"By contrast, if Barack Obama says tomorrow that there’s a ton of waste in the USFWS that he was never able to tackle due to the political clout of Big Fish, my assumption will be that there’s something fishy with this agency."
Of all the depressing characteristics of the current era, one of the worst is widespread ignorance of obvious truths. “It’s important to win elections.” “Understanding what’s true is useful.” “Choices must be made.”
What's even more depressing is I do think a lot of elite political actors still understand this, but are too scared of attracting negative intra-party attention to do anything about it.
Yup - we have people in leadership positions who aren't leaders and don't want to lead people or ask the hard questions. People crave power, not leadership it seems like.
Yes, I have my opinions on where Democrats should move to the right to win elections but to win more they need to move to the right somewhere on Foreign, Social or Economic policy.
Seems like it could be a result of individual incentives, like it's better for you to have high prestige in your party, even if the party overall is losing elections. Better to be a big fish in a little pond than a relatively small fish in a much bigger pond.
The obvious truths have one thing in common. They make people feel sad.
No, you can't easily and cheaply solve climate change. No, you can't have your cake and eat it. No, it isn't responsible to go into an election with unpopular policies. No, you can't solve the deficit by firing a few civil servants.
I think this whole aversion to discomfort is very pernicious. It shows a lack of maturity. Acknowledging difficult choices and intractable problems should not make us feel sad. That is a choice.
I disagree vehemently: we should try to leave a more comfortable world to our children than the one that our parents left to us. A world with endless abundance, where we can consume as much as we like and work as little as we choose should be the ultimate objective.
Knowing that there are difficult choices and intractable problems should make us sad. That shouldn't make us averse to them, nor should it make us lie to ourselves about them.
We should face the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. But that doesn't mean that we can't be sad that it is not as we would like it to be. Pretending that my father isn't dead won't bring him back. But I am allowed to be sad that he is. And I'll still be allowed to be sad when he's been dead 20 years instead of 2. The same applies to policies. We'd like to have a world of fully automated luxury communism (or, as I prefer to put it: fully automated universal aristocracy). We can't do that yet. But we're a hell of a lot closer than we were 300 years ago as a species, and that drive to improve conditions for everyone is part of why we are closer.
“A world with endless abundance, where we can consume as much as we like and work as little as we choose should be the ultimate objective.”
Wow I hope you are not serious. Not that endless abundance would not be wonderful but from what sources with what consequences and distributed equitable to whom? Further consuming as much we like would be great but unthinking consumption for consumption’s sake is one definition of immaturity. And lastly working as little as possible without thought about what to do with the time saved is defined best as “not having a reason to get up in the morning”. This is simply not my choice of ideal reality.
Energy and housing abundance would be good. It would be good if I could easily support myself working part-time if I wanted to focus on raising kids or volunteering in my community or making art.
Women know that "working as little as we choose" is not possible for most of us. (Although it is for me because I don't have anyone to take care of beyond moral support. At this point. I'm fine, but many would not want that world.)
I'm not an expert on Iain M Banks work, but the Culture seems much worse than Star Trek TNG. For example, it doesn't have the Prime Directive and is very much interested in compelling others, by force if necessary. The Culture seems much more ambiguous, whereas the Federation (as presented in TNG) is more desirable to live in.
So much of American society is built around creature comforts though and not being uncomfortable in the least bit. At least the last 40 years. People on all sides of the political spectrum think they can all get what they want with literally zero downsides, risk or interruption, or decrease in quality. We are a spoiled bunch.
When what we should be doing is paying attention and anticipating how we'd manage if all the creature comforts went away.
This can take many forms. Reading history is a common one. Traveling is another. Just getting old requires one to think about managing the possible pain, disability, boredom, and awkward human relationships (caregivers, unresolved family issues) that can accompany the end of life.
I've elected to stay in a geographically risky area with the intention of living through hard times if they happen and hoping I don't end up regretting it.
I think that, "lack of maturity," fails to capture the extent to which intelligence is involved in mitigating the discomfort and thus reducing the maturity requirements. If you can see more of the corner cases and how much more grey (than black and white) the situation is, then you realize that neither side fully eliminates the discomfort.
Self-replying: I guess that I am saying that, as a boundary case, if you aren't especially bright, then the world is a scary place and the maturity required to not want simple answers may be out of reach for even the best of us.
I saw a well-written piece on another Substack (I forget which one) that argue that what Trump voters most wanted from him was STABILITY: the sense that a strong person was in charge in a complex, scary, rapidly changing world.
From my perspective, looking to Trump for stability is forking insane, but I can see how from the perspective of certain voters it would make sense.
I tend not to believe poll results; people haven't thought through their positions. Maybe people value stability. Or perhaps what they really want, but were loath to tell a pollster, is that they value entertainment and repudiated Biden because he was boring.
One could argue that "that" is what both sides want. I wanted not-Trump so that the world wouldn't turn into a chaotic scary rapidly changing (by devolving into WWIII) world.
The boundary case (not especially bright) I was considering was from the point of view of my Downs Syndrome brother. His discomfort with redefining or recategorizing ideas (that he feels are settled) is palpable.
It seems like this is in tension with mental health polarization between Democrats and Republicans, and makes me think about how people accused Reagan of Panglossianism.
I would amend this to you can’t fund Medicare for All with just the defense budget without radically reducing American military power and overseas obligations. That’s the choice.
I agree with everything Matt has written today about DOGE. I think it is a ham-fisted way of disrupting a group of people who don't like Donald Trump. This is a pretty accurate framework for almost everything President Trump 2.0 is doing.
But there is one thing that is still sticking in my craw, and it goes to Matt's criticisms of The Groups -- NGOs and the constellation of non-profits who push extreme policies -- as a bad influence on the Democratic Party. I've long thought of these groups as being funded by either currently-alive rich people (Soros, Laurene Jobs, Mackenzie Scott) or long-dead rich people whose foundation has drifted left (Rockefeller, Macarthur, etc). But I'm not so sure anymore.
In the early reporting on DOGE, I read about Global Refuge. In looking back through their Form 990's, they averaged $54M per year during 2011-2020, providing services for migrants and refugees, and political advocacy for immigration broadly. 95% of their funding comes from the government.
In 2019 Global Refuge named Krish Vignarajah as CEO, a then 40-year old who had previously worked for Michelle Obama (as Policy Director for the First Lady), as Senior Advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and unsuccessfully ran for Governor of Maryland. After her appointment, revenue for Global Refuge rose to over $200M annually -- 4X their previous decade's average. For her efforts, she is paid $640K.
Now, I know that funnelling $200M/year through this organization isn't the reason for the budget deficit. Even if you multiply this by 100 and make it $20B per year, it is a rounding error in the budget deficit discussions. But it does fund this organization as one of The Groups that push the Democratic Party into more extreme policy positions that, ultimately, hurt more than help.
I guess what I'm saying is that we should resist the DOGE work around their indiscriminate firings and punitive policies intended to push people out of government work. But in the spirit of yesterday's post by Matt, we should use the information they are highlighting to clean up some of the money sloshing around the NGO sector -- not for deficit-reduction purposes, but as part of reducing the power of The Groups.
One funny thing that might fall out from these DOGE attacks and cuts is that the groups wind up losing the resources necessary to lobby/bully Democrats into losing policy and narrative positions, thus Democrats can more easily pivot and moderate which then makes Republicans less competitive in future elections.
A successful War on Woke would erode the GOP's advantage.
A Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox but for partisan politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grossman-Stiglitz_Paradox Successfully vanquishing your most hated partisan enemies is likely to improve the electoral viability of your opponent's coalition and weaken the latent appetite for a party built on their demise.
Nah, Darth Vader was never close to in favor of the light side (supply-side deregulatory energy growth) until that kid he abandoned after in-vitro'ing with a random Naboo queen defeated him in combat.
I always figured that prophecy was totally accurate. When Anakin was a kid there were like 1-2 Sith and hundreds of light-side Jedi. Thanks to him by the end of his life the numbers of Sith and Jedi are basically balanced. Really, it's the fault of the Jedi Council for not actually thinking through what "balance to the force" would actually look like!
More broadly, if we manage to avoid a coup, some of the work being accomplished by MAGA likely will reverberate to the eventual benefit of Democrats. Neutralization of DEI is high on that list. I have mixed feelings about some of the actual policy ramifications of the right's dismantling of DEI, but I do think Democrats are likely to benefit politically if significant numbers of voters perceive it's no longer much of a threat to them personally (because Trump has fixed it).
I will be so happy when they whole DEI Stazi apparatus is purged from academia. I became radicalized when I started applying for academic jobs in 2022. In a period of four years the whole system seemed to go nuts. There was this uniform language, mandatory litmus tests demanding that you show correct ideological fealty, explicit racism and sexism for purely aesthetic reasons, and crap pay to boot.
I went to a guest lecture at “my” university last week where the speaker, who has done great work retrofitting suburban areas with more housing, better and greener public spaces, etc, was asked by a faculty member about degrowth. It was clear from the context that the professor asking the question was in favor of degrowth. This was *an architecture program.* I wanted to ask how he thought his students felt about promoting a political agenda that, if successful, would leave them unemployed and in debt. But as a puny adjunct co-teaching a class, I didn’t want to embarrass the professor who hired me.
I am an economist. Growth is a moral imperative if we want to reduce poverty. Enforced austerity harms the weakest in society. Refusing to build housing to accommodate people moving into an area is just enacting a form of regulatory serfdom where birth and parentage determines one’s opportunities.
Not to mention that degrowth is inherently genocidal and requires a totalitarian Holodomor to actually be carried out. (Though the cultists assert that somehow billions of people will somehow willingly suffer material deprivation to satiate the whims of cult leader Hickel.)
The stupidity was exacerbated by the smugness with which the question was asked. To her credit, the guest lecturer sidestepped it gracefully, pretending that it was about infill development, which she promotes.
Any signs it's tapering off yet? I've never regarded it as a very persuasive ideology: it has way too many shortcomings such as the suppression of speech. If I'd been in academia they would never have heard the end of my logical and pragmatic arguments.
Lots of departments and DEI staff have been cut due to budget problems and the growing demographic cliff cutting enrollment. Austerity is fixing some if this admin bloat.
At least we'll get to see that the anti-DEI movement is more about re-establishing old patronage networks rather than anything else. I mean, that's what the hiring practices of anti-DEI people indicate.
Based on current appearances, it seems that with the Trump Administration in charge, it is mostly not going to be about thoughtfully curbing the worst excesses of DEI and instead is simply institutionalizing hostility to, and discriminating against, Blacks and women in executive roles in the federal government and elsewhere.
This is what I'm increasingly expecting. I'm just hoping that Democrats can at least manage to avoid stepping on themselves with it for long enough to win in 2028.
Not just executive roles. I'm waiting in the wings to raise the consciousness of conservatives. Boomer women know that they were rescued from being restricted to pink collar jobs and their puny salaries. Younger women are pretty much clueless about how things were when our first job searches involved ads labeled "men" and "women". (And which also had codes for "whites preferred / okay for Negroes to apply")
The best thing Republicans could do is just spend less money on higher education. The DOGE philosophy is a very bad way to handle PEPFAR, but a pretty solid one to handle higher ed spending and its social consequences.
Do not create a giant new fund for anti-woke professors (fun fact, the religious non-profits maximizing asylum seekers Republicans are mad about today are due in part to Dubya's efforts to create socially conservative non-profit institutions), just cap the masters loans.
Asylum seekers or refugees coming through the U.N. refugee program? Many of the resettlement agencies in the U.S. are religious organizations: The Catholic Church and the Lutherans for example.
I believe it's also true for asylum that a lot of religious non-profits were involved setting up resources and networks, although it wouldn't surprise me if some rightists that don't like the refugee program and conflate both.
But I think some number of refugees should be admitted annually and hope some enterprising Democrat could take it up with Musk to include certain property seizures (per his frustration with South Africa) if Musk is willing to join forces to keep a stable annual program.
In this limited domain I think it’s kind of resetting the amount of ruin in a nation. The trouble is not running the tab up higher than that in a kajillion other domains.
In the short-term, that's probably(?) true, but if your platform is using the government to deliver valuable services to citizens and the ability to do so has been cut off at the knees, I don't think that's going to be a positive-sum tradeoff.
Relatedly, I see a lot of people getting angry about DOGE’s actions without engaging with their own stated strategy on its own terms:
They are firing lots of federal workers first, not to cut the spending on federal salaries, but because they think they can fire their way into a more loyal, competent, nimble “better” (in their view) workforce, and once they have a better workforce, then they will be able to cut regulations and programs to actually cut spending. They think past efforts to cut regulation and spending have been undermined by the federal workforce, and so they are prioritizing a purge of the federal workforce first and foremost.
This strategy was explicitly laid out by Chris Rufo and others in his orbit before the inauguration.
There’s still a lot to criticize with this plan!
- It’s probably illegal under current law, and despite having control of Congress, they’re not waiting for Congress to change the laws to make it legal first.
- It could fail, and you end up with a much worse workforce on all dimensions than we had before. (E.g. if Congress refuses to open the taps on paying market wages for federal workers)
- It could “work” eventually, but the work of the federal government is too important, and it could cause disaster in the interim while they’re rebuilding.
- The plan working could be a bad thing, as everyone prioritizes “loyalty” to Trump over running a working government.
But you have to engage with the other side’s argument, and not just say “you can’t cut salaries to fix the deficit”.
It's a stupid plan, though. The Republicans have never cut the deficit because the Republicans have never actually tried to cut the deficit. They occasionally do some edge-trimming on spending and use it to pass a massive tax cut, but they never do even edge-trimming on spending in its own right, to say nothing of anything major.
This is not complicated. If they wanted to pass a budget that cut spending and left taxes alone it is entirely within their power to just fucking do it.
> They also worked with Obama to curtail spending.
L O L
that's literally the opposite of how it happened. they *refused* to work with Obama, so we got "the super committee", and then "the sequester", which was supposed to be so painful that no one would accept, but the GOP couldn't find their own asses so it went into effect anyway. We basically got a second recession because Boehner had no control over his caucus.
It is a stupid plan, but it might be somewhat less stupid if you hypothesize that they're not being truthful about the end goal of the plan being to "cut regulations and spending."
"Better" is a value judgment, I guess, and depends on objectives. The workforce isn't "better" from the perspective of you or me or other normal people. But maybe it's "better" if your main objective is to send people to Mars, or to transition to a Yarvinist system of government.
DOGE's buyout/firing strategy reminds me, in a way, of the theory that companies were implementing RTO policies to do "quiet layoffs" and reduce headcount without having to announce workforce cuts.
It could be true, but the idea that your best workers are truly committed to the company and will jump through whatever hoops they need to keep their jobs doesn't ring true to me. If you're withdrawing a benefit (WFH) or offering a buyout (a la DOGE) the first people to leave are going to be the high performers that can get a similar job right away.
This is 100% correct, but also I think missing the point.
The actual purpose of DOGE is to demoralize the federal workforce so that people will leave, and they can be replaced with lackeys and minions. Firing probationary workers is just the simplest solution. You actually want to get the high performers and the committed people out, because they're the ones least likely to play ball with the replacements.
And frankly, a lot of DOGE is simply 'what have the Romans ever done for us?' For the few agencies that they do actually believe are needed, the assumption is AI or any high-school dropout can just as easily do the job.
A serious, position by position, program by program audit and review would undoubtedly yield many government expenditures that were either unauthorized by the enabling legislation or appropriation would, in a rational world, be a means of reducing government spending. That never really happens and is certainly not what DOGE is doing. They do not seem to understand what an employee or program does; indeed, there is little evidence that they care.
This sort of assessment and reconsideration never happens because Congress and the White House, year after year, have projects and programs they want and do not wish to justify. In addition, such a review might address the extent to which a program is fulfilling its intended purpose but there is little constituency for such efforts. Likewise, regulations and enforcement could be examined to see if they are working but many regulators don’t want that since it puts them on the defensive and rarely have the resources to do the work assigned to them. Regulated industries would typically oppose such reviews since enforcement is almost never as rigorous or effective as intended. Sometimes Congress will hold a few hearings but typically these are dumbshows in support of getting rid of a program. Today, they are not even bothering with that, reduced to calling in fear when cuts affect their constituents.
What we will get is a dysfunctional swiss cheese government. No doubt, it will all be blamed on DEI and the Democrats.
You missed another reason it’s a bad plan: because of “last in, first out,” the people who will keep their jobs won’t be the most nimble, flexible employees, but the opposite.
0.2% of GDP is a bizarre way to frame this and people should feel bad about falling for that.
Trusting the math on 0.2% * GDP, its $60 Billion in salary costs out of a Federal Budget of $6800 Billion or a little under 1% of spending. Or about 6% of the deficit.
Those numbers still tell us how we can't lay off people to balance the budget.
On the other hand, Brookings says that federal personnel spending is $291 Billion or 6.6% of the Federal Budget. So somebody's math is way off. Or someone's hiding the ball, which is easier when using weird measurements.
Good point - something's not right. The federal civilian workforce is ~2m people, meaning that if the cost was only $60b, the average pay would be only $30k. Ben probably did the research; maybe he can explain where that number came from?
Is there any evidence Global Refuge has done anything wrong? From skimming their website, it seems their #1 activity is helping immigrants find jobs...is that a bad thing?
Krish Vignarajah finished magna cum laude at Yale before a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford and a Yale JD. Doesn't on the face of it seem to be a problematic person to lead an organisation!
Her $640k, I would expect/hope, was based on recommendation from a compensation consultant.
> was based on recommendation from a compensation consultant.
It probably was, but that's part of the entire stupidity around executive compensation in both the NGO and for-profit world. Outsource all important decisions to consultants, then the consultants end up in charge.
Also the government shouldn't be giving money to groups that have lobbying and advocacy anywhere in their mission.
Though I love this idea in principle, I think it's hard to do it in practice. Think Planned Parenthood, which provides great reproductive health services and is really the behemoth in this domain. But they do a lot of advocacy too. Probably similar for Global Refuge. The people who do something with a political tinge are likely the same ones who want to do advocacy.
And stipulating that government money can only be used for the doing-things and not the advocacy part of the mission is fine, but it ignores the fungibility of money.
Split it into two independent orgs with separate finances. One for operations and the other for advocacy. Government funds only go to the operational org and, moreover, it needs to make it's spending legible and publicly available for scrutiny. The advocacy org is private and donor funded, it can do whatever it wants.
That seems an awful lot like just saying that an organization that accepts government funds can't use those funds for advocacy. I guess the two orgs' "independence" from each other is the difference. But, again, I think this is problematic.
Suppose Planned Parenthood decides it's only going to be a service (not advocacy) organization, and it puts in a lot of IUDs. Suppose some state outlaws a certain sort of commonly used IUDs (some fringe people claim that IUD use is tantamount to abortion), which are thought to be the safest and most effective. Would you say that Planned Parenthood shouldn't send their doctors to testify before the state legislature against this law? Or lobby against this law? What if there's a proposed law that, say, outlaws the use of techs rather than nurses in the Operating Room? Shouldn't Planned Parenthood be able to advocate with regard to this?
You might say, no, they shouldn't be lobbying at all. But at some point public policy affects the nitty-gritty of how a service organization functions and hence affects its mission. Saying the organization can't try to affect policy in this regard is problematic.
I really, really agree with the idea, but I really, really think it's complicated. It seems like it's always impossible to draw reasonable lines in our unreasonable country.
I agree it's difficult, but it seems like we could employ some of the methods we use to discourage the use of public funds for religious purposes. Formally prohibit it, demand organizational separation, and back it up with penalties:
> If you violate the requirements specified in your grant or otherwise improperly use the funds you receive, you may be subject to legal action. Among other things, you may lose your grant funds, be required to repay the funds you received, and pay any damages that might be awarded through court action. If an organization uses its funds fraudulently, it could be subject to criminal prosecution.
