmental Protection Agency lost 0.8% of its scientific workforce on average per year." A 3.2% decrease in scientific workforce over a 4 year period doesn't seem that dramatic...?
Thanks for the link.
Depends on the agency.
I too work for a Federal agency and have heard 1) from seniors and 2) does happen (EPA gets a blank check to do whatever though.) One thing that apparently happened in 2018 is that Congress mandated agencies state learning goals and created another form to fill out for various agency actions.
It is dumb.
People who can’t do implementation simple appoint more people that can. Then it just repeats as the new people with lifetime gov experience don’t have that skill set either. Leads to extremely weird rulemaking
Lots of political appointees think they should get say on everything even when it isn’t in their wheelhouse.
Wow, thanks for the info! I'd love to see some reporting on that!
I like businesses. They are fascinating organizations where economics, sociology, communication and engineering come together in a group of people with varied skills, education, age and experience. Each business has its own culture, but one that is fragile and ever-changing. Success requires bright ideas, leadership, teamwork, domain expertise and a little luck. A brilliant person can transform an organization; a bad leader can doom it to failure. Each business is a study in the human experience.
The anti-business trajectory of the Democratic Party has been happening for a while, but has accelerated over the past 12 years. Part of this is due to Donald Trump and the (wholly incorrect) perception that he is what passes for a businessperson. Partly due to the scars of the 2008-2009 recession and slow recovery. And partly due to the general rise of marxist-adjacent thinking among Progressives.
Regardless of the cause, though, the turn against business is a real risk for the Party. Donald Trump won't be around forever. I'm convinced that if the GOP takes a step (well, two steps) toward sanity post Trump, the business people who have defected to the Democrats will return to where they are welcomed.
Another thing the anti-trust and anti- corporation evangelizers need to reckon with is that they were actually in power for four years.
Did your agenda really lower prices for consumers? Obviously, no. We had historic inflation. Of course that’s not entirely their fault, but I think even if you assume they’re right and there are certain anti-competitive businesses that need to be sued. It is absolutely clear that that is not a totally popular agenda or something that will meaningfully lower health care prices, housing, etc.
Oh come on Ben. The antitrust reformers are fighting against decades of terrible precedent in the judiciary that has allowed absurd levels of consolidation in many of our industries. Part of the reason inflation was as bad as it was can be traced to consolidation making supply shocks worse.
Undoing 40 years of terrible policy can't be done in four years. Good lord.
Obviously not blaming Lina Khan for inflation and I understand it takes a while to fight these cases in the court system. But the central point is that those reformers believe their cause should be central to dem economic policy agenda, but it fails to meaningfully address the cost of things Americans care most about.
It's notable that she's made her biggest splash against tech companies, which have minimal effects on inflation.
I guess one exception is real estate commissions and rent price collusion via cooperative databases, but don't those cases predate Biden?
But you're concluding that it doesn't address the cost of things Americans care the most about based on... the fact that the results haven't shown up yet?
We haven't even really seen any meaningful breakups of big firms. Thus far, because of the uphill climb, we're mostly seeing a world where indiscriminate consolidation is being challenged (and, sometimes) prevented. But it's hard to prove a negative.
As an example - I live in Chicago, and here, other than Whole Foods and Walmart, the two dominant grocery chains are owned by Kroger and Albertsons. Kroger and Albertsons are trying to merge. This is a merger that, ten or fifteen years ago, would have sailed through without even any kind of forced divestiture. We know what large grocery chain mergers do to industry wages and consumer prices in areas where the merger effectively eliminates competition (Kroger in particular has a very documented history here). Stores close, with consumers losing options and workers losing jobs. Prices go up. Choices in products get eliminated as store brands consolidate to one generic from several and "efficiencies" result in "streamlined" inventory. Grocery prices are certainly of concern to regular people.
The FTC and DOJ are also now looking at healthcare and veterinary care rollups. I saw an article just the other day in the Atlantic complaining about the massive inflation in vet bills that have happened as a result of PE acquisitions. Antitrust enforcement here would make a very real difference.
But, even if the various parties challenging the Kroger/Albertsons merger, or the PE rollups across industries, succeed at blocking them or forcing meaningful divestiture that somehow works (that would be a first), it's not going to meaningfully show up in your data because the alternative universe where the merger happened won't be the one we're living in. We won't have that example to compare to. And so people like you will continue to say that antitrust enforcement policy is therefore irrelevant to the concerns of everyday Americans.
Current precedent under the Sherman Act etc is clearly a huge hurdle for the "new Brandeis" etc movement, but they don't seem to have a plan to solve it. So far it looks like this:
(1) Complain about antitrust law
(2) Bring cases that try to push the boundaries of antitrust law
(3) Lose those cases, bigly, creating more status quo-favoring precedent
(4) ???
(5) Change antitrust law
If they really want to change antitrust law, they will need legislation, because courts (especially now) generally dislike changing law, especially in areas like antitrust where they tend to assume that (1) Congress can fix it and (2) any changes they make may screw up the economy in ways they don't understand or anticipate.
Why was this 40 years of precedent bad? My understanding of the period is that this has been an extremely positive trend that has saved tens of millions of lives. Do you deny the existence of increasing returns to scale?
Based on the Twitter reaction I believe they’re convinced that they’re not in power. “Real anti corporationism has never been tried”. Which really speaks more to their level of delusion.
This sidesteps that inequality went down, unemployment stayed return to remarkably low levels, and growth was world leading.
Biden administration performance wasn't perfect, and it turns out voters care a lot more about inflation than the do the relationship of their wages to prices.
I think the core argument of the original piece holds, but the administration succeeded in empowering workers and growing the economy. They, and I, just overestimated how popular that would be.
I work for Meta. And despite the fact that our core product offerings are maybe a mixed bag in societal impact, it is impossible not to be impressed by the sheer competence and work ethic of the people there. It is a brute fact that a significant share of the world’s best and brightest are making apps, doing bond deals, and making decks at places like McKinsey. You can either use them or not, but what a waste to not even look.
Government should pay high level bureaucrats more to compete with Meta, McKinsey, etc. on talent!
I think in countries with more competent bureaucracies like France or Japan, 'serving your country at the highest level as a civil servant' is a really high-prestige job in a way that's just unthinkable here in the US. So I doubt it's a question of just money
I think it's arguably prestigious in the US, but only for a handful of very specific and often extremely high-level jobs that are mostly appointed rather than career civil service.
Who is the "Secretary of Transportation"?
vs.
Just one step down, also a senate-confirmed position:
Who is the "Undersecretary of Transportation for Policy". (Until April 2024 it was someone named Carlos Monje)
(I don't mean to impugn Carlos in any way, we just don't know that much about various under-secretaries even though they are positions that are consider high-level enough to require Senate confirmation)
Carlos mostly gets high level jobs because he interned with the right person (Barack obama) in 06/07 and had his career in dem policy launched into the stratosphere by that.
While I do get the sentiment of having higher-competence people in the bureaucracy, I think that there really is something to the idea that you want your best and your brightest out producing stuff, growing the economy, not regulating stuff.
Take all the complaints that people have about smart people going into finance and (very arguably!) not producing anything of value, and apply that to government as well. And law!
The government produces the conditions for growth. Agglomeration economics only work if you can get people to places where they have certainty that everything is going to work well underneath them.
Yup. Singapore figured that out years ago.
My perspective may be considered unconventional, but I respectfully disagree. First, it's important to note that most bureaucrats, particularly those in rank and file positions, earn a decent living when you factor in their pensions.
Secondly, while I may not have held a traditional bureaucratic role, my extensive experience in government has led me to question the necessity of the 'best and brightest' in such positions. Bureaucracies are designed to execute standardized processes with unwavering fidelity, not to harness the potential of the most brilliant minds. This is not a sinister agenda but rather a commitment to ethical and consistent rule application.
When you start changing the rules on institutions in massive and unexpected ways (what brilliant people do---think early Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.), it just messes everything up for the people who adhere to those rules. Being a risk-taking, potentially rule-bending/breaking, brilliant person is not a plus in this environment. What is important is being conscientious, ethical, and consistent.
From my vantage point, the prevalence of 'Great Idea Faries' in our system is a concern. Individuals like Lina Khan, who I would categorize as such, can be problematic in roles like anti-trust, where consistency is critical.
I saw this personally when I worked with Barrack Obama's DOJ Civil Rights Division (edit - I do not mean to imply that I worked for them...I was with an agency they were focusing on and had to work with them in the process). The DOJ wanted to somehow outsource (this is my belief, not a proven fact) improved policing and figure out how to address really tough issues in policing. To accomplish this, they used novel legal theories to re-envision the 1994 Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
They realized that, instead of focusing on police agencies that were out of control and behaving unconstitutionally (which was what was done initially), they could use the authority to create ambiguities that they believed would positively influence police agencies to behave in a way they thought best (again, this is my belief not a proven fact). They could also get agencies to develop solutions to the tough problems that could be employed elsewhere (this statement is more of fact as Jonathan Smith of the DOJ said as much in an interview).
