The problem we have is that we have, questionably for good reason, nearly eliminated the consequences for not working hard. It's hard for teachers to fail a student who refuses to do their homework. It's hard for managers to fire poor performers. Ninth-place trophies, etc., etc. We value graduation rates and low unemployment rather than incentivizing hard work. If we want hard workers to work hard, we need to let failing workers fail. Just like sports.
Matt, I wish the best for your son and I hope he achieves whatever academic and/or professional goals he aspires to. But you should also make sure he is comfortable changing a tire or assembling a table from the IKEA kit.
> What’s bad, it seems to me, is that we’ve advanced the aspiration to educate more people primarily by watering down the product.
I have seen this in so many different contexts. It's a lazy way of implementing "expanded access". This can be motivated by many things, but equity and inclusion are big ones. Then the opponents of those concepts point to obvious reductions in standards to support their opposition. This is really a shame, because it's not *necessary* to reduce standards if you want to reduce bias/bigotry. In fact, it's just another form of it: the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I would feel better about AI regulation if it didn't feel like the people demanding it seem completely unaware of the way their regulation risks both limiting our access to free and open speech -- like it or not the next generation will likely get most of their info from AI and if we impose liability on AI when it gets blamed for suicide or bad choices we risk losing truly free access to information -- as well as the risk of creating huge barriers that prevent anyone but the biggest companies from developing AI.
I would support smart AI regulation but so far I don't think we even really know what that will mean and the ideas I've seen so far for regulation look less measured than vibe based outlash.
Pretty substantial, I'd think. Nixon would presumably remain a Senator until at least 1956 in that scenario and, given the combination of his lower national profile, more limited financial resources, and general cultural attitudes about needing to "earn" a shot at the presidency, he probably wouldn't try to run for President any earlier than 1964, at which point I don't know how well he'd do in the primaries. (As a sitting VP, Nixon faced no organized opposition in 1960. In 1968, Nixon won a large majority of delegates, but Reagan actually got slightly more votes in the primaries.)
Would I be wrong to assume that most commenters here did not attend a liberal arts college? I get the sense that people think there is a path and since it doesn’t work for everyone maybe it shouldn’t be there?
In regard to “hard work”. I didn’t really have to work hard until college (although it wouldn’t have been a bad thing in high school), and one of the motivations I had for transferring from a state school to a liberal arts college was that I wasn’t challenged and I sort of wanted to work harder.
Maybe the “secret sauce” here is that you should find something that you’re motivated to do rather than having your parents tell you to do.
On the hard work front, I think the next Democratic candidate would do well to talk a lot about ordinary middle-class values like hard work, honesty, playing by the rules, etc. Trump has really stood for a kind of anti-virtue politics that I think even many of his supporters will be hungry to leave behind.
The number is unknowable because you would really be talking about changing the entire system, 18% of our entire economy.
Just to understand one of the first order changes. Providers who accept Medicaid, lose money on virtually every Medicaid patient. They make it up, just to break even, by charging more to other patients, those privately insured along with other government payors like Medicare and the VA.
As soon as you make everyone eligible, people with other coverage will lose that coverage and the system grinds to a halt.
The sheer size, along with the the tapestry of payors, is much of what makes radical changes like moving to a single payor system similar to Canada or Britain, probably unworkable. Because we cannot predict what would happen or how to manage the change. No one in the history of the world has ever tried to make that large a change in any system, and anyone who thinks they know how it will turn out is thinking magically.
Yeah, if providers can only take medicaid patients by cross-subsidizing them from other patients, then medicaid for all isn't going to scale too well....
As a follow-up, what would be the political economy of reducing some of America's healthcare costs? If we have fewer payers and less individual negotiation, for instance, that would save a lot of time and money spent by providers and insurers arguing over coverage -- that's touted as an advantage of single-payer, but can it be done in a largely privatized system?
A public option like medicaid-for-all might also increase the competitive pressure on private insurance -- and it would mitigate one of the problems American providers sometimes face, where they generate bills but no one pays (insurance denies it, patient can't pay), where providers rely on cross-subsidy from other patients?