Then how in the world would the groups be able to make a case for government funding? Simply by managing to hit the right language in grant applications? (Bring on the LLMs!)
This would be like businesses growing without ever making their case to possible investors, or ever advertising for that matter.
My sister founded a mental health non-profit. She spends lots and lots of time educating people about general issues around mental health. Then she has to do a lot of work explaining exactly what her particular program does, what its goals are and how success is measured, and what the actual evidence for success is. Without advocacy, funders would not be able to understand what they were granting money for.
(BTW, they are large enough at this point to have a contract with a lobbyist who advises on strategy and statehouse dynamics, but for many legislators in her state, being "lobbied" means encountering her in person, and facing her passion, commitment and hands-on experience.)
I don't think they've done any *illegal*, but the whole processes is sketchy. First, I wouldn't wave away that $640k as nothing --- that's a lot of money, but the general process is that these organizations get government money to do something that's arguably useful, but that money cross subsidies left-wing advocacy.
I don't know much about Global Refuge, but I can give local examples (for Madison, WI). We have a couple organizations (Freedom Inc [1] and Urban Triage [2]) which get government money [3, 4] for (sometimes) defensible programs (youth programs, rental assistance, etc.) and then turn around and advocate for abolishing the police and related nonsense [5, 6]. I'll add that this wasn't just a 2020 thing. They were anti police before it was cool.
So, yes, these organizations can provide useful services that may be worth government funding, but the government funding is also paying these idiots a salary and paying for the infrastructure they use for advocacy --- from the printers they use to make stupid flyers to the shitty squarespace websites where they post their demands.
The useful services they do provide could be provided by organizations which don't do this shit.
The challenge here is, are these groups actually using government money to pay for advocacy, or are they using government money to pay for services they agreed to provide, and then seperately doing fundraising from the private sector and devoting THAT revenue stream to paying for advocacy.
The only way to really avoid that issue is to insist that organizations that contract with the government cannot spend any money on advocacy.
The problem with THAT is that these non-profits are able to charge less to the government by paying their people like shit, but only because theose people are fanatics who believe in the mission, and you keep motivating those people to take a below-market rate paycheck by having your organization engage in advocacy. If you don't pay 20% of their salary from some private donor to go marching in the streets on Fridays demanding the abolition of police, you'd have to pay them a lot more money to run a soup kitchen Monday-Thursday.
I think NGOs should be allowed to advocate within their mission, at least to some extent. But it seems abolishing the police goes beyond what is reasonable.
I can see how they justified it to themselves as part of the mission of delivering social services, however.
I know John was just using this as an example. Generally, useful effective programs should be funded more and ineffective ones less. That should really be the operating principle. Defining usefulness and effectiveness is part of the challenge.
I'm not sure I get what your criticism here is. Do you think someone running an organization that manages revenues of $200 million and has nearly 600 employees should be paid substantially less than $640k a year? Maybe he should accept less because he believes in the mission, but it's certainly already much less than anyone running a similar sized for profit organization.
Do you think we shouldn't as a government spend money on the programs Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Refugee Services) provides? Do you think we should close the tent to people advocating for the poor and the neglected here and abroad?
I have direct insight into Global Relief's Catholic counterpart, and I can assure you there's not some big sloshing pot of money that they're drinking from. They are essentially government contractors providing capacity that the government doesn't have or can't ramp up quickly.
They run on shoe string budgets and provide very basic services to people who would otherwise be literally out in the cold. If it's the advocacy part that bothers you, I can't speak to the Lutherans, but for the Catholics it's not some well funded K street operation, it's one or two people trying to get their phone calls returned by Congressional staffers so they can understand the math of what it takes to shelter a 16 year old for a couple months until they can be placed with a cousin somewhere with space for one more mattress on the floor.
Just to be clear, you’re saying that an organization “providing services for migrants and refugees, and political advocacy for immigration broadly” is “extreme politics”?
Has this always been the case? Is being pro-immigration or pro-refugee always extreme or is it newly extreme because of recent shifts in public opinion? I guess I want to understand the limits here of “everything is the fault of the groups” when it feels like, in this case, this group’s position would have been pretty centrist not that long ago. W was fairly pro immigration, for example. The right used to think accepting political refugees from communist countries as important to American foreign policy and self-image. Is it just that times change so these are the bad guys now? Is it purely popularism and the need to bend to whatever the median voter believes at any given moment?
I can see that but I’m not sure we’d all have felt that was true in the early 2000s. We employed a number of NGOs to help with resettling refugees from Somolia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere as part of increased foreign policy engagement with Muslim populations around the world. Beyond that particular example, we’ve always relied on a number of public/private partnerships to advance US objectives in Africa and Asia. Plus sometimes these groups are useful for intelligence gathering. While it sounds reasonable right now to say the government shouldn’t be funding advocacy groups, I really feel like that’s a recent development based on swings in public opinion.
Why would those groups need to lobby the government rather than get on with a job? Would you want Blackwater, for example, to have foreign policy making advocacy?
Because their work is aligned with policy objectives of the administration and sometimes that includes work to lobby members of congress or local and state officials or what have you.
If I'm resettling refugees, it's not simply a matter of me plopping them down somewhere. I have a variety of political considerations, including the need for buy-in from various politicians up and down the local/state/federal ladder. If my administration and party's position is that asylum is a net-positive for the country, that advocacy is an important part of achieving my policy goals.
I get that in 2024 such positions were political losers and that a popularist approach would have democratic politicians either tacking to the right on immigration or holding their tongues about their true feelings. But what I see in these comments is some kind of flabbergasted surprise that these kinds of programs exist at all when, if you take a longer view of how the government functions, you see that it's always relied to some extent on private entities to achieve policy goals, including advocacy.
"Because their work is aligned with policy objectives of the administration and sometimes that includes work to lobby members of congress or local and state officials or what have you."
Why should we want these organizations to do the lobbying though? If their work is aligned with the administration, have the administration lobby congress or various other political groups that need persuading.
That rather begs the question as to how much involvement NGOs had in destabilizing the region in the first place. It's a neat trick to get someone to pay you to cause harm, then pay you to ameliorate the harm you caused; and I wish I believed that did not happen more often than most of us would be comfortable with. The bureaucratic version of the addict stealing your wallet then helping you look for it.
These orgs don't get money for advocacy, they get fees for services. Many nonprofits associated with the Catholic and Lutheran churches (Global Refuge is Lutheran) are essentially government contractors in this area.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on all things Global Rescue or Krish Vignarajah. In looking through the organization's press releases, I see a clear point of view regarding immigration that seems to go beyond the provision of needed services. A few examples from the Biden-era (to remove the Trump effect):
2/2024: "Global Refuge alarmed by Biden administration consideration of new asylum ban"
Is the argument that money is completely fungible, and therefore the US was somehow giving them money for advocacy, albeit indirectly? Because weren't the grants they received from the US for the refugee resettlement services? Wouldn't a restriction on the free speech rights of non-profit groups that receive government grants be a First Amendment problem?
Sure! And these were probably counterproductive positions to be staking out in the Biden era given the public’s change in perception of immigration! The popularist point is there. My point is that these positions were not radical all that long ago and funding organizations like Global Rescue were even embraced as an important component of US policy goals. When we look at the program today with the view limited to the Biden years, it’s easy to armchair quarterback and call this an egregious error that justifies Elon’s savaging of the agencies.
Would the asylum seekers not have benefited just as much if the government had funded a logistics company, for transport and housing, and granted legal aid rather than this NGO run by a former staffer making $640k a year?
I am not here to defend the efficacy or efficiency of the program. I am pointing out that it is not crazy for such a program to exist and to front the claim that the government has relied on non-state actors repeatedly and for many years in causes both foreign and domestic to accomplish policy goals.
My guess is that the government also funded NGOs that did the logistics, transport, legal aid, etc. Hell, maybe Global Refuge did those things too. I have no idea.
The USG funding domestic advocacy organizations is pretty sketchy, IMO. Service organizations are a different story, and I'd be fine with the Government drawing a clear line about that.
This organization's funding also makes one ask why, if these services are so valuable to for immigrants, we fund an NGO to perform them rather than bringing it in-house.
(Of course, the reasons for this status quo are mostly orthogonal to delivering effective services efficiently. Which is a much broader and more fundamental indictment of our current politics.)
I don't know anything about Global Refuge, but in each city where I've lived the bulk of refugee resettlement support has been done by decentralized religious charities such as the local Catholic Charities or Jewish Family and Children's Services, or by local specialist groups like the International Institute in St. Louis. Of course these agencies are losing federal funding as well, but I'm not clear what purpose a nationwide entity serves, as the actual services provided to refugees or asylees is most effectively done by locals.
I think the way to go after this is the corruption angle that's been discussed in the comments here before. Like, if you're going to make popularist hay next time the sun shines, the actual work of the organization is not what's going to gin up broad public outrage. What you do is point out that it's thinly concealed self-dealing for a former staffer and politically connected person to be given a sweetheart role funded by the taxpayer.
The public hates the revolving door, even if Matt doesn't think the argument is good on the merits.
All that information was already publicly available. Musk could have put in a public records request and gotten all that information at any time. That's the law. You could have done the same thing, but I doubt you would be willing to invest the time. DOGE, however, obfuscates everything they do. No one knows for sure what they are doing because they don't follow public records law, it's no different than Hillary's private email server. You are essentially arguing that we should abandon our current system of government information being publicly available because we were all too lazy to look at it. Better to put Musk in charge and let him work in absolute secrecy.
This would be more compelling if we knew for a fact that Global Refuge isn't worth all that money. I have no idea, but it can't just be assumed because its funding went up and its director gets paid $640K.
Global Refuge and similar orgs are more like government contractors than advocacy groups, which is why they get so much public funding. It's a religious (Lutheran) charity that receives fees for services performed. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is heavily integrated into the refugee pipeline for historical reasons--its predecessor bodies were ethnic immigrant churches for Scandinavians and Germans. The Roman Catholic Church has similar large orgs in this space.
If I'm reading their Form 990 correctly, out of $220M in revenues they spent $126K on lobbying?
Like, I'm sympathetic to the argument that the second number should be 0, but ~99.94% of what the government spent seems to have gone towards actual tangible goods and services.
I guess I'd want to look at the spectrum of NGOs receiving federal aid: does the power of The Groups result in especially progressive NGOs getting a disproportionate share of the grants? Or is federal aid distributed fairly evenly across the political spectrum?
(A wrinkle here might be deciding which sectors to look at. If someone objects to federal funding that supports immigrants or refugees at all, then the result will automatically appear to be disproportionate. In my non-profit work, I was always aware of the distinction between advocacy and just providing services (mainly because I find advocacy boring compared with the challenge of addressing practical problems.)
I think the tension here is that yes, ethically, morally, and for the purposes of effective governing and actually advancing your interests, misinformation is counterproductive.
However, misinformation and leveraging it within your own coalition specifically has tactical political advantages against those in your coalition anchored by reality. Those willing to bullshit always have more maneuverability, and since the time between "fucking around" and truly "finding out" in terms of bullshit making people's lives worse in a way that generates real political blowback is frustratingly long these days, the bullshitters just race ahead, until the Finding Out eventually hits, which honestly, it hasn't yet.
Right. Additionally, even if the tactical argument for “honesty” were solid (and I think you’ve made a good case that it’s not), there is a real cost to trying to be accurate and precise in public, which is different. Take Matt’s example about inflation. Democrats and their allies in the press were saying something true but imprecise. And maybe Matt’s point is that they just shouldn’t have brought up relative inflation around the world. But given that tangible inflation was the main thing on voters’ minds, what was the right move? Explain the issue in multiple paragraphs that require significant background knowledge to understand? Detail which inflationary moves Trump made (pandemic relief checks!), which ones Biden made (more pandemic relief checks!), which ones were a mistake, and how much inflation is attributable to outside factors? That’s complex, and when Democrats say complex things, they get dinged as out of touch elitists. Being accurate and precise also puts you at risk of having to change your message when new facts come to light — but unless those new facts are palpable to your audience, they are likely to view you as merely waffling.
I agree that the ideal political leader would be able to deliver honest, accurate, precise messages in a way that ordinary people find clear and helpful. I think Warren and Buttigieg are the closest we have to this ideal, and maybe if we had run one of them this year we’d be in a different place now. But when brazen lying has been working so well for the other side, it’s hard for me to keep faith in that ideal.
"That's complex, and when Democrats say complex things, they get dinged out of touch elitists."
People love to make this claim, but I don't think it's true. Can you give me any examples of Democrats actually giving a complicated answer and then being criticized as elitist for it?
Complicated answers have a hard time spreading in today's media environment because people scroll away too quickly, but I don't think they think complicated answers are elitist.
What actually turns people off is giving simple answers that require trusting the speaker in lieu of more complicated answers that don't. It's perceived as elitist to say, "Global warming will kill us all if we don't act now, and if you don't believe me you're anti-science," whereas explaining the real risks of global warming in enough detail to be useful is merely boring.
I think it also hurts that we just don’t have anyone with enough star wattage to wield the bully pulpit.
Obama did some of it at the beginning, but Biden just always undermined himself by coming off as old and creaky when he tried to forcefully explain things.
Part of what works for Trump and worked for Hitler but also worked for less objectionable leaders like MLK and JFK was to simply be able to say things passionately and comprehensibly.
Agreed. On the one hand, it sucks to think that charisma matters far more than policy specifics. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that charisma matters far more than policy specifics for the Presidential race, at least. So when we're picking our next nominee, I really friggin' hope we pick someone with some actual charisma.
Unfortunately, pretty much the only person waiting in the wings on our side with real star wattage is Pete Buttigieg, and a lot of people seem to dislike him because he's crafted his whole life to work for a presidential campaign (which, to me, seems like an obviously good thing, but go figure).
I mean, in large part, education polarization DOES mean that people resent the people who, up until now, thought they were doing ALL the right things by relentlessly having their ducks in a row.
I sympathize with the cosmic injustice of it all, but also, Pete's a smart boy, and if he's worth his peanuts, he'll adapt. If he isn't, we need leaders who can. Like with the charisma, it's kind of as simple as that.
I do think that this should also force us to rethink the Democratic party's internal primary processes -- both formal AND informal. We should have them select a LOT harder for general charisma, instead of just "who can navigate the hack promotion track the best" like Harris.
Agreed on all points. And I think, to some extent, Pete's already adapting. His crack about the most recent DNC elections feeling like a Portlandia sketch was spot on and well-tailored to the audience that needs to hear it.
One more point of agreement: I think what this does is make it more important to make sure that when we get a charismatic leader, they do the right policies.
Which is a problem, because that leads us right back to The Groups and their odious tactics!
Perhaps the synthesis, though, is that we don’t need to demand The Groups’ same level of ideological purity, but rather that we simply need to have a healthy institutional party that can (1) promote charismatic candidates, and (2) furnish them with a party apparatus that can host a diverse set of policy ideas, rigorously vet them, and then convert them into a feasible policy program regardless of which options get selected.
For instance, let’s say it ends up being Pete. Great! He’s still gonna need people to help him implement the Abundance Agenda. And that agenda will only fail if it hasn’t been vetted properly and doesn’t have the buy-in.
That synthesis is pretty much my dream outcome, but I despair of reaching it unless the candidate we choose is strong-willed enough to stand up to the Groups and naturally inclines in a classically liberal direction.
My read on Buttigieg is that he probably meets qualification #2, but I have no idea if he meets qualification #1. He certainly didn't do it in 2020, but it would have been political suicide to try way back then.
Well, I think a lot of things turn people off, and I guess the question is which thing is turning off the most relevant group… but FWIW I was mostly thinking of both Gore and Kerry running against Bush. I don’t honestly know if the narrative (people wanted to get a beer with Bush, not be lectured to by Gore/Kerry) is accurate or explanatory; but I buy it because it matches a dynamic I’ve seen in my own life as a teacher. When students encounter something that is too complex for them to follow, some of them work hard to figure it out; some of them feel bad about themselves and give up; some of them say “this is boring”; and some of them get actively mad at it—“this is stupid,” “this author is just showing off” etc. (Not an exhaustive description of their reactions, of course!) I’m not sure any of those reactions is a particularly useful one for a politician to trigger in their voters, so yeah, I think there are at least potential costs to trying to communicate complexity. (And yes, I do think adult voters, in their aggregate, can be fairly compared to teenaged students—which I don’t mean to be derogatory; I love and respect my students.)
I agree that those reactions aren't terribly helpful, but only the "this author is just showing off" reaction equates to "elitism" in my mind, and I suspect that reaction is most likely to occur when the person giving the complicated explanation fills their explanation with a bunch of jargony gobbledygook.
The best solution, methinks, is to strive for a combination of humility, picking good policies going forward, and picking good communicators to promote them. For example, I think Pete Buttigieg could've explained which policies pushed by each side contributed to inflation, explained why our policies at least had good intentions, and then moved on to explaining how his economic agenda would fight inflation. And I think he could've carried most normies along with him through all that in 3-4 sentences at most.
(Note: I'm not saying we need to give complicated answers every time. That's obviously a bad idea. But I think our candidates must be able to give the nuanced version of our answer in debates and other policy-focused settings, and to carry normies along when doing so. We have put too little premium on that ability for too long.)
Matt wasn't saying that the inflation claim was true, but imprecise. He was saying it was actively misleading! The claim that "inflation was similar here and in Europe" is literally true. The conclusion "therefore it wasn't our fault" is false.
Making statements that are technically true and hoping your audience draws false conclusions from them *is* brazen lying! The number of people who don't think willful miscommunication is dishonest drives me up a wall.
But the conclusion “therefore it wasn’t ALL our fault” is true—no? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the economic argument. Letting people draw their own conclusions from true statements may be misleading, but it is not brazen lying! And whether we view it as dishonest depends, I think, on whether the people doing it 1) intend to lead their audience to a specific conclusion 2) know that conclusion to be FALSE, not merely incomplete.
Oh also requiring Americans to learn basic economics before graduating high school, and putting that on the exam to graduate.
I would also fully support making people pass a basic economics and constitutional law test before they can vote (yes I know about the racist past, but don't care)
I think the brazen lying works for the same reason as the ideal leader’s “honest, accurate, precise” messages would: because ordinary people find both “clear and helpful”.
Were people in the Biden-then-Harris campaign really saying Americans shouldn't worry about inflation because it was no worse than in Europe? Maybe they did; I don't remember. If they did, that was malpractice. (I know commentators and analysts were saying that, but that's not the same). What they could have said was that we had an unfortunate spike in inflation but under Biden-Harris policies that has rapidly come down, and meanwhile they would continue to go after price gougers, and that Trump doesn't care about you, and his policies would make things worse.
I couldn't really follow why Matt devoted so much time to this US vs European inflation question. How important was this? Not very, imo.
I would only add that educational polarization has upended which things each party attempts to FA on, and also the degree to which either one FOs once they try it.
Basically, Republicans structurally get away with more bullshit because they have more rubes, cranks, and dropouts. Democrats also asymmetrically take shit from the less-educated dirtbag left.
AND to boot, Democrats have a tougher uphill sled trying to win over uneducated voters, because those voters (A) perceive any attempt to correct their ignorance as condescending, and (B) can’t understand what the hell the faculty lounge is talking about.
I think this ultimately points in a Beutlerian direction of “throw out the consultants”, because the only way to rebalance against education polarization is to competently reach them where they’re at — the Rogan podcasts, the manosphere, etc.
Fundamentally, not enough of the country is educated for that to be your core constituency. Which also suggests public political appeals that selectively target and flatter people with college or advanced degrees is actively detrimental.
I agree? Someone on Substack recently suggested that the blue states should sell out hard on getting everyone a college degree so that they can build a national majority via diffusion, but they admitted that it’s more of a long term plan, not one geared towards winning in the next couple cycles.
