I think you're onto something here, Matt. I wrote a whole article -- The Procedure Fetish -- about how procedures meant to serve beneficent ends wind up making it hard to do anything at all. https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-procedure-fetish/
Interesting post, with regard to the vaccine tiers it seems like the prioritzers never took into consideration anyone's actual ability to implement it. And that's sort of the opposite of a technocracy, it's an academic exercise pretending to be a technocratic solution
"Technocratic" is an interesting word and concept.
But I agree there's been a tendency to elevate academic credentials over certain kinds of practical administrative experience.
This is one reason I'm kind of leery about the current trend toward disparaging the idea of anyone with a corporate background working in government. Somebody who runs supply-chains and logistics for a Giant Evil Corporation but who also thinks abortion should be legal and immigrants are good and it's sad when poor people don't have any money could potentially contribute a lot to the public sector. Conversely, while some of my best friends are college professors or think tank experts I'm not sure trying to have college professors and think tankers administer the federal government is going to have a happy ending.
I am a VP of Engineering in a public tech company. I've legit considered going to the public sector after I've made enough money to retire in the private sector.
Here's the thing... one should not have to get to financial independence to consider that an option, and it's sad I can't just try now!
Yep. I'm presently in an engineering role at a big-name company, and was previously the CTO of a startup. After the startup went bust and I was looking around for my next thing, I did _briefly_ consider applying for some state government roles, but the compensation wasn't adequate for me to seriously consider; I wouldn't have been able to pay a mortgage in Silly Valley.
Surely part of the solution is paying public sector people more, finding ways to make government bureaucracy high-status. France is a low-trust country like the USA but there the smartest college students often want to be government functionaries. (The word "functionary" is not vaguely insulting in French, which says something in itself.)
"Junior government finance auditor" is one of the most elite, difficult-to-get starting jobs in France - becoming one has about the same effect on your career there as going to Yale Law School does in the USA. (It is what Macron didi after graduating.) In a society that is organized like that, government can do more.
Probably because of the outsized influence of the French government teat. I mean even if you went to work for some industrial champion like Renault, you're still dealing with what the French government wants in France.
There are problems with the French system but nothing wrong in principle with a big government if it works well. Or a system where well-regarded civil servants get hired to run companies more often than private-sector managers parachuting into the civil service.
Renault has its problems but EDF is owned by the French government & it is one of the world's better-run energy companies.
Also you can be a fancy pubic servant there without being a lawyer. (There are exceptions in the US - Dr. Fauci, the military, certain economists. But the Senate is more than half lawyers.)
Macron is not a lawyer. Anybody remotely similar to Macron in the US system is a lawyer.
The US and France still have relatively high trust, even if it’s lower than before. You don’t need armed guards to walk down the street, and houses don’t have high walls and gated courtyards. In low-trust countries, people rely on bribes and connections to navigate bureaucracy because government institutions don’t function well. Cash beats banks, contracts are weak, and inefficiency is everywhere.
It's also very egotistical to assume that we can target everything perfectly. Things like EITC miss a lot of people and also don't account for things like whether people will have time to fill out their taxes perfectly. It's a lot more realistic about our own knowledge and wisdom about the world to just go broad.
One thing I’ve noticed moving from academia to industry is that in industry people get promoted to managerial positions based on their ability to manage people which just isn’t the case for college professors.
It's more like the potential pitfalls of technocracy - bad technocracy essentially becomes complexity for complexity's sake. By trying to make something that works perfectly perfect with no holes at all, a bloated mess is made that doesn't come close to doing what is should.
I guess the reason I see as more of a fake technocracy is that no one would design a road system without consulting civil engineers, which is analogous to how this seems to be going here. It becomes more like a grad school seminar.
In some ways it's just a semantic, between fake or bad technocracy. But I think conceptually a technocratic solution has to be an actually deliverable solution in order to merit the designation at all.
This is a widespread problem I hope Matt addressed in a future post. You can think of police violence as a similar example: we have all these rules about what cops are allowed to do, and the cops just ignore them.
Two important points: liberal lawyer legislators clearly have a blind spot when it comes to implementation. Moreover, the solution is clearly not going to be to layer on further rules about how cops can do the job!
Actually, relative to other professions that come with a high degree of public trust, we have very *few* rules about what cops are supposed to do. Doctors and lawyers (and many others) receive professional licenses that can be revoked if they harm other people--cops don't. There's a huge amount of constitutional case law that regulates what cops can and can't do, but even though it's easy to sue cops it's hard to fire them.
The reasons for this are complicated and the solutions aren't immediately obvious. But I think an enterprising state governor could push a straightforward licensing bill and get plenty of traction. It's definitely going to piss some people off, but saying that "cops who shoot people and beat them up for no reason should be fired" would pass this test I think.
Given how bad the licensing schemes are for both doctors and lawyers in the US, I don't know that we want using them as a blueprint. The number of either profession who are sanctioned or suspended for malpractice is incredibly small and usually only after completely outrageous behavior. This seems to be exactly what Matt is arguing against which is trying to solve the root problem, police violence, with an additional layer of process. Instead, just make police officers liable civilly and criminally for illegal behavior.
