I completely agree with Matt’s answer on the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden was a complete disaster as President but this is one thing that he got right. The real culprits are Bush and Obama for trying to do nation building in Afghanistan, which was a complete failure. Trump to some extent but he should get some credit for making a deal with Taliban regarding the withdrawal, even though he timed it to take place after his reelection because he has some good instincts on these issues compared to the so called foreign policy “experts” who’ve spent their entire lives in DC. People like David Brooks should be ashamed of themselves for being wrong for so long and still not being able to accept it. Andrew Sullivan is one of the few who accepted being wrong on cheerleading the excesses of the war on terror.
The way I usually find success to tout YIMBYism in small resort towns is to frame it as very rich people trying to hoard access to such a town for their own purposes to get away from (and keep out) other people.
I find it both extremely hard to believe and extremely disheartening that giving even more money to boomers (add dental, vision, etc to medicare) is so popular
Unless there is also a concerted push to expand Medicare/Medicaid to the larger population. I think Dems should go for it next year assuming they flip both chambers.
For the presidential election of 1876, only three confederate states had troops in them. In the rest of the south, Black voters had already been disenfranchised. Federal troops could observe but not act in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida and it was their observations of the disenfranchisement of African-Americans that led to throwing out the vote totals of those three states. Republicans salvaged the presidency but the Reconstruction was lost by the time of the election, not afterwards.
Beat me to it. As Matt says, Northerners never had the gumption to really follow through with Reconstruction for the long time it was needed to make it stick, but by 1876, the cause was really lost and on its last gasp. Matt clearly wanted to go off on a long spiel about the importance of monetary policy in other places in history, but 1876 in the United States wasn't as contingent as those other examples.
Nice synecdoching of the longest and most complete mailbag answer being tediously boring but very important weeds minutiae about macroeconomic policy. We are what we write. William Jennings Bryan would approve.
I'm too poor to interface with SV elites directly, but part of what makes the rationalist subculture fun is that they do/are those people, so one becomes familiar with the ideas through distillation and osmosis. Red Plenty! Albion's Seed! Fussel on class! Daniels Parfit and Dennet! Open Socrates! Moral Mazes! It's hard to actually lead a life of the mind while bagging groceries for a living...but reading the people who debate and review the canon books is a good way to at least pretend to. The life of an undergrad, just with less debt. Sure as hell beats watching television, at any rate. (Matt has at least convinced me to actually read Disembowling Alone rather than pretend I've read it, so good endorsement deal for The Argumentative Bookclub. I wouldn't actually respect an Amazon affiliate link to go with such content, but it'd be sort of funny too.)
Afghanistan. The good war. The good war because it was from a cave in Afghanistan that the plan was hatched to take down the twin towers on 9/11.
I suppose we could have withdrawn and washed our hands of it once we ran al-Qaeda out of the caves. But we chose a different path. We tried to Westernize the country. In addition, we had the help of our NATO partners.
Sadly, religious fanaticism won out. But we were barely at war; the Afghan Army, with US air support and intelligence, was winning battles against the Taliban. It was the air support they could call in that was the game changer. The plan the Pentagon laid out was to keep 2500 soldiers at Bagram, support the air component, and continue to let the Afghan Army fight the Taliban.
I was sympathetic to the idea of ending our participation, but not ending support for the Afghan Army. What Joe Biden did was disgraceful. Let me give you some numbers. 4459 American deaths over 20 years is 222 a year. How many of you know that, on average 1000 military members die every year through accidents?
The Afghan Army was talking about the vast number of casualties. Over 60,000, in fact. I submit this latest piece from the NY Times that is worth a read. We have freed the women of Afghanistan from severe Shia rules. That is all gone, and women are being made into virtual prisoners in their own homes.
For me, supporting the Afghan Army with intelligence and some helicopter gunships was a small price to pay for being able to spy and collect intelligence on China and keep an eye on Pakistan's numerous terrorist groups, along with Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda.