IMO it’s unlikely the correlation is causal and that it would hold up if 60% of the country had advanced degrees. Even if we had the ability and desire to pay for college at its current prices, which is far from true, there are much cheaper and faster ways to convince people to support blue state policies - to wit, break with the extreme 10% that want racial quotas and public fentanyl use! If you want something slow and steady, make housing cheaper…
I think that your arguments about misinformation creating problems for governance are largely true, but you really haven’t demonstrated that it’s not electorally useful. A strong piece of counter-evidence: the 2024 election, which, as David Shor argues, was entirely swung by a change in the preferences of poorly-informed voters who have higher rates of holding objectively false beliefs about verifiable matters of fact.
The historical answer to this problem— used into the early 21st century— is one which a lot of us find uncomfortable when stated aloud. Basically, maintain separate communication channels for the typical voter (who is objectively not smart or well informed) and for elites who actually make decisions. (The Republicans still do this to a certain extent— see the difference between the narrative that Trump surrogates presented to Bloomberg and the WSJ and the narrative they presented on like, Fox News and various podcasts— and it probably helps them win elections.)
One of the tougher challenges for democrats is the inability to do this severed communication. Given education polarization, general interest in politics or just group dynamics, it becomes much harder to segment communications without the elite targeted message cannibalizing the other. If a Democrat tried to message a softer approach on abortion to abortion skeptic black or hispanic christian voters the elite messaging network would lose their friggin minds.
"Basically, maintain separate communication channels for the typical voter (who is objectively not smart or well informed) and for elites who actually make decisions. (The Republicans still do this to a certain extent— see the difference between the narrative that Trump surrogates presented to Bloomberg and the WSJ and the narrative they presented on like, Fox News and various podcasts— and it probably helps them win elections.)"
I think there's an inherent asymmetry on this given that belief in hierarchy is a fundamental component of conservatism while egalitarianism is a fundamental component of liberalism. No doubt there are complexities here (right-populism is about maintaining certain hierarchies while simultaneously being, well, populist, liberals obviously have elites, people on both sides are often hypocritical) but the root principles of each ideology still cast long shadows, and make it much more difficult for the left-of-center coalition to execute a "separate communication channels" strategy.
I think this is somewhat true in theory, but in practice, most successful left of center political movements have found ways around it, generally involving some sort of ideological construct about a better informed group needing to provide leadership and education to the unenlightened. (See: the orthodox Marxist “vanguard of the proletariat” concept, the Fabian Society building social democracy in the UK, WEB DuBois’s “talented tenth” concept, etc.)
So I kind of think that Marxism was a fusion of far-right-wing and far-left-wing beliefs. Basically, pre-Marx, being on the left meant fighting against the tyrannies and monarchies that had largely run the world for centuries. Whether the topic was the structure of political systems or economics or social mores or anything else, the prescription was always the same: egalitarian distribution of concentrated power to the masses. So you had democracy in politics, the free market in economics, liberation of women, etc. But then you ran into some inherent contradictions. What do you do when the masses actually want to maintain certain hierarchies and can even (at least under certain circumstances) be persuaded to support tyranny? What do you do when the free market doesn't lead to economic equality? What do you do about the fact that the masses don't entirely want either a pure free-market system or perfect economic equality? So everyone comes up with a way to bridge the gap based on their priorities. Standard liberals say we should (a) have democracy but add guardrails so people can't vote to cancel elections or persecute minorities or whatever, (b) have a generally free market, but allow people to vote to deviate from pure free-market ideals while also accepting a fair amount of economic inequality. Standard conservatives think we should have democracy but focus the guardrails more on the free-market economy than on the structure of the democratic system, while more or less abandoning economic inequality as a goal whatsoever. Communists say economic inequality is the overriding goal, and if the only way to achieve that goal is to use far-right-wing political methods (dictatorship), then that's what we're going to do.
I am a standard liberal and I think the standard liberal position is the one that tries hardest to paper over the contradictions in the way that's most consistent with the underlying egalitarian impulses - the minimally invasive option, if you will. And while I don't always agree with Democrats on everything, I recognize them to also be within this standard liberal tradition. And I think that anyone within this broad tradition is going to have a hard time executing a strategy of intentionally deceiving its own members and maintaining perfect message discipline. But the Marxists can do it because they (in my opinion) do not value being, and are not really attempting to be, as faithful to egalitarian principles as they can. This is why, although Marxists sometimes give liberals flak for supposedly being soft on fascism, Joseph Stalin was capable of entering into a formal alliance with Hitler, and why Marxist regimes after a while devolve into something that in lived experience feels functionally indistinguishable from a right-wing dictatorship (Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Chinese Communist Party today, etc).
"the 2024 election, which, as David Shor argues, was entirely swung by a change in the preferences of poorly-informed voters who have higher rates of holding objectively false beliefs about verifiable matters of fact."
Granting that observation, there's no reason to think that those objectively false beliefs caused them to vote for Trump. History is replete with poorly-informed groups who, despite their ignorance, correctly identified candidates that represented their interests. For example, coming out of Jim Crow, in the 60s, most black Americans had very little access to policy information or even the background needed to evaluate politicians' claims. Would anyone claim that this was the reason they chose Democrats?
None of which is to say I know for sure that objectively false beliefs played no role in the 2024 election, but I never hear detailed, plausible arguments in favor of that hypothesis.
(But some specific false beliefs that seem to have played a role:
* Belief that the US economy is in recession and that ordinary people were poorly off relative to history
* Belief that Trump and his allies could simultaneously cut taxes and reduce the deficit without significant benefit cuts for ordinary people
* (related to the previous belief)— the belief that a huge portion of US government spending is somehow fraudulent, a family of false beliefs around how federal spending is distributed
* Belief that Trump would somehow resolve the Gaza conflict on more favorable terms for the Palestinians than Democrats would
* Belief that high and indiscriminate tariffs are good for the US economy and will help rather than hurt employment rates etc
This is better, for sure. We could at least in theory determine whether these false beliefs actually determined someone's vote, though I think that would be extremely difficult - do you disagree?
But here are some conflicting possibilities addressing each of your points, to illustrate why I'm suspicious they determined anyone's vote:
* Most ordinary people don't know what the technical definition of a recession - that's part of being a low-information voter. So when they say "I believe the US economy is in recession" they really mean "I lost my job", "my husband can't find a job", or "Housing prices are going up faster than my salary."
* Likewise, most Americans probably don't understand the deficit at all. They may believe (correctly) that Trump will reduce their taxes, the only part of that salient to most voters.
* I'll grant you this one, it probably matters! However, "fraudulent" is probably an expansive term that also includes stuff like "funds immigration advocacy".
* A much simpler explanation for the uncommitted movement is that they were trying to blackmail Democratic politicians into taking pro-Palestinian positions on Gaza.
* I'm honestly not sure about the tariffs question. My sense is that, again, the voters you're talking about didn't know enough to be influenced by this. To the extent that their votes were swayed by facts (rather than appeals to interest), they were more generalized perceptions like "Trump has a lot of buildings with his name on them and a TV show, while Biden didn't trust Harris to do anything important."
Re: Uncommitted— that was certainly the perspective that a lot of movement participants expressed openly, but there are plenty of counterexamples like the Hamtranck mayor full-throatedly endorsing Trump, and there’s been a fair amount of after-the-fact reporting on Michigan Arabs expressing disappointment with Trump’s Gaza policy and frustration that he didn’t give them what they wanted after they gave him more electoral support. I’m sure that in some cases, this sort of communication is strategic, but a bunch of people actually do seem to have been tricked.
* Re: recessions— I agree with you that low-information voters don’t have a good technical sense of the definition, but it’s also worth noting that a: opinion surveys consistently showed voters expressing a negative view of the economy but a positive view of their own financial situation (so it was an expression of generalized bad vibes than of personal experience), and b: even if “recession” just means “ambient conditions not great for a person like me relative to history”, it’s still possible for people to have a false belief about it. (A lot of the time, it’s just a skill issue!)
* Re: deficits— I think that your diagnosis of the typical voter view here is false; they’re wrong about it, but not in the way that you specify here. The most common folk theory of the deficit that I’ve seen in the wild is that government finance is basically like personal finance and that deficit spending is sort of like racking up credit card debt, and will carry serious consequences down the line. (In reality, for countries which issue debt in their own currency, inflation and interest rates are the real budget constraint— you can have a high deficit, low inflation, low interest rates, or economic growth, but you generally can’t have all four at the same time.) And indeed, deficit reduction consistently polls well even in macroeconomic contexts where it would probably be a bad idea.
* Regarding "uncommitted", I definitely think there's a fair amount of strategic communication, but false beliefs clearly played a role for some people (even though I also think the quantity of anecdotal reporting overstates its significance - the man-bites-dog angle and bitter irony are irresistible hooks).
* Recessions: I feel bad about dodging to an extent, because that's an interesting point, but I'd want to see the exact wording of the polls in question. Polls are invaluable, but also kind of epistemological infohazards.
* Very good point. My only caveat is that I think it's rarely been a highly-salient issue, though it often finds its place as part of a gish gallop against Democrats.
At this point, though, we're talking about rather minimal impact, and that's before considering whether Harris voters were driven by any false beliefs!
Unless you're arguing no one felt economic pain under Biden, I think that's beside the point.
If I could impress one idea on people it would be this:
"Unemployment" is merely a bloodless abstraction, while "I lost my job" (or "I had to take a shittier job") is personal and real, even when unemployment is low. Economic conditions are geographically uneven and hit subpopulations differently.*
* Ok if I could only get one idea across, it would be either "tradeoffs exist", or "costs and benefits both matter".
The problem with this entire line of thinking is that there will always be some level of unemployment. Unless we get to a full Star Trek economic paradise, some people will always be able to claim they're economically hurting more than ever before. If voters from now on are going to react to the same economic conditions of Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" with a doom loop, we're simply going to be stuck in a perpetual social and electoral doom loop.
Put it this way, in practice, is misinformation just what we call it when it's specifically educated people do it?
I think that “The dumbest and most poorly informed people’s preferences swung most in this election— with those variables offering significantly more explanatory power than any other characteristic, but their poorly informedness had nothing to do with the swing” is a very Occam’s Razor-violating piece of mental gymnastics, and if you’re arguing for it; the burden of proof is on you.
I realize there's vast inferential distance between us, which is why I tried to crack open your handwaving interpretation of Shor's analysis with an argument. But you ignored it!
How's this for Occam's Razor? Even the best-informed voters are ignorant of almost everything. Voters actually make decisions based on heuristics about who's likely to act in their interests, and those heuristics are mostly correct.
"Voters actually make decisions based on heuristics about who's likely to act in their interests, and those heuristics are mostly correct."
Assertion STRONGLY in need of evidence, unless you're saying that a poor farmer in a red state is sitting there saying to himself, "Yes, I can no longer sell my crops to USAID and my chronically ill sister is about to get kicked off Medicaid, but goddamn it, it was all worth it to make those f*cking libs cry!"
Maybe some people feel this way. But if I understand correctly, most Trump voters wanted him to do what they consider good (make libs cry) but not what they consider bad (cut off government programs I depend on). “I never thought the leopards would eat my face.”
That is at least a simpler argument, but in its simplest sense, it’s super obviously false if you look at stuff like the relationship between income and political preference.
FWIW, I agree with your assessment that voters in general are not super well informed and that supermajorities of them have some important false beliefs, but there’s a wide spectrum of how in/out of touch with baseline reality people are, and the degree of it explains their political behavior.
It might be helpful for you to think of an example of this from the left side of the political spectrum— is the average poster on the r/antiwork subreddit well-informed about history or economics? Do you think that their beliefs about politics would stay the same if they knew more?
That argument is only obviously false if you have an extremely narrow conception of what people's interests are.
Your closing challenge is interesting. That's the approach I took elsewhere in the thread: I doubt learning more about the economics of solar is going to change an environmentalist's views. Similarly, I don't think factual information is going to change the beliefs of r/antiwork posters.
None of which is to say I've given up on persuasion. My theory is that facts matter in politics, but only when the person you're talking to/at thinks you want the same thing as they do. (Which is why it's so destructive within parties).
I, uh, actually have changed my mind about the optimal approach to energy policy on getting a better sense of the economic challenge of scaling battery storage to deal with the intermittency problem. (And changed my mind about a fair number of other policy issues on learning new information.)
I’m probably more inclined to update than average, but “people’s beliefs about the world have no effect on their policy preferences” seems like a really extreme conclusion.
"was entirely swung by a change in the preferences of poorly-informed voters who have higher rates of holding objectively false beliefs about verifiable matters of fact."
sounds like we need to fix our education system, teach basic economics, logical fallacies and constitutional law in school (and require you to pass those tests before graduating)
even better require you to pass those tests before voting
The problem with this argument is the propaganda works for the Republicans. They keep winning elections with the argument that they can fix the economy and then they come into power and finance huge tax cuts for the wealthy with deficit spending. What's their incentive to stop rolling out that playbook?
Republicans also *lose* plenty of elections. Democrats won the elections of 2018 and 2020. I'd argue they won 2022 as well. Pity Dems couldn't make it four in a row. But there's a good chance they'll make it four out of five in 2026!
Democrats are in a pickle right now, sure. So's the country. I just highlight the above because, well, I like accuracy, and the doom and gloom pronouncements wrt the political fortunes of Democrats, while understandable given the radical nature of the folks who just took power, don't seem to comport with reality. And I rather suspect this lack of precision could feed into a damaging low morale feedback loop.
Given how unpleasable the electorate is, I think this is going to be the new norm: win trifecta year 1, lose trifecta year 3, lose to a trifecta year 5, take a house of Congress year 7, win trifecta year 9, for both parties, unless someone manages to durably capture the middle.
Maybe, but it's not too hard to imagine a future where the presidency goes back and forth every four years, while Republicans maintain rock solid control of everything else.
The House seems competitive now, but if the remaining portions of the Civil Rights Act get thrown out by Thomas and Alito's Court, every remaining Democratic district in the Deep South suddenly flips red, which, even at one seat per state, still adds up. On top of this, Texas and Florida are gaining population, at the expense of New York and California. And, of course, partisan redistricting gets better and better due to the combination of improved data collection and computer technology, plus voters becoming ever more predictable.
And, of course, if Republicans get permanent control of the Senate, then they have permanent control of the courts, because a GOP Senate is unlikely to confirm any judicial nominee of a Democratic president every again.
That's because neither party is trying to be a majority party. They are trying to turn out their base and barely win.
If Republicans were trying to be a majority party they would have nominated someone like Nikky Haley.
If Democrats were trying to be a majority party they would have moderated on cultural issues, fixed the border and pulled back on stimulus after it became clear inflation was a problem
It's actually a mixture of risk aversion and lack of means. There are officials in both parties who calculate that reaching out to the middle might translate into more wins. But (1) this is scary to attempt because it would probably lose you some of your base, and (2) in any event the structures (ie, party control, smoke-filled rooms, etc) are no longer in place to guarantee moderates get nominated.
Against what baseline are we saying "propaganda works for the Republicans"? They win half the time and have governing trifectas for roughly half of that time.
It seems like everyone conflates the one-time existence of the New Deal Coalition with the baseline for modern politics, which it just isn't.
It is so plainly true that propaganda works for Republicans because it also sucks up some in the middle. Also, normie Democrats have no ability to counter that for dispositional reasons. Histrionic pleas and styles tend to turn off high information voters. It’s why Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green and others of their ilk are able to be stars as clowns, but when a democrat tried to be a clown (Alan Grayson), D’s grow tired of it.
Propaganda has obvious downsides. When republicans are in power their propaganda collides with reality. Can't balance the budget on the back of cutting waste and fraud.
Election denial didn't actually work and cost republicans in 2022. The best performing dems in MI and AZ were our SoS candidates running against ''stop the steal'' candidates.
Kari Lake would be governor if she said Biden had won.
Republicans convinced their base that any non-conservative media is lying and can't be trusted. Primary voters then ignore scandals broken by non-conservative media and nominate weak candidates.
In the long run I think it will work out badly for them. Fascist governments didn't last very long. Communist ones lasted a bit longer, but they all eventually collapsed under their own weight. Every time the GOP catches the car, voters are disappointed with the results. No strategy will guarantee victory forever, no sports team changes their entire playbook because of one or two losses.
Could Obama or any leading Democrat ever openly say a government agency is corrupt, inefficient, or broken? Some surely are dysfunctional, but admitting it seems at odds with the current Democratic ethos.
They wouldn't say it because an entire agency being corrupt is bonkers. What would that look like? All the workers are taking bribes and funneling government funds into their own pockets? Leading Democrats do often complain about inefficiencies and dysfunction, people just don't notice because they aren't using the same rhetoric as Republicans.
I've heard Ro Khanna talk about how in the 90s Congress and the Clinton administration worked together to reduce waste and make the bureacracy more efficient. Except I don't see any Democrats wanting to do the same thing now (even if such gestures would be unsuccessful)
They certainly couldn’t say it about any agency that isn’t corrupt, inefficient, or broken. I think that few, if any, are corrupt or broken, but democrats do often complain about agencies that are inefficient.
DOGE philosophy is: When I went fishing, the ranger asked me for my ticket and I didn’t just refuse to give him my name, I fired him. There is obvious fraud and waste in that department. /s
One thing I would say here is that the fractured media means that the other side is way less likely to hear your propaganda. I remember seeing conservatives crowing in August and September that Walz would have to drop off the ticket and it was literally just nonsense that didn’t break out of the right-wing media bubble.
It is also the case that your own side has not even heard the misinformation from the other side and that is bad too because a) it may contain some kernel of truth that is worth knowing and acting on and b) per yesterday's conversation, we can't correctly un-misinform someone unless we know how they are misinformed.
I don’t have tik tok but I have a good friend who gets most of his news from tik tok. He sends me these crazy clips (which I have trouble watching a lot of the time now because tik tok tries to force you to download the app to watch the videos) and they are usually either exaggerated or complete misrepresentations of the facts.
He sent me one that was like “Trump is bringing back SLAVERY FOR BLACK PEOPLE” and I was like “hmm, that’s got to hyperbole, right?” but no, this video was arguing using FACTS AND LOGIC to say that Trump was building massive secret slave camps and creating the legal framework to bring back slavery.
I pushed back on this idea but my buddy was just like “okay man, whatever, don’t say I didn’t warn you”. This guy isn’t dumb, he’s an accomplished professional. Truly wild what is out there and how people get trapped in these hysteria generating algorithms.
Your friend isn't actually trying to determine how likely a particular outcome is; he is signaling that he's on the "right" side. It's a cheap belief that he has no real stake in.
To give an example, I was recently at a conference where a friend said "it's too bad this is the last annual meeting" (note that while Trump is attacking science, it's still a long ways from ending a private professional society's meetings). I offered to bet him whatever amount of money he wanted that we would meet again next year at which point he immediately backed down.
One of my fellow poll workers (who was a little more #online on the phone than I was last November) told us as we were leaving that she'd see us at the next election, IF THERE WAS ONE amirite
I worked with her at the polls last week, at our next scheduled election. I didn't see value in rubbing this in.
A lot of social media has broken down some people's ability to tell when another person is a loser. Pretty much every time someone shows me a TikTok, my immediate reaction is usually "the person in this TikTok is a loser." Social media is making people take seriously other people they see online whom they would never believe in person.
They might be a successful professional but a useful definition of dumb must cover people who swallow absurd theories from TikTok. It raises lots of interesting philosophical questions, like "should you take a cardiologists advice less seriously if you discover they are a creationist or believe in astrology"
Two rationalist articles that vaguely cover the idea
Along these lines, Ben Carson overall is likely a lot smarter than me and is definitely smarter when it comes to surgery. But only one of us believe that the pyramids were used to store grain.