Is there any evidence legal malpractice is particularly common? Unlike medicine, most legal clients (especially in the private sector) can tell the quality of their lawyers without too much trouble, and law firms generally don't tolerate incompetence. The incentives aren't the same if you're in government or a solo/small firm, but government jobs are pretty hard to get and being an incompetent solo/small firm is a very rough way to make a living.
This makes it sound like the average police officer during an average traffic stop or 911 response is using violence in an unjustified way. Whatever you think the rate of force from police officers should be, the rate is not so large to say that most police are just ignoring all rules and possible penalties.
Killer post! One of the best distillations of the tragic state of American policymaking. To add a little color: I worked in state/local government and politics for about a decade and the extent to which supply-sider//good government political gestalt (is this neoliberalism?) has eaten the brains of folks in that world is remarkable.
Literally, one of the unassailable rhetorical gambits in any program design debate, large or small, is something along the lines of "Are we putting strict enough controls on the flow of taxpayer dollars? Are there more points where we should put them in?" As though parsimony were actually the prime directive of government, rather than a stylistic choice.
To a large extent, this problem gets worse the higher you go up the policymaking food chain (see Harris' absurd "If you start a business in xyz census tract and operate for 3 years, etc."). These well-intentioned and capable liberals (like well-intentioned and capable liberals almost everywhere) live in mortal terror of Being Criticized, and it leads to them, as Yglesias put it, taking refuge in process. And it sucks
A lot of this tendency to impose ever more controls and harsher penalties stems from failure to think though, from top to bottom, what incentives are being created by a program. Instead what happens are intricate but programs whose design basically inventivizes abuse, and can only rely on harsh penalties to try to prevent people from acting in their self interest.
And the punitive structures are themselves fraught with incentives toward inaction, encumbered design, and glacial pacing. It creates a situation where the 'best case' for an administrative actor is that no one seeks to use the program
Agree. The regulatory area I know best is healthcare, and it is rife with extremely technical and harsh regulations intended to mitigate the fact that govt healthcare programs don't use the same kind of controls that are common in private insurance, so are easier to rip off. And the result is a very large wet blanket on innovation in the delivery of healthcare.
The "mortal terror of Being Criticized" sounds funny, but it also sounds true. I'm curious to compare the psychological tendencies of lefty and righty politicians. Like, do conservatives tend to be more combative and, therefore, don't shy from criticism as much, or have they become so accustomed to criticism (from the left, anyway) that they dismiss it?
I think conservatives live in utter abject fear of being criticized. That's why they are so willing to go along with whatever Trump asks them to do, because if they don't, they'll lose their next primary.
I had this thought at whichever presidential debate someone said Biden was "living in fear" of the virus because he was wearing such a big mask - it seemed absolutely obvious to me that *Trump* was the one "living in fear", because if he was seen in public with a mask, that would be the end of his macho persona.
Good post, but I think you’re being too generous to the “all we got is $600” choir. If you own or work for a small business, or you got laid off, you probably know that the government at least tried to do something for you. Low-trust people who post things like the Guy Fieri tweet either don’t fall into one of those groups, can’t be bothered to check the facts before they speak, or simply want to get a lot of likes on Twitter—probably all three. I don’t think clearer program designs would have changed what we’ve seen from them.
And also why "M4A" is so confusing in the primary - everyone in the primary was in favor of some version of it (except maybe Amy Klobuchar), but no one could agree whether it meant a public option or the immediate closure of all private insurance firms.
In a sense, it *should* be simple: "expand eligibility for the current Medicare program to all people". But it often seems to mean setting up some separate program, so not what it says on the tin!
Turning the vaccine distribution procedure into something it seems like the DMV would do isn't a good way to win people over to the Democrats, and I say this as a Democrat who used to be a Republican when he was young and stupid in college.
If the answer is fewer lawyers (but muh rules!) in politics, and more product managers, let's do it! As someone who in my day job preaches outcome over effort, seeing Newsom and Cuomo spin on this is about as frustrating as it could be.
I agree with most of post. But I really struggle with this: "Normal people lack the technical competence to make judgments about what street features will have what impact." This seems fine when we talk about features we like. But I worry that it threatens to return us to the dark world of Robert Moses and elite urban planners telling the rabble what is good for them.
Normal people on "Radio Row" and Cortlandt Street were pretty sure the World Trade Center project in the 1960s and 1970s would destroy their lives and livelihoods, and they were right. Freeway fighters all over the country were pretty sure that interstate highways cutting through their neighborhoods would destroy their neighborhoods, and they were right. RIP Jane Jacobs, normal person.
>> But I worry that it threatens to return us to the dark world of Robert Moses and elite urban planners telling the rabble what is good for them.