My intuition is that as long as there are providers billing someone for medical services, there's going to be some kind of gatekeeping by the payers and some attempt to work out how to optimize for getting paid by the payees. I'm sure that can be more/less efficient, but someone needs to make sure that the M4A office isn't sending money to providers who aren't doing anything, or paying for unnecessary services, or paying padded bills. And someone in the provider's office is going to need to make sure that the M4A office isn't shorting them for what they did provide, and will probably be trying to work out how to make sure to code everything so they get paid as much as possible.
I suspect opaque cross-subsidies and perverse incentives are all over the place in medicine and drive a lot of high medical costs, but this is low-confidence--I'm an outsider making at best an educated guess.
"I’m sure there was a time in the past when the de-nationalization of the major national soccer leagues was considered a big deal" Resident soccer nut here and timely question/answer given the World Cup (an attendant politics). I can tell you that it was quite a big deal when foreign players started coming to EPL and while it's not quite as controversial was maybe it was 10-20 years ago (will get to why), it absolutely is a topic of discussion and VERY relevant to current UK politics.
Part of the issue was just pure to be frank bigotry. "These foreigns and their 'fancy dan' ways don't know 'our' game" was common complaint (maybe not this exact phrasing but something pretty close). "These foreign players are cheaters, look how much they dive unlike the 'good' English players"* and "these foreign players are taking spots away from good English players"**.
The last one is probably key here. Because as most of you know, International tournaments are more important to soccer than it is basketball. And the way teams perform is very tied into national identity with a lot of countries but especially England given they invented the sport and the modern rules. And there is a lot of angst and quite frankly psychosis around the fact that England have basically been one tier below the elite level teams since 1970 (and realistically since World War II and very specifically November 25th, 1953), with the pretty fair criticism that England has been sort one generation behind the times consistently vis a vis other elite countries. So add it up, a toxic stew for a lot of backlash to the influx of foreign players. Especially from post 2006 to pre 2018 when the English national team was pretty mediocre and di pretty poorly in tournaments (sometimes embarrassingly so like the 2016 loss to Iceland which is pretty much the nadir)*.
But today? Team has had it's best run since 1966. Players are more technically gifted then previous generations and while they are probably still a bit below top Spanish and French players in key aspects, the gap has narrowed. And reason is influx of immigrant labor wasn't just players but coaches. Most important was Arsene Wenger, but later coaches like Jose Mourinho, Rafa Benitiz and current times Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp. The importance of which is they didn't just update tactics so that EPL is basically no longer behind the times. But changed how youth coaching is done. Which is why current crop of players are more technically gifted. Also, not a mistake a disproportionate number of players on WC roster are named "Saka", "Eze", "Madueke", "Mainoo" and "Guehi" (my pick for England's second most important player in determining how well they do but whole other convo).
* When you see the slew of anti soccer articles that almost always cite "diving" for why the sport supposedly sucks, just keep in mind this isn't really an American thing but the downstream consequences of first mover advantage of the British Empire. What these American whiners are actually doing is echoing old school Victorian ethos of "fair play" and "sportsmanship". Not sure it's really appreciated how much Victorian ideals of sport govern American sporting landscape last 125 years (see amateurism and college sports).
** The reason this complaint has more validity with soccer (or NBA) then most other walks of life is the "lump of labor" fallacy isn't actually a fallacy with top level sports. The number of teams in Premier League is fixed so there really is only so many starting spots and bench positions to go around. Little bit more complicated with NBA since there's possibility of expansion, but in general the same dynamic holds.
The funny thing is that a whole lot of the diving and time-wasting could be ended in two seconds if IFAB, which remains dominated by the Victorian ethos of the UK itself, would just deign to recognize that we have developed the technology of the stopwatch.
One other comment on DIY stuff: Knowing how to do some relatively simple DIY stuff makes it easier to understand what the pro you hired to fix a problem is doing, whether he's competent/doing a good job, if he's lying to you, etc. (I also very much recommend sitting and watching the guy work and asking questions, but obviously that isn't consistent with hiring someone to fix stuff for you so you can be working and making more money.)
Also, being able to do some basic repair on your own often means the difference between fixing the problem now and living with it until the plumber/electrician/handyman can get there.