It's basically the same debate people are having over Musk, who 1) is very smart, yet 2) does and believes stupid things.
What it often comes down to is "is there a correction mechanism for mistakes?" If Bo's friend believed false significant things about his profession he face rapid negative feedback and consequences. But he can believe that Trump is building slave camps and will never need to update that over the rest of his life. Even if it never happens he'll just say "it was because people like me spread the word."
> This guy isn’t dumb, he’s an accomplished professional.
So is Musk and numerous other notable people pushing insane ideas on social media. Nate Silver recently published a thoughtful article on this general topic, with him as an example in "Elon Musk and spiky intelligence". https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-and-spiky-intelligence
See also Scott Alexander 2023 review of Musk biography, [2] in which Scott offers some charity in attempting to answer the question, “Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?” https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
And all of us have our own biases in our perception and interpretation of our world—although hopefully less pronounced in terms of absurdities.
We are all librarians now. While we used to tune into the nightly news or read the local paper and have a good expectation that it was generally true (if slanted). Now it is up to us to gauge the trueness and slant of all our media outlets. And lots of outlets (Twitter, TikTok, etc.) have embedded sources that each have to be their own viewpoint and veracity that needs to be determined.
Some folks have just checked out on their need to engage at the more basic level on every news / data source.
It is really depressing how basic facts like solar energy output varying over the day and federal personnel costs only being a small percentage of government spending fail to cross the political aisle despite being easy to access and understand.
The real solution is to look at what the Arab Gulf States and some of the South American states do and look into solar power towers for the southern states. At their latitude and with their climate you get power output for days if the sun disappears. I believe Spain has been building enough of them that they've been getting economies of scale. Its more expensive when using things like levellised cost since the initial infrastructure and operating costs are higher but it neatly solves the intermittency problem since the tower's contents is inherently a battery.
Maybe in theory, but there hasn't been any cases yet of too much solar breaking the grid and leading to blackouts. Simply put, batteries complement solar quite well, and we're not nearly at the point yet where solar comprises anywhere near 100% of energy anywhere. There have, however, been cases in Texas, where some fossil-fueled power plants were down for maintenance during a heat wave and solar+battery storage was able to pick up the slack and avoid blackouts, while everyone was cranking their air conditioners.
Those facts can and do cross the aisle, they're just not politically significant.
Think about voters that prioritize environmental action: their preferences don't depend on misunderstanding the cost or variability of green energy sources. Those only become relevant when formulating policy, which plays a minor role in elections.
Plenty of times I’ve seen folks concede the fact but not the implications of the fact. Shows how hard it can be to get to an objective discussion on the essentials of a topic. Which I guess is even more depressing.
On the plus side moderate left of centre folks are probably the best at getting to this ideal.
This piece went in a slightly different direction than I expected. Still a thoughtful piece but I thought, in keeping with yesterday's piece, it would more directly take on the merits of "Fact-Checking" as both a media enterprise and a successful political strategy. A very informed friend of mine is absolutely convinced that the central problem of Democrats' strategy against Trump is a failure to sufficiently call out his lies enough..... and just....jeez idk man...
There's no escape velocity to doing politics. There is not some magical way in which if you tell ardent Republicans trump is lying they will mystically be disabused of their existing beliefs. What you can do is do your best to make the lies they say less and less believable to the marginal voter. "Democrats only care about DEI, Climate Change, or Trans People, not your grocery and gas prices" is not "true" in a metaphysical sense, but you cannot defeat that by giving it Four Pinocchio's. You have to meet voters where they are at some level through your actions and words. There's no "One Neat Trick, Republicans Hate Him!" method to defeating their lies and surely the lesson of the last decade is having self righteous bluechecks yelling "YOU'RE LYING!" when voters substantively disagree with their stated political positions isn't gonna do it.
Any thoughts on the right way to get more people to understand the true magnitude of the federal deficit problem? It seems like the numbers involved are too enormous to penetrate the normal human mind. And actually grappling with the $ amounts forces you to consider SERIOUS tax hikes or spending cuts (or probably both) and no one wants to accept that harsh reality.
I keep wishing that news agencies would routine report per capita numbers. How much is the federal debt? The interest payments each year? The annual deficit in the federal budget?
The per capita numbers are relatable, while the billions and trillions of the totals are not.
hmm, see I worry the per capita numbers look too SMALL, and if people anchor on "their share" then a $20B budget cut feels like it should make a real difference.
Also for most people, their individual number looks totally unpayable, so I think this tilts the scale toward cuts. But tax revenue doesn't come from "most people" really.
That's kind of true. 37% of tax revenue does come from the top 1%. But a whole lot of it still comes from the next 24% of income earners (basically another 50%)
The fact that taxes don't come from most people is the biggest hurdle we have to get over to really solve this problem. The lefties love to rant about the billionaires taxes but if we want universal healthcare, college, and better social services the reality is that working class people are going to have to start paying thier share of those things.
I was just googling around for per capita numbers and stumbled across The Heritage Foundation’s “Federal Budget In Pictures” website. It’s pretty slick and easy on the eyes. Maybe a non-partisan version of that.
Given recent events, I would tie it to inflation. You need to model deficit spending, inflation, and the current economic capacity in such a way that you can say "if the deficit doesn't get down to this level, inflation will increase" Because as we've seen, people are very sensitive to inflation and don't like it. But simply worrying about the deficit itself is not convincing and not really the problem.
One way is to talk about deficits rather than debt.
Another is to talk about the here and now of marginal changes in deficits rather than some far off debt catastrophe. Every dollar borrow from a potential investor makes us a little poorer in the future than not borrowing.
Another is to talk about specific taxes that ought to go up (a VAT, a personal progressives consumption tax) and down (the wage tax underfunding SS and Medicare and the corporate income tax and spending that ought to go down (farm and ethanol subsidies EV and solar roof top subsides). [If you don't like my list, make your own. :)]
> A progressive version of this emerged about five years ago, when arguments started popping up that wind and solar power had become cheaper sources of electricity than fossil fuels. This is based on a concept called the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) that, unfortunately, paints a misleading view of the situation.
What is true is that solar panels have become very cheap to manufacture, such that a well-located utility-scale solar plant is cheaper to build than a fossil fuel plant that generates the same amount of electricity over the course of a year. ...
But the inference progressives wanted to draw from this LCOE framework — that there were no economic downsides to trying to strangle fossil fuel extraction — is totally wrong. The issue is that solar intermittency, which is easy to ignore when you’re not using that much solar power, becomes a bigger and bigger deal the more solar grows as a share of the total electricity mix. You start needing to overbuild, to add expensive storage features, or to maintain purpose-built natural gas backups.
Matt is committing an upside down version of the error that he ascribes, incorrectly, to all users of LCoE. Like them, he correctly identifies the twin issues of intermittency and self-cannibalization: a given renewables portfolio will mostly be generating less or more than total naive grid load at a given time. However, he throws out the baby with the bathwater:
1. Solar production is very predictable, allowing demand to match it
5. Solar and batteries are so cheap today, and cheaper every year, that "over-"building solar is a great strategy
6. We will not need enormous amounts of "purpose-built" natural gas: we have enormous amounts of legacy natural gas, plus iron-air batteries, plus demand response, enhanced geothermal ...
7. The existing distribution grid (the wires from your house to the substation) is badly underutilized
Matt should supplement his reliance on the BTI folks, who do some fine work, by reading and promoting Casey Handmer, Shayle Kahn, Danielle Fong, Auke Hoekstra, and other abundance-centric thinkers.
I'm a long time fan of manufacturing methane out of atmospheric CO2. The idea goes back at least to Carter and syngas. So I clicked this link eagerly.
The company gives off some weird vibes, like doing their press releases on this guy's blog. I can't tell how I feel about the retro-style of https://terraformindustries.com/. But they raised $26m, so while we still haven't succeeded, it looks like we're going through the necessary preliminary steps.
*EDIT* Reading more, it's only economical because of government subsidies, which might be vanishing with the current administration.
> Operating the equivalent of 2190 hours per year, one Terraformer produces over 2 million cubic feet of natural gas. At $10/Mcf sale price and $54/Mcf for IRA PTCs (45V, 45Q, 45E) each unit produces up to $150,000 of annual revenue.
(I assume "over 2 million" is "2.3 million" based on other numbers.)
The lifetime of the unit is 5 years, the unit costs $100,000. Without subsidy you get back more-or-less $115,000 worth of natural gas at the end. But that assumes the solar array is free. Solar is still over $1 per watt but say you can get that at scale. That's $1 million. You can use the array for maybe 25 years so split it over 5 consecutive Terraformer Mark 1's that's $200,000. Even at 0% interest, $300,000 in costs to get back $115,000 worth of natural gas isn't competitive.
If they get paid for carbon capture it's still not competitive. 1 Mcf releases 0.055 tons of CO2 and the high end of payment for carbon capture is $100 per ton so that's just $5.50 per Mcf. You're up to $173,000 return on your initial $300,000 in costs.
I strongly encourage people to check my math for mistakes.
There's this annoying double-dipping where renewable fans will say "this energy is cheaper than fracking, it's stoopid we aren't using it" but it's only cheaper due to massive subsidy. And I largely sign on to those subsidies! We're likely to need lots of tech like this and maybe we won't need *exactly* this but it's in the right general area so subsidize away! But we'd need solar to drop by 10x. Then it's 120K up front (100K for the unit, 20K for the solar) to get 35K of gas (only subsidy is max price for carbon capture) per year. At 5% capital costs, you end up with ahead by 50K at the end.
They are going for broke, and if they succeed they will make the world a better place. But what's certain is that they are directionally right. World grid load is ~3,000GW; China is shipping > 300GW of panels every year, which if installed will produce ~50GW prorated. As Casey observes, that is an extraordinary wealth-generation machine, and we will harvest from it.
Excellent comment. Matt becoming negatively polarized on climate, along with his increasing reliance on BTI, has led him to make the kind of political and analytic errors he, justifiably, accuses climate Groups, and the Groups in general, of making. His climate policy related columns and analysis have become a slog of bad faith and bad analysis. And to tie this into today’s column, ultimately his bad analysis leads his readers to become misinformed on the nature of the climate policy and what various Groups and people have pushed for.
Thanks for the kind words. I think you are too harsh on Matt. My perspective roughly matched David Roberts' until Matt patiently talked me out of it. My knowledge of the field is higher-resolution than Matt's because I devote a much larger fraction of my time to it (I work in clean energy), so I try to offer him new knowledge that he might find useful. But his overall climate perspective has a lot to recommend it, especially as a corrective to the average climate-centric progressive, whose views are badly in need of updating.
This is a fair response. And you’re right Matt’s approach has a lot to offer. I think Tuesday’s column is a good example of the issues I’ve noticed. His ultimate policy recommendation, stop subsidizing EVs, is fine enough. I don’t agree with that position, but it’s an interesting idea. But on the way to making that point he veers into bad faith (implying policies increasing EV shares of statewide fleets means you support “raising costs for most people”), bad analysis (emissions reductions by any political entity do not matter cause it’s a global problem) and bad politics (criticizing Washington State for spending money on EV subsidies which benefit Washington residents and instead saying the state should spend money on subsidizing new technologies which will not benefit Washington residents anytime soon)
Matt’s a damn good commentator and I will continue reading him. But right now, the climate policy columns and comments he puts out do live up to the (high) standard of policy analysis and insight he provides on other issues.
I get banging on people for taking climate change worries up to 11 when it is a manageable problem and to strongly criticize them for trying to get rid of all fossil fuels at one fell swoop. But as you rightly say, No, he seems to have gone overboard here in criticizing the entire effort to move to renewables. He's a smart guy (and he has solar panels!); I don't get it.
"Solar production is very predictable, allowing demand to match it"
People don't want to match demand to energy production, they just want it to be there.
"5. Solar and batteries are so cheap today, and cheaper every year, that "over-"building solar is a great strategy"
This just really isn't true. We've looked into getting solar for our house several times, even with subsidies it's pretty freaken expense. To run our whole house, we would be looking at a system that's probably $60 to $80k or more.
> People don't want to match demand to energy production, they just want it to be there.
You misunderstood me: I meant demand managed by organizations and technology, not regular folks being self-conscious
> This just really isn't true. We've looked into getting solar for our house several times, even with subsidies it's pretty freaken expense.
You misunderstood me: I was referring to the panels, not to installed home solar systems. You are correct that home solar (especially to 100%) is too expensive, 3x in the US what it is in Australia with similar labor rates.
Solar panels are much cheaper done by utilities as farms out in the desert than rooftops on private homes. Bulk production and distribution, plus not needing crews that are trained to climb roofs, or needing to worry about roof maintenance.
Yes, and rooftop solar is roughly 3x cheaper in Australia than in the US. The problem today is that we are subsidizing "soft cost" waste. We can't find the right equilibrium without attacking that double-issue.
I always felt this particular scenario is largely fantasy, whether the plan is to use it for hydrogen, "e-fuels", scrubbing co2 from the air, or something similar. No matter how cheap panels themselves get to make, labor to install them isn't getting any cheaper, and land is still finite.
I want to stand up for LCOE as a useful metric to compare the economic performance of new generation on the margin. That's not to say baseload power isn't important, but we're nowhere near the level of renewables on the grid where that starts to sting in cost terms. Maybe it gave people misleading intuition about a region of the S curve we're not in, but strictly speaking LCOE is true
Yes and no. Geography and politics have concentrated renewables in the wrong place. The whole point of LCOE being an incomplete metric is it misses grid reliability. Obviously LCOE *can* include transmission/storage costs, and often does now (especially storage), but Matt's point was that they weren't included 5 years ago, for political convenience, rather than addressing the tradeoffs with renewables vs gas.
In the short term, more renewables will improve grid reliability, by adding capacity and not removing anything. However, generally new marginal renewables will hurt grid reliability in the mid-term, by pushing out gas, which is extremely reliable, in favour of solar, which is extremely unreliable. Batteries (or other viabible storage) can vastly improve reliability, probably well beyond what fossils achieved, but they aren't cheap.
So I'm not an ERCOT power trader, just an energy technology researcher. The famous cold-snap grid outage in 2021 was initially blamed on wind, but in fact the point of failure was natural gas distribution.
From a system design level, wind outages aren't strongly geographically correlated; go a ways away and they're closer to independent. Additionally, solar and wind intermittency are anti-correlated which is handy. This all nets out to you can manage these problems at our current rate of deployment if you have enough transmission; ability to move power hedges geographic risk.
Once you get up into the ~65% range for solar and wind you start to need more storage. Going from 70 to 90% requires significant overbuild and storage. For these reasons, cleanfirm power and existing baseload (hydro, nuclear, geothermal) are all important, even if they're ultimately going to be supporting actors to the solar and battery headliners
There may have been specific stresses on the ERCOT grid of which I'm unaware, but this is the story told the system level modelling from groups like Rhodium or NREL with which I'm familiar.
"By contrast, if Barack Obama says tomorrow that there’s a ton of waste in the USFWS that he was never able to tackle due to the political clout of Big Fish, my assumption will be that there’s something fishy with this agency."
I won't take the bait.
That line had me hooked
Lured me in, too.
Are you guys gonna carp all day about this?
Not me, I'm going to swim upstream and spawn a whole new comment thread.
~fin~
I think we should indeed continue all day until we've scaled the heights of bad punnery.
Carry on, everyone. I won’t reel you in. My only sole purpose is to keep an eye on things.
thanks, chum
Angling for a top comment, eh?
Of all the depressing characteristics of the current era, one of the worst is widespread ignorance of obvious truths. “It’s important to win elections.” “Understanding what’s true is useful.” “Choices must be made.”
What's even more depressing is I do think a lot of elite political actors still understand this, but are too scared of attracting negative intra-party attention to do anything about it.
Yes, and it's an outrageous failure of leadership. Why the hell are they there if they're so craven?
Beats the hell out of being a middling lawyer, which was the job opportunity for most of them.
Yup - we have people in leadership positions who aren't leaders and don't want to lead people or ask the hard questions. People crave power, not leadership it seems like.
One of the best lines I remember from Yes Minister. "Power is to be enjoyed, not exercised!"
Yes, I have my opinions on where Democrats should move to the right to win elections but to win more they need to move to the right somewhere on Foreign, Social or Economic policy.
It is deranged people deny this.
Seems like it could be a result of individual incentives, like it's better for you to have high prestige in your party, even if the party overall is losing elections. Better to be a big fish in a little pond than a relatively small fish in a much bigger pond.
The obvious truths have one thing in common. They make people feel sad.
No, you can't easily and cheaply solve climate change. No, you can't have your cake and eat it. No, it isn't responsible to go into an election with unpopular policies. No, you can't solve the deficit by firing a few civil servants.
I think this whole aversion to discomfort is very pernicious. It shows a lack of maturity. Acknowledging difficult choices and intractable problems should not make us feel sad. That is a choice.
I couldn't agree more. The throughline I see in all of this is a childish way of looking at the world.
But try telling the voters that, and you're condemned as a sneering elitist.
I disagree vehemently: we should try to leave a more comfortable world to our children than the one that our parents left to us. A world with endless abundance, where we can consume as much as we like and work as little as we choose should be the ultimate objective.
Knowing that there are difficult choices and intractable problems should make us sad. That shouldn't make us averse to them, nor should it make us lie to ourselves about them.
We should face the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. But that doesn't mean that we can't be sad that it is not as we would like it to be. Pretending that my father isn't dead won't bring him back. But I am allowed to be sad that he is. And I'll still be allowed to be sad when he's been dead 20 years instead of 2. The same applies to policies. We'd like to have a world of fully automated luxury communism (or, as I prefer to put it: fully automated universal aristocracy). We can't do that yet. But we're a hell of a lot closer than we were 300 years ago as a species, and that drive to improve conditions for everyone is part of why we are closer.
“A world with endless abundance, where we can consume as much as we like and work as little as we choose should be the ultimate objective.”
Wow I hope you are not serious. Not that endless abundance would not be wonderful but from what sources with what consequences and distributed equitable to whom? Further consuming as much we like would be great but unthinking consumption for consumption’s sake is one definition of immaturity. And lastly working as little as possible without thought about what to do with the time saved is defined best as “not having a reason to get up in the morning”. This is simply not my choice of ideal reality.
Energy and housing abundance would be good. It would be good if I could easily support myself working part-time if I wanted to focus on raising kids or volunteering in my community or making art.
Women know that "working as little as we choose" is not possible for most of us. (Although it is for me because I don't have anyone to take care of beyond moral support. At this point. I'm fine, but many would not want that world.)
I would sum this up that living in the Star Trek TNG universe would be amazing.
Or The Culture, which is what I had in mind.
I'm not an expert on Iain M Banks work, but the Culture seems much worse than Star Trek TNG. For example, it doesn't have the Prime Directive and is very much interested in compelling others, by force if necessary. The Culture seems much more ambiguous, whereas the Federation (as presented in TNG) is more desirable to live in.
So much of American society is built around creature comforts though and not being uncomfortable in the least bit. At least the last 40 years. People on all sides of the political spectrum think they can all get what they want with literally zero downsides, risk or interruption, or decrease in quality. We are a spoiled bunch.
When what we should be doing is paying attention and anticipating how we'd manage if all the creature comforts went away.
This can take many forms. Reading history is a common one. Traveling is another. Just getting old requires one to think about managing the possible pain, disability, boredom, and awkward human relationships (caregivers, unresolved family issues) that can accompany the end of life.
I've elected to stay in a geographically risky area with the intention of living through hard times if they happen and hoping I don't end up regretting it.
I think that, "lack of maturity," fails to capture the extent to which intelligence is involved in mitigating the discomfort and thus reducing the maturity requirements. If you can see more of the corner cases and how much more grey (than black and white) the situation is, then you realize that neither side fully eliminates the discomfort.