Here is where the US made its tragic error. Afghanistan is tribal by nature. Each province has its tribal leadership. Attempting to make a central government was the error. We should have appointed governors from among Tribal leaders and given them direct support. Not what ended up being corrupt central government leadership.
Joe Biden’s hasty, poorly run administration left thousands of those who help the US behind, made America appear callous and weak, and no doubt gave the impression that America is unwilling to fight.
Donald Trump's strategic blunder over the Iran war has left America much weaker. The World now knows we are unwilling to risk military personnel. That America is no longer willing to have soldiers die in overseas lands. Our Allies now know that America is not the country to rely on.
It is sad that 18 US soldiers died in this poorly thought-out war. But for those of you who know little about war, because only 1% of Americans serve in the military, let me leave you with this number. The battle for Okinawa resulted in 49,000 US casualties and 12,500 deaths. That battle lasted 52 days.
The American public's ignorance of the real cost of war could fill a library. Its intolerance for death displays the new axiom Presidents should take into consideration. There are no clean, quick, easy wars. People die in war, so you had better prepare the nation for the deaths of its children. War is serious business, and Trump’s miscalculation will have consequences for American Foreign policy for decades.
Alternate history: America does not spend decades backing corrupt, oppressive Middle East rulers who promised to keep the oil flowing, and “Death to America” does not become the rallying cry energizing radical Islam. There is no 9/11. Also, the US does not back the Taliban to overthrow the Soviet controlled Afghan government and post-Soviet Union, the Afghanistan is just another dysfunctional but not threatening (at least to America) former Soviet republic.
I don’t disagree with your basic take, but I think you miss a few points on some key details. Most important of these is that Biden would’ve had to say at the outset that he was going to tear up the agreement Trump had made on withdrawal. Perhaps he should’ve done that, but doing so would have shifted the focus from other things he wanted to accomplish.
Second, my hazy memory is that the regular Afghan army was collapsing by the summer of 2021 and that if we were going to pull the trigger on withdrawal, there was no better time than then to do it.
Totally fine with lead remediation. Pro-remediation in fact. Just going with Matt's "cut the lead and add ___". I'm very big on eliminating the Presidential pardon. Wait until we see the pardons coming at the end of this current Presidential term.
The problem with the pardon is that it's in the Constitution so can only be changed through a constitutional amendment, which is extremely difficult. You never want to be promising things and then not delivering. Regular people will not understand or care about your procedural excuses.
As a pretty right-leaning person, the lead abatement investment is one of the few things i'd advocate for. But i could be 1 of 1 on this one. Need to look for things you like that others will give you when bargaining. Might not be something so partisan but there are things out there. this could be one.
One really important point in factional disputes in the Democratic Party is that 'moderate/radical' and 'stationary bandit/ not' are fairly orthogonal. One key point with Mamdami is that he really genuinely isn't part of, or interested in helping, any of the well-established ethnic stationary bandits - hence the routine articles on him aggravating some fairly left-wing 'community group'. OTOH, Brandon Johnson is radical but entirely represents a subset of the existing stationary bandits.
The lack of a cohesive national platform is indicative of the ineffective leadership of Schumer & co. This is something democrats have struggled with since Obama. They have a series of pitches to every interest group but no overall message of what it means to be a Democrat.
Running against an unpopular incumbent sort obviates the need for an agenda. If you ever worked on a campaign, you would know that the last thing many of these people want to do is set positions on policy. If your Roy Cooper and you’re going to win an election essentially regardless of whatever you say, why would you want to pick a bunch of random positions. No matter, it is irrelevant and policy is based on congressional apportionment. Running against an unpopular incumbent sort obviates the need for an agenda. If you ever worked on a campaign, you would know that the last thing many of these people want to do is set positions on policy. If your Roy Cooper and you’re going to win an election essentially regardless of whatever you say, why would you want to pick a bunch of random positions. No matter, it is irrelevant and policy is based on congressional composition.