That worked once for me. In our first house, DH and I had laboriously and painfully replaced the garbage disposal. We were young and strong then. I had to try to hold the blasted thing up while DH attached it. It involved both reaching my arms forward and then lifting up. It was hard! There was a lot of swearing.
10 years later we're in our new house and we have way more disposable income. Garbage disposal needs to be replaced. I called the big plumbing company. I'm going to use inflation-adjusted numbers here.
Guy says, "We can do it for $1,200."
Me: "WTF? That's a $150 part RETAIL, which you are surely not paying."
Guy: (Shrugs in a slightly embarrassed manner)
Guy: "If you join our membership club and pay something stupid annually, I can reduce that by 10%."
Me: "Thank you so much for stopping by! Sorry to waste your valuable time, and mine."
Then I found a local handyman guy who did the whole thing for about $250, including the part. I was happy to pay him $100 to do the literal heavy lifting.
Looking at the picture of Ike gracing the top of today's post, it wouldn't surprise me if the oldest woman in the photo was, like, 35 years old.
People looked different back then. I sometimes look at pictures of my late father and wonder how long it will be until I look as adult and then realize that I'm twenty years older than he was in the photo.
It took a while for me to realize that my conception of myself about height wasn’t accurate. That is, if I imagined myself next to someone “adult” I would be looking up at them when the reality was I would more likely be looking down at them. (I’m 5’11” almost 6’.)
Look, I’ve seen all the ‘90s high school movies and they make it perfectly clear that ska was the true cultural force of the ‘90s
The problem we have is that we have, questionably for good reason, nearly eliminated the consequences for not working hard. It's hard for teachers to fail a student who refuses to do their homework. It's hard for managers to fire poor performers. Ninth-place trophies, etc., etc. We value graduation rates and low unemployment rather than incentivizing hard work. If we want hard workers to work hard, we need to let failing workers fail. Just like sports.
Navel gazing is bad, but self reflection is good. If you feel like you do a good job of looking inward and knowing yourself then fair enough.
But that's definitely not true for a *lot* of people. Having someone to guide them through making sense of their inner self is valuable for them.
Meeting with a therapist for an hour once a month isn't going to turn anyone to solipsism.
Combining two of the topics…
Matt, I wish the best for your son and I hope he achieves whatever academic and/or professional goals he aspires to. But you should also make sure he is comfortable changing a tire or assembling a table from the IKEA kit.
> What’s bad, it seems to me, is that we’ve advanced the aspiration to educate more people primarily by watering down the product.
I have seen this in so many different contexts. It's a lazy way of implementing "expanded access". This can be motivated by many things, but equity and inclusion are big ones. Then the opponents of those concepts point to obvious reductions in standards to support their opposition. This is really a shame, because it's not *necessary* to reduce standards if you want to reduce bias/bigotry. In fact, it's just another form of it: the soft bigotry of low expectations.
You gotta love how the solution to America's heath care situation is:
> Just tweets and press conferences and encouraging people [i.e., pundits (substackers?)] to write articles.
>Johnny B. Goode,” which I probably know primarily from “Back to the Future,”
I have lost all respect for Matt. There is a reason that this joke works: https://youtube.com/shorts/bmZrGx1sjuk?is=bKflMR_m2iZ8due7
I would feel better about AI regulation if it didn't feel like the people demanding it seem completely unaware of the way their regulation risks both limiting our access to free and open speech -- like it or not the next generation will likely get most of their info from AI and if we impose liability on AI when it gets blamed for suicide or bad choices we risk losing truly free access to information -- as well as the risk of creating huge barriers that prevent anyone but the biggest companies from developing AI.
I would support smart AI regulation but so far I don't think we even really know what that will mean and the ideas I've seen so far for regulation look less measured than vibe based outlash.
Make th ebig idea reduceing the deficit to no more than the sum of (increaed) public investment (activities with NPV>0)
Any change in the Nixon trajectory if he's not on the Ike ticket?