Self-replying: I guess that I am saying that, as a boundary case, if you aren't especially bright, then the world is a scary place and the maturity required to not want simple answers may be out of reach for even the best of us.
I saw a well-written piece on another Substack (I forget which one) that argue that what Trump voters most wanted from him was STABILITY: the sense that a strong person was in charge in a complex, scary, rapidly changing world.
From my perspective, looking to Trump for stability is forking insane, but I can see how from the perspective of certain voters it would make sense.
I tend not to believe poll results; people haven't thought through their positions. Maybe people value stability. Or perhaps what they really want, but were loath to tell a pollster, is that they value entertainment and repudiated Biden because he was boring.
One could argue that "that" is what both sides want. I wanted not-Trump so that the world wouldn't turn into a chaotic scary rapidly changing (by devolving into WWIII) world.
The world is not ipso facto a scary place but a lot of people seem to think so. Social media and isolation and loneliness are not helping this.
The boundary case (not especially bright) I was considering was from the point of view of my Downs Syndrome brother. His discomfort with redefining or recategorizing ideas (that he feels are settled) is palpable.
It seems like this is in tension with mental health polarization between Democrats and Republicans, and makes me think about how people accused Reagan of Panglossianism.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Look no further than COVID for an example.
Things might be burning down around me but at least I got to see duckies floating this morning.
Have you considered acknowledging that difficult choices make people uncomfortable and sad :)
You can’t fund Medicare for all using the defense budget.
I would amend this to you can’t fund Medicare for All with just the defense budget without radically reducing American military power and overseas obligations. That’s the choice.
No, there’s not enough money in the Defense budget even if it went to zero. Medicare for All will easily require over a trillion dollars a year.
My god I hated that whole part of the 2020 primary debates. What a waste of time.
"Tradeoffs exist."
"Exercise is good for you."
"Our material standards of living are very high on average."
"If elected president I promise free rainbows and unicorns for EVERYONE! And I will make that guy pay"
I agree with everything Matt has written today about DOGE. I think it is a ham-fisted way of disrupting a group of people who don't like Donald Trump. This is a pretty accurate framework for almost everything President Trump 2.0 is doing.
But there is one thing that is still sticking in my craw, and it goes to Matt's criticisms of The Groups -- NGOs and the constellation of non-profits who push extreme policies -- as a bad influence on the Democratic Party. I've long thought of these groups as being funded by either currently-alive rich people (Soros, Laurene Jobs, Mackenzie Scott) or long-dead rich people whose foundation has drifted left (Rockefeller, Macarthur, etc). But I'm not so sure anymore.
In the early reporting on DOGE, I read about Global Refuge. In looking back through their Form 990's, they averaged $54M per year during 2011-2020, providing services for migrants and refugees, and political advocacy for immigration broadly. 95% of their funding comes from the government.
In 2019 Global Refuge named Krish Vignarajah as CEO, a then 40-year old who had previously worked for Michelle Obama (as Policy Director for the First Lady), as Senior Advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and unsuccessfully ran for Governor of Maryland. After her appointment, revenue for Global Refuge rose to over $200M annually -- 4X their previous decade's average. For her efforts, she is paid $640K.
Now, I know that funnelling $200M/year through this organization isn't the reason for the budget deficit. Even if you multiply this by 100 and make it $20B per year, it is a rounding error in the budget deficit discussions. But it does fund this organization as one of The Groups that push the Democratic Party into more extreme policy positions that, ultimately, hurt more than help.
I guess what I'm saying is that we should resist the DOGE work around their indiscriminate firings and punitive policies intended to push people out of government work. But in the spirit of yesterday's post by Matt, we should use the information they are highlighting to clean up some of the money sloshing around the NGO sector -- not for deficit-reduction purposes, but as part of reducing the power of The Groups.
One funny thing that might fall out from these DOGE attacks and cuts is that the groups wind up losing the resources necessary to lobby/bully Democrats into losing policy and narrative positions, thus Democrats can more easily pivot and moderate which then makes Republicans less competitive in future elections.
A successful War on Woke would erode the GOP's advantage.
A Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox but for partisan politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grossman-Stiglitz_Paradox Successfully vanquishing your most hated partisan enemies is likely to improve the electoral viability of your opponent's coalition and weaken the latent appetite for a party built on their demise.
To flip it, successful state initiatives protecting abortion probably did a lot to neutralize the issue at a national level in 2024
Wouldn't this read make Elon Musk the greatest abundance liberal ever, properly understood?
In the way that Anakin Skywalker eventually did bring balance to the Force in a roundabout way, yes.
Nah, Darth Vader was never close to in favor of the light side (supply-side deregulatory energy growth) until that kid he abandoned after in-vitro'ing with a random Naboo queen defeated him in combat.
I always figured that prophecy was totally accurate. When Anakin was a kid there were like 1-2 Sith and hundreds of light-side Jedi. Thanks to him by the end of his life the numbers of Sith and Jedi are basically balanced. Really, it's the fault of the Jedi Council for not actually thinking through what "balance to the force" would actually look like!
Maybe we can work midi-chlorians in here somehow?
We'd better hurry, Project 2025 will make it illegal to bring up Episode 1 soon.
So you're saying that there's no actual downside?
This is what I've been thinking for a while, though you explained it more eloquently than I would have.
War on Woke is just alliteration in action.
More broadly, if we manage to avoid a coup, some of the work being accomplished by MAGA likely will reverberate to the eventual benefit of Democrats. Neutralization of DEI is high on that list. I have mixed feelings about some of the actual policy ramifications of the right's dismantling of DEI, but I do think Democrats are likely to benefit politically if significant numbers of voters perceive it's no longer much of a threat to them personally (because Trump has fixed it).
I will be so happy when they whole DEI Stazi apparatus is purged from academia. I became radicalized when I started applying for academic jobs in 2022. In a period of four years the whole system seemed to go nuts. There was this uniform language, mandatory litmus tests demanding that you show correct ideological fealty, explicit racism and sexism for purely aesthetic reasons, and crap pay to boot.
I went to a guest lecture at “my” university last week where the speaker, who has done great work retrofitting suburban areas with more housing, better and greener public spaces, etc, was asked by a faculty member about degrowth. It was clear from the context that the professor asking the question was in favor of degrowth. This was *an architecture program.* I wanted to ask how he thought his students felt about promoting a political agenda that, if successful, would leave them unemployed and in debt. But as a puny adjunct co-teaching a class, I didn’t want to embarrass the professor who hired me.
I am an economist. Growth is a moral imperative if we want to reduce poverty. Enforced austerity harms the weakest in society. Refusing to build housing to accommodate people moving into an area is just enacting a form of regulatory serfdom where birth and parentage determines one’s opportunities.
Not to mention that degrowth is inherently genocidal and requires a totalitarian Holodomor to actually be carried out. (Though the cultists assert that somehow billions of people will somehow willingly suffer material deprivation to satiate the whims of cult leader Hickel.)
Degrowth occasionally crops up in my discipline (geography), and I have mostly ignored it, but man, is it deeply stupid.
The stupidity was exacerbated by the smugness with which the question was asked. To her credit, the guest lecturer sidestepped it gracefully, pretending that it was about infill development, which she promotes.
Any signs it's tapering off yet? I've never regarded it as a very persuasive ideology: it has way too many shortcomings such as the suppression of speech. If I'd been in academia they would never have heard the end of my logical and pragmatic arguments.
Lots of departments and DEI staff have been cut due to budget problems and the growing demographic cliff cutting enrollment. Austerity is fixing some if this admin bloat.
At least we'll get to see that the anti-DEI movement is more about re-establishing old patronage networks rather than anything else. I mean, that's what the hiring practices of anti-DEI people indicate.
Based on current appearances, it seems that with the Trump Administration in charge, it is mostly not going to be about thoughtfully curbing the worst excesses of DEI and instead is simply institutionalizing hostility to, and discriminating against, Blacks and women in executive roles in the federal government and elsewhere.
That all suggests that the net result of the war on woke might be the redoubling of wokeness when there’s a chance to fix the problems.
This is what I'm increasingly expecting. I'm just hoping that Democrats can at least manage to avoid stepping on themselves with it for long enough to win in 2028.
Not just executive roles. I'm waiting in the wings to raise the consciousness of conservatives. Boomer women know that they were rescued from being restricted to pink collar jobs and their puny salaries. Younger women are pretty much clueless about how things were when our first job searches involved ads labeled "men" and "women". (And which also had codes for "whites preferred / okay for Negroes to apply")
The best thing Republicans could do is just spend less money on higher education. The DOGE philosophy is a very bad way to handle PEPFAR, but a pretty solid one to handle higher ed spending and its social consequences.
Do not create a giant new fund for anti-woke professors (fun fact, the religious non-profits maximizing asylum seekers Republicans are mad about today are due in part to Dubya's efforts to create socially conservative non-profit institutions), just cap the masters loans.
Asylum seekers or refugees coming through the U.N. refugee program? Many of the resettlement agencies in the U.S. are religious organizations: The Catholic Church and the Lutherans for example.
I believe it's also true for asylum that a lot of religious non-profits were involved setting up resources and networks, although it wouldn't surprise me if some rightists that don't like the refugee program and conflate both.
But I think some number of refugees should be admitted annually and hope some enterprising Democrat could take it up with Musk to include certain property seizures (per his frustration with South Africa) if Musk is willing to join forces to keep a stable annual program.
In this limited domain I think it’s kind of resetting the amount of ruin in a nation. The trouble is not running the tab up higher than that in a kajillion other domains.
In the short-term, that's probably(?) true, but if your platform is using the government to deliver valuable services to citizens and the ability to do so has been cut off at the knees, I don't think that's going to be a positive-sum tradeoff.
Relatedly, I see a lot of people getting angry about DOGE’s actions without engaging with their own stated strategy on its own terms:
They are firing lots of federal workers first, not to cut the spending on federal salaries, but because they think they can fire their way into a more loyal, competent, nimble “better” (in their view) workforce, and once they have a better workforce, then they will be able to cut regulations and programs to actually cut spending. They think past efforts to cut regulation and spending have been undermined by the federal workforce, and so they are prioritizing a purge of the federal workforce first and foremost.
This strategy was explicitly laid out by Chris Rufo and others in his orbit before the inauguration.
There’s still a lot to criticize with this plan!
- It’s probably illegal under current law, and despite having control of Congress, they’re not waiting for Congress to change the laws to make it legal first.
- It could fail, and you end up with a much worse workforce on all dimensions than we had before. (E.g. if Congress refuses to open the taps on paying market wages for federal workers)
- It could “work” eventually, but the work of the federal government is too important, and it could cause disaster in the interim while they’re rebuilding.
- The plan working could be a bad thing, as everyone prioritizes “loyalty” to Trump over running a working government.
But you have to engage with the other side’s argument, and not just say “you can’t cut salaries to fix the deficit”.
It's a stupid plan, though. The Republicans have never cut the deficit because the Republicans have never actually tried to cut the deficit. They occasionally do some edge-trimming on spending and use it to pass a massive tax cut, but they never do even edge-trimming on spending in its own right, to say nothing of anything major.
This is not complicated. If they wanted to pass a budget that cut spending and left taxes alone it is entirely within their power to just fucking do it.
"The Republicans have never cut the deficit"
this is factually incorrect. Republicans in congress worked with Bill Clinton to actually cut the deficit.
They also worked with Obama to curtail spending.
Maybe you meant they have never cut the deficit with a Republican president.
Though, I believe Bush 1 actually raised taxes because he was concerned about the deficit, so that probably still isn't true.
I'm not going to give the Republicans a lick of credit for having fiscal probity forced on them by Democratic presidents who actually care about it.
Don't reverse causality and try to feed me the reverse narrative either, I am not in the mood for GOP autofellatio narratives today.
You know which branch of government originates the budget, right?
The correct matrix here is:
Dem President + Dem Congress - has cut the deficit (Clinton)
Dem President + GOP Congress - has cut the deficit (Clinton, Obama)
GOP President + Dem Congress - has cut the deficit (GWHB)
GOP President + GOP Congress - has never cut the deficit
"I'm not going to give the Republicans a lick of credit for having fiscal probity forced on them by Democratic presidents who actually care about it."
ROFL
You think it was Bill Clinton that forced Newt Gingrich to cut the deficit?
REALLY?
And it certainly wasn't Obama that was forcing Republicans to cut things either.
> They also worked with Obama to curtail spending.
L O L
that's literally the opposite of how it happened. they *refused* to work with Obama, so we got "the super committee", and then "the sequester", which was supposed to be so painful that no one would accept, but the GOP couldn't find their own asses so it went into effect anyway. We basically got a second recession because Boehner had no control over his caucus.
It is a stupid plan, but it might be somewhat less stupid if you hypothesize that they're not being truthful about the end goal of the plan being to "cut regulations and spending."
Does DOGE's frat house look like a better work force to you? And these are the *first* people they hired.
"Better" is a value judgment, I guess, and depends on objectives. The workforce isn't "better" from the perspective of you or me or other normal people. But maybe it's "better" if your main objective is to send people to Mars, or to transition to a Yarvinist system of government.
Fair enough. I personally am more interested in going to Mars, or even farther, than I was a couple months ago.
DOGE's buyout/firing strategy reminds me, in a way, of the theory that companies were implementing RTO policies to do "quiet layoffs" and reduce headcount without having to announce workforce cuts.
It could be true, but the idea that your best workers are truly committed to the company and will jump through whatever hoops they need to keep their jobs doesn't ring true to me. If you're withdrawing a benefit (WFH) or offering a buyout (a la DOGE) the first people to leave are going to be the high performers that can get a similar job right away.
This is 100% correct, but also I think missing the point.
The actual purpose of DOGE is to demoralize the federal workforce so that people will leave, and they can be replaced with lackeys and minions. Firing probationary workers is just the simplest solution. You actually want to get the high performers and the committed people out, because they're the ones least likely to play ball with the replacements.
And frankly, a lot of DOGE is simply 'what have the Romans ever done for us?' For the few agencies that they do actually believe are needed, the assumption is AI or any high-school dropout can just as easily do the job.
A serious, position by position, program by program audit and review would undoubtedly yield many government expenditures that were either unauthorized by the enabling legislation or appropriation would, in a rational world, be a means of reducing government spending. That never really happens and is certainly not what DOGE is doing. They do not seem to understand what an employee or program does; indeed, there is little evidence that they care.
This sort of assessment and reconsideration never happens because Congress and the White House, year after year, have projects and programs they want and do not wish to justify. In addition, such a review might address the extent to which a program is fulfilling its intended purpose but there is little constituency for such efforts. Likewise, regulations and enforcement could be examined to see if they are working but many regulators don’t want that since it puts them on the defensive and rarely have the resources to do the work assigned to them. Regulated industries would typically oppose such reviews since enforcement is almost never as rigorous or effective as intended. Sometimes Congress will hold a few hearings but typically these are dumbshows in support of getting rid of a program. Today, they are not even bothering with that, reduced to calling in fear when cuts affect their constituents.
What we will get is a dysfunctional swiss cheese government. No doubt, it will all be blamed on DEI and the Democrats.
You missed another reason it’s a bad plan: because of “last in, first out,” the people who will keep their jobs won’t be the most nimble, flexible employees, but the opposite.
I mean, given that per Matt’s article they’re apparently 0.2% of GDP in *total,* I kind of think you can’t cut salaries to fix the deficit.
0.2% of GDP is a bizarre way to frame this and people should feel bad about falling for that.
Trusting the math on 0.2% * GDP, its $60 Billion in salary costs out of a Federal Budget of $6800 Billion or a little under 1% of spending. Or about 6% of the deficit.
Those numbers still tell us how we can't lay off people to balance the budget.
On the other hand, Brookings says that federal personnel spending is $291 Billion or 6.6% of the Federal Budget. So somebody's math is way off. Or someone's hiding the ball, which is easier when using weird measurements.
Good point - something's not right. The federal civilian workforce is ~2m people, meaning that if the cost was only $60b, the average pay would be only $30k. Ben probably did the research; maybe he can explain where that number came from?
Is there any evidence Global Refuge has done anything wrong? From skimming their website, it seems their #1 activity is helping immigrants find jobs...is that a bad thing?
Krish Vignarajah finished magna cum laude at Yale before a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford and a Yale JD. Doesn't on the face of it seem to be a problematic person to lead an organisation!
Her $640k, I would expect/hope, was based on recommendation from a compensation consultant.
> was based on recommendation from a compensation consultant.
It probably was, but that's part of the entire stupidity around executive compensation in both the NGO and for-profit world. Outsource all important decisions to consultants, then the consultants end up in charge.
Also the government shouldn't be giving money to groups that have lobbying and advocacy anywhere in their mission.
Though I love this idea in principle, I think it's hard to do it in practice. Think Planned Parenthood, which provides great reproductive health services and is really the behemoth in this domain. But they do a lot of advocacy too. Probably similar for Global Refuge. The people who do something with a political tinge are likely the same ones who want to do advocacy.
And stipulating that government money can only be used for the doing-things and not the advocacy part of the mission is fine, but it ignores the fungibility of money.
Split it into two independent orgs with separate finances. One for operations and the other for advocacy. Government funds only go to the operational org and, moreover, it needs to make it's spending legible and publicly available for scrutiny. The advocacy org is private and donor funded, it can do whatever it wants.
That seems an awful lot like just saying that an organization that accepts government funds can't use those funds for advocacy. I guess the two orgs' "independence" from each other is the difference. But, again, I think this is problematic.
Suppose Planned Parenthood decides it's only going to be a service (not advocacy) organization, and it puts in a lot of IUDs. Suppose some state outlaws a certain sort of commonly used IUDs (some fringe people claim that IUD use is tantamount to abortion), which are thought to be the safest and most effective. Would you say that Planned Parenthood shouldn't send their doctors to testify before the state legislature against this law? Or lobby against this law? What if there's a proposed law that, say, outlaws the use of techs rather than nurses in the Operating Room? Shouldn't Planned Parenthood be able to advocate with regard to this?
You might say, no, they shouldn't be lobbying at all. But at some point public policy affects the nitty-gritty of how a service organization functions and hence affects its mission. Saying the organization can't try to affect policy in this regard is problematic.
I really, really agree with the idea, but I really, really think it's complicated. It seems like it's always impossible to draw reasonable lines in our unreasonable country.
I agree it's difficult, but it seems like we could employ some of the methods we use to discourage the use of public funds for religious purposes. Formally prohibit it, demand organizational separation, and back it up with penalties:
> If you violate the requirements specified in your grant or otherwise improperly use the funds you receive, you may be subject to legal action. Among other things, you may lose your grant funds, be required to repay the funds you received, and pay any damages that might be awarded through court action. If an organization uses its funds fraudulently, it could be subject to criminal prosecution.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/fbci/faq.html
Then how in the world would the groups be able to make a case for government funding? Simply by managing to hit the right language in grant applications? (Bring on the LLMs!)
This would be like businesses growing without ever making their case to possible investors, or ever advertising for that matter.
My sister founded a mental health non-profit. She spends lots and lots of time educating people about general issues around mental health. Then she has to do a lot of work explaining exactly what her particular program does, what its goals are and how success is measured, and what the actual evidence for success is. Without advocacy, funders would not be able to understand what they were granting money for.
(BTW, they are large enough at this point to have a contract with a lobbyist who advises on strategy and statehouse dynamics, but for many legislators in her state, being "lobbied" means encountering her in person, and facing her passion, commitment and hands-on experience.)
I don't think they've done any *illegal*, but the whole processes is sketchy. First, I wouldn't wave away that $640k as nothing --- that's a lot of money, but the general process is that these organizations get government money to do something that's arguably useful, but that money cross subsidies left-wing advocacy.