To accomplish this, they went after some agencies that were problematic but also started going after agencies that were functional but had issues (think mental health, racial issues, etc.) to try and get them to "solve" these problems.
Here's a good overview of the issue - https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/11/13/forced-reforms-mixed-results/. Note this is a fairly balanced article from a liberal outlet. It does not say the ideas were wrong (although I think today, we can look back at the lack of success and say that, at a minimum, things got worse after adopting these ideas).
Ultimately, it's crucial to let bureaucrats focus on consistency and incremental change, as they are less likely to do the unintentional harm caused by 'brilliant' bureaucrats. Instead, we should encourage brilliant minds to work on solving health issues or building the economy, where their unconventional approaches can be harnessed positively.
The revolving door creates a huge subsidy to government workers. If we eliminate it, we either need to dramatically increase pay or simply have significantly less qualified people. A great trial lawyer with the Department of Justice makes $100,000 a year - a great trial lawyer at a private firm makes more than a $1,000,000 a year. Great trial lawyers will work at the Department of Justice because it is both prestigious and also they know they can make a lot of money in the private sector later on.
I just don't think it is politically feasible to raise government salaries ten fold.
Honestly would there be ROI there? It’s not clear to me that they wouldn’t just have their work steamrolled by political considerations.
You could consider it a societal failing that the best and brightest are making apps and doing bond deals rather than doing basic science and advising public policy.
That said, the first-order effect of hiring them to advise public policy would be in the right direction.
I don't know the second-order effect. More regulatory capture because interested parties are working in regulation? Less, because former app makers are less conflicted than current ones? More competence in policy because it's being made by people who know the industry? I'd be interested in historical case studies.
This “societal failing” argument drives me crazy.
The dirty secret of basic science is that it’s a lottery: plenty of highly talented scientists go their whole careers without making any meaningful contribution to their discipline. I too work at Meta and my boss is an ex-physicist from a top program. She described her brief stint as a working physicist as “trying to shrink confidence intervals in high energy particle experiments” - I did not get the sense for a second that she was motivated by money to leave physics, but rather the meaninglessness of the work as well as the toxic culture of physics itself (where everyone is just constantly hustling for grant money).
As for “advising about public policy” I’m not sure why we need more people advising about public policy than just implementing it optimally - which is, functionally, what “doing bond deals” constitutes in a capitalist economy.
You make a good point that it’s possible for the structure of academic science to either be poorly structured generally or for things like empirical high energy physics (especially) or really anything requiring grant money (generally) to be more capital- than labor-constrained under current margins, and that someone has to actually “do the work” of capitalism.
TR’s point is that “moving the boundaries of human knowledge forward” is a collective advancement that seems intuitively like a noble use of tremendous intellect, whereas building social media apps…isn’t. The issue with the “financialization” of the economy is a perception that unlike either academic science (or various engineering disciplines like ChemE or Aerospace), certain industries can absorb the best and brightest without producing commensurate societal rewards. Eventually you get into zero- or negative-sum forms of competition like optimizing for sub-millisecond trading strategies (clearly totally divorced from any actual belief in accurate pricing information) and the like.
I can’t tell you what the optimal number of quants or app developer *is* and the burden of proof is generally on those who want to do so, but you don’t have to be a Marxist ideologue to think that, e.g., throwing tremendous mechanical aptitude into the pointless status competition catered to by the Swiss Watch industry is kind of a waste of engineering talent.
agreed. I'm an economist/MBA/CPA and I really don't like most financial innovation. We need to shrink the size of the financial sector back to 1970's levels, and get rid of a lot of that innovation.
Finance should be a boring low margin business.
In good times (which I've taken to mean low-interest-rate environment), companies invest in long-shot R&D projects, such as ESMFold from Meta.
They unceremoniously laid off the whole team last year, but those former employees turned lemons into lemonade: https://www.biopharma-reporter.com/Article/2024/06/27/EvolutionaryScale-raises-142M-and-launches-AI-model-for-protein-discovery
>that the best and brightest are making apps and doing bond deals rather than doing basic science and advising public policy
I think a good chunk of America's elite intellectual talent also went into medicine, FWIW. Some of the the smartest people in this country are now MDs. I'd count that as closer to your goal than 'making apps and doing bond deals'
It would probably be better for the country if a few more of the best and brightest went into medicine, but the AMA has fought hard to cap the number of doctors and make sure residents have the most horrible working conditions imaginable which is driving smart, capable people away.
As someone who works closely with physicians and medical students AND is a patient myself, I will be a bit contrarian and argue that our medical schools/residency programs over-prioritize intellectual firepower and under-prioritize the character/personality traits we need in our doctors. The med schools and residency programs prioritize test scores and grades in (sometimes unnecessary) undergrad basic sciences courses because it's easiest on the admissions end to go off these stats and because having high average MCAT scores in their admits makes them look good. Then the med students with the highest test scores all go into specialties like dermatology and orthopedic surgery instead of primary care and pediatrics because the money is what appeals to them. The students at the selective med school I work at spend inordinate amounts of time on research so they can rack up publications for their residency applications, which I'd argue would be better spent taking care of their mental and physical health and getting adequate sleep so they can be at their best when they're at clinic.
I've never had an encounter with a healthcare provider where I walked away thinking "wow I was so impressed by what a genius they were." I *have* walked away thinking "I was pleasantly surprised that this person listened to me and explained things thoroughly."
I forgot to mention: Successful businesses create wealth and economic prosperity!
I graduated in the top quarter of my class from a top ten law school, and yet I never got an offer from a big firm. My speech impediment probably played a big role. That experience makes me question how much opportunity businesses really create. If you check all the boxes, there will be good opportunities, but relatively few people check all the boxes. Most didn’t go to the best schools or didn’t get excellent grades or have some sort of disability or don’t want to work their fingers to the bone.
I’m willing to defer somewhat to industry because it’s really good at making stuff, but I’m not sure industry is that good at distributing opportunity broadly and deeply.
This lacks perspective: businesses create opportunity in an uneven, path-dependent way. Matching people to positions is an extremely hard problem, and whole industries screw it up plenty often, but if you think businesses aren't "good at distributing opportunity broadly and deeply", then you should step back, look at the big picture, and ask yourself whether your standards are realistic.
Consider the emergence of the tech industry. When I was growing up (let's call it the nineties), being introverted or nonconforming (in any number of directions) imposed severe limitations on your job prospects. Because of the specific, historically-contingent way that division of labor developed in the tech industry, it now provides millions of people that match those descriptions with excellent livelihoods, tens of thousands of people with preposterous wealth, and an additional long tail of less attractive but useful employment.
But it excludes even more people.
Thankfully, there are other industries!
I don't mean that the state of things is _optimal_: hiring heuristics are often very bad and a big firm probably would have been lucky to have you. Arbitrage is a thing. But you've got to consider global manufacturers and strange, tiny passion projects; farmer's co-ops and popup art vendors; shipping companies and publishers; life coaches and corner stores; printer's shops and … I'm sure you get the picture. The failure of a narrow segment of a single industry is a misleading way to assess the social value of businesses as a whole.
I am sorry that you experienced this, tho admittedly as a fellow swimmer of these waters, the structure and organization of a BigLaw firm is fundamentally a lot weirder than the typical Fortune 500 public company.
That’s really surprising to me. I am sorry that happened to you but it is a very unusual experience. Top quartile grads (well, 1L grades actually) from top ten schools usually have no trouble lining up Big Law summer associate jobs.
Were you interviewing only for a smaller market or something?
No, I interviewed for DC, Richmond and Baltimore. I was offered zero summer associateships.
If I hadn’t had the opportunity to start my own practice, I probably would have wound up with some law adjacent job for a big company, but I was rather particular about wanted to be a lawyer.
The legal profession is extremely elitist, especially when it comes to Big Law and tech firms. I went to a small law school in Florida and work for a largish software company as an in house counsel and basically only got the job because the company is headquartered in Europe. They don't care as much about pedigree in the way that US companies and especially tech firms do. Meanwhile, during the my job search I was told numerous times by internal and external recruiters that "we love your experience negotiating complex technology agreements" however since you didn't graduate from a top law school the general counsel won't even look at your resume. Similarly, I have friends who have done M&A for boutique firms for years and won't even get a sniff from Big Law since they didn't graduate from a top 14 school. I get that hiring is an imperfect science but it was still an extremely frustrating experience.
The big businesses are fully staffed. Thus they create opportunity. If there were 2x as many of those big businesses then they would be forced to hire candidates less close to their ideal. (I can't believe the largely-Lefty guy here is lecturing the largely-Righty on the merits of enterprise)
This is profoundly funny. I hope you meant it as such.
Actually executing as Mr. Business is hard and regular people are basically trying to perform it well.
You have to call him by his full name, Mr. James Business. Pat your shoulder and sing to him a little.
