Friday grab bag: The war on complexity

Plus, the child care cliff that wasn't and more context on Russia in Africa

My recommended reading of the week is Rachel Cohen’s article looking back at warnings about an apocalyptic “child care cliff” that never came to pass, along with Jerusalem Demsas’ 2022 piece that touches on the wave of post-Covid evictions that never materialized. But Cohen’s piece cuts closer to the bone in terms of the extent to which these bad predictions are somewhat deliberate.

It’s not exactly that people are lying, but they are taking possible bad outcomes and willfully exaggerating how likely they are as an advocacy strategy. And few people are kicking the tires on the quality of the underlying analysis.

I think that this is based, at root, in a significant misperception among progressive funders that they have actually worked out all the answers to all the substantive questions in the world, and thus the only real challenge is how to obtain the requisite political power to implement them. When I was in Chicago several weeks ago, I talked to someone who is working on climate economics issues, and she expressed to me frustration with her work because (according to her) “we know what we need to do” and nailing down the exact parameters isn’t as important as figuring out the marketing and politics. And I just don’t think that this is actually true for child care or for climate change. In the case of climate, that’s mostly because the technical questions are extraordinarily difficult.