I don't know much about Global Refuge, but I can give local examples (for Madison, WI). We have a couple organizations (Freedom Inc [1] and Urban Triage [2]) which get government money [3, 4] for (sometimes) defensible programs (youth programs, rental assistance, etc.) and then turn around and advocate for abolishing the police and related nonsense [5, 6]. I'll add that this wasn't just a 2020 thing. They were anti police before it was cool.
So, yes, these organizations can provide useful services that may be worth government funding, but the government funding is also paying these idiots a salary and paying for the infrastructure they use for advocacy --- from the printers they use to make stupid flyers to the shitty squarespace websites where they post their demands.
The useful services they do provide could be provided by organizations which don't do this shit.
[1] https://freedom-inc.org/
[2] https://urbantriage.org/
[3] https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/investigations/daniel-bice/2020/06/02/group-leading-madison-protests-paid-millions-state-tax-dollars/5316822002/
[4] https://captimes.com/news/urban-triage-housing-assistance-for-homeless-people-100k-over-budget/article_1a816530-713f-11ef-b4d2-eb441bcd5324.html
[5] https://captimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/activists-want-to-defund-the-madison-police-what-does-that-mean/article_41d48491-4c37-5311-b0d3-219934fd2d45.html "Freedom Inc., an activist group that is leading protest actions in Madison, has called for the police to be abolished, especially in marginalized neighborhoods where people of color are concentrated."
[6] https://captimes.com/news/local/neighborhoods/voices-of-protest-urban-triages-brandi-grayson-is-fighting-for-a-madison-she-can-be/article_24e27805-3c1b-53d0-9403-2fa958831991.html
The challenge here is, are these groups actually using government money to pay for advocacy, or are they using government money to pay for services they agreed to provide, and then seperately doing fundraising from the private sector and devoting THAT revenue stream to paying for advocacy.
The only way to really avoid that issue is to insist that organizations that contract with the government cannot spend any money on advocacy.
The problem with THAT is that these non-profits are able to charge less to the government by paying their people like shit, but only because theose people are fanatics who believe in the mission, and you keep motivating those people to take a below-market rate paycheck by having your organization engage in advocacy. If you don't pay 20% of their salary from some private donor to go marching in the streets on Fridays demanding the abolition of police, you'd have to pay them a lot more money to run a soup kitchen Monday-Thursday.
I think NGOs should be allowed to advocate within their mission, at least to some extent. But it seems abolishing the police goes beyond what is reasonable.
I can see how they justified it to themselves as part of the mission of delivering social services, however.
I know John was just using this as an example. Generally, useful effective programs should be funded more and ineffective ones less. That should really be the operating principle. Defining usefulness and effectiveness is part of the challenge.
I'm not sure I get what your criticism here is. Do you think someone running an organization that manages revenues of $200 million and has nearly 600 employees should be paid substantially less than $640k a year? Maybe he should accept less because he believes in the mission, but it's certainly already much less than anyone running a similar sized for profit organization.
Do you think we shouldn't as a government spend money on the programs Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Refugee Services) provides? Do you think we should close the tent to people advocating for the poor and the neglected here and abroad?
I have direct insight into Global Relief's Catholic counterpart, and I can assure you there's not some big sloshing pot of money that they're drinking from. They are essentially government contractors providing capacity that the government doesn't have or can't ramp up quickly.
They run on shoe string budgets and provide very basic services to people who would otherwise be literally out in the cold. If it's the advocacy part that bothers you, I can't speak to the Lutherans, but for the Catholics it's not some well funded K street operation, it's one or two people trying to get their phone calls returned by Congressional staffers so they can understand the math of what it takes to shelter a 16 year old for a couple months until they can be placed with a cousin somewhere with space for one more mattress on the floor.
Just to be clear, you’re saying that an organization “providing services for migrants and refugees, and political advocacy for immigration broadly” is “extreme politics”?
Has this always been the case? Is being pro-immigration or pro-refugee always extreme or is it newly extreme because of recent shifts in public opinion? I guess I want to understand the limits here of “everything is the fault of the groups” when it feels like, in this case, this group’s position would have been pretty centrist not that long ago. W was fairly pro immigration, for example. The right used to think accepting political refugees from communist countries as important to American foreign policy and self-image. Is it just that times change so these are the bad guys now? Is it purely popularism and the need to bend to whatever the median voter believes at any given moment?
I think the point is that the *government* has no business paying anyone to influence anyone into being either for or against immigration.
I can see that but I’m not sure we’d all have felt that was true in the early 2000s. We employed a number of NGOs to help with resettling refugees from Somolia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere as part of increased foreign policy engagement with Muslim populations around the world. Beyond that particular example, we’ve always relied on a number of public/private partnerships to advance US objectives in Africa and Asia. Plus sometimes these groups are useful for intelligence gathering. While it sounds reasonable right now to say the government shouldn’t be funding advocacy groups, I really feel like that’s a recent development based on swings in public opinion.
Why would those groups need to lobby the government rather than get on with a job? Would you want Blackwater, for example, to have foreign policy making advocacy?
Because their work is aligned with policy objectives of the administration and sometimes that includes work to lobby members of congress or local and state officials or what have you.
If I'm resettling refugees, it's not simply a matter of me plopping them down somewhere. I have a variety of political considerations, including the need for buy-in from various politicians up and down the local/state/federal ladder. If my administration and party's position is that asylum is a net-positive for the country, that advocacy is an important part of achieving my policy goals.
I get that in 2024 such positions were political losers and that a popularist approach would have democratic politicians either tacking to the right on immigration or holding their tongues about their true feelings. But what I see in these comments is some kind of flabbergasted surprise that these kinds of programs exist at all when, if you take a longer view of how the government functions, you see that it's always relied to some extent on private entities to achieve policy goals, including advocacy.
"Because their work is aligned with policy objectives of the administration and sometimes that includes work to lobby members of congress or local and state officials or what have you."
Why should we want these organizations to do the lobbying though? If their work is aligned with the administration, have the administration lobby congress or various other political groups that need persuading.
That rather begs the question as to how much involvement NGOs had in destabilizing the region in the first place. It's a neat trick to get someone to pay you to cause harm, then pay you to ameliorate the harm you caused; and I wish I believed that did not happen more often than most of us would be comfortable with. The bureaucratic version of the addict stealing your wallet then helping you look for it.
Finally we've learned their master plan.
These orgs don't get money for advocacy, they get fees for services. Many nonprofits associated with the Catholic and Lutheran churches (Global Refuge is Lutheran) are essentially government contractors in this area.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on all things Global Rescue or Krish Vignarajah. In looking through the organization's press releases, I see a clear point of view regarding immigration that seems to go beyond the provision of needed services. A few examples from the Biden-era (to remove the Trump effect):
2/2024: "Global Refuge alarmed by Biden administration consideration of new asylum ban"
12/2023: "Global Refuge Decries Drastic Immigration Proposals in Supplemental Funding Negotiations"
11/2023: "Global Refuge Opposes Congressional Efforts to End Asylum Protections in Budget Negotiations"
02/2023: "Transit Ban 2.0: New Biden Rule Would Limit Asylum Eligibility" (They were against this)
Is the argument that money is completely fungible, and therefore the US was somehow giving them money for advocacy, albeit indirectly? Because weren't the grants they received from the US for the refugee resettlement services? Wouldn't a restriction on the free speech rights of non-profit groups that receive government grants be a First Amendment problem?
They’re allowed to lobby, even as a tax exempt organization, apparently up to a million dollars per year.
Sure! And these were probably counterproductive positions to be staking out in the Biden era given the public’s change in perception of immigration! The popularist point is there. My point is that these positions were not radical all that long ago and funding organizations like Global Rescue were even embraced as an important component of US policy goals. When we look at the program today with the view limited to the Biden years, it’s easy to armchair quarterback and call this an egregious error that justifies Elon’s savaging of the agencies.
Would the asylum seekers not have benefited just as much if the government had funded a logistics company, for transport and housing, and granted legal aid rather than this NGO run by a former staffer making $640k a year?
I am not here to defend the efficacy or efficiency of the program. I am pointing out that it is not crazy for such a program to exist and to front the claim that the government has relied on non-state actors repeatedly and for many years in causes both foreign and domestic to accomplish policy goals.
My guess is that the government also funded NGOs that did the logistics, transport, legal aid, etc. Hell, maybe Global Refuge did those things too. I have no idea.
But the government are funding a group that has an interest in keeping the gravy train rolling, using money to influence government policy.
Giving money to NGO's to them turn around and lobby for the administrations position seems like a clear case of corruption
Not to mention authorizing payments to an NGO staffed by your wife, who receives a salary in the very high six figures from said NGO.
The USG funding domestic advocacy organizations is pretty sketchy, IMO. Service organizations are a different story, and I'd be fine with the Government drawing a clear line about that.
This organization's funding also makes one ask why, if these services are so valuable to for immigrants, we fund an NGO to perform them rather than bringing it in-house.
(Of course, the reasons for this status quo are mostly orthogonal to delivering effective services efficiently. Which is a much broader and more fundamental indictment of our current politics.)
I don't know anything about Global Refuge, but in each city where I've lived the bulk of refugee resettlement support has been done by decentralized religious charities such as the local Catholic Charities or Jewish Family and Children's Services, or by local specialist groups like the International Institute in St. Louis. Of course these agencies are losing federal funding as well, but I'm not clear what purpose a nationwide entity serves, as the actual services provided to refugees or asylees is most effectively done by locals.
I think the way to go after this is the corruption angle that's been discussed in the comments here before. Like, if you're going to make popularist hay next time the sun shines, the actual work of the organization is not what's going to gin up broad public outrage. What you do is point out that it's thinly concealed self-dealing for a former staffer and politically connected person to be given a sweetheart role funded by the taxpayer.
The public hates the revolving door, even if Matt doesn't think the argument is good on the merits.
All that information was already publicly available. Musk could have put in a public records request and gotten all that information at any time. That's the law. You could have done the same thing, but I doubt you would be willing to invest the time. DOGE, however, obfuscates everything they do. No one knows for sure what they are doing because they don't follow public records law, it's no different than Hillary's private email server. You are essentially arguing that we should abandon our current system of government information being publicly available because we were all too lazy to look at it. Better to put Musk in charge and let him work in absolute secrecy.
This would be more compelling if we knew for a fact that Global Refuge isn't worth all that money. I have no idea, but it can't just be assumed because its funding went up and its director gets paid $640K.
Global Refuge and similar orgs are more like government contractors than advocacy groups, which is why they get so much public funding. It's a religious (Lutheran) charity that receives fees for services performed. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is heavily integrated into the refugee pipeline for historical reasons--its predecessor bodies were ethnic immigrant churches for Scandinavians and Germans. The Roman Catholic Church has similar large orgs in this space.
If I'm reading their Form 990 correctly, out of $220M in revenues they spent $126K on lobbying?
Like, I'm sympathetic to the argument that the second number should be 0, but ~99.94% of what the government spent seems to have gone towards actual tangible goods and services.
I guess I'd want to look at the spectrum of NGOs receiving federal aid: does the power of The Groups result in especially progressive NGOs getting a disproportionate share of the grants? Or is federal aid distributed fairly evenly across the political spectrum?
(A wrinkle here might be deciding which sectors to look at. If someone objects to federal funding that supports immigrants or refugees at all, then the result will automatically appear to be disproportionate. In my non-profit work, I was always aware of the distinction between advocacy and just providing services (mainly because I find advocacy boring compared with the challenge of addressing practical problems.)
I think the tension here is that yes, ethically, morally, and for the purposes of effective governing and actually advancing your interests, misinformation is counterproductive.
However, misinformation and leveraging it within your own coalition specifically has tactical political advantages against those in your coalition anchored by reality. Those willing to bullshit always have more maneuverability, and since the time between "fucking around" and truly "finding out" in terms of bullshit making people's lives worse in a way that generates real political blowback is frustratingly long these days, the bullshitters just race ahead, until the Finding Out eventually hits, which honestly, it hasn't yet.
Right. Additionally, even if the tactical argument for “honesty” were solid (and I think you’ve made a good case that it’s not), there is a real cost to trying to be accurate and precise in public, which is different. Take Matt’s example about inflation. Democrats and their allies in the press were saying something true but imprecise. And maybe Matt’s point is that they just shouldn’t have brought up relative inflation around the world. But given that tangible inflation was the main thing on voters’ minds, what was the right move? Explain the issue in multiple paragraphs that require significant background knowledge to understand? Detail which inflationary moves Trump made (pandemic relief checks!), which ones Biden made (more pandemic relief checks!), which ones were a mistake, and how much inflation is attributable to outside factors? That’s complex, and when Democrats say complex things, they get dinged as out of touch elitists. Being accurate and precise also puts you at risk of having to change your message when new facts come to light — but unless those new facts are palpable to your audience, they are likely to view you as merely waffling.
I agree that the ideal political leader would be able to deliver honest, accurate, precise messages in a way that ordinary people find clear and helpful. I think Warren and Buttigieg are the closest we have to this ideal, and maybe if we had run one of them this year we’d be in a different place now. But when brazen lying has been working so well for the other side, it’s hard for me to keep faith in that ideal.
"That's complex, and when Democrats say complex things, they get dinged out of touch elitists."
People love to make this claim, but I don't think it's true. Can you give me any examples of Democrats actually giving a complicated answer and then being criticized as elitist for it?
Complicated answers have a hard time spreading in today's media environment because people scroll away too quickly, but I don't think they think complicated answers are elitist.
What actually turns people off is giving simple answers that require trusting the speaker in lieu of more complicated answers that don't. It's perceived as elitist to say, "Global warming will kill us all if we don't act now, and if you don't believe me you're anti-science," whereas explaining the real risks of global warming in enough detail to be useful is merely boring.
I think it also hurts that we just don’t have anyone with enough star wattage to wield the bully pulpit.
Obama did some of it at the beginning, but Biden just always undermined himself by coming off as old and creaky when he tried to forcefully explain things.
Part of what works for Trump and worked for Hitler but also worked for less objectionable leaders like MLK and JFK was to simply be able to say things passionately and comprehensibly.
Agreed. On the one hand, it sucks to think that charisma matters far more than policy specifics. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that charisma matters far more than policy specifics for the Presidential race, at least. So when we're picking our next nominee, I really friggin' hope we pick someone with some actual charisma.
Unfortunately, pretty much the only person waiting in the wings on our side with real star wattage is Pete Buttigieg, and a lot of people seem to dislike him because he's crafted his whole life to work for a presidential campaign (which, to me, seems like an obviously good thing, but go figure).
I mean, in large part, education polarization DOES mean that people resent the people who, up until now, thought they were doing ALL the right things by relentlessly having their ducks in a row.
I sympathize with the cosmic injustice of it all, but also, Pete's a smart boy, and if he's worth his peanuts, he'll adapt. If he isn't, we need leaders who can. Like with the charisma, it's kind of as simple as that.
I do think that this should also force us to rethink the Democratic party's internal primary processes -- both formal AND informal. We should have them select a LOT harder for general charisma, instead of just "who can navigate the hack promotion track the best" like Harris.
Agreed on all points. And I think, to some extent, Pete's already adapting. His crack about the most recent DNC elections feeling like a Portlandia sketch was spot on and well-tailored to the audience that needs to hear it.
One more point of agreement: I think what this does is make it more important to make sure that when we get a charismatic leader, they do the right policies.
Which is a problem, because that leads us right back to The Groups and their odious tactics!
Perhaps the synthesis, though, is that we don’t need to demand The Groups’ same level of ideological purity, but rather that we simply need to have a healthy institutional party that can (1) promote charismatic candidates, and (2) furnish them with a party apparatus that can host a diverse set of policy ideas, rigorously vet them, and then convert them into a feasible policy program regardless of which options get selected.
For instance, let’s say it ends up being Pete. Great! He’s still gonna need people to help him implement the Abundance Agenda. And that agenda will only fail if it hasn’t been vetted properly and doesn’t have the buy-in.
That synthesis is pretty much my dream outcome, but I despair of reaching it unless the candidate we choose is strong-willed enough to stand up to the Groups and naturally inclines in a classically liberal direction.
My read on Buttigieg is that he probably meets qualification #2, but I have no idea if he meets qualification #1. He certainly didn't do it in 2020, but it would have been political suicide to try way back then.
Before we put in useful policies, I think the most important thing a future Democrat leader needs to do is get revenge.
Well, I think a lot of things turn people off, and I guess the question is which thing is turning off the most relevant group… but FWIW I was mostly thinking of both Gore and Kerry running against Bush. I don’t honestly know if the narrative (people wanted to get a beer with Bush, not be lectured to by Gore/Kerry) is accurate or explanatory; but I buy it because it matches a dynamic I’ve seen in my own life as a teacher. When students encounter something that is too complex for them to follow, some of them work hard to figure it out; some of them feel bad about themselves and give up; some of them say “this is boring”; and some of them get actively mad at it—“this is stupid,” “this author is just showing off” etc. (Not an exhaustive description of their reactions, of course!) I’m not sure any of those reactions is a particularly useful one for a politician to trigger in their voters, so yeah, I think there are at least potential costs to trying to communicate complexity. (And yes, I do think adult voters, in their aggregate, can be fairly compared to teenaged students—which I don’t mean to be derogatory; I love and respect my students.)
I agree that those reactions aren't terribly helpful, but only the "this author is just showing off" reaction equates to "elitism" in my mind, and I suspect that reaction is most likely to occur when the person giving the complicated explanation fills their explanation with a bunch of jargony gobbledygook.
The best solution, methinks, is to strive for a combination of humility, picking good policies going forward, and picking good communicators to promote them. For example, I think Pete Buttigieg could've explained which policies pushed by each side contributed to inflation, explained why our policies at least had good intentions, and then moved on to explaining how his economic agenda would fight inflation. And I think he could've carried most normies along with him through all that in 3-4 sentences at most.
(Note: I'm not saying we need to give complicated answers every time. That's obviously a bad idea. But I think our candidates must be able to give the nuanced version of our answer in debates and other policy-focused settings, and to carry normies along when doing so. We have put too little premium on that ability for too long.)
That might be exactly right, and I hope it is!!
Matt wasn't saying that the inflation claim was true, but imprecise. He was saying it was actively misleading! The claim that "inflation was similar here and in Europe" is literally true. The conclusion "therefore it wasn't our fault" is false.
Making statements that are technically true and hoping your audience draws false conclusions from them *is* brazen lying! The number of people who don't think willful miscommunication is dishonest drives me up a wall.
But the conclusion “therefore it wasn’t ALL our fault” is true—no? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the economic argument. Letting people draw their own conclusions from true statements may be misleading, but it is not brazen lying! And whether we view it as dishonest depends, I think, on whether the people doing it 1) intend to lead their audience to a specific conclusion 2) know that conclusion to be FALSE, not merely incomplete.
What candidate for office was saying that? (And btw, it's not clear even then that "it was our fault", at least in the main part).
Yeah, I don’t know that any candidate was, I’m running with what seems to be the premise in Matt’s piece.
"what was the right move?'
pulling back unspent stimulus when the inflation started to show up. And if that wasn't enough, budget cuts and or raising taxes.
Both would be far better than raising interest rates.
Oh also requiring Americans to learn basic economics before graduating high school, and putting that on the exam to graduate.
I would also fully support making people pass a basic economics and constitutional law test before they can vote (yes I know about the racist past, but don't care)
I didn’t meant “what was the right economic move?” but rather “what was the right thing to say?”
I don't think there was a right thing to say after making the wrong policy moves.
I think the brazen lying works for the same reason as the ideal leader’s “honest, accurate, precise” messages would: because ordinary people find both “clear and helpful”.