First point yes - at the core, businesses are owned by the shareholders and managed by the C-suite and VPs, and loyalty to employees further down is a nice to have. Few actual psychopaths who get off on firing people or making their work lives hell, but the bottom line does come first.
Second point not sure - if co-ops were the best way to compete in the current market environment we'd likely see more. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be worker-friendly changes that would make them more likely to work, though!
Healthy companies recognize that loyalty to employees is just a different way to represent/describe institutional knowledge. Even a well-functioning psychopath would do his or her best to retain effective employees. Meanwhile, a well-functioning saint would still eventually jettison ineffective ones.
I don't think Hellkitty is interested in this, and would gladly live in a world where all firms across the board performed worse, but wealth distribution were more equitable.
I am not sure they have thoroughly thought through just how badly the quality of life decreases in such a world would be, but I could be wrong. Maybe they don't care.
There's more nuance to this question than you (or GP, to be fair) consider. If we measure "quality of life" (as we seem to be) as "GDP increases", then... Yeah, you may be right. That's easy to measure - but you're also in danger of falling into the "metric becomes the target" territory, and losing track of other important things.
"More people have less trouble making rent", or "fewer people fear losing everything if they have a medical emergency" are also quality of life indicators, but aren't exactly easy to measure, so they tend to get get left out of our economic evaluations.
Now, would re-structuring business regulations to encourage co-ops lower GDP? Maybe. Would they improve those more nebulous markers? I dunno! I'd still like to see co-ops be more feasible, because a) lots of people who work in them say they're pretty happy, and lots of people who work for conventional businesses think they'd be more happy in co-ops, and enabling "the pursuit of happiness" is a good thing, and b) I think economies as a whole are more robust if more than one corporate model is viable - even if easily-measured short-term metrics may not go up as quickly.
(Please note that these arguments aren't to do with "wealth distribution". In this context, I think it's another short-term metric that's easy to measure, and so gets more attention than it probably deserves.)
No, I'm making the claim that an economy run entirely by coops will have far worse quality of life (like, communist levels of of QOL), not because "number no go up" but because capitalist markets tend to lead to lots more innovation.
This is mostly because it is the best system that exists in terms of efficiently allocating capital, which generally tends to lead to better outcomes.
"I think economies as a whole are more robust if more than one corporate model is viable - even if easily-measured short-term metrics may not go up as quickly."
Sure. My argument was against the straw man economy that Hellkitty proposed where *all* the corporations are co ops, which is the exact opposite of "more than one corporate model".
we live in a largely free market. People are free to get together and form businesses as co-ops.
"Largely" is doing a lot, there. Corporate structures revolve around Delaware state law, and the Delaware court system. If those make co-ops difficult to form / administer, then (regardless of their other merits) they're at a disadvantage.
To be fair, my "if" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph: I'm not familiar enough with corporate law to have an informed opinion about the hows and wherefores. I'm only pointing out that "well, go ahead and form a co-op then" (which, I recognize, you didn't quite say) is a lazy take.
"Corporate structures revolve around Delaware state law, and the Delaware court system." This is not required. They can incorporate in Vermont if they want!
This could be a nice addendum to the top comment on the Sunday grab bag - in addition to what happens to the GOP if Trump loses again, what cracks/fissures get exposed within the Democratic party?
Without the threat of Trump, will Harris feel any need to actually implement and live up to the policies she is campaigning on? Or will she try to ban fracking anyway?
I think there’s been a faction of the Democratic Party that has used Trump's unpopularity to push their own unpopular ideas, or "expand the Overton Window" as they would frame it. Bit, faced with an actually sane opponent they may have to get more serious.
So, I guess it could go either way. That said as long as fracking is a thing in PA, my guess is that one is closed.
Something interesting is how Harris has mostly avoided the "Trump's threat to democracy" message for the first couple weeks of her successful campaign rollout. I suspect there's a curious thing behind this; does the leftist or the centrist side of the Democratic party benefit more from "Trump is a threat to democracy."
It seems hard to say for sure; if you convince suburban swing voters you're fundamentally more respectable and small-c conservative, you might get away with more on policy they might actually dislike. But if you say Trump is a threat to democracy, that should make it easier to say no to various interest groups with progressive demands. It depends who the reference point is.
At any rate, Harris has talked about it a lot less than Biden. That's interesting and I haven't heard a convincing theory for if that change is here to stay.
I don’t think that Harris ever actually had a strong ideological commitment to banning fracking, and sitting presidents have a solid incentive not to seek a ban (they know the voters will be unhappy if their gas prices and heating bills go up.)
Related to your quote elsewhere:
"To a certain extent, I think this is just a pretty classic example principle-agent problem. When you’re uncertain about a person’s actual motivations, you’ll be more inclined to look for costly signals of commitment"
What signals would voters have from Harris to understand what strong ideological commitments she has that will lead her to follow through or not?
*You could generalize this question beyond Harris, but she seems the most relevant right now.
That’s a reasonable question. I think there are four major useful signals which voters can use to evaluate elected officials:
1: Long-term positioning history. In general, politicians are more likely to actually believe arguments that they’ve embraced over long periods of time.
2: Resource use and policy prioritization in office.
3: Leaked details from private conversations and correspondence.
4: Personal material interests.
In Harris’s specific case, I think the best-evidenced core commitments are a: policy items in the “entire Democratic Party agrees on this” bucket, and b: seeing “punishing malefactors-at-scale through prosecution and litigation” as a key lever for improving society. Overall, though, she seems to be relatively ideologically flexible, in both good (focuses on actionable stuff, willing to change her mind iin the face of new evidence) and bad (opportunistically changing positions when doing so might help her advance) ways.
I think it’s reasonable for voters to have some degree of distrust in Harris in situations where her ambition might conflict with what they want— this is one of my own biggest reservations about her (and also why her bid to win the “progressive” lane in the 2020 primary fell flat.)
To the extent that “ban fracking” was just her scrambling to the deranged center of gravity of the Democratic primary debate in 2019, I don’t expect her to go back to that. The upshot being, I don’t think anyone knows what to actually expect of her, and I find myself bemused that Matt isn’t mad that the press isn’t covering the Harris policy platform (I get why he isn’t in reality).
> I find myself bemused that Matt isn’t mad that the press isn’t covering the Harris policy platform
Yes, this is pretty funny, that after the months of complaining about under-coverage of second Trump administration's policy consequences, he's been mum about Harris just kind of essentially vibing the campaign without even bothering with pro forma policy pages on her website.
It really sucks when you need the Loyal Opposition to be in the same party as the Government.
I'm not sure what you're referring to
This is basically just an issue of progressives making assumptions. They don't seem to understand that there are many people that work in the corporate world that believe in a strong safety net (hello I'm one of them!) and making that safety net stronger is important to us! There are also lots of right wing public high school teachers and sanitation workers. It's not mutually exclusive to hold the position that strengthening Social Security and Medicare is important but it's also important to repeal the Jones Act or make it easier to build energy infrastructure.
Progressives in position of influence seemingly don't understand that one's choice of career or place of employment doesn't perfectly align with their political beliefs!
Yep. This is part of my ongoing series, "how the Democrats can be the 60% party rather than the 50% + 1 party." I keep hearing the take that voters are economics progressive and socially conservative, which I think is taking one data points way too far. The successful triangulators (Bill Clinton) moderated on economics too. The Democrats have an agenda that involves spending, so that moderation isn't going to be "agree to cut taxes for rich people," because then they'll just end up with exploding deficits. What they CAN do is focus on streamlining regulation. This can be accompanied by some anti-big government rhetoric.
Example: https://youtu.be/IvTj9FS29GU?si=j0mpF6dPd8FHPMqF
This is why the left self immolating over omnicausing and the GOP self immolating over fealty to Trump provides an opportunity for Democrats to reframe themselves as pro-growth pro-prosperity.
A tricky thing about Democrats reframing themselves in contrast to leftists is that leftists are within the Democratic tent, and tend to define it for people who consider themselves moderate or conservative. The leftists are loud and attention-grabbing, they are active online, the media likes to report on them, and these are the most conspicuous things about left-of-center American politics. We don't have a separate "left" party, just the Democrats, so the institutional structure is not conducive to public contrasts. If you're not a leftist, the Democrats are the left.
The thing is that much of the “left” wing of the coalition has not been under the tent but rather free-riding. Those that are under the tent have relied on moral suasion to push Democratic policy stances. The loss of moral position and popularity means that this part of the Democratic coalition has been disempowered.
In addition, businesses are one of the few social structures where one can regularly interact with people from across the political spectrum. I wish more people got to have this experience to understand that the other side isn't that scary.
the vast majority of working Americans work for businesses. Anybody who doesn't understand their experience doesn't understand American society.
That said, having respectful and constructive political discussions with co-workers has become much harder over the last ~decade. There always seems to be one person, from whatever side, ranting by repeating half-baked memes, which puts a chill on all political discourse.