This is the irreducible conflict. The United States decided that the correct remedy to Moses making some bad calls was to tie up all future public sector action in knots of community review. This has some benefits. But it turns out that rather than making the average quality of projects better, it symmetrically hampers both bad projects and good projects which over time has sapped the will and ability to do anything at all.
A different way to think about it would be to say "yes, if the governor appoints someone bad to be in charge of transportation projects you are going to get bad projects. But the flipside is that if he appoints someone good you are going to get good projects." You admit that in democratic politics you are, yes, flying without a net and shitty leaders will deliver shitty results. But what we have right now is a system that's sanded off some worst-case outcomes at the cost of preventing anything good from ever happening.
You might square the circle by saying that the problem with Robert Moses wasn't that he had too much power; it was that he had bad ideas. Just listening to the people who live nearby is a bad way to make policy too, even if it sometimes gets things right as it did in the freeway revolts.
Yes, they did have bad ideas. In Matt's formulation, the people could see this and then vote for different things. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to vote out an already-constructed highway or superblock. I think "streets before trust" might actually work best for things like rebate checks or vaccine distribution policies. Things that are not...streets.
The point being: The politics of local infrastructure are the same whether you're trying to build "bad" infrastructure or "good" infrastructure.
I do agree that a key assumption of the do-exactly-what-it-says-on-the tin philosophy is that political actors can be held accountable. As many others have identified, every branch of government is unaccountable in its own special way--unless the institutions themselves change, Congress will continue to have its messy Grand Bargains and local government will continue to function on the backs of bureaucrats. Those systems could be improved, but I don't think that undermines the central point here.
I do think the "streets before trust" notion elevates an idea that has become unfashionable in left circles as of late--the need for diverse representation at the decision-making level. I don't know if I buy into this totally, but if the folks making decisions have the lived experience that leads to more thoughtful decision-making, you do something to solve the "Robert Moses problem."
accountability is very diffuse even when major projects go bad: the Purple Line in MD suburbs of DC has been a disaster already, even before we find out whether it actually gets used (if it eventually gets built). That involved state govt, county planning (in 2 counties), the DOT, US senators, Representatives, the former county executive, the current exec, the county council etc etc etc.
I think one of the important moves in the urban planning world in the last decade or two (which Jeannette Sadik-Khan was partially instrumental in, but has been much broader) is the growing interest in pop-up and trial projects. Just put out some safety cones for a few weeks to make a fake bike lane, and then see whether people like it, rather than ask people whether they would like hypothetical bike lanes and let the opinions voiced in this hypothetical state rule the day.
I'm hopeful that a lot of the temporary "healthy streets" initiatives I see around Austin during Covid will become permanent, because people will have seen that they too can have the benefits of a cul-de-sac preventing drivers rushing through their neighborhood, while people on foot and on bikes can still easily get where they're going.
I think in this model, elected representatives would play a greater freeway fighting role, which is somewhat in tension with Matt's earlier suggestion on more executive consolidation.
This is probably my favorite article on SB so far. I've been winding myself up about basically this for ages - government needs to DO stuff in a clear, concise, and effective way or why the hell would people vote for the party of more government? Democrats far too often lose track of this.
Same. And he correctly identifies the cause: it’s the f’ing lawyers. Democrats need to stop being the goddamn party of Big Law already. Elect some more diverse professional backgrounds to Congress.
Even if there isnt a concern about low-trust voters I think straightforward policies with clear rules are better than complex programs with thirty exceptions or waivers, that inevitably leads to gaming the system.
Is there some sort of empirical connection between policy complexity and trust? Back in the high-trust days of the mid-20th century, was policy really that much simpler than it is today? I could say WWII as having boosted government trust ("we beat the Nazis that everybody hates, just like we said we would") but that is not really a "policy" in the sense we are talking about here.
The drop in American social capital (as described by Robert Putnam in "Bowling Alone") is a large and perhaps dominant factor in the drop in social trust. People have fewer friends, fewer hobbies, and engage less with their communities than ever before. This leads to a natural degradation of trust.
What I'm saying is that background conditions of trust were higher for various reasons. You cite a few of them. But I would really emphasize the much lower level of education in the population and the much more primitive state of communications technology. A population that generally lacked a high school diploma and got information through the thin tube of network television and radio was not in a position to nitpick about policy choices. In a very big picture sense, the outcomes were good starting with FDR's inauguration and rolling through until Vietnam so you had a trusting environment.
Fair, although for the record Putnam studied whether education correlated with a decrease in social capital and found that it did not. Social capital has dropped among all education levels over the past 75 years, so I would be interested to know if the same is true of trust.
What are the prospects of this sort of policy making in this Congress? My first instinct was they aren’t very good because legislative consensus building requires concessions to median votes and stuff that passes will be the result of a somewhat convoluted budget reconciliation process which makes for a whole lot of fine print on the tin. On the other hand though, there are probably 60 votes for checks in the Senate, a result of the broad public consensus built around that issue.