I appreciate matts writing, but I think he misunderstand how much issue taking and policy play on the campaign trail. And his turn towards politics as his primary focus rather than policy I think shows this misunderstanding. To put it differently, you don’t see Republicans taking many positions related to public policy, even though they’re just going to cut rich people’s taxes. They frequently don’t have any issue positions.
Separately, members in swing states do not want Chuck Schumer the delimiting the agenda. It makes things difficult for them. As a former staffer for a blue dog, you don’t want congressional leadership always staking out the public positions.
If Democrats win the election, it will be because of the electric being disinterested in Republicans. It won’t be because of six pretty banal issue positions.
Totally unrelated, I do not think it’s true that the blue dog caucus is growing substantially. It’s tiny and remains tiny.
feels like the most important part of matt's point is the condition that moderates, leadership and progressives agree on the way forward. Conditional on that, it would help blue-dogs and front line members because when the GOP tries to smear them as being one of the far-left dems it'll be harder--but not impossible obviously--if the leadership and progressives stay on message about popular things the front-line members also believe. By making the extremes and middle of the party look more moderate you help the front-line members with marginal swing voters if they have a more moderate view of the dem party.
If one thinks that tourist are ruining a destination use a seasonal hotel/air-B&B or seasonally higher sales tax. Tax the externality. Housing is not the externality.
But it would be weird to levy taxes on tourists that would make it so that only much wealthier people than the inhabitants are able to visit a location. That already occurs for some less developed parts of the world, but it would be strange in over touristed places like Amsterdam or Barcelona.
For locations that have defined their existence as small and sparsely populated with pastoral views of nature, the externality is the presence of more people and more houses.
I'm all for building more houses in places people want to live. YIMBYism doesn't have to be an answer for all places and in all situations. It's great for cities large and small, plus their surrounding areas. Keep the focus there.
Places evolve though. The standard shouldn't be a significant (however defined) segement of a community doesn't want this change. NIMBY's in large cities would make similar arguments and be just as correct. The difference is you personally are more sympathetic to the coast community's aesthetic argument than the inner suburbs that have never had and don't want missing middle housing.
Building more housing has externalities. That's true everywhere. The question is how you weigh the externalities relative to other things. The cost-benefit profile of constraining new housing where it reduces access to high-paying jobs and agglomeration benefits looks different from the cost-benefit profile of constraining housing in a vacation destination distant from job hubs where the primary amenity is scenery or other public goods impacted by higher density. None of which is to say Cape Cod shouldn't build more housing (it should, and it can do so without losing the things that make it attractive) but the YIMBY case just does look different in those kinds of places.
Favoring the "Gold Standard" is just crankish. More damaging is support for big defcits, and trade and immigration restrictions. Opposing those things used to be common sense and techies ought to know better than the average Joe that they are detrimental to growth.
I don’t think people in tech support the gold standard. Twitter/X is not real life. It would be weird if the same industry that supports crypto would also support the gold standard.
What a lot of gold standard cranks really want is no form of government currency at all, in favor of markets developing competing currencies. By that angle, it was no surprise at all that they were the very first boosters of crypto. They just ended up overshadowed by the grand majority who just want to use it to try to get rich quick.
Many of them red pilled their way to being MAGA adjacent in recent years. Specifically Marc Andreesen used to be reasonable but went off the deep end. A lot of these people live in a bubble with their own reality.
I think the gold standard is intuitive. it just happens to be wrong. It's like finding out that the image your brain receives from your eyes is upside down. It sounds crazy but is correct. But i don't think it's crazy for people that don't know this to think the image should be right side up. I think lay people are being pretty reasonable in their priors. They just happen to be wrong for reasons that are hard to grasp and understand (besides arguing about empirical results at this point).
Techies are probably just as prone as anyone else to a combination of "This is obviously true and only ivory tower egg heads disagree" and "Despite conventional wisdom, this is actually a hidden truth only grasped by a few." Both flatter the right gut instinct priors. What the Silicon Valley set has that the rest of the populace don't is, essentially, that book club of fashionable ideas ensuring that they hold the same set of "obvious" and "outsider" beliefs.