Like you, I think that market mechanisms are necessary for making a complex economy work, that commerce is good, and that generalized hostility to business is counterproductive for political parties in mixed-economy countries like ours. (And I also work in the private sector, in finance.)
All that said, I think that you’re probably underplaying the rational case for viewing business leaders with a baseline degree of suspicion. As Adam Smith might note, markets are useful mechanisms for harnessing avarice for pro-social purposes— alchemizing personal vice into societal virtue. Unfortunately, there are plenty of traits that most of us (correctly) regard as pathological that correlate with success in business— including avarice, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. (See evidence like the society-wide studies referenced in this HBR piece— https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-bad-guys-win-at-work ). Donald Trump manifests those traits particularly strongly, but business leaders in general are quite a bit more like him in that particular respect than the general population is. The greater business community, in turn, is highly tolerant of both individual psychopathology (feting man-children like Trump or ghoulish psychopaths like Peter Thiel) and professional misconduct (see: the Chamber of Commerce literally selecting the CEO of a pyramid scheme as its leader.)
Overall, I think that if they want to maintain their prestige, business leaders should be more willing to aggressively “Sister Souljah” their more questionable colleagues and enforce basic behavioral norms.
John - what do you think is the ideal primary accountability mechanism for regulatory agencies?
To caricature somewhat, liberals want to there to be none and conservatives want there to be accountability to the executive.
In the absence of other methods, I agree that accountability to the executive and, indirectly, to citizens through elections is valuable. But I've really struggled in light of the Chevron case to decide what else is best. The current combination of laws, executive direction, public comment on rules, and sometimes litigation is insufficient and has enabled tremendous bloat. But it also isn't a disaster. Shifting accountability to the courts may help, but I can't figure out how it works at scale in practice.
I have a friend who audits manufacturing plants for the EPA. Every opinion he writes has to be pre-vetted with lawyers because most firms sue to avoid findings. In my field of healthcare, suing the FDA is a suicide mission and only to be done if the company's life is on the line.
The left is hypocritical on this issue, but I think there's a deeper disagreement here than opportunistic enforcement of a made-up set of rules.
The left sincerely believes that good governance is a matter of hiring morally upstanding people and rejecting the morally depraved (rather than hiring capable people and rejecting the incapable). A central philosophical tenet on the activist left is that exposure to the profit-seeking motive in the private sector makes people *become* greedy.
To a certain extent, I think this is just a pretty classic example principle-agent problem. When you’re uncertain about a person’s actual motivations, you’ll be more inclined to look for costly signals of commitment— like forgoing income to work in academia or the nonprofit sector. You don’t need those signals quite as much when you have more trust.
I don't know about the non-profit sector, but we academics lie constantly and have extremely impure motives!
Shhh you’re not supposed to talk about that
Much like how many of the moderates who voted for Biden in the Democratic primary were unaware of his motivations!
You partially beat me to it. I can quickly see why Matt teased this as an article that would have a trolly headline on Twitter. And that's because Twitter is filled with tons of academics and nonprofit types who love to yell at him for various grievances.
Among those grievances is a deeply rooted belief that they view that they are working to make the world a better place, and that the way they see this should be done is not spoiled by what they see as selfish human desires. The profit seeking motive is the top one as you say, but there are also ancillary motives, with anti-discrimination and perosnal sacrifice toward environmental protection being very notable, as well as a disdain for anyone seeking power for their own personal gain.
"a trolly headline on Twitter". What does this part mean?
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1822025066978152850
“I've got a real troll headline coming out on Monday — keep your eyes peeled."
oh, never mind, I was reading it like "trolley". I thought it had something to do with the trolley problem or it meant something else entirely. thanks
"Why I changed my mind about mixed-traffic streetcars"
No matter which way you flip the switch, the trolley runs over Sunrise and the staff of Jacobin. Not sure it’s a trolley “problem”.
Let's not let Helikitty set our example for how to talk about political opponents.
I have a long association with the DoD and I think a lot of Biden's mid-level appointments there were a disaster. You could forget about getting a job there unless you were a minority, gay or transgendered, or a female. Nothing wrong with any of those groups as appointees but the ones they chose had no experience in the defense industry, and the taxpayer took the hit for that. How? Because the entrenched career people got a free pass to continue to pursue their own wasteful and inefficient ways of doing business because Biden's cadre just didn't know enough to challenge them in setting policy or even in group meetings. It's not a problem to hire people from various historically underrepresented minorities but they have to know something about where they're going to be effective.
The two Biden DoD appointments I'm most familiar with (senate confirmed but no one that normies would ever have heard of) we're both straight white men. They both had experience in or around the DOD. They both seemed pretty normal in comparison to other folks who've been in these jobs. FWIW, both are more competent than the equivalents that Trump appointed.
Anecdotes aren't data, but your statements don't match my experience.
Just to be clear, The biggest failure in our defense strategy right now is the inability of our defense industrial base to build the stuff the nation has decided it needs. Every ship program is years behind schedule. We have a massive shortage of air-defense missiles.
But when you look at the people at DoD who oversee industry, the most notable thing is that not one has ever worked for an industrial company. They are typically academics or former Hill staffers -- and predictably, Black or Hispanic or Trans or Gay. Those that have ANY experience in the private sector typically have worked for a small "butts in seats" government contractor. None have ever had to deal with public shareholders. Their lack of understanding of how industry really operates is stunning. I spent a lot of my time working with the military officers to help them understand these issues since there is little chance their civilian counterparts will be able to do that.
Just look at the bios of this team here: https://www.businessdefense.gov/leadership/our-leaders.html. Not one White guy, BTW, even though they account for about 1 in 3 Americans of working age.
I looked at the link, and while none of those people are white guys, I didn't see anything quite as bleak as what you're describing.
Here's part of Molly Just's bio, for example:
Prior to leading C3, Ms. Just most recently served as an executive at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investor for the U.S. Intelligence and Defense Communities. In that role, she led In-Q-Tel’s strategic investment portfolio for the National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Air Force, and Space Force. Prior to joining In-Q-Tel, she was a senior management consultant and practice lead at Avascent (now Oliver Wyman) where she specialized in advising private equity firms on mergers and acquisitions in the national security sector and providing growth strategy to the major defense primes. Prior to Avascent, Ms. Just spent three years at the Department of Defense serving as a Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics.
Respectfully disagree. Advising private equity on the acquisition of defense companies may give you a view of the industry at 50,000 feet. What matters for day-to-day operations and policy is the 5,000 feet view. I respectfully submit she lacks that.
I think this is a class issue with Democrats actually, they love the consultant class types that rotate between McKinsey, private equity and VC firms, and whose expertise is being able to quickly gain a superficial understanding of a subject and make good PowerPoint presentations. The people that are trying to optimize production processes or negotiating supply chain deals are too technical and boring and don’t speak the right corporate/academic speak to have access to the halls of power.
What’s especially interesting to me is that this is an issue that the leading companies in the US - namely the tech industry - has learned to go *completely* the opposite direction. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia are at least the ones I’m familiar with and are run by their engineers, from top to bottom. No one would ever consider hiring the McKinsey slide deck brigade for anything other than layoffs, as it would be an admission of incompetence. Leaders are expected to be operators who develop strategic and leadership skills, not the other way around.
And it works, because if you’re doing anything of even mild complexity, any strategic vision that fails to take into account the technical nuances of the subject matter will fail faster than Anthony Scaramucci’s stint in the Trump administration. (This isn’t limited to tech - hospitals tend to be run by MDs; Alon Levy has made these points about rail agencies; etc)
So you are 100% right to make this distinction, and the fact that this isn’t obvious to the median democrat (who still thinks that the divide between private sector and the rest is about who’s greedy and who isn’t) says everything.
You may well be right, Chris.
Yes, but she’s just one person. Someone with her type of experience belongs in this space even if someone else with the type of expertise you describe is also needed.
Yeah, but that's just the point. The other players with the knowledge and experience needed to address the problems I outlined above were lacking making her presence on the team unproductive. Look, any MBA in Finance can advise on M&A. But what's that going to get you in terms of making the procurement process more cost effective and efficient? You need a very specific type of industry experience and expertise to make that happen. That's where the gold is.
I see -- so you think we need leaders who have experience as, what, managers or CEOs of particular defense companies?
Managers, yes, but I wouldn’t say they had to be CEOs. We need nuts and bolts people to do a nuts and bolts job. JMTC…By the way, thanks for a good exchange.
Frankly, the Feds probably aren't paying enough to get the truly talented diverse candidates. Senior business architects and supply chain managers are extremely valuable in private industry.
>Anecdotes aren't data, but your statements don't match my experience.<
Listen pal: some us have paid good money to be able to engage in a Dem-bashing thread in this forum, so take your skepticism about unverified DEI anecdotes and put it where the sun don't shine.
Fair enough.
Honestly that would go a decent way towards explaining how we haven’t managed to restart the defense industrial manufacturing base.