I think this would require moderate members of congress to change their thinking a little, away from "look moderate by scaling down big reforms" and towards "look effective by voting for things that help people right away" (with a side of "look moderate by taking stands against unpopular cultural policies"). This would be a big change relative to e.g. 2009-2010 and I'm almost sure there are moderates in Congress who would be suspicious of it. But I really do think this change would help their reelection prospects, and because so many of the policies involved are spending-related a lot of this can be done in reconciliation, so in theory someone should be able to get through to them?
Since so much effort is expended trying to fit camels through the needle's eye of budget reconciliation, maybe it's time to reconsider whether those rules, along with various other Congressional procedure rules, are helping or hurting in the big picture. It doesn't exactly inspire trust when major pieces of legislation are enacted with 10 year sunsets or other bizarrely arbitrary contortions just to comply with some Congressional rule.
I think what you meant to suggest was to abolish the filibuster, which is the only reason the limited reconciliation process exists. If you only eliminate the limitations on reconciliation you just get three filibuster-proof bill per year.
(1) I would gently push back on your characterization of those two restaurant tweets. I don't think anyone is saying the government is barely doing anything. They are saying the government isn't doing nearly enough. The WSJ just published that 110,000 locations have closed or fallen dormant. Same article, another 37% are expecting to close within the next six months without further assistance.
(2) I'm still so angry the banks were bailed out back in 2008 and not the actual homeowners. It's a stain on Obama's administration that only widens with time.
The banks had to be bailed out - the stain is that there wasn't an appropriate bloodletting in the finance industry. I realize that there are big fairness problems with collective punishment, but there area also fairness problems with not having it in this case.
I wonder how much anti-elite sentiment has at least some root in seeing a bunch of super rich bankers and hedge fund managers do their job badly, screw up the economy, make a ton of money doing it, and then get bailed out so they could keep doing those jobs.
I'd welcome your thoughts here. This is my biggest ax to grind with Obama's legacy - specially the neoliberal critique. I think the TARP funds could have stabilized the individual under-performing mortgages, rather than what became a direct injection into the banks. To your point on blood letting ... yes! So much yes. All the shareholders should have been taken to zero as a condition of any support.
Hmmm...I'm a fan of Taibbi and his anti-wall-street view, but I feel like that article hasn't aged well and is really muddled in its critiques.
We also have a big problem of counterfactuals - we can agree that HARP was a dud by any reasonable measurement, but what we don't know is whether it could ever have worked, or did the incredible convolution, complexity and distribution of the MBS system make restructuring mortgages legally impossible.
The problem with the 2008 crisis was that it was a banking crisis, which means the goal of fixing the banks and the goal of fixing the economy are in direct opposition. Taibbi doesn't explain what his framework for evaluating the bailouts is.
In some ways, we now have clear indications circa 2020 that the bailout was successful - the banks got off life support and lowered their risk profile such that in the 2020 recession, we don't have a banking crisis and the banks can actually put some slack in the system with their clients without going under. Matt Levine wrote some good stuff in his Bloomberg column before he went on paternity leave comparing 2008 to 2020 and contrasting banking then and now.
So to me the hanging chad isn't the cost to taxpayers or the result - it's the total lack of accountability. In my view, the government should do what's necessary to put the banking system back together...but maybe with the current set of bankers not at their jobs.
Every now and then Hank Greenberg has a temper tantrum in court that he was treated "unfairly" by the mean people who took his company - Fanny/Freddy investors sometimes bang around about how much excess profits the government has taken after nationalizing them.
In my view, this was the right outcome - taxpayers come to the rescue, taxpayers keep the toys; if/when these institutions are privatized, it needs to be of zero benefit to the original owners.
It's hard to know whether this would have fixed the panic, and counterfactuals are hard, but the question is whether the "arranged marriages" (e.g. Lehman -> BoA, etc.) could have been replaced with straight nationalizations instead; the win would be a clear mechanism to zero out equity holders and toss insiders.
The second problem of competing interests in the bail-out is that disciplining the bond market (by writing down bond holders) and stabilizing the credit markets are at odds as well, and you can make an argument that unless the bond holders get wounded as well as the equity holders, the capital markets haven't properly "paid" for their bail-outs.
I think the point with the first tweet is the use of the loaded phrase 'big government'. The implication isn't that the government isn't doing enough (which is true), but that government can't get the job done (which is false).
I think you're onto something here, Matt. I wrote a whole article -- The Procedure Fetish -- about how procedures meant to serve beneficent ends wind up making it hard to do anything at all. https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-procedure-fetish/
I've now read this and it's great ^^
That's very good--thanks for sharing!
Interesting post, with regard to the vaccine tiers it seems like the prioritzers never took into consideration anyone's actual ability to implement it. And that's sort of the opposite of a technocracy, it's an academic exercise pretending to be a technocratic solution
"Technocratic" is an interesting word and concept.
But I agree there's been a tendency to elevate academic credentials over certain kinds of practical administrative experience.