Pretty substantial, I'd think. Nixon would presumably remain a Senator until at least 1956 in that scenario and, given the combination of his lower national profile, more limited financial resources, and general cultural attitudes about needing to "earn" a shot at the presidency, he probably wouldn't try to run for President any earlier than 1964, at which point I don't know how well he'd do in the primaries. (As a sitting VP, Nixon faced no organized opposition in 1960. In 1968, Nixon won a large majority of delegates, but Reagan actually got slightly more votes in the primaries.)
Would I be wrong to assume that most commenters here did not attend a liberal arts college? I get the sense that people think there is a path and since it doesn’t work for everyone maybe it shouldn’t be there?
In regard to “hard work”. I didn’t really have to work hard until college (although it wouldn’t have been a bad thing in high school), and one of the motivations I had for transferring from a state school to a liberal arts college was that I wasn’t challenged and I sort of wanted to work harder.
Maybe the “secret sauce” here is that you should find something that you’re motivated to do rather than having your parents tell you to do.
On the hard work front, I think the next Democratic candidate would do well to talk a lot about ordinary middle-class values like hard work, honesty, playing by the rules, etc. Trump has really stood for a kind of anti-virtue politics that I think even many of his supporters will be hungry to leave behind.
For healthcare, how much would it cost to just extend medicaid eligibility to, say, every US citizen or every citizen and legal resident?
The number is unknowable because you would really be talking about changing the entire system, 18% of our entire economy.
Just to understand one of the first order changes. Providers who accept Medicaid, lose money on virtually every Medicaid patient. They make it up, just to break even, by charging more to other patients, those privately insured along with other government payors like Medicare and the VA.
As soon as you make everyone eligible, people with other coverage will lose that coverage and the system grinds to a halt.
The sheer size, along with the the tapestry of payors, is much of what makes radical changes like moving to a single payor system similar to Canada or Britain, probably unworkable. Because we cannot predict what would happen or how to manage the change. No one in the history of the world has ever tried to make that large a change in any system, and anyone who thinks they know how it will turn out is thinking magically.
Yeah, if providers can only take medicaid patients by cross-subsidizing them from other patients, then medicaid for all isn't going to scale too well....
As a follow-up, what would be the political economy of reducing some of America's healthcare costs? If we have fewer payers and less individual negotiation, for instance, that would save a lot of time and money spent by providers and insurers arguing over coverage -- that's touted as an advantage of single-payer, but can it be done in a largely privatized system?
A public option like medicaid-for-all might also increase the competitive pressure on private insurance -- and it would mitigate one of the problems American providers sometimes face, where they generate bills but no one pays (insurance denies it, patient can't pay), where providers rely on cross-subsidy from other patients?
My intuition is that as long as there are providers billing someone for medical services, there's going to be some kind of gatekeeping by the payers and some attempt to work out how to optimize for getting paid by the payees. I'm sure that can be more/less efficient, but someone needs to make sure that the M4A office isn't sending money to providers who aren't doing anything, or paying for unnecessary services, or paying padded bills. And someone in the provider's office is going to need to make sure that the M4A office isn't shorting them for what they did provide, and will probably be trying to work out how to make sure to code everything so they get paid as much as possible.
I suspect opaque cross-subsidies and perverse incentives are all over the place in medicine and drive a lot of high medical costs, but this is low-confidence--I'm an outsider making at best an educated guess.
"I’m sure there was a time in the past when the de-nationalization of the major national soccer leagues was considered a big deal" Resident soccer nut here and timely question/answer given the World Cup (an attendant politics). I can tell you that it was quite a big deal when foreign players started coming to EPL and while it's not quite as controversial was maybe it was 10-20 years ago (will get to why), it absolutely is a topic of discussion and VERY relevant to current UK politics.
Part of the issue was just pure to be frank bigotry. "These foreigns and their 'fancy dan' ways don't know 'our' game" was common complaint (maybe not this exact phrasing but something pretty close). "These foreign players are cheaters, look how much they dive unlike the 'good' English players"* and "these foreign players are taking spots away from good English players"**.