I can't comment on defense, but it's widely known but little-said that the median conservative federal judge is now a significantly better writer and technician than the median liberal one, especially a median liberal Biden appointee. That's due to a combination of an allergy to private-practice lawyers and a policy of very strong diversity preferences in the Biden admin.
Of the people conventional wisdom thought would get promotions to top judiciary jobs in the Biden admin, especially white/Asian men, hardly any got them. People like Vince Chhabria, Gary Feinerman (who quit after being passed over), Jesse Furman, Paul Oetken who were considered locks.
Man I just woke up, saw the headline, and assumed there were some municipalities that had banned revolving doors from apartment buildings and this was making the housing shortage worse.
"You know you have Slow Boring brain when...any figure of speech that comes from a building is construed to decry the lack of housing supply that we suffer from."
Revolving doors are underrated! Except for the automatic ones that never stop slowly turning, those are stressful.
they're great for able-bodied people (like me) but are a huge impediment for all kinds of disabled people
Oh I agree, they should definitely not be the only way to access a building or even the primary one.
I feel like the continually turning ones are better because at least you know they are turning and they move at a predictable rate of speed. Automatic revolving doors that start cold can catch unaware, fast-walking pedestrians, who get partway into the door before it starts moving.
Hot take: all automatic doors should be of the sliding variety.
https://youtu.be/kGjwA0yLCFQ?si=quTQyr8Aplm5FynM
Totally agree with this. One thing we saw in Biden’s administration is that it’s really important to be effective and make good decisions. If inflation had been less severe or if the administration had undertaken a sincere and technocratically sound program of supply-side regulatory reform, voters would have been more pleased with the results. The failure to do this I would propose has to do with Leftist’s fascination with big ideas and revolutionary change—if we need a political revolution then why bother with doing a good job writing regulations? That’s small-potatoes after all.
Agree. And sometimes it’s just getting off your butt and acting. When we had that (fortunately short lived) baby formula shortage, there was no ideological fight- we just needed to get an emergency suspension of import regs of baby formula from places like Europe that we knew were making safe formula. The admin eventually did this but it took way longer than it should have. Don’t know what the failure was here, but this is exactly the kind of thing that “normie” voters care about.
One thing you'll find in a healthy business is a respect for people who just do something about a problem instead of having three meetings about it first. That spirit seems lacking in government sometimes.
Why is inflation lower in the US than the rest of the world while sustaining full employment?
I know it's not really the central point of the piece, but the Democrats' attitude toward student loans has long struck me as very disingenuous. While *forgiving* student loans is very controversial, I expect many Republicans would gladly get on board with a plan to *stop making new* loans. For example, create a type of loan that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, but payment is limited to something like 10% of income for 10 years, and let the free market for loans decide what schools and majors are actually worth it. If the goal is to stop young people from getting into financial ruin, why not take the easy win? To me, it seems like the better explanation is that university administrator and humanities professor positions have become a spoils system for the Left, and goal of loan forgiveness is to shift the burden of this system away from similarly left-leaning university students and on to the general tax paying public.
The better solution (which many on the right support) is to allow debt to be dischargable in bankruptcy under strict conditions (IE they are broke and projected to remain broke, not just a doctor fresh out of med school but with years of earnings in front of them).
BUT, make colleges responsible for a portion of the debt of their students. Now colleges have some skin in the game, and will have incentives to keep costs low and make sure people graduating have marketable skills.
I find it strange that the whole college/student loan tower hasn't fallen down yet. It seems massively unsustainable and wasteful. As you identify, student loans (and the idea of loan forgiveness) are basically a huge handout to universities.
The driver for years has been increasing enrollment via a) population growth and b) increased access/incentives to college attendance.
Both those trends have already ended and are shifting in reverse for the next 2 decades.
It will certainly be interesting.
I would love to see more moves to make jobs degree-optional (or to replace the BA/BS requirement with an AA/AS).
It's the grad student lending in particular that has taken off with not a lot of clear marginal gains for graduates. I blame Pelosi and Bush at least as much as Biden (and I guess Trump in 2020 initial COVID aid lol) on this.
https://reason.com/2024/02/06/the-real-student-loan-crisis/
This seems clearly correct.
Why do you think GOP lawmakers would want to stop making new student loans? Conservative higher ed relies on those resources just as much as the rest of higher ed. And it seems to me most of the scammier online and private schools had more support from GOP lawmakers than Dems. Plus the GOP loves having taxpayer funded hippies as political targets.
This doesn't completely abolish student loans, but the GOP legislative proposal earlier this year would appear to be intended to limit their appeal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2024/01/26/republicans-plan-to-repeal-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-and-relief-programs/
Universities are generally seen as centers of power and prestige that heavily lean leftward. I would think Republicans would be eager to take a hatchet to their budgets, especially if the more left-leaning humanities departments would be hardest hit.
It's important they stress the cost of this status quo on graduate students who have frankly been misled about their career prospects even controlling for all the well-known scorn on tenure track prospects. Price signals matter a lot to people borrowing money, and distorting them changes people's choices a lot too. Ron DeSantis gave a great comment on this when he said last summer that he felt some of these students had been taken for a ride. Broadening that coalition beyond just Fox segments calling everyone at college a left-wing freak can help in getting the job done and fixing this.
I think this is fundamentally a trust -related game theory problem. It’s relatively hard to align incentives for executive branch officials post-hoc, so a hirer looking to achieve a particular set of goals will prioritize identifying goal alignment in their screening process. Avoiding the private sector (and its commensurate rewards) is a very costly signal that you’re genuinely committed to a particular political coalition and its principles, so in cases with enough uncertainty, it will tend to become a filter. Somebody like Ron Klein gets a pass precisely because he’s trusted.
The Republicans managed to solve a similar sort of coordination problem by creating the Federalist Society, which ideologically screens future would-be conservative prosecutors and judges (and forces them to make costly commitment signals) in law school. I wonder if it would be possible to use a similar mechanism to create a credible “I work in the private sector, but I’m a committed social democrat” signal.
(I made a similar point in a reply, but thought this merited top-level discussion.)
I kinda agree with that, actually, if we wanted to build out a bench with people in the industry, i think it's useful to create professional associations that show a commitment to social democratic politics.
Have Democrats had a long history of problems with people working in the private sector joining new administrations and quietly sabotaging the President's goals? I think that only makes sense in the context of factional infighting, and one of the key problems of infighting is that the costs (having less competent staffers) are borne by the coalition, while the benefits (ideological rigidity) are captured by the faction. It's a negative sum game and should be called out as such, as Matt does here.
This makes sense to me but what I don’t understand is why/how that political coalition is in power.
It seems to me like this signals loyalty to a group that compromises a minority of democrats and who lost the last primary, so why is Biden applying this filter?
I’m honestly somewhat confused by this too. Matt has complained about this situation a lot, but I think that he and other moderates should do more introspection about how it happened— it almost certainly reflects some of their faction’s weaknesses and failings. (I’m a bit more left-leaning myself, but I understand that we need to cooperate with the moderates to achieve goals, and I think that would be a lot easier if they were better at actually articulating their preferences etc.)
I have some experience with the question "How much do university professors offer to their direct reports (PhD students and post-docs) per actual hour worked compared to the private sector?", and I'd like to say "Democrats, please don't hire any professor for anything labor-related ever.". Thank you for attending my lecture on "Do as I say, not as I do.".
In other words, they pay very talented and skilled people below minimum wage, and act like academia is some enlightened, noble pursuit while "business" is morally corrupt.
It reminds me of the old Roman aristocracy who looked down on people who conducted trade while they carried on "the noble Roman tradition" of politics and war-making. Or the feudal lords who looked down on merchants and farmers and workers of any kind.
OK, so as a professor, I'm going to defend the honor of my profession.
1. I don't set the pay scales for grad students or postdocs; the university does.
2. The funding environment is brutal. The NIH funds something like 10% of grant submissions on a good day. It's just very, very hard to get research money, and I'm not complaining, because I knew that was the case when I chose to seek a faculty position, but it's just not realistic with the current funding environment for us professors to pay graduate students a lot more.
3. Personnel compensation is the single highest ongoing expense for a research lab (not counting large equipment purchases, which are one-time expenses). Pay students and postdocs more = have fewer postdocs and students = less research gets done.
4. I helped review grad student applications last year. I had to narrow down something like 50 applications to six interview slots. For all that academia pays poorly, it remains highly popular.
It's a hard problem, I guess the answer is: have a lot fewer research labs, so that the surviving ones have a higher chance to get research grants and can afford to pay their people more. That would be bad news for everyone struggling to get a grad student or postdoc or faculty position, but that's the tradeoff.
We usually agree on stuff, so I'll have to vigorously disagree here.