Especially because I have a hard time even identifying what the difference would actually be. I guess I just don't follow this factional fight closely enough to disentangle primary voter messaging from what a candidate might actual campaign and run on in a national general election.
What even makes someone "centrist" or "moderate" in the national conversation? Is it a willingness to occasionally break from the party? When Ro says he wants a progressive, is that just someone who pushes harder for redistribution and soapboxes more progressive causes?
Yeah. Although I would assume that when Ro Khanna says they should nominate a progressive, what he means is that they should nominate Ro Khanna. Or if not, then someone who'll do whatever Ro Khanna would do.
"The single most underrated thing in politics is getting the technical aspects of macroeconomic policy right."
In eight years of Bernanke-Yellen the Fed refused to get the price level traectory back up to the pre-2008 trend. Bernanke whoud have had a roaring recovery going by 2010 elections if the Fed had just fulfilled its price stability mandate!
Germany should have been off of gold by 1930. There was no good reason for mistkes o US monetary policy to transmit interntionally.
I completely agree with Matt’s answer on the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden was a complete disaster as President but this is one thing that he got right. The real culprits are Bush and Obama for trying to do nation building in Afghanistan, which was a complete failure. Trump to some extent but he should get some credit for making a deal with Taliban regarding the withdrawal, even though he timed it to take place after his reelection because he has some good instincts on these issues compared to the so called foreign policy “experts” who’ve spent their entire lives in DC. People like David Brooks should be ashamed of themselves for being wrong for so long and still not being able to accept it. Andrew Sullivan is one of the few who accepted being wrong on cheerleading the excesses of the war on terror.
I love the placebo effect. Lots of times it works even when the subject knows.....
The way I usually find success to tout YIMBYism in small resort towns is to frame it as very rich people trying to hoard access to such a town for their own purposes to get away from (and keep out) other people.
I find it both extremely hard to believe and extremely disheartening that giving even more money to boomers (add dental, vision, etc to medicare) is so popular
I think it is fine idea and woud bean opportuity to put the program on a sound footing with a VAT.
Unless there is also a concerted push to expand Medicare/Medicaid to the larger population. I think Dems should go for it next year assuming they flip both chambers.
For the presidential election of 1876, only three confederate states had troops in them. In the rest of the south, Black voters had already been disenfranchised. Federal troops could observe but not act in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida and it was their observations of the disenfranchisement of African-Americans that led to throwing out the vote totals of those three states. Republicans salvaged the presidency but the Reconstruction was lost by the time of the election, not afterwards.
Beat me to it. As Matt says, Northerners never had the gumption to really follow through with Reconstruction for the long time it was needed to make it stick, but by 1876, the cause was really lost and on its last gasp. Matt clearly wanted to go off on a long spiel about the importance of monetary policy in other places in history, but 1876 in the United States wasn't as contingent as those other examples.
Causing deflations is never a good monetary polciy, was it Bernanke?
Nice synecdoching of the longest and most complete mailbag answer being tediously boring but very important weeds minutiae about macroeconomic policy. We are what we write. William Jennings Bryan would approve.
I'm too poor to interface with SV elites directly, but part of what makes the rationalist subculture fun is that they do/are those people, so one becomes familiar with the ideas through distillation and osmosis. Red Plenty! Albion's Seed! Fussel on class! Daniels Parfit and Dennet! Open Socrates! Moral Mazes! It's hard to actually lead a life of the mind while bagging groceries for a living...but reading the people who debate and review the canon books is a good way to at least pretend to. The life of an undergrad, just with less debt. Sure as hell beats watching television, at any rate. (Matt has at least convinced me to actually read Disembowling Alone rather than pretend I've read it, so good endorsement deal for The Argumentative Bookclub. I wouldn't actually respect an Amazon affiliate link to go with such content, but it'd be sort of funny too.)