This is one reason I'm kind of leery about the current trend toward disparaging the idea of anyone with a corporate background working in government. Somebody who runs supply-chains and logistics for a Giant Evil Corporation but who also thinks abortion should be legal and immigrants are good and it's sad when poor people don't have any money could potentially contribute a lot to the public sector. Conversely, while some of my best friends are college professors or think tank experts I'm not sure trying to have college professors and think tankers administer the federal government is going to have a happy ending.
I am a VP of Engineering in a public tech company. I've legit considered going to the public sector after I've made enough money to retire in the private sector.
Here's the thing... one should not have to get to financial independence to consider that an option, and it's sad I can't just try now!
Yep. I'm presently in an engineering role at a big-name company, and was previously the CTO of a startup. After the startup went bust and I was looking around for my next thing, I did _briefly_ consider applying for some state government roles, but the compensation wasn't adequate for me to seriously consider; I wouldn't have been able to pay a mortgage in Silly Valley.
Surely part of the solution is paying public sector people more, finding ways to make government bureaucracy high-status. France is a low-trust country like the USA but there the smartest college students often want to be government functionaries. (The word "functionary" is not vaguely insulting in French, which says something in itself.)
"Junior government finance auditor" is one of the most elite, difficult-to-get starting jobs in France - becoming one has about the same effect on your career there as going to Yale Law School does in the USA. (It is what Macron didi after graduating.) In a society that is organized like that, government can do more.
Probably because of the outsized influence of the French government teat. I mean even if you went to work for some industrial champion like Renault, you're still dealing with what the French government wants in France.
There are problems with the French system but nothing wrong in principle with a big government if it works well. Or a system where well-regarded civil servants get hired to run companies more often than private-sector managers parachuting into the civil service.
Renault has its problems but EDF is owned by the French government & it is one of the world's better-run energy companies.
Also you can be a fancy pubic servant there without being a lawyer. (There are exceptions in the US - Dr. Fauci, the military, certain economists. But the Senate is more than half lawyers.)
Macron is not a lawyer. Anybody remotely similar to Macron in the US system is a lawyer.
The US and France still have relatively high trust, even if it’s lower than before. You don’t need armed guards to walk down the street, and houses don’t have high walls and gated courtyards. In low-trust countries, people rely on bribes and connections to navigate bureaucracy because government institutions don’t function well. Cash beats banks, contracts are weak, and inefficiency is everywhere.
It's also very egotistical to assume that we can target everything perfectly. Things like EITC miss a lot of people and also don't account for things like whether people will have time to fill out their taxes perfectly. It's a lot more realistic about our own knowledge and wisdom about the world to just go broad.
One thing I’ve noticed moving from academia to industry is that in industry people get promoted to managerial positions based on their ability to manage people which just isn’t the case for college professors.
Managing is a very underappreciated skilll
Matt - you just described me! I'd gladly work in a transportation department for govt, but I'm not sure I can deal with the layers of bureaucracy.
It's more like the potential pitfalls of technocracy - bad technocracy essentially becomes complexity for complexity's sake. By trying to make something that works perfectly perfect with no holes at all, a bloated mess is made that doesn't come close to doing what is should.
I guess the reason I see as more of a fake technocracy is that no one would design a road system without consulting civil engineers, which is analogous to how this seems to be going here. It becomes more like a grad school seminar.
In some ways it's just a semantic, between fake or bad technocracy. But I think conceptually a technocratic solution has to be an actually deliverable solution in order to merit the designation at all.
This is a widespread problem I hope Matt addressed in a future post. You can think of police violence as a similar example: we have all these rules about what cops are allowed to do, and the cops just ignore them.
Two important points: liberal lawyer legislators clearly have a blind spot when it comes to implementation. Moreover, the solution is clearly not going to be to layer on further rules about how cops can do the job!
Actually, relative to other professions that come with a high degree of public trust, we have very *few* rules about what cops are supposed to do. Doctors and lawyers (and many others) receive professional licenses that can be revoked if they harm other people--cops don't. There's a huge amount of constitutional case law that regulates what cops can and can't do, but even though it's easy to sue cops it's hard to fire them.
The reasons for this are complicated and the solutions aren't immediately obvious. But I think an enterprising state governor could push a straightforward licensing bill and get plenty of traction. It's definitely going to piss some people off, but saying that "cops who shoot people and beat them up for no reason should be fired" would pass this test I think.
Given how bad the licensing schemes are for both doctors and lawyers in the US, I don't know that we want using them as a blueprint. The number of either profession who are sanctioned or suspended for malpractice is incredibly small and usually only after completely outrageous behavior. This seems to be exactly what Matt is arguing against which is trying to solve the root problem, police violence, with an additional layer of process. Instead, just make police officers liable civilly and criminally for illegal behavior.
Is there any evidence legal malpractice is particularly common? Unlike medicine, most legal clients (especially in the private sector) can tell the quality of their lawyers without too much trouble, and law firms generally don't tolerate incompetence. The incentives aren't the same if you're in government or a solo/small firm, but government jobs are pretty hard to get and being an incompetent solo/small firm is a very rough way to make a living.