Points 1, 2, and 4 are correct* and it's true that the market rather than the professors set PhD and post-doc salaries. The same is true for Walmart though; if they offer higher salaries someone else will undercut them, and the profit margins in their industry aren't that great anyway. Yet, Walmart faces a level of criticism that universities don't face, and that's what I'm objecting to. Judge sectors by what they actually pay for a given set of skills!
* Point 3 is also correct, and I side with the fewer employees with better salaries here.
It… doesn’t sound like we actually disagree that much? I totally agree with you that academia shouldn’t be exempt from criticism based on “academics are pure and noble, because they don’t work for a profit, while businesspeople are evil and greedy.” Double standards are bad! I was just pointing out that there isn’t an easy solution to the problem.
The problem is that we can't decide what PhD students (and postdocs for that matter) are. Are they employees or trainees? Depends on who you ask and when! I'll make a list of some random thoughts though.
1) The cost on a grant of a PhD student is over 2x what their salary actually is. Universities are screwing us both brother.
2) While stipends and salaries increase, grants remain flat. We are already talking about shrinking our class sizes because we can't afford the same number of students anymore. The people truly suffering are those who never get a chance at a PhD in the first place.
3a) Sorry to be blunt, but most PhD students are barely worth their low salary as it is (and many less than that, but commitments have already been made and we don't like to kick people out). Many of them will get there, but it will take their entire PhD and then some. Training takes forever because science is HARD.
3b) Also, their writing is total shit. I spend as much, if not more, time correcting it as I would writing it myself. This is part of the training process though, so I'm usually happy to do it.
4) The tradeoff cuts both ways. If students want to get paid more, then they will need to exhibit a *much* higher level of professionalism. None of this showing up whenever they feel like it, excuses for missing deadlines, etc. And no more classes - that's on your time, not mine.
I could go on and on, but basically it's a fiction that PhD students are underpaid. If it's not worth your time, just don't bother coming.
"I could go on and on, but basically it's a fiction that PhD students are underpaid. If it's not worth your time, just don't bother coming."
I fully agree on this. However, let's think about the CEO of a company with a reputation of being a bad employer. If she made the exact same (correct) point about low-paid employees of the company that choose to stay and not leave, she would be treated (by both media and politicians) very differently. My main point in this thread is that I view university professors not very differently from the CEO of Walmart.
I also think that it's clear if a PhD is an employee or a trainee. Research and teaching assistants do a specific job, so they are employees. The rest are not.
1) I know, and I have already mentioned that in another comment in this (admittedly long) thread. However, my view is that university professors (and especially tenured professors) have much more power to rectify this than PhDs. Professors in my department weren't really vocal about this.
2) I don't view a PhD as a human right. Fewer PhD slots are fine by me. I don't view not getting the chance to a PhD as "suffering".
3a) You are correct on this, but, again, a PhD is not a human right. Don't employ PhDs that aren't worth their salary.
3b) chatGPT will probably solve this in the not too distant future.
4) A demand for more professionalism is both fine by me, and also, in my view, a net positive for both the PhD and the professor. I said it elsewhere in this thread that now that I have graduated and get paid much more, the whole structure around me enables me to be much more productive compared to my PhD years. I get paid more, I produce more, that's a win-win.
edit: I don't want to imply that I was a great PhD student. Maybe I was the marginal one that wouldn't have been able to get a PhD if standards were higher. In that case, I'd prefer to be told, rather than be allowed to waste time on something I'm not good at.
Let me just add a distinct thought: if we count tuition, then a PhD student is probably paid roughly at the level of a recent BS grad, i.e., around $35-40k salary + $20k tuition = $55-60k. So in that sense, it seems fair.
Why count tuition? If you want to separate the work from the education, then a PhD student should be paying their own tuition. After all, they are working on a PhD instead of at Walmart because they believe it will give them better job prospects later. I could see an argument for converting most of that tuition into salary in the latter half of the program though.
Okay, I get your point better now!
Regarding (1), believe me, we've tried. The universities are not giving up the tuition for grad students anytime soon, let alone the indirects. But to be fair, that's not the students' problem either, except insofar as it means there are fewer of them.
Anyway, it would be very interesting to try to turn a PhD into a more professional job with higher pay. But I think we would have to get a lot more comfortable with reprimanding and even firing low performers. As it is, there's so much leeway and forgiveness built into the model now because they still are treated like students. It would be such a huge cultural shift to move away from this, but maybe it would be better in the long run! The way academic science is done has so many weird history-dependent artifacts that I'm not sure anyone can argue that it's optimal.
Unrelated to the main thrust of this discussion, ChatGPT and it's ilk are unlikely to produce good writing any time soon. I expect if anything LLMs will make mediocre writing even more ubiquitous.
Addendum: in accordance with the proverb "where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit," I acknowledge that I have my own biases, and that it's easy for me to say what I just said. It would have been a lot harder if I were still a PhD student, as I was, uh, a large number of years ago now. I wish you all the best in your studies.
I thought you were in Europe, but your posts sound like you're at a university in the US, am I confusing you with someone else?
I really like the way you phrase it here!
I'm frustrated even though I can explain some of these things* just as I would find it normal for low-level Walmart/Amazon employees to be frustrated with their managers even though I know why their situation is the way it is.
Also, I'm European but at a US university, so that's why I might have confused you. I'm also not a PhD student anymore (I tried to change my handle some time ago, but couldn't find the setting and gave up without much trying). Things are going pretty well right now (I really appreciate your wishes though!!) on OPT. Ironically, that contributes to my frustration. I work probably literally half the time for more than four times the salary, AND I produce more, just because I'm at a much more organized environment. I would have graduated much much faster at current levels of productivity.
* I do think that some of the things universities do are indefensible (e.g., how much of research money is redirected by the university to other uses).
You can probably change your Substack handle here: https://substack.com/profile/edit -- Though changing it amidst an active conversation might confuse people.
All of that is fine but have you considered that these exact dynamics affect other industries as well? And if you have, well you’re not the target of the complaint! the targets are the professors who think capitalist corporate private sector is evil for not paying everyone more.
It's a crappy system and no one person or position is to blame for all of it. The better "glass half empty" takes on the business world would conclude the same thing and not consider a business person tainted because they participated.
But on #1 and #2 the professors do make a very comfortable living. Do they make enough that they could raise their serfs out of poverty? Sometimes, yes. You might work in the humanities, if I remember correctly. But I'm more familiar with STEM profs, who very often make huge amounts on side-businesses which they more-or-less force their serfs (sorry, I'll stop with that but of course I mean PhDs / lab techs / etc...) to work on. They could absolutely spread that money around but I've rarely seen it happen unsefifshly.
No, I don't work in humanities; I'm in STEM.
"very often make huge amounts on side-businesses which they... force their serfs... to work on"
I'm sorry, what? Yes, I'm aware that some STEM professors run spin-off biotech startups in parallel with running their labs (I frankly don't know how they do it; just running your lab is more than a full-time job). But how do they use their "serfs" to run these biotech startups? That would be a major violation of university policy! Students are paid off grants, and each grant is for doing research for the university, not going off and doing for-profit research for a startup!
I'm somewhat certain that I know students at a fancy STEM department of my university (not my department) who were also interns for their professor's company during their studies.
I'm less certain, but I think it's reasonable that once a couple of grad students have tried a couple of different things on something, their professor has a better understanding on what works and what doesn't for similar problems facing the startup.
This is surprisingly common in the sciences and engineering and is somewhat encouraged by universities who want to benefit from university-supported startups.
Long ago, one of my profs left to do a startup he had been working on while a prof, and had had grad students work on but I'm pretty sure the grad students got to go with the successful startup.
I can't speak to how this worked out from the university's standpoint(I simply don't know), but it didn't seem to me like the prof's grad students ended up exploited.
That's my impression from friends at CMU and Caltech. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the funding and staffing works, but one of my friends, for example, is always doing work that feeds into the development and marketing of his Profs company. The way he explains it, it's quite exploitive.
JFC! CMU and Caltech need to crack down on their conflict of interest enforcement, sounds like.
FWIW, I've never done such a thing or witnessed my colleagues do it (doesn't mean it doesn't happen).
Simple answer to your question. They're tenured, work only part time at their ostensible full-time jobs, and take that free time to make more money on spin-off startups using cheap grad student labor.
> using cheap grad student labor.
If a company wants to hire a grad student, it will cost them over $80k/year (at least at my university). *Maybe* cheaper than fresh BS grad when benefits are factored in, but the work output will be notably lower.
To have a student work on the side for a company is possible, but the university sets up a lot of checks on it. For one, it requires another professor to step in and act as a second advisor to make sure there's no conflict of interest and that the student is still making progress on their thesis.
As far as "spreading the money around", a startup is not a "get rick quick" scheme. The investors have *very* high demands on progress (makes grant reporting look quaint), and every dime goes into growing the company. Of a few colleagues I know who sold their businesses for $100m+, only one actually appears to be rich to me. Maybe the others have their money sitting in a retirement account or something, but I think the reality is that the investors end up getting most of the gains.