Were people in the Biden-then-Harris campaign really saying Americans shouldn't worry about inflation because it was no worse than in Europe? Maybe they did; I don't remember. If they did, that was malpractice. (I know commentators and analysts were saying that, but that's not the same). What they could have said was that we had an unfortunate spike in inflation but under Biden-Harris policies that has rapidly come down, and meanwhile they would continue to go after price gougers, and that Trump doesn't care about you, and his policies would make things worse.
I couldn't really follow why Matt devoted so much time to this US vs European inflation question. How important was this? Not very, imo.
I think the intent was that “this inflation is world wide and out side the control of the administration “…
I would only add that educational polarization has upended which things each party attempts to FA on, and also the degree to which either one FOs once they try it.
Basically, Republicans structurally get away with more bullshit because they have more rubes, cranks, and dropouts. Democrats also asymmetrically take shit from the less-educated dirtbag left.
AND to boot, Democrats have a tougher uphill sled trying to win over uneducated voters, because those voters (A) perceive any attempt to correct their ignorance as condescending, and (B) can’t understand what the hell the faculty lounge is talking about.
I think this ultimately points in a Beutlerian direction of “throw out the consultants”, because the only way to rebalance against education polarization is to competently reach them where they’re at — the Rogan podcasts, the manosphere, etc.
Fundamentally, not enough of the country is educated for that to be your core constituency. Which also suggests public political appeals that selectively target and flatter people with college or advanced degrees is actively detrimental.
I agree? Someone on Substack recently suggested that the blue states should sell out hard on getting everyone a college degree so that they can build a national majority via diffusion, but they admitted that it’s more of a long term plan, not one geared towards winning in the next couple cycles.
IMO it’s unlikely the correlation is causal and that it would hold up if 60% of the country had advanced degrees. Even if we had the ability and desire to pay for college at its current prices, which is far from true, there are much cheaper and faster ways to convince people to support blue state policies - to wit, break with the extreme 10% that want racial quotas and public fentanyl use! If you want something slow and steady, make housing cheaper…
The FO part might not hit for years later, by which time they can blame it on the other side.
I think that your arguments about misinformation creating problems for governance are largely true, but you really haven’t demonstrated that it’s not electorally useful. A strong piece of counter-evidence: the 2024 election, which, as David Shor argues, was entirely swung by a change in the preferences of poorly-informed voters who have higher rates of holding objectively false beliefs about verifiable matters of fact.
The historical answer to this problem— used into the early 21st century— is one which a lot of us find uncomfortable when stated aloud. Basically, maintain separate communication channels for the typical voter (who is objectively not smart or well informed) and for elites who actually make decisions. (The Republicans still do this to a certain extent— see the difference between the narrative that Trump surrogates presented to Bloomberg and the WSJ and the narrative they presented on like, Fox News and various podcasts— and it probably helps them win elections.)
One of the tougher challenges for democrats is the inability to do this severed communication. Given education polarization, general interest in politics or just group dynamics, it becomes much harder to segment communications without the elite targeted message cannibalizing the other. If a Democrat tried to message a softer approach on abortion to abortion skeptic black or hispanic christian voters the elite messaging network would lose their friggin minds.
"Basically, maintain separate communication channels for the typical voter (who is objectively not smart or well informed) and for elites who actually make decisions. (The Republicans still do this to a certain extent— see the difference between the narrative that Trump surrogates presented to Bloomberg and the WSJ and the narrative they presented on like, Fox News and various podcasts— and it probably helps them win elections.)"
I think there's an inherent asymmetry on this given that belief in hierarchy is a fundamental component of conservatism while egalitarianism is a fundamental component of liberalism. No doubt there are complexities here (right-populism is about maintaining certain hierarchies while simultaneously being, well, populist, liberals obviously have elites, people on both sides are often hypocritical) but the root principles of each ideology still cast long shadows, and make it much more difficult for the left-of-center coalition to execute a "separate communication channels" strategy.
I think this is somewhat true in theory, but in practice, most successful left of center political movements have found ways around it, generally involving some sort of ideological construct about a better informed group needing to provide leadership and education to the unenlightened. (See: the orthodox Marxist “vanguard of the proletariat” concept, the Fabian Society building social democracy in the UK, WEB DuBois’s “talented tenth” concept, etc.)
So I kind of think that Marxism was a fusion of far-right-wing and far-left-wing beliefs. Basically, pre-Marx, being on the left meant fighting against the tyrannies and monarchies that had largely run the world for centuries. Whether the topic was the structure of political systems or economics or social mores or anything else, the prescription was always the same: egalitarian distribution of concentrated power to the masses. So you had democracy in politics, the free market in economics, liberation of women, etc. But then you ran into some inherent contradictions. What do you do when the masses actually want to maintain certain hierarchies and can even (at least under certain circumstances) be persuaded to support tyranny? What do you do when the free market doesn't lead to economic equality? What do you do about the fact that the masses don't entirely want either a pure free-market system or perfect economic equality? So everyone comes up with a way to bridge the gap based on their priorities. Standard liberals say we should (a) have democracy but add guardrails so people can't vote to cancel elections or persecute minorities or whatever, (b) have a generally free market, but allow people to vote to deviate from pure free-market ideals while also accepting a fair amount of economic inequality. Standard conservatives think we should have democracy but focus the guardrails more on the free-market economy than on the structure of the democratic system, while more or less abandoning economic inequality as a goal whatsoever. Communists say economic inequality is the overriding goal, and if the only way to achieve that goal is to use far-right-wing political methods (dictatorship), then that's what we're going to do.
I am a standard liberal and I think the standard liberal position is the one that tries hardest to paper over the contradictions in the way that's most consistent with the underlying egalitarian impulses - the minimally invasive option, if you will. And while I don't always agree with Democrats on everything, I recognize them to also be within this standard liberal tradition. And I think that anyone within this broad tradition is going to have a hard time executing a strategy of intentionally deceiving its own members and maintaining perfect message discipline. But the Marxists can do it because they (in my opinion) do not value being, and are not really attempting to be, as faithful to egalitarian principles as they can. This is why, although Marxists sometimes give liberals flak for supposedly being soft on fascism, Joseph Stalin was capable of entering into a formal alliance with Hitler, and why Marxist regimes after a while devolve into something that in lived experience feels functionally indistinguishable from a right-wing dictatorship (Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Chinese Communist Party today, etc).
"the 2024 election, which, as David Shor argues, was entirely swung by a change in the preferences of poorly-informed voters who have higher rates of holding objectively false beliefs about verifiable matters of fact."
Granting that observation, there's no reason to think that those objectively false beliefs caused them to vote for Trump. History is replete with poorly-informed groups who, despite their ignorance, correctly identified candidates that represented their interests. For example, coming out of Jim Crow, in the 60s, most black Americans had very little access to policy information or even the background needed to evaluate politicians' claims. Would anyone claim that this was the reason they chose Democrats?
None of which is to say I know for sure that objectively false beliefs played no role in the 2024 election, but I never hear detailed, plausible arguments in favor of that hypothesis.
(But some specific false beliefs that seem to have played a role:
* Belief that the US economy is in recession and that ordinary people were poorly off relative to history
* Belief that Trump and his allies could simultaneously cut taxes and reduce the deficit without significant benefit cuts for ordinary people
* (related to the previous belief)— the belief that a huge portion of US government spending is somehow fraudulent, a family of false beliefs around how federal spending is distributed
* Belief that Trump would somehow resolve the Gaza conflict on more favorable terms for the Palestinians than Democrats would
* Belief that high and indiscriminate tariffs are good for the US economy and will help rather than hurt employment rates etc
This is better, for sure. We could at least in theory determine whether these false beliefs actually determined someone's vote, though I think that would be extremely difficult - do you disagree?
But here are some conflicting possibilities addressing each of your points, to illustrate why I'm suspicious they determined anyone's vote:
* Most ordinary people don't know what the technical definition of a recession - that's part of being a low-information voter. So when they say "I believe the US economy is in recession" they really mean "I lost my job", "my husband can't find a job", or "Housing prices are going up faster than my salary."
* Likewise, most Americans probably don't understand the deficit at all. They may believe (correctly) that Trump will reduce their taxes, the only part of that salient to most voters.
* I'll grant you this one, it probably matters! However, "fraudulent" is probably an expansive term that also includes stuff like "funds immigration advocacy".
* A much simpler explanation for the uncommitted movement is that they were trying to blackmail Democratic politicians into taking pro-Palestinian positions on Gaza.
* I'm honestly not sure about the tariffs question. My sense is that, again, the voters you're talking about didn't know enough to be influenced by this. To the extent that their votes were swayed by facts (rather than appeals to interest), they were more generalized perceptions like "Trump has a lot of buildings with his name on them and a TV show, while Biden didn't trust Harris to do anything important."
Re: Uncommitted— that was certainly the perspective that a lot of movement participants expressed openly, but there are plenty of counterexamples like the Hamtranck mayor full-throatedly endorsing Trump, and there’s been a fair amount of after-the-fact reporting on Michigan Arabs expressing disappointment with Trump’s Gaza policy and frustration that he didn’t give them what they wanted after they gave him more electoral support. I’m sure that in some cases, this sort of communication is strategic, but a bunch of people actually do seem to have been tricked.
* Re: recessions— I agree with you that low-information voters don’t have a good technical sense of the definition, but it’s also worth noting that a: opinion surveys consistently showed voters expressing a negative view of the economy but a positive view of their own financial situation (so it was an expression of generalized bad vibes than of personal experience), and b: even if “recession” just means “ambient conditions not great for a person like me relative to history”, it’s still possible for people to have a false belief about it. (A lot of the time, it’s just a skill issue!)
* Re: deficits— I think that your diagnosis of the typical voter view here is false; they’re wrong about it, but not in the way that you specify here. The most common folk theory of the deficit that I’ve seen in the wild is that government finance is basically like personal finance and that deficit spending is sort of like racking up credit card debt, and will carry serious consequences down the line. (In reality, for countries which issue debt in their own currency, inflation and interest rates are the real budget constraint— you can have a high deficit, low inflation, low interest rates, or economic growth, but you generally can’t have all four at the same time.) And indeed, deficit reduction consistently polls well even in macroeconomic contexts where it would probably be a bad idea.
Those are all good points.
* Regarding "uncommitted", I definitely think there's a fair amount of strategic communication, but false beliefs clearly played a role for some people (even though I also think the quantity of anecdotal reporting overstates its significance - the man-bites-dog angle and bitter irony are irresistible hooks).
* Recessions: I feel bad about dodging to an extent, because that's an interesting point, but I'd want to see the exact wording of the polls in question. Polls are invaluable, but also kind of epistemological infohazards.
* Very good point. My only caveat is that I think it's rarely been a highly-salient issue, though it often finds its place as part of a gish gallop against Democrats.
At this point, though, we're talking about rather minimal impact, and that's before considering whether Harris voters were driven by any false beliefs!
"So when they say "I believe the US economy is in recession" they really mean "I lost my job", "my husband can't find a job."
But unemployment was low.
Unless you're arguing no one felt economic pain under Biden, I think that's beside the point.
If I could impress one idea on people it would be this:
"Unemployment" is merely a bloodless abstraction, while "I lost my job" (or "I had to take a shittier job") is personal and real, even when unemployment is low. Economic conditions are geographically uneven and hit subpopulations differently.*
* Ok if I could only get one idea across, it would be either "tradeoffs exist", or "costs and benefits both matter".
The problem with this entire line of thinking is that there will always be some level of unemployment. Unless we get to a full Star Trek economic paradise, some people will always be able to claim they're economically hurting more than ever before. If voters from now on are going to react to the same economic conditions of Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" with a doom loop, we're simply going to be stuck in a perpetual social and electoral doom loop.
Put it this way, in practice, is misinformation just what we call it when it's specifically educated people do it?
I think that “The dumbest and most poorly informed people’s preferences swung most in this election— with those variables offering significantly more explanatory power than any other characteristic, but their poorly informedness had nothing to do with the swing” is a very Occam’s Razor-violating piece of mental gymnastics, and if you’re arguing for it; the burden of proof is on you.
I realize there's vast inferential distance between us, which is why I tried to crack open your handwaving interpretation of Shor's analysis with an argument. But you ignored it!
How's this for Occam's Razor? Even the best-informed voters are ignorant of almost everything. Voters actually make decisions based on heuristics about who's likely to act in their interests, and those heuristics are mostly correct.
"Voters actually make decisions based on heuristics about who's likely to act in their interests, and those heuristics are mostly correct."
Assertion STRONGLY in need of evidence, unless you're saying that a poor farmer in a red state is sitting there saying to himself, "Yes, I can no longer sell my crops to USAID and my chronically ill sister is about to get kicked off Medicaid, but goddamn it, it was all worth it to make those f*cking libs cry!"
Can you even doubt it?
Neither of us get to decide other people's preferences for them.
Maybe some people feel this way. But if I understand correctly, most Trump voters wanted him to do what they consider good (make libs cry) but not what they consider bad (cut off government programs I depend on). “I never thought the leopards would eat my face.”
That is at least a simpler argument, but in its simplest sense, it’s super obviously false if you look at stuff like the relationship between income and political preference.
FWIW, I agree with your assessment that voters in general are not super well informed and that supermajorities of them have some important false beliefs, but there’s a wide spectrum of how in/out of touch with baseline reality people are, and the degree of it explains their political behavior.
It might be helpful for you to think of an example of this from the left side of the political spectrum— is the average poster on the r/antiwork subreddit well-informed about history or economics? Do you think that their beliefs about politics would stay the same if they knew more?
That argument is only obviously false if you have an extremely narrow conception of what people's interests are.
Your closing challenge is interesting. That's the approach I took elsewhere in the thread: I doubt learning more about the economics of solar is going to change an environmentalist's views. Similarly, I don't think factual information is going to change the beliefs of r/antiwork posters.
None of which is to say I've given up on persuasion. My theory is that facts matter in politics, but only when the person you're talking to/at thinks you want the same thing as they do. (Which is why it's so destructive within parties).
I, uh, actually have changed my mind about the optimal approach to energy policy on getting a better sense of the economic challenge of scaling battery storage to deal with the intermittency problem. (And changed my mind about a fair number of other policy issues on learning new information.)
I’m probably more inclined to update than average, but “people’s beliefs about the world have no effect on their policy preferences” seems like a really extreme conclusion.
"was entirely swung by a change in the preferences of poorly-informed voters who have higher rates of holding objectively false beliefs about verifiable matters of fact."
sounds like we need to fix our education system, teach basic economics, logical fallacies and constitutional law in school (and require you to pass those tests before graduating)
even better require you to pass those tests before voting
There should only be one test to vote: are you a Democrat?
But it might just be best to restrict the candidate pool to Democrats
The market is an invaluable coordination mechanism for figuring out what the business community wants.
The problem with this argument is the propaganda works for the Republicans. They keep winning elections with the argument that they can fix the economy and then they come into power and finance huge tax cuts for the wealthy with deficit spending. What's their incentive to stop rolling out that playbook?
Republicans also *lose* plenty of elections. Democrats won the elections of 2018 and 2020. I'd argue they won 2022 as well. Pity Dems couldn't make it four in a row. But there's a good chance they'll make it four out of five in 2026!
Democrats are in a pickle right now, sure. So's the country. I just highlight the above because, well, I like accuracy, and the doom and gloom pronouncements wrt the political fortunes of Democrats, while understandable given the radical nature of the folks who just took power, don't seem to comport with reality. And I rather suspect this lack of precision could feed into a damaging low morale feedback loop.
Given how unpleasable the electorate is, I think this is going to be the new norm: win trifecta year 1, lose trifecta year 3, lose to a trifecta year 5, take a house of Congress year 7, win trifecta year 9, for both parties, unless someone manages to durably capture the middle.
Agreed. The three political branches change hands frequently when the two parties are so closely matched. Very modest shifts result in turnover.
Maybe, but it's not too hard to imagine a future where the presidency goes back and forth every four years, while Republicans maintain rock solid control of everything else.
The House seems competitive now, but if the remaining portions of the Civil Rights Act get thrown out by Thomas and Alito's Court, every remaining Democratic district in the Deep South suddenly flips red, which, even at one seat per state, still adds up. On top of this, Texas and Florida are gaining population, at the expense of New York and California. And, of course, partisan redistricting gets better and better due to the combination of improved data collection and computer technology, plus voters becoming ever more predictable.
And, of course, if Republicans get permanent control of the Senate, then they have permanent control of the courts, because a GOP Senate is unlikely to confirm any judicial nominee of a Democratic president every again.
Is the electorate unpleasable, or is our political system in permanent gridlock (in part because of the structure of our government)?
Well, it's the latter if we've always been in permanent gridlock for the last couple centuries.
The joylessness of progressive politics and Woke-ism really has played out. We need to stop being such sourpusses.
That's because neither party is trying to be a majority party. They are trying to turn out their base and barely win.
If Republicans were trying to be a majority party they would have nominated someone like Nikky Haley.
If Democrats were trying to be a majority party they would have moderated on cultural issues, fixed the border and pulled back on stimulus after it became clear inflation was a problem
It's actually a mixture of risk aversion and lack of means. There are officials in both parties who calculate that reaching out to the middle might translate into more wins. But (1) this is scary to attempt because it would probably lose you some of your base, and (2) in any event the structures (ie, party control, smoke-filled rooms, etc) are no longer in place to guarantee moderates get nominated.
The problem is that they hold strong power even during the cycles they have lost.
Against what baseline are we saying "propaganda works for the Republicans"? They win half the time and have governing trifectas for roughly half of that time.
It seems like everyone conflates the one-time existence of the New Deal Coalition with the baseline for modern politics, which it just isn't.
It is so plainly true that propaganda works for Republicans because it also sucks up some in the middle. Also, normie Democrats have no ability to counter that for dispositional reasons. Histrionic pleas and styles tend to turn off high information voters. It’s why Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green and others of their ilk are able to be stars as clowns, but when a democrat tried to be a clown (Alan Grayson), D’s grow tired of it.
I don’t think this is plainly true at all. They win some and lose some.
Propaganda has obvious downsides. When republicans are in power their propaganda collides with reality. Can't balance the budget on the back of cutting waste and fraud.
Election denial didn't actually work and cost republicans in 2022. The best performing dems in MI and AZ were our SoS candidates running against ''stop the steal'' candidates.
Kari Lake would be governor if she said Biden had won.
Republicans convinced their base that any non-conservative media is lying and can't be trusted. Primary voters then ignore scandals broken by non-conservative media and nominate weak candidates.
NC-GOV in 2024 as the most recent example.
In the long run I think it will work out badly for them. Fascist governments didn't last very long. Communist ones lasted a bit longer, but they all eventually collapsed under their own weight. Every time the GOP catches the car, voters are disappointed with the results. No strategy will guarantee victory forever, no sports team changes their entire playbook because of one or two losses.
Could Obama or any leading Democrat ever openly say a government agency is corrupt, inefficient, or broken? Some surely are dysfunctional, but admitting it seems at odds with the current Democratic ethos.
I’d guess he said something about financial regulation agencies being broken in the wake of the Great Recession and the lead up to Dodd-Frank?
Only Nixon could go to China.
They wouldn't say it because an entire agency being corrupt is bonkers. What would that look like? All the workers are taking bribes and funneling government funds into their own pockets? Leading Democrats do often complain about inefficiencies and dysfunction, people just don't notice because they aren't using the same rhetoric as Republicans.
I've heard Ro Khanna talk about how in the 90s Congress and the Clinton administration worked together to reduce waste and make the bureacracy more efficient. Except I don't see any Democrats wanting to do the same thing now (even if such gestures would be unsuccessful)
Bill Clinton said "the era of big government is over"
They certainly couldn’t say it about any agency that isn’t corrupt, inefficient, or broken. I think that few, if any, are corrupt or broken, but democrats do often complain about agencies that are inefficient.
many are certainly filled with lazy people
Most people are lazy!