This makes it sound like the average police officer during an average traffic stop or 911 response is using violence in an unjustified way. Whatever you think the rate of force from police officers should be, the rate is not so large to say that most police are just ignoring all rules and possible penalties.
Killer post! One of the best distillations of the tragic state of American policymaking. To add a little color: I worked in state/local government and politics for about a decade and the extent to which supply-sider//good government political gestalt (is this neoliberalism?) has eaten the brains of folks in that world is remarkable.
Literally, one of the unassailable rhetorical gambits in any program design debate, large or small, is something along the lines of "Are we putting strict enough controls on the flow of taxpayer dollars? Are there more points where we should put them in?" As though parsimony were actually the prime directive of government, rather than a stylistic choice.
To a large extent, this problem gets worse the higher you go up the policymaking food chain (see Harris' absurd "If you start a business in xyz census tract and operate for 3 years, etc."). These well-intentioned and capable liberals (like well-intentioned and capable liberals almost everywhere) live in mortal terror of Being Criticized, and it leads to them, as Yglesias put it, taking refuge in process. And it sucks
A lot of this tendency to impose ever more controls and harsher penalties stems from failure to think though, from top to bottom, what incentives are being created by a program. Instead what happens are intricate but programs whose design basically inventivizes abuse, and can only rely on harsh penalties to try to prevent people from acting in their self interest.
And the punitive structures are themselves fraught with incentives toward inaction, encumbered design, and glacial pacing. It creates a situation where the 'best case' for an administrative actor is that no one seeks to use the program
Agree. The regulatory area I know best is healthcare, and it is rife with extremely technical and harsh regulations intended to mitigate the fact that govt healthcare programs don't use the same kind of controls that are common in private insurance, so are easier to rip off. And the result is a very large wet blanket on innovation in the delivery of healthcare.
The "mortal terror of Being Criticized" sounds funny, but it also sounds true. I'm curious to compare the psychological tendencies of lefty and righty politicians. Like, do conservatives tend to be more combative and, therefore, don't shy from criticism as much, or have they become so accustomed to criticism (from the left, anyway) that they dismiss it?
I think conservatives live in utter abject fear of being criticized. That's why they are so willing to go along with whatever Trump asks them to do, because if they don't, they'll lose their next primary.
I had this thought at whichever presidential debate someone said Biden was "living in fear" of the virus because he was wearing such a big mask - it seemed absolutely obvious to me that *Trump* was the one "living in fear", because if he was seen in public with a mask, that would be the end of his macho persona.
"Don’t deliver something over budget and behind schedule that turns out not to work well and then congratulate yourself on your community outreach."
My favorite quote of the post. Hear, hear.
Good post, but I think you’re being too generous to the “all we got is $600” choir. If you own or work for a small business, or you got laid off, you probably know that the government at least tried to do something for you. Low-trust people who post things like the Guy Fieri tweet either don’t fall into one of those groups, can’t be bothered to check the facts before they speak, or simply want to get a lot of likes on Twitter—probably all three. I don’t think clearer program designs would have changed what we’ve seen from them.
This is why M4A and the Wall are so popular. Keep it simple stupid!
And tax cuts!
And also why "M4A" is so confusing in the primary - everyone in the primary was in favor of some version of it (except maybe Amy Klobuchar), but no one could agree whether it meant a public option or the immediate closure of all private insurance firms.
In a sense, it *should* be simple: "expand eligibility for the current Medicare program to all people". But it often seems to mean setting up some separate program, so not what it says on the tin!
Turning the vaccine distribution procedure into something it seems like the DMV would do isn't a good way to win people over to the Democrats, and I say this as a Democrat who used to be a Republican when he was young and stupid in college.
If the answer is fewer lawyers (but muh rules!) in politics, and more product managers, let's do it! As someone who in my day job preaches outcome over effort, seeing Newsom and Cuomo spin on this is about as frustrating as it could be.
I agree with most of post. But I really struggle with this: "Normal people lack the technical competence to make judgments about what street features will have what impact." This seems fine when we talk about features we like. But I worry that it threatens to return us to the dark world of Robert Moses and elite urban planners telling the rabble what is good for them.
Normal people on "Radio Row" and Cortlandt Street were pretty sure the World Trade Center project in the 1960s and 1970s would destroy their lives and livelihoods, and they were right. Freeway fighters all over the country were pretty sure that interstate highways cutting through their neighborhoods would destroy their neighborhoods, and they were right. RIP Jane Jacobs, normal person.
>> But I worry that it threatens to return us to the dark world of Robert Moses and elite urban planners telling the rabble what is good for them.
This is the irreducible conflict. The United States decided that the correct remedy to Moses making some bad calls was to tie up all future public sector action in knots of community review. This has some benefits. But it turns out that rather than making the average quality of projects better, it symmetrically hampers both bad projects and good projects which over time has sapped the will and ability to do anything at all.