Ooh, the poor little babies. They have a guaranteed job with tenure protections, and they aren't always able to monetize that into getting rich. It's all upside for them, and if it falls apart, they just go back to their tenured guaranteed job. The poor little dears.
I wasn't trying to imply they (we) are to be pitied or anything. Just that it's not the case that most founders, let alone most profs in STEM, are raking it in.
I saw the new NIAID payline (9%) and almost cried. I've submitted five proposals this summer, will submit a couple more in the next month, and ideally at least a couple more in November. All of this is not really for myself but so I can hopefully avoid laying anyone off next summer.
I think you have a misunderstanding of how coalitions work. It's a common one, one that was shared by Nick Clegg when he was in a coalition government, so it's completely understandable.
Members of the coalition do not commit not to criticise the coalition's policies. They just commit to vote for them.
The FDP routinely criticise the policies of the Scholz government in Germany. They are part of that government. They often voted for the very policies they are criticising. This isn't seen as hypocritical, they aren't expected to agree with everything done by the coalition they are part of, they are just expected to say that the things they did get were worth the things they opposed.
The only person who has to pretend to support everything done by a coalition government is the head of government. The rest of their party can and will say that these are concessions and may say they are bad policies and will argue over whether they got enough in exchange for the concessions, but the Chancellor or Prime Minister is expected to publicly support his coalition's policies.
It is just false that everyone can criticise what the government does in coalitions. Collective responsibility is a very widely discussed concept in the UK's parliamentary democracy. It is routine for people who have left the government and are asked why they have changed their message on a topic to explain that they haven't changed their view, they just gained the ability to say what they think rather have to explain the government's policy. This is necessary: what every junior minister thinks about every issue is irrelevant; what matters is what government policy is on the matter.
This is true both of multi-party coalitions but also one-party governments where factions still exist but happen to sit within the same party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_collective_responsibility
Leftist ministers resigning from Biden's cabinet (but retaining their back-bench seats) over Gaza would have been a classic parliamentary-style political kerfuffle for exactly that reason, that would be the method of communicating their dissent.
I’d heard many times is “we won the primary but lost the staffing.”
Biden was elected, but we got a Warren-Sanders administration. Sure there was eventually pushback. But if Biden had been as firm about the border and as accommodating about fossil fuels projects at the beginning as at the end, Harris's lead would be more comfortable. [Not that he ever got etither totally right!]
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/an-unfair-evaluation-of-bidens-economic
Was there eventually pushback? I still see Biden jumping through hoops to do student loan forgiveness.
Yep I'm a never Trumper that might have been willing to vote for Biden or Harris in 2024. But they did not govern in a Bill Clinton centrist style. I will be writing in somebody else. Probably Niki Haley
I know it might be ancient history, and that Matt thinks the normie narrative is wrong, but I don't know how he thinks this article can get away with dodging the spectre of Tim Geithner. Is that not the first name that pops into people's head when they think about the "revolving door" and why they hate it? Such a gigantic amount of our politics still stems from people on both sides being extremely mad about bailouts in 08-09. I get that Matt fully buys the counter-narrative where the problem was lack of stimulus, but that's an econ argument more than a politics one. Pretending the other type of anger isn't still driving events seems like a gigantic blind spot at best.
I don't follow your reference of Tim Geithner with respect to the revolving door. He worked exclusively in NGOs, government, and the NY federal reserve bank, until toping out as Treasury Secretary under Obama. [1] After that he's had an unremarkable career in private equity and likely couldn't get a government job in either party.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Geithner#Early_career
His support for bailouts and cooperation with the banks stemmed from his technocratic and institutionalist background. He was certainly not alone; everyone who understood and respected the weight of the crisis similarly supported these actions. Only ignorant morons opposed this, particularly the proto tea party republicans who voted against their own president and treasury secretary's proposal.
Fair to say that Geithner wasn't personally a hedge fund guy until after he left Treasury. He's just the guy who ran the Treasury when it was entirely staffed with hedge fund guys. Of course he wasn't the first, Paulson was the guy who actually worked for Goldman, but Geithner WAS the proverbial revolving door all those people were walking through at the time it pissed everybody off.
Geithner is viewed as completely captured by hedge funds and private equity. It doesn't help that he immediately cashed in upon leaving the Obama administration.
People were going to be *much* angrier about what would have happened if the bailouts didn't happen.
I’ve been convinced that mostly due to how fast moving the crisis was, there probably wasn’t an alternative to bailouts. BUT: there could have been a lot more accountability. I think Obama tried to address this once by saying something like: “when your neighbor’s house is burning down you want to call the fire department to protect your own, not ask if they were smoking in bed”. True, but after you put out the fire you will do an investigation and there will be consequences if the neighbor WAS smoking in bed. We could have conditioned the bailouts with, say bans on executives working in the industry for X period of time and just chose not to. And I think that would have really helped politically.
> We could have conditioned the bailouts with, say bans on executives working in the industry for X period of time and just chose not to. And I think that would have really helped politically.
Many of the executives would've rejected the funding if such conditions were attached. Notably, Paulson and Bernanke wanted every bank to take funds, even those in a relatively strong financial position, so that counterparties wouldn’t interpret some banks as being at higher risk of insolvency. That would've caused depositors (particularly institutions) to withdraw funds from perceived weak banks. So TARP funding was structured on particularly favorable terms. The CEOs recognized the logic of collective action, saw the chance for cheap funding on good terms, and they all agreed.
The collapse of Lehman is insightful to what could’ve happened. Paulson tried to engineer some acquisitions, but CEO Dick Fuld kept pushing acquirers for better terms. He really lived up to his name! He waited too long and eventually only Barclays was still at the table.. Fuld reluctantly agreed to tough terms, but the British government blocked the deal; and for good reasons.
Many more vulnerable banks would’ve gone the way of Lehman if the Federal Gov attempted to push harsh terms for accepting TARP.
Can you elaborate how you think that would play out legally and practically?
"hey company that is struggling, here's a bailout, but we need you to fire everyone at the top who knows who your business is run all at the same time"
Would you not expect them to just rotate so that one company's execs end up at another firm and vice versa?
When an industry is shrinking (which it was between 2009 and 2013 or so) those opportunities to “rotate executives” simply don’t exist. Obama had plenty of opportunity to do some real punitive investigations a few years after the bailouts were done, if he wanted to.
We're not talking about 10s of thousands of people here - or at least I hope not. This is maybe a couple hundred at most. Many/Most of them would have had severance packages built into their contracts. And usually have pretty broad networks to get other opportunities.
As for punitive investigations a few years later - can you give me an example of the law breaking you think was widespread among these executives?
I have yet to get an answer to this question and I’ve been asking for almost 15 years.
You’re right it couldn’t have been everyone - but maybe some corporate officers. The point isn’t to actually take out that many people but to symbolically “encouragez les outres”. I think you could have done some kind of temporary ban for rehire amongst other SEC regulated companies. Of course they would have just gone to hedge funds or something so it’s not like the punishment would have been all that harsh but you would have shown the public that you were trying to do SOMETHING on the accountability front.
There's nothing the public likes more than public punishment that doesn't actually accomplish anything, so that a year after the punishment is done, all these articles come out about how ineffective the government's actions were.
Why not simplify things and just hand them a card that says "we think you're bad" - signed "the American people."
Yeah Obama was president for 8 years, I’d say around 2012 or so he could have done some investigations or something.
I agree with you the Great Recession is the dark energy for resurgent populism on the Left and Right.
The literature is clear that entering the workforce during a recession causes permanent harm to your career earnings and life outcomes: https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recession-graduates-long-lasting-effects-unlucky-draw.
It took nearly a decade for full employment to return to the United States:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060. The consequences of not reaching full employment will be felt for a long-time.
Elites mostly feel like they did a good job in the great recession response due to the fact a second great depression didn't occur (which was a real possibility). But IMO much of the dysfunctional nature of current developed world politics stems from the failure to get full employment.
Populists on the Left and Right had predating grievances. They used the Great Recession anger to try to get the public to support their pre-existing policies. On the Right this has resulted in renewed xenophobia. On the left it has resulted in a broad turn against the private sector.
There is a lesson for elites here on the Left and Right. If you dislike most of the populists, and I mainly do, you should recognize that prolonged unemployment brings them to power. The power-elite basically gave up on full employment as a policy goal for a decade. And that has resulted in bad public policy.
Thankfully, it appears the elites did learn that lesson. In the US our COVID response was very much we need to get full employment ASAP. And those that disagreed with that mindset were neutralized. Even if the public was angry about inflation, that anger is still way less bad than the simmering resentment of the Great Recession.
As an aside, the bias against Geithner is weird. He was a career civil servant. Heck he was the type of civil servant we should respect the most. He clearly could have made way more money in the private sector but chose public service.