DOGE philosophy is: When I went fishing, the ranger asked me for my ticket and I didn’t just refuse to give him my name, I fired him. There is obvious fraud and waste in that department. /s
One thing I would say here is that the fractured media means that the other side is way less likely to hear your propaganda. I remember seeing conservatives crowing in August and September that Walz would have to drop off the ticket and it was literally just nonsense that didn’t break out of the right-wing media bubble.
It is also the case that your own side has not even heard the misinformation from the other side and that is bad too because a) it may contain some kernel of truth that is worth knowing and acting on and b) per yesterday's conversation, we can't correctly un-misinform someone unless we know how they are misinformed.
I don’t have tik tok but I have a good friend who gets most of his news from tik tok. He sends me these crazy clips (which I have trouble watching a lot of the time now because tik tok tries to force you to download the app to watch the videos) and they are usually either exaggerated or complete misrepresentations of the facts.
He sent me one that was like “Trump is bringing back SLAVERY FOR BLACK PEOPLE” and I was like “hmm, that’s got to hyperbole, right?” but no, this video was arguing using FACTS AND LOGIC to say that Trump was building massive secret slave camps and creating the legal framework to bring back slavery.
I pushed back on this idea but my buddy was just like “okay man, whatever, don’t say I didn’t warn you”. This guy isn’t dumb, he’s an accomplished professional. Truly wild what is out there and how people get trapped in these hysteria generating algorithms.
Your friend isn't actually trying to determine how likely a particular outcome is; he is signaling that he's on the "right" side. It's a cheap belief that he has no real stake in.
To give an example, I was recently at a conference where a friend said "it's too bad this is the last annual meeting" (note that while Trump is attacking science, it's still a long ways from ending a private professional society's meetings). I offered to bet him whatever amount of money he wanted that we would meet again next year at which point he immediately backed down.
The thing that is going to bring our way of life down and doom the entire human experiment is this tendency of people to catastrophize.
One of my fellow poll workers (who was a little more #online on the phone than I was last November) told us as we were leaving that she'd see us at the next election, IF THERE WAS ONE amirite
I worked with her at the polls last week, at our next scheduled election. I didn't see value in rubbing this in.
I think this has some truth to it but I think a fair bit of it is genuine too.
A lot of social media has broken down some people's ability to tell when another person is a loser. Pretty much every time someone shows me a TikTok, my immediate reaction is usually "the person in this TikTok is a loser." Social media is making people take seriously other people they see online whom they would never believe in person.
They might be a successful professional but a useful definition of dumb must cover people who swallow absurd theories from TikTok. It raises lots of interesting philosophical questions, like "should you take a cardiologists advice less seriously if you discover they are a creationist or believe in astrology"
Two rationalist articles that vaguely cover the idea
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/23/the-general-factor-of-correctness/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory
Along these lines, Ben Carson overall is likely a lot smarter than me and is definitely smarter when it comes to surgery. But only one of us believe that the pyramids were used to store grain.
Teach the controversy! https://amorphia-apparel.com/teach/grainpyramid-a-ben-carson-pyramid-satire-shirt#!/
It's basically the same debate people are having over Musk, who 1) is very smart, yet 2) does and believes stupid things.
What it often comes down to is "is there a correction mechanism for mistakes?" If Bo's friend believed false significant things about his profession he face rapid negative feedback and consequences. But he can believe that Trump is building slave camps and will never need to update that over the rest of his life. Even if it never happens he'll just say "it was because people like me spread the word."
> This guy isn’t dumb, he’s an accomplished professional.
So is Musk and numerous other notable people pushing insane ideas on social media. Nate Silver recently published a thoughtful article on this general topic, with him as an example in "Elon Musk and spiky intelligence". https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-and-spiky-intelligence
See also Scott Alexander 2023 review of Musk biography, [2] in which Scott offers some charity in attempting to answer the question, “Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?” https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
And all of us have our own biases in our perception and interpretation of our world—although hopefully less pronounced in terms of absurdities.
We are all librarians now. While we used to tune into the nightly news or read the local paper and have a good expectation that it was generally true (if slanted). Now it is up to us to gauge the trueness and slant of all our media outlets. And lots of outlets (Twitter, TikTok, etc.) have embedded sources that each have to be their own viewpoint and veracity that needs to be determined.
Some folks have just checked out on their need to engage at the more basic level on every news / data source.
It is really depressing how basic facts like solar energy output varying over the day and federal personnel costs only being a small percentage of government spending fail to cross the political aisle despite being easy to access and understand.
The cheap cost of solar should be a signal that we should loosen permitting on the construction of solar farms to take advantage of the opportunity.
Solar has lots of advantages but without planning and investment, too much solar will break the grid and lead to blackouts.
The real solution is to look at what the Arab Gulf States and some of the South American states do and look into solar power towers for the southern states. At their latitude and with their climate you get power output for days if the sun disappears. I believe Spain has been building enough of them that they've been getting economies of scale. Its more expensive when using things like levellised cost since the initial infrastructure and operating costs are higher but it neatly solves the intermittency problem since the tower's contents is inherently a battery.
Maybe in theory, but there hasn't been any cases yet of too much solar breaking the grid and leading to blackouts. Simply put, batteries complement solar quite well, and we're not nearly at the point yet where solar comprises anywhere near 100% of energy anywhere. There have, however, been cases in Texas, where some fossil-fueled power plants were down for maintenance during a heat wave and solar+battery storage was able to pick up the slack and avoid blackouts, while everyone was cranking their air conditioners.
Those facts can and do cross the aisle, they're just not politically significant.
Think about voters that prioritize environmental action: their preferences don't depend on misunderstanding the cost or variability of green energy sources. Those only become relevant when formulating policy, which plays a minor role in elections.
Plenty of times I’ve seen folks concede the fact but not the implications of the fact. Shows how hard it can be to get to an objective discussion on the essentials of a topic. Which I guess is even more depressing.
On the plus side moderate left of centre folks are probably the best at getting to this ideal.
This piece went in a slightly different direction than I expected. Still a thoughtful piece but I thought, in keeping with yesterday's piece, it would more directly take on the merits of "Fact-Checking" as both a media enterprise and a successful political strategy. A very informed friend of mine is absolutely convinced that the central problem of Democrats' strategy against Trump is a failure to sufficiently call out his lies enough..... and just....jeez idk man...
There's no escape velocity to doing politics. There is not some magical way in which if you tell ardent Republicans trump is lying they will mystically be disabused of their existing beliefs. What you can do is do your best to make the lies they say less and less believable to the marginal voter. "Democrats only care about DEI, Climate Change, or Trans People, not your grocery and gas prices" is not "true" in a metaphysical sense, but you cannot defeat that by giving it Four Pinocchio's. You have to meet voters where they are at some level through your actions and words. There's no "One Neat Trick, Republicans Hate Him!" method to defeating their lies and surely the lesson of the last decade is having self righteous bluechecks yelling "YOU'RE LYING!" when voters substantively disagree with their stated political positions isn't gonna do it.
Any thoughts on the right way to get more people to understand the true magnitude of the federal deficit problem? It seems like the numbers involved are too enormous to penetrate the normal human mind. And actually grappling with the $ amounts forces you to consider SERIOUS tax hikes or spending cuts (or probably both) and no one wants to accept that harsh reality.
I keep wishing that news agencies would routine report per capita numbers. How much is the federal debt? The interest payments each year? The annual deficit in the federal budget?
The per capita numbers are relatable, while the billions and trillions of the totals are not.
hmm, see I worry the per capita numbers look too SMALL, and if people anchor on "their share" then a $20B budget cut feels like it should make a real difference.
Also for most people, their individual number looks totally unpayable, so I think this tilts the scale toward cuts. But tax revenue doesn't come from "most people" really.
That's kind of true. 37% of tax revenue does come from the top 1%. But a whole lot of it still comes from the next 24% of income earners (basically another 50%)
https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/tax-burden-across-varying-income-percentiles
The fact that taxes don't come from most people is the biggest hurdle we have to get over to really solve this problem. The lefties love to rant about the billionaires taxes but if we want universal healthcare, college, and better social services the reality is that working class people are going to have to start paying thier share of those things.
I was just googling around for per capita numbers and stumbled across The Heritage Foundation’s “Federal Budget In Pictures” website. It’s pretty slick and easy on the eyes. Maybe a non-partisan version of that.
Pie charts.
Ross Perot, fruitcake that he was, did a good job communicating the numbers.
Given recent events, I would tie it to inflation. You need to model deficit spending, inflation, and the current economic capacity in such a way that you can say "if the deficit doesn't get down to this level, inflation will increase" Because as we've seen, people are very sensitive to inflation and don't like it. But simply worrying about the deficit itself is not convincing and not really the problem.
It's hard to do, but try to tie it to the mortgage rates they pay, and the interest on their car loans and credit cards.
And then, if you're a Democrat, tell them that Trump's tax cuts for the rich fat cats will make all of those higher.
One way is to talk about deficits rather than debt.
Another is to talk about the here and now of marginal changes in deficits rather than some far off debt catastrophe. Every dollar borrow from a potential investor makes us a little poorer in the future than not borrowing.
Another is to talk about specific taxes that ought to go up (a VAT, a personal progressives consumption tax) and down (the wage tax underfunding SS and Medicare and the corporate income tax and spending that ought to go down (farm and ethanol subsidies EV and solar roof top subsides). [If you don't like my list, make your own. :)]
> A progressive version of this emerged about five years ago, when arguments started popping up that wind and solar power had become cheaper sources of electricity than fossil fuels. This is based on a concept called the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) that, unfortunately, paints a misleading view of the situation.
What is true is that solar panels have become very cheap to manufacture, such that a well-located utility-scale solar plant is cheaper to build than a fossil fuel plant that generates the same amount of electricity over the course of a year. ...
But the inference progressives wanted to draw from this LCOE framework — that there were no economic downsides to trying to strangle fossil fuel extraction — is totally wrong. The issue is that solar intermittency, which is easy to ignore when you’re not using that much solar power, becomes a bigger and bigger deal the more solar grows as a share of the total electricity mix. You start needing to overbuild, to add expensive storage features, or to maintain purpose-built natural gas backups.
Matt is committing an upside down version of the error that he ascribes, incorrectly, to all users of LCoE. Like them, he correctly identifies the twin issues of intermittency and self-cannibalization: a given renewables portfolio will mostly be generating less or more than total naive grid load at a given time. However, he throws out the baby with the bathwater:
1. Solar production is very predictable, allowing demand to match it
2. Wind's median production is quite high, complements solar, and is probably overstated by LCoE: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/how-utilities-and-big-oil-broke-the
3. (Notice how Matt drops wind after the first sentence)
4. Solar is becoming so cheap that Terraform Industries plans to synthesize cheaper-than-fossil methane with it: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/radical-energy-abundance/
5. Solar and batteries are so cheap today, and cheaper every year, that "over-"building solar is a great strategy
6. We will not need enormous amounts of "purpose-built" natural gas: we have enormous amounts of legacy natural gas, plus iron-air batteries, plus demand response, enhanced geothermal ...
7. The existing distribution grid (the wires from your house to the substation) is badly underutilized
Matt should supplement his reliance on the BTI folks, who do some fine work, by reading and promoting Casey Handmer, Shayle Kahn, Danielle Fong, Auke Hoekstra, and other abundance-centric thinkers.
> 4. Solar is becoming so cheap that Terraform Industries plans to synthesize cheaper-than-fossil methane with it: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/radical-energy-abundance/
I'm a long time fan of manufacturing methane out of atmospheric CO2. The idea goes back at least to Carter and syngas. So I clicked this link eagerly.
The company gives off some weird vibes, like doing their press releases on this guy's blog. I can't tell how I feel about the retro-style of https://terraformindustries.com/. But they raised $26m, so while we still haven't succeeded, it looks like we're going through the necessary preliminary steps.
*EDIT* Reading more, it's only economical because of government subsidies, which might be vanishing with the current administration.
> Operating the equivalent of 2190 hours per year, one Terraformer produces over 2 million cubic feet of natural gas. At $10/Mcf sale price and $54/Mcf for IRA PTCs (45V, 45Q, 45E) each unit produces up to $150,000 of annual revenue.
(I assume "over 2 million" is "2.3 million" based on other numbers.)
The lifetime of the unit is 5 years, the unit costs $100,000. Without subsidy you get back more-or-less $115,000 worth of natural gas at the end. But that assumes the solar array is free. Solar is still over $1 per watt but say you can get that at scale. That's $1 million. You can use the array for maybe 25 years so split it over 5 consecutive Terraformer Mark 1's that's $200,000. Even at 0% interest, $300,000 in costs to get back $115,000 worth of natural gas isn't competitive.
If they get paid for carbon capture it's still not competitive. 1 Mcf releases 0.055 tons of CO2 and the high end of payment for carbon capture is $100 per ton so that's just $5.50 per Mcf. You're up to $173,000 return on your initial $300,000 in costs.
I strongly encourage people to check my math for mistakes.
There's this annoying double-dipping where renewable fans will say "this energy is cheaper than fracking, it's stoopid we aren't using it" but it's only cheaper due to massive subsidy. And I largely sign on to those subsidies! We're likely to need lots of tech like this and maybe we won't need *exactly* this but it's in the right general area so subsidize away! But we'd need solar to drop by 10x. Then it's 120K up front (100K for the unit, 20K for the solar) to get 35K of gas (only subsidy is max price for carbon capture) per year. At 5% capital costs, you end up with ahead by 50K at the end.
They are going for broke, and if they succeed they will make the world a better place. But what's certain is that they are directionally right. World grid load is ~3,000GW; China is shipping > 300GW of panels every year, which if installed will produce ~50GW prorated. As Casey observes, that is an extraordinary wealth-generation machine, and we will harvest from it.
Excellent comment. Matt becoming negatively polarized on climate, along with his increasing reliance on BTI, has led him to make the kind of political and analytic errors he, justifiably, accuses climate Groups, and the Groups in general, of making. His climate policy related columns and analysis have become a slog of bad faith and bad analysis. And to tie this into today’s column, ultimately his bad analysis leads his readers to become misinformed on the nature of the climate policy and what various Groups and people have pushed for.
Thanks for the kind words. I think you are too harsh on Matt. My perspective roughly matched David Roberts' until Matt patiently talked me out of it. My knowledge of the field is higher-resolution than Matt's because I devote a much larger fraction of my time to it (I work in clean energy), so I try to offer him new knowledge that he might find useful. But his overall climate perspective has a lot to recommend it, especially as a corrective to the average climate-centric progressive, whose views are badly in need of updating.
This is a fair response. And you’re right Matt’s approach has a lot to offer. I think Tuesday’s column is a good example of the issues I’ve noticed. His ultimate policy recommendation, stop subsidizing EVs, is fine enough. I don’t agree with that position, but it’s an interesting idea. But on the way to making that point he veers into bad faith (implying policies increasing EV shares of statewide fleets means you support “raising costs for most people”), bad analysis (emissions reductions by any political entity do not matter cause it’s a global problem) and bad politics (criticizing Washington State for spending money on EV subsidies which benefit Washington residents and instead saying the state should spend money on subsidizing new technologies which will not benefit Washington residents anytime soon)
Matt’s a damn good commentator and I will continue reading him. But right now, the climate policy columns and comments he puts out do live up to the (high) standard of policy analysis and insight he provides on other issues.
I am glad he write Tuesday's column, but once again fisked him a bit. In particular, while Team Roberts (to pick an arbitrary name for climate-first Dems) gets a lot wrong that Matt corrects, we are still looking at devastation *of the US* (let alone the world) around the time Matt becomes a great-grandfather: https://www.slowboring.com/p/democrats-should-stop-subsiding-tesla/comment/95804196?utm_source=activity_item
I get banging on people for taking climate change worries up to 11 when it is a manageable problem and to strongly criticize them for trying to get rid of all fossil fuels at one fell swoop. But as you rightly say, No, he seems to have gone overboard here in criticizing the entire effort to move to renewables. He's a smart guy (and he has solar panels!); I don't get it.
"Solar production is very predictable, allowing demand to match it"
People don't want to match demand to energy production, they just want it to be there.
"5. Solar and batteries are so cheap today, and cheaper every year, that "over-"building solar is a great strategy"
This just really isn't true. We've looked into getting solar for our house several times, even with subsidies it's pretty freaken expense. To run our whole house, we would be looking at a system that's probably $60 to $80k or more.
> People don't want to match demand to energy production, they just want it to be there.
You misunderstood me: I meant demand managed by organizations and technology, not regular folks being self-conscious
> This just really isn't true. We've looked into getting solar for our house several times, even with subsidies it's pretty freaken expense.
You misunderstood me: I was referring to the panels, not to installed home solar systems. You are correct that home solar (especially to 100%) is too expensive, 3x in the US what it is in Australia with similar labor rates.
Solar panels are much cheaper done by utilities as farms out in the desert than rooftops on private homes. Bulk production and distribution, plus not needing crews that are trained to climb roofs, or needing to worry about roof maintenance.
Yes, and rooftop solar is roughly 3x cheaper in Australia than in the US. The problem today is that we are subsidizing "soft cost" waste. We can't find the right equilibrium without attacking that double-issue.
"Solar is becoming so cheap that Terraform Industries plans to synthesize cheaper-than-fossil methane with it: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/radical-energy-abundance/"
I always felt this particular scenario is largely fantasy, whether the plan is to use it for hydrogen, "e-fuels", scrubbing co2 from the air, or something similar. No matter how cheap panels themselves get to make, labor to install them isn't getting any cheaper, and land is still finite.
You should read their business model. They are not unaware of these challenges ;-)
I have been saying this for a long time. If one's position has merit then they don't need to lie.
This is why I turned on Republicans back in the 2000s. This is why I have turned on progressives in the last four years.
I want to stand up for LCOE as a useful metric to compare the economic performance of new generation on the margin. That's not to say baseload power isn't important, but we're nowhere near the level of renewables on the grid where that starts to sting in cost terms. Maybe it gave people misleading intuition about a region of the S curve we're not in, but strictly speaking LCOE is true
Yes and no. Geography and politics have concentrated renewables in the wrong place. The whole point of LCOE being an incomplete metric is it misses grid reliability. Obviously LCOE *can* include transmission/storage costs, and often does now (especially storage), but Matt's point was that they weren't included 5 years ago, for political convenience, rather than addressing the tradeoffs with renewables vs gas.
In the short term, more renewables will improve grid reliability, by adding capacity and not removing anything. However, generally new marginal renewables will hurt grid reliability in the mid-term, by pushing out gas, which is extremely reliable, in favour of solar, which is extremely unreliable. Batteries (or other viabible storage) can vastly improve reliability, probably well beyond what fossils achieved, but they aren't cheap.
Hasn't the percent of renewable already been a problem in places like Texas when the wind stopped blowing?
So I'm not an ERCOT power trader, just an energy technology researcher. The famous cold-snap grid outage in 2021 was initially blamed on wind, but in fact the point of failure was natural gas distribution.
From a system design level, wind outages aren't strongly geographically correlated; go a ways away and they're closer to independent. Additionally, solar and wind intermittency are anti-correlated which is handy. This all nets out to you can manage these problems at our current rate of deployment if you have enough transmission; ability to move power hedges geographic risk.
Once you get up into the ~65% range for solar and wind you start to need more storage. Going from 70 to 90% requires significant overbuild and storage. For these reasons, cleanfirm power and existing baseload (hydro, nuclear, geothermal) are all important, even if they're ultimately going to be supporting actors to the solar and battery headliners
There may have been specific stresses on the ERCOT grid of which I'm unaware, but this is the story told the system level modelling from groups like Rhodium or NREL with which I'm familiar.
It hasn't. The statement that it has is mostly Republican-sponsored mis-information.
As Alex said, the percent of electricity from solar and wind needs to be much higher than current levels before it becomes an issue.