A different way to think about it would be to say "yes, if the governor appoints someone bad to be in charge of transportation projects you are going to get bad projects. But the flipside is that if he appoints someone good you are going to get good projects." You admit that in democratic politics you are, yes, flying without a net and shitty leaders will deliver shitty results. But what we have right now is a system that's sanded off some worst-case outcomes at the cost of preventing anything good from ever happening.
You might square the circle by saying that the problem with Robert Moses wasn't that he had too much power; it was that he had bad ideas. Just listening to the people who live nearby is a bad way to make policy too, even if it sometimes gets things right as it did in the freeway revolts.
Yes, they did have bad ideas. In Matt's formulation, the people could see this and then vote for different things. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to vote out an already-constructed highway or superblock. I think "streets before trust" might actually work best for things like rebate checks or vaccine distribution policies. Things that are not...streets.
But it's also difficult to vote out an already-constructed bike lane, or transit-oriented affordable housing development. And for every Jane Jacobs, you get someone like this asshole who undermined a plan to build a dedicated express bus lane a .5 mile from where I live: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2013/09/03/deconstructing-the-misleading-info-in-an-ashland-western-coalition-flyer/
The point being: The politics of local infrastructure are the same whether you're trying to build "bad" infrastructure or "good" infrastructure.
I do agree that a key assumption of the do-exactly-what-it-says-on-the tin philosophy is that political actors can be held accountable. As many others have identified, every branch of government is unaccountable in its own special way--unless the institutions themselves change, Congress will continue to have its messy Grand Bargains and local government will continue to function on the backs of bureaucrats. Those systems could be improved, but I don't think that undermines the central point here.
I do think the "streets before trust" notion elevates an idea that has become unfashionable in left circles as of late--the need for diverse representation at the decision-making level. I don't know if I buy into this totally, but if the folks making decisions have the lived experience that leads to more thoughtful decision-making, you do something to solve the "Robert Moses problem."
Yes--and that he wasn't accountable to any voters.
accountability is very diffuse even when major projects go bad: the Purple Line in MD suburbs of DC has been a disaster already, even before we find out whether it actually gets used (if it eventually gets built). That involved state govt, county planning (in 2 counties), the DOT, US senators, Representatives, the former county executive, the current exec, the county council etc etc etc.
>signon = <accountability
I think one of the important moves in the urban planning world in the last decade or two (which Jeannette Sadik-Khan was partially instrumental in, but has been much broader) is the growing interest in pop-up and trial projects. Just put out some safety cones for a few weeks to make a fake bike lane, and then see whether people like it, rather than ask people whether they would like hypothetical bike lanes and let the opinions voiced in this hypothetical state rule the day.
I'm hopeful that a lot of the temporary "healthy streets" initiatives I see around Austin during Covid will become permanent, because people will have seen that they too can have the benefits of a cul-de-sac preventing drivers rushing through their neighborhood, while people on foot and on bikes can still easily get where they're going.
I think in this model, elected representatives would play a greater freeway fighting role, which is somewhat in tension with Matt's earlier suggestion on more executive consolidation.
This is probably my favorite article on SB so far. I've been winding myself up about basically this for ages - government needs to DO stuff in a clear, concise, and effective way or why the hell would people vote for the party of more government? Democrats far too often lose track of this.
Same. And he correctly identifies the cause: it’s the f’ing lawyers. Democrats need to stop being the goddamn party of Big Law already. Elect some more diverse professional backgrounds to Congress.
Even if there isnt a concern about low-trust voters I think straightforward policies with clear rules are better than complex programs with thirty exceptions or waivers, that inevitably leads to gaming the system.
This is just another way of saying “the low level of trust is often warranted”. Which is true!
The filibuster is terrible for trust. If you have a majority in the House, Senate and Presidency, why can't you pass anything.
Is there some sort of empirical connection between policy complexity and trust? Back in the high-trust days of the mid-20th century, was policy really that much simpler than it is today? I could say WWII as having boosted government trust ("we beat the Nazis that everybody hates, just like we said we would") but that is not really a "policy" in the sense we are talking about here.
The drop in American social capital (as described by Robert Putnam in "Bowling Alone") is a large and perhaps dominant factor in the drop in social trust. People have fewer friends, fewer hobbies, and engage less with their communities than ever before. This leads to a natural degradation of trust.
I don't believe the policies were simpler.
What I'm saying is that background conditions of trust were higher for various reasons. You cite a few of them. But I would really emphasize the much lower level of education in the population and the much more primitive state of communications technology. A population that generally lacked a high school diploma and got information through the thin tube of network television and radio was not in a position to nitpick about policy choices. In a very big picture sense, the outcomes were good starting with FDR's inauguration and rolling through until Vietnam so you had a trusting environment.
File this comment under "Martin Gurri Watch"
Fair, although for the record Putnam studied whether education correlated with a decrease in social capital and found that it did not. Social capital has dropped among all education levels over the past 75 years, so I would be interested to know if the same is true of trust.
Thanks for the reply!
GD this is well done.