Afghanistan. The good war. The good war because it was from a cave in Afghanistan that the plan was hatched to take down the twin towers on 9/11.
I suppose we could have withdrawn and washed our hands of it once we ran al-Qaeda out of the caves. But we chose a different path. We tried to Westernize the country. In addition, we had the help of our NATO partners.
Sadly, religious fanaticism won out. But we were barely at war; the Afghan Army, with US air support and intelligence, was winning battles against the Taliban. It was the air support they could call in that was the game changer. The plan the Pentagon laid out was to keep 2500 soldiers at Bagram, support the air component, and continue to let the Afghan Army fight the Taliban.
I was sympathetic to the idea of ending our participation, but not ending support for the Afghan Army. What Joe Biden did was disgraceful. Let me give you some numbers. 4459 American deaths over 20 years is 222 a year. How many of you know that, on average 1000 military members die every year through accidents?
The Afghan Army was talking about the vast number of casualties. Over 60,000, in fact. I submit this latest piece from the NY Times that is worth a read. We have freed the women of Afghanistan from severe Shia rules. That is all gone, and women are being made into virtual prisoners in their own homes.
For me, supporting the Afghan Army with intelligence and some helicopter gunships was a small price to pay for being able to spy and collect intelligence on China and keep an eye on Pakistan's numerous terrorist groups, along with Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda.
Here is where the US made its tragic error. Afghanistan is tribal by nature. Each province has its tribal leadership. Attempting to make a central government was the error. We should have appointed governors from among Tribal leaders and given them direct support. Not what ended up being corrupt central government leadership.
Joe Biden’s hasty, poorly run administration left thousands of those who help the US behind, made America appear callous and weak, and no doubt gave the impression that America is unwilling to fight.
Donald Trump's strategic blunder over the Iran war has left America much weaker. The World now knows we are unwilling to risk military personnel. That America is no longer willing to have soldiers die in overseas lands. Our Allies now know that America is not the country to rely on.
It is sad that 18 US soldiers died in this poorly thought-out war. But for those of you who know little about war, because only 1% of Americans serve in the military, let me leave you with this number. The battle for Okinawa resulted in 49,000 US casualties and 12,500 deaths. That battle lasted 52 days.
The American public's ignorance of the real cost of war could fill a library. Its intolerance for death displays the new axiom Presidents should take into consideration. There are no clean, quick, easy wars. People die in war, so you had better prepare the nation for the deaths of its children. War is serious business, and Trump’s miscalculation will have consequences for American Foreign policy for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/world/asia/afghan-women-taliban-rule.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5VA.2UE3.iikFaA4w9JPM&smid=url-share
Alternate history: America does not spend decades backing corrupt, oppressive Middle East rulers who promised to keep the oil flowing, and “Death to America” does not become the rallying cry energizing radical Islam. There is no 9/11. Also, the US does not back the Taliban to overthrow the Soviet controlled Afghan government and post-Soviet Union, the Afghanistan is just another dysfunctional but not threatening (at least to America) former Soviet republic.
I don’t disagree with your basic take, but I think you miss a few points on some key details. Most important of these is that Biden would’ve had to say at the outset that he was going to tear up the agreement Trump had made on withdrawal. Perhaps he should’ve done that, but doing so would have shifted the focus from other things he wanted to accomplish.
Second, my hazy memory is that the regular Afghan army was collapsing by the summer of 2021 and that if we were going to pull the trigger on withdrawal, there was no better time than then to do it.
Cut the lead thing and propose a Constitutional Amendment eliminating the presidential pardon.
Are you pro-lead?
Totally fine with lead remediation. Pro-remediation in fact. Just going with Matt's "cut the lead and add ___". I'm very big on eliminating the Presidential pardon. Wait until we see the pardons coming at the end of this current Presidential term.
The problem with the pardon is that it's in the Constitution so can only be changed through a constitutional amendment, which is extremely difficult. You never want to be promising things and then not delivering. Regular people will not understand or care about your procedural excuses.