The last one is probably key here. Because as most of you know, International tournaments are more important to soccer than it is basketball. And the way teams perform is very tied into national identity with a lot of countries but especially England given they invented the sport and the modern rules. And there is a lot of angst and quite frankly psychosis around the fact that England have basically been one tier below the elite level teams since 1970 (and realistically since World War II and very specifically November 25th, 1953), with the pretty fair criticism that England has been sort one generation behind the times consistently vis a vis other elite countries. So add it up, a toxic stew for a lot of backlash to the influx of foreign players. Especially from post 2006 to pre 2018 when the English national team was pretty mediocre and di pretty poorly in tournaments (sometimes embarrassingly so like the 2016 loss to Iceland which is pretty much the nadir)*.
But today? Team has had it's best run since 1966. Players are more technically gifted then previous generations and while they are probably still a bit below top Spanish and French players in key aspects, the gap has narrowed. And reason is influx of immigrant labor wasn't just players but coaches. Most important was Arsene Wenger, but later coaches like Jose Mourinho, Rafa Benitiz and current times Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp. The importance of which is they didn't just update tactics so that EPL is basically no longer behind the times. But changed how youth coaching is done. Which is why current crop of players are more technically gifted. Also, not a mistake a disproportionate number of players on WC roster are named "Saka", "Eze", "Madueke", "Mainoo" and "Guehi" (my pick for England's second most important player in determining how well they do but whole other convo).
* When you see the slew of anti soccer articles that almost always cite "diving" for why the sport supposedly sucks, just keep in mind this isn't really an American thing but the downstream consequences of first mover advantage of the British Empire. What these American whiners are actually doing is echoing old school Victorian ethos of "fair play" and "sportsmanship". Not sure it's really appreciated how much Victorian ideals of sport govern American sporting landscape last 125 years (see amateurism and college sports).
** The reason this complaint has more validity with soccer (or NBA) then most other walks of life is the "lump of labor" fallacy isn't actually a fallacy with top level sports. The number of teams in Premier League is fixed so there really is only so many starting spots and bench positions to go around. Little bit more complicated with NBA since there's possibility of expansion, but in general the same dynamic holds.
The funny thing is that a whole lot of the diving and time-wasting could be ended in two seconds if IFAB, which remains dominated by the Victorian ethos of the UK itself, would just deign to recognize that we have developed the technology of the stopwatch.
One other comment on DIY stuff: Knowing how to do some relatively simple DIY stuff makes it easier to understand what the pro you hired to fix a problem is doing, whether he's competent/doing a good job, if he's lying to you, etc. (I also very much recommend sitting and watching the guy work and asking questions, but obviously that isn't consistent with hiring someone to fix stuff for you so you can be working and making more money.)
Also, being able to do some basic repair on your own often means the difference between fixing the problem now and living with it until the plumber/electrician/handyman can get there.
That worked once for me. In our first house, DH and I had laboriously and painfully replaced the garbage disposal. We were young and strong then. I had to try to hold the blasted thing up while DH attached it. It involved both reaching my arms forward and then lifting up. It was hard! There was a lot of swearing.
10 years later we're in our new house and we have way more disposable income. Garbage disposal needs to be replaced. I called the big plumbing company. I'm going to use inflation-adjusted numbers here.
Guy says, "We can do it for $1,200."
Me: "WTF? That's a $150 part RETAIL, which you are surely not paying."
Guy: (Shrugs in a slightly embarrassed manner)
Guy: "If you join our membership club and pay something stupid annually, I can reduce that by 10%."
Me: "Thank you so much for stopping by! Sorry to waste your valuable time, and mine."
Then I found a local handyman guy who did the whole thing for about $250, including the part. I was happy to pay him $100 to do the literal heavy lifting.
Looking at the picture of Ike gracing the top of today's post, it wouldn't surprise me if the oldest woman in the photo was, like, 35 years old.
People looked different back then. I sometimes look at pictures of my late father and wonder how long it will be until I look as adult and then realize that I'm twenty years older than he was in the photo.
It took a while for me to realize that my conception of myself about height wasn’t accurate. That is, if I imagined myself next to someone “adult” I would be looking up at them when the reality was I would more likely be looking down at them. (I’m 5’11” almost 6’.)
Well, I'm 5'9" so I'll bow to your superior maturity. :-)