I really think the "it's all about unemployment" hypothesis is overweighted. The problem was that government spending created a real estate bubble that hedge fund guys exploited to get super rich. Then when the housing bubble popped the guys who got rich inflating home prices were the first people to get pulled out of the fire by the feds and instead of home prices actually staying affordable they've been reinflated through a combination of those same shenanigans and new supply constraints. What should have happened is the real estate bubble should have stayed popped and all those guys should have lost their shirts. Similar story in Higher Ed. Massive federally financed bubbles driving the affordability crisis and making rent extractors rich. Throwing money right back at the same people getting fat on these bubbles in the name of "full employment" is not a sustainable response to populist grievance.
This seems like reckless gambling to me. There is a real possibility your strategy would have resulted in unemployment hitting 14%.
Bailing out everyone with check until inflation hit 5% would have brought the US to full employment quickly. And that is what we should have done.
To some degree the huge scale of the necessary correction implies a similarly dramatic misallocation of resources in the economy and associated opportunity costs. My argument is not that we should have done nothing to mitigate the harms of the correction. It's that we threw a ton of money into preventing the correction from happening. Capitalism doesn't work when the state will hop in to socialize the loses of vested interests.
Austrian much? The economy is not a morality play.
What actually happened is that the Fed messed up and caused a severe recession which led to a financial crisis. Then it continued to keep money too tight.
It's not about morality, it's about perverse incentives. If the hedge fund guys figure out that the government is prepared to socialize their losses they will not miss an opportunity in the future to shamelessly and ruthlessly exploit that.
Many people with industry experience have worked for the executive branch. Some highly effectively, others less so. Just like career public servants.
I don’t know much about the Washington game, but I do know that no major Biden appointee called on Biden to step aside and no one resigned to pressure him to drop out. That tells me his administration is staffed with apparatchiks who are hunting for the next job and has basically zero men of independent means who can put country first.
The idea that having "independent means" makes one more likely to put the country first is extremely over-baked. It happened to be the primary argument of Republicans for Trump at their convention, and he's never done that once.
The median person of independent means is not a sociopath. Trump is.
It's still a trope without any particular evidence, Rex Tillerman had $325 million and was fired by Trump rather than quitting, for example. It doesn't even hold up in your example Janet Yellen's net worth is $20 million, Blinken's $10 million, they're old and near the end of their careers they weren't holding on to pad their pension.
In British politics back in the day, plenty of ministers resigned over principle.
There was plenty of WH leaking after the debate debacle. That tells me some of them correctly figured their boss had to go, and that providing intel was likely to be an effective way of contributing to the effort to construct a new ticket. Also, Pelosi by all accounts threatened to do it "the hard way" if Biden didn't drop out, and for all we know resignations may have been part of that (or perhaps the 25th amendment). Finally, Kamala Harris was Biden's single most important "appointee" and it seems likely that—while she quite rightly made a show of loyalty in public—she was a key, behind the scenes player.
At the end of the day it took Democrats all of three weeks to prevail upon the president to resign, once they got going. Not bad.
"At the end of the day it took Democrats all of three weeks to prevail upon the president to resign, once they got going. Not bad."
I agree with most of your post, but will respond with we only knew it took three weeks when it hit the public in the debate. Its uncertain how long Biden has been struggling like this and his administration spent the last year threatening to knife any competitors.
Pelosi is seeking re-election.
Disagree. As a former service member, it's not the job of staff to make public comments about their boss, it's their job to follow all lawful orders. We don't know what was going on behind the scenes with the staff. You could be right and they could all be yes-men but I don't think their lack of public dissent is the best measure.
Matt nearly makes this point in the final paragraph but I think to a certain audience, democrats’ recent hostility to enterprise evinces how much of a facade the “democracy is in the balance” message really is. For the longest time, almost no one in democratic party officialdom was *acting* like they believe this to be the case. Not just in initially nominating an 82 year old nominee but in using the democracy threat to throttle dissent and push a highly doctrinally progressive agenda and browbeat moderates to get in line or else. A party that truly thought the consequences of losing was the end of the republic would make *more* concessions to influential actors in the economy and people who disagreed with its policy agenda, not less!
In many ways some of the promise of Harris is she seems to come from a different perspective on this matter. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/us/kamala-harris-tech-fundraiser.html
2 problems with Matt's argument:
1. The Hillary's speeches problem. Basically if a politician surrounds themself with very rich people, the opportunities and attempts at bribery will become more common.
2. The policy giveaway problem. One big reason, for instance, that all the things Matt now admits were mistakes in our trade policy happened is because "New Democrats"/DLC types listened too much to rich people who advised them.
The other thing I would say is what I would specifically like more Dems to do is hire people who have working class backgrounds and went to state schools or spent time as an ordinary wage earner. Hiring a bunch of Harvard professors and nonprofit types with Yale degrees gives you just as elite a group of advisors as hiring corporate titans. What you really want to do is look for some people who actually experienced what it meant to not be privileged and elite.
I want to live an America that gives ample and abundant opportunities to working class wage earning workers, but do you seriously want a local SEIU member running important parts of the Treasury or Fed? Top university credentials are not a perfect proxy for capability or intelligence but at a certain point the aversion to them at all becomes a desire against qualified expertise.
1. I absolutely want at least one former union shop steward somewhere in the economic policy apparatus of the federal government. Probably more than one.
2. There are tons of people who went to state schools or HBCU's who understand economics perfectly well. Hiring from Harvard just bakes elite preference into the government, and creates this massive unhealthy competition for Harvard admissions. And it is massively discriminatory against marginalized groups.
So yeah, we should be looking away from the Ivy League when staffing the government.
#1 is a big no for me.
Why? Dilan clearly isn't proposing that we select a shop steward at random from somewhere, "for representation", or anything like that. Experience as a non-management employee, however, somewhere in an appointee's background (and even if they've later gone on to get an <egads!> Ivy-league degree) seems like it'd be an unambiguous advantage, politically, even if in no other way. (I don't think that'd be the only advantage.)
Yeah, I look at unions with extreme skepticism but as long as it's not
1) a "quota"/"representation" hire
2) combined with _never_ having business people
having that perspective in a group can be valuable for making better decisions, given that a lot of people _do_ belong to unions.
(I would want the person to no _longer_ be in the union, for the same conflict of interest reasons that I don't want a current business owner there - but this is "former union shop steward"
Agree with all you say. I wouldn't care about union or not, either - and I'd vastly prefer to have someone (union or not) recently off the shop / store / restaurant floor than someone who's spent the last twenty years in union leadership. The point is to have someone who thinks through these issues from the point of view of the "little guy", which seems sadly lacking at the moment.
The best trick the Ivy League ever pulled off was convincing people that the range of human accomplishment is greater than it is. Ivy League grads are just not that much smarter or harder working than the rest of us.
Importantly, they absolutely aren't smarter or harder working than people who graduate near the top of a state school or HBCU class. Indeed, given that a lot of people get into the Ivy League despite dubious academic merit because their parents are wealthy, a lot of them are probably dumber and lazier. At that state school or HBCU, you are likely to run into the people with "Ivy League smarts" who had a kid or a husband and couldn't move to Cambridge or New Haven for school. Or had to work to pay tuition and could only attend night classes. Etc. I went to school with a number of these people. Some of them were extremely smart.
We have a system that basically reproduces privilege, generation after generation. And it does it through the Ivy League. The anti-elite party, the Democrats, should be aware of it and should actively be creating disincentives for Ivy League strivers.
At the mid/lower levels, one of the issues today is the simple result of (a) gov systems are very outdated, so (b) every agency is going through modernization projects at every level, but while (c) technology begets capability, (d) with no private sector experience no one in public sector has the right experience to modernize their office. So a lot of the working level detail is handed to outside firms. So you end up with (e) senior consultants having often far more working knowledge of agencies than their own staff, esp if they’re less than 5y into a role
There needs to be a revitalization of the Fed workforce, which was one of Bidens #1 goals in the PMA that no one really talks about. Goal #2 was improving gov CX which has failed miserably due to A-D above. It’s a deeper problem that at the cabinet level.
Having seen how difficult tech overhauls can be even in the private sector, I am sympathetic to how much of a nightmare it must be in government, with all the additional constraints it faces. Maintaining the technological infrastructure of an organisation with $5-6 trillion of expenditures and millions of employees while navigating elections every two years is genuinely an extremely tough problem.
The original sin of gov systems was making everything agency-specific on-prem requirements. Instantly in a world of no interoperability, special snowflake status for every little thing. The best thing we could do would be to elevate the CIO and CDO to cabinet level positions with purview over all civilian agencies.
I find Federal agencies have much more capable staff than States, often more capable project management than in private sector (sometimes they are contractors though as you mention, it's sad that our gov has to hire contractors to work both sides of a project so frequently)
Sure in general I agree but when it comes time to get down to technical detail they are often far worse because they believe they cannot use commercial products, they’re the state dept or USPTO, they must have something special they don’t even really understand
I agree they should be hitting up the GSA more often, and stop looking for all in one solutions so frequently.