As a pretty right-leaning person, the lead abatement investment is one of the few things i'd advocate for. But i could be 1 of 1 on this one. Need to look for things you like that others will give you when bargaining. Might not be something so partisan but there are things out there. this could be one.
One really important point in factional disputes in the Democratic Party is that 'moderate/radical' and 'stationary bandit/ not' are fairly orthogonal. One key point with Mamdami is that he really genuinely isn't part of, or interested in helping, any of the well-established ethnic stationary bandits - hence the routine articles on him aggravating some fairly left-wing 'community group'. OTOH, Brandon Johnson is radical but entirely represents a subset of the existing stationary bandits.
The lack of a cohesive national platform is indicative of the ineffective leadership of Schumer & co. This is something democrats have struggled with since Obama. They have a series of pitches to every interest group but no overall message of what it means to be a Democrat.
Running against an unpopular incumbent sort obviates the need for an agenda. If you ever worked on a campaign, you would know that the last thing many of these people want to do is set positions on policy. If your Roy Cooper and you’re going to win an election essentially regardless of whatever you say, why would you want to pick a bunch of random positions. No matter, it is irrelevant and policy is based on congressional apportionment. Running against an unpopular incumbent sort obviates the need for an agenda. If you ever worked on a campaign, you would know that the last thing many of these people want to do is set positions on policy. If your Roy Cooper and you’re going to win an election essentially regardless of whatever you say, why would you want to pick a bunch of random positions. No matter, it is irrelevant and policy is based on congressional composition.
I appreciate matts writing, but I think he misunderstand how much issue taking and policy play on the campaign trail. And his turn towards politics as his primary focus rather than policy I think shows this misunderstanding. To put it differently, you don’t see Republicans taking many positions related to public policy, even though they’re just going to cut rich people’s taxes. They frequently don’t have any issue positions.
Separately, members in swing states do not want Chuck Schumer the delimiting the agenda. It makes things difficult for them. As a former staffer for a blue dog, you don’t want congressional leadership always staking out the public positions.
If Democrats win the election, it will be because of the electric being disinterested in Republicans. It won’t be because of six pretty banal issue positions.
Totally unrelated, I do not think it’s true that the blue dog caucus is growing substantially. It’s tiny and remains tiny.
I like this typo because now it's giving me ideas for a rebranding of immigration as "eletorate too cheap to meter".
feels like the most important part of matt's point is the condition that moderates, leadership and progressives agree on the way forward. Conditional on that, it would help blue-dogs and front line members because when the GOP tries to smear them as being one of the far-left dems it'll be harder--but not impossible obviously--if the leadership and progressives stay on message about popular things the front-line members also believe. By making the extremes and middle of the party look more moderate you help the front-line members with marginal swing voters if they have a more moderate view of the dem party.
because any step in a positive direction that isn't all the way there (half-a-loaf) is because Dems are sellouts and crooks. *Not my position*
If one thinks that tourist are ruining a destination use a seasonal hotel/air-B&B or seasonally higher sales tax. Tax the externality. Housing is not the externality.
Hotels and short term rentals are forms of housing!
If tourists are causing certai forms of nuisance, then just regulate those nuisances like any other.
But it would be weird to levy taxes on tourists that would make it so that only much wealthier people than the inhabitants are able to visit a location. That already occurs for some less developed parts of the world, but it would be strange in over touristed places like Amsterdam or Barcelona.
For locations that have defined their existence as small and sparsely populated with pastoral views of nature, the externality is the presence of more people and more houses.
I'm all for building more houses in places people want to live. YIMBYism doesn't have to be an answer for all places and in all situations. It's great for cities large and small, plus their surrounding areas. Keep the focus there.
Places evolve though. The standard shouldn't be a significant (however defined) segement of a community doesn't want this change. NIMBY's in large cities would make similar arguments and be just as correct. The difference is you personally are more sympathetic to the coast community's aesthetic argument than the inner suburbs that have never had and don't want missing middle housing.