What are the prospects of this sort of policy making in this Congress? My first instinct was they aren’t very good because legislative consensus building requires concessions to median votes and stuff that passes will be the result of a somewhat convoluted budget reconciliation process which makes for a whole lot of fine print on the tin. On the other hand though, there are probably 60 votes for checks in the Senate, a result of the broad public consensus built around that issue.
I think this would require moderate members of congress to change their thinking a little, away from "look moderate by scaling down big reforms" and towards "look effective by voting for things that help people right away" (with a side of "look moderate by taking stands against unpopular cultural policies"). This would be a big change relative to e.g. 2009-2010 and I'm almost sure there are moderates in Congress who would be suspicious of it. But I really do think this change would help their reelection prospects, and because so many of the policies involved are spending-related a lot of this can be done in reconciliation, so in theory someone should be able to get through to them?
"What are the prospects of this sort of policy making in this Congress?"
What, the electorate actually trusting Congress?! No chance.
Since so much effort is expended trying to fit camels through the needle's eye of budget reconciliation, maybe it's time to reconsider whether those rules, along with various other Congressional procedure rules, are helping or hurting in the big picture. It doesn't exactly inspire trust when major pieces of legislation are enacted with 10 year sunsets or other bizarrely arbitrary contortions just to comply with some Congressional rule.
I think what you meant to suggest was to abolish the filibuster, which is the only reason the limited reconciliation process exists. If you only eliminate the limitations on reconciliation you just get three filibuster-proof bill per year.
Case well made here. Two thing come to mind:
(1) I would gently push back on your characterization of those two restaurant tweets. I don't think anyone is saying the government is barely doing anything. They are saying the government isn't doing nearly enough. The WSJ just published that 110,000 locations have closed or fallen dormant. Same article, another 37% are expecting to close within the next six months without further assistance.
(2) I'm still so angry the banks were bailed out back in 2008 and not the actual homeowners. It's a stain on Obama's administration that only widens with time.
The banks had to be bailed out - the stain is that there wasn't an appropriate bloodletting in the finance industry. I realize that there are big fairness problems with collective punishment, but there area also fairness problems with not having it in this case.
I wonder how much anti-elite sentiment has at least some root in seeing a bunch of super rich bankers and hedge fund managers do their job badly, screw up the economy, make a ton of money doing it, and then get bailed out so they could keep doing those jobs.
I'd welcome your thoughts here. This is my biggest ax to grind with Obama's legacy - specially the neoliberal critique. I think the TARP funds could have stabilized the individual under-performing mortgages, rather than what became a direct injection into the banks. To your point on blood letting ... yes! So much yes. All the shareholders should have been taken to zero as a condition of any support.
I liked Taibbi's retrospective:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/
Hmmm...I'm a fan of Taibbi and his anti-wall-street view, but I feel like that article hasn't aged well and is really muddled in its critiques.
We also have a big problem of counterfactuals - we can agree that HARP was a dud by any reasonable measurement, but what we don't know is whether it could ever have worked, or did the incredible convolution, complexity and distribution of the MBS system make restructuring mortgages legally impossible.
The problem with the 2008 crisis was that it was a banking crisis, which means the goal of fixing the banks and the goal of fixing the economy are in direct opposition. Taibbi doesn't explain what his framework for evaluating the bailouts is.
In some ways, we now have clear indications circa 2020 that the bailout was successful - the banks got off life support and lowered their risk profile such that in the 2020 recession, we don't have a banking crisis and the banks can actually put some slack in the system with their clients without going under. Matt Levine wrote some good stuff in his Bloomberg column before he went on paternity leave comparing 2008 to 2020 and contrasting banking then and now.
So to me the hanging chad isn't the cost to taxpayers or the result - it's the total lack of accountability. In my view, the government should do what's necessary to put the banking system back together...but maybe with the current set of bankers not at their jobs.
Every now and then Hank Greenberg has a temper tantrum in court that he was treated "unfairly" by the mean people who took his company - Fanny/Freddy investors sometimes bang around about how much excess profits the government has taken after nationalizing them.
In my view, this was the right outcome - taxpayers come to the rescue, taxpayers keep the toys; if/when these institutions are privatized, it needs to be of zero benefit to the original owners.
It's hard to know whether this would have fixed the panic, and counterfactuals are hard, but the question is whether the "arranged marriages" (e.g. Lehman -> BoA, etc.) could have been replaced with straight nationalizations instead; the win would be a clear mechanism to zero out equity holders and toss insiders.
The second problem of competing interests in the bail-out is that disciplining the bond market (by writing down bond holders) and stabilizing the credit markets are at odds as well, and you can make an argument that unless the bond holders get wounded as well as the equity holders, the capital markets haven't properly "paid" for their bail-outs.
I think the point with the first tweet is the use of the loaded phrase 'big government'. The implication isn't that the government isn't doing enough (which is true), but that government can't get the job done (which is false).
This whole post seems to violate its own premise, though.
It was quick, snappy and interesting, while the can said "slow boring."
It undermines my trust, you know?
But seriously: good post. I hope Ron Klain reads it and creates the giant checks labeled "Biden Bucks."