Building more housing has externalities. That's true everywhere. The question is how you weigh the externalities relative to other things. The cost-benefit profile of constraining new housing where it reduces access to high-paying jobs and agglomeration benefits looks different from the cost-benefit profile of constraining housing in a vacation destination distant from job hubs where the primary amenity is scenery or other public goods impacted by higher density. None of which is to say Cape Cod shouldn't build more housing (it should, and it can do so without losing the things that make it attractive) but the YIMBY case just does look different in those kinds of places.
Agglomeration benefits also happen in small resort towns too with their own industries. Particularly the recreation industry.
Favoring the "Gold Standard" is just crankish. More damaging is support for big defcits, and trade and immigration restrictions. Opposing those things used to be common sense and techies ought to know better than the average Joe that they are detrimental to growth.
I don’t think people in tech support the gold standard. Twitter/X is not real life. It would be weird if the same industry that supports crypto would also support the gold standard.
What a lot of gold standard cranks really want is no form of government currency at all, in favor of markets developing competing currencies. By that angle, it was no surprise at all that they were the very first boosters of crypto. They just ended up overshadowed by the grand majority who just want to use it to try to get rich quick.
Many of them red pilled their way to being MAGA adjacent in recent years. Specifically Marc Andreesen used to be reasonable but went off the deep end. A lot of these people live in a bubble with their own reality.
I think the gold standard is intuitive. it just happens to be wrong. It's like finding out that the image your brain receives from your eyes is upside down. It sounds crazy but is correct. But i don't think it's crazy for people that don't know this to think the image should be right side up. I think lay people are being pretty reasonable in their priors. They just happen to be wrong for reasons that are hard to grasp and understand (besides arguing about empirical results at this point).
Techies are probably just as prone as anyone else to a combination of "This is obviously true and only ivory tower egg heads disagree" and "Despite conventional wisdom, this is actually a hidden truth only grasped by a few." Both flatter the right gut instinct priors. What the Silicon Valley set has that the rest of the populace don't is, essentially, that book club of fashionable ideas ensuring that they hold the same set of "obvious" and "outsider" beliefs.
How do the Democrats promulgate the six policies? It's not like at a Democratic convention.
This question is fair in way, but also turn it around.
Why can't the Democratic party figure out a way to promulgate policies? They've only had, what, 150 years to think about it.
They could just do a press conference.
If you could come to an agreement then message discipline becomes much easier.
They could send a mass e-mail to all the campaign managers, I suppose. But true they can't force anyone to listen, it would be reliant on persuasion.
The easiest way is a presidential candidate, or even better a president.
Speaking of which: https://www.npr.org/2026/08/13/nx-s1-5888570/rep-ro-khanna-shares-why-he-thinks-democrats-should-nominate-a-progressive-in-2028
Might be interesting to see a response from Matt since it's a pretty much a diametrically opposite argument about our current politics.
Yeah, I'd love to see that response.
Especially because I have a hard time even identifying what the difference would actually be. I guess I just don't follow this factional fight closely enough to disentangle primary voter messaging from what a candidate might actual campaign and run on in a national general election.
What even makes someone "centrist" or "moderate" in the national conversation? Is it a willingness to occasionally break from the party? When Ro says he wants a progressive, is that just someone who pushes harder for redistribution and soapboxes more progressive causes?
Yeah. Although I would assume that when Ro Khanna says they should nominate a progressive, what he means is that they should nominate Ro Khanna. Or if not, then someone who'll do whatever Ro Khanna would do.
"The single most underrated thing in politics is getting the technical aspects of macroeconomic policy right."
In eight years of Bernanke-Yellen the Fed refused to get the price level traectory back up to the pre-2008 trend. Bernanke whoud have had a roaring recovery going by 2010 elections if the Fed had just fulfilled its price stability mandate!
Germany should have been off of gold by 1930. There was no good reason for mistkes o US monetary policy to transmit interntionally.