Where does electoral instability in the US rank for you here? I’m referring to your recent, maybe not totally literal, tweet about the GOP stealing the 2024 election if it comes down to Wisconsin. Do you think of these conflicts, potential stolen elections, as relatively short-term issues? Not something we will look back on in 2100?
Abortion is seen by many on the right as unjust and immoral as slavery. If they win-the-day on public opinion in 2100--driven mainly by universal use of long-term birth control access, which reduces the percentage of pregnancies that are unwanted--I think the abortion question will be seen in the same light that we see slavery's defenders in the 19th century. That's one cultural fight that might be seen as important in 2100. But if the status quo remains, the fight will seem unimportant much as it might've seemed to someone in 1800. So, the importance is dependent on the outcome and then near universal acceptance of that outcome.
Sure the solution to the AI problem is massive investment in AI alignment research just as the solution for pandemics is massive investment in vaccine research/research into other countermeasures . If you announce the funding smart people will come forward with great ideas that you can support. There are many ways of better understanding and learning to control AI we should be able to master before it becomes too powerful. So long as we fund them adequately before it's too late.
Since I think part of our problem with climate change is thinking it is too hard, I like MY’s take. Still, it came across at a little too rosy in that it seems to imply that zero CO2 energy generation will continue to get cheaper. Sure, technology will continue to do its thing (with geothermal, too?), but is it not also possible that we have already grabbed the lowest hanging solar and wind fruit?
Without a tax on CO2 emissions (net to pay for carbon sequestration) I do not think green investment will do the trick. And without an understanding of why a tax on net emissions is the lowest cost way to minimize the losses of emissions, there is nothing to prevent negative NPV “green” investment.
Sort of related, I’m not impressed by adaptation policy. The incentive are not in place (forward looking insurance rates would be large part of this) for people to make investments that minimize climate generated losses.
"Concrete things are not only more important, but precisely because they are concrete, they are more amenable to compromises and win-win solutions than zero-sum symbolic battles over symbolism and social status."
Thank you for saying this, it's a really important point that I've been trying to make for years. I see it as a symptom of capitalist overproduction; in this "Age of Information" symbols are the commodities, and in order to sustain ever-expanding growth people need to be convinced that the symbols are really really important. It's not evil, but it's wrecking everything because it's displacing "normal" politics and blinding us to what really matters.
Re what matters, why are the Dems allotting $285 billion - the SECOND LARGEST PROGRAM in BBB - to helping out the well-to-do by lifting the $10,000 cap on state and local taxes (SALT)? I guess this shows that "working families" are less of a priority than they claim.
My anger at this is never ending. The bill has ended up going from a lot of stuff I thought was good and exciting to one really good thing that doesn't help dems much politically (climate stuff), a bunch of temporary ~okay~ stuff that will just die in the 2023 majority-Republican house, and a massive awful thing in SALT. Honestly if SALT were part of the BBB of July, maybe I'd let it slide, but at this point it's a Climate bill with some temporary and moderately regressive tax changes.
The SALT limitation raised my federal taxes 60%, not the biggest deal in the world, but pretty eye-opening at the time. I'm sure it did the same for a lot of other taxpayers in high tax states. Not surprising their representatives are responding to complaints, just as they would to higher gas and food prices.
You and I agree. What I was surprised by was how big an impact the limit had on my tax bill. I thought I was under-taxed before, and not complaining now. But a simple change to the tax code that changes your bill 60% makes no sense.
I think MY's critique of BBB (tries to do everything poorly, does nothing well) was already pretty damning, but putting SALT deductions in it is gross.
I get where the Biden administration is coming from ("we're comfortable with this crap sandwich because we're not gonna get the votes otherwise" - slight paraphrase by me) even though it's stupid and bankrupt. I'm disappointed in Pelosi for not cracking the whip and killing this thing - it's a bad idea and it undermines democrats among the progressive base and swing state centrist democrats.
Also from that Atlantic article: "The scope of the SALT provision within the overall bill is also enormous; over the first five years of the bill, it is the single largest piece of the proposal, Furman told me, costing more money over that period than the Democrats’ spending on climate change, education, or health care."
For a party that campaigned on raising taxes on the rich as a way of reducing inequality, the existence of the costly SALT proposal in the middle of an ambitious progressive bill sticks out like a sore, hypocritical thumb. The policy is no minor throw-in or pet project; its cost as a tax expenditure represents a significant portion of the overall bill and undercuts Biden’s goal of reducing inequality by shifting the tax burden from the poor and working class toward the wealthy. Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who served as the chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, remarked earlier this month that the proposed giveaway for wealthy taxpayers was “obscene.” Households making several million dollars a year “could get a $25,900 tax cut,” wrote Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.
YES. This makes me SO MAD. I personally will benefit from it -- I did some back of the envelope math back in the year of Trump's tax cut, and found that on net it cost my family about four grand, primarily because of the SALT limitation.
The thing is, I was _completely fine with that_. While I live in an incredibly expensive market, and I live basically an upper-middle-class lifestyle, it is just an objective fact that we are rich. Our net worth cracks seven figures, and our income is around the second or third percentile. We aren't _quite_ The One Percent, but getting close. We should be paying more taxes.
The fact that even progressive Democrats like Katie Porter from SoCal felt they had to go all-in on a tax cut for people like me makes me just despair. I assume she felt like she had to, because so many self-styled SoCal "progressives" are infected with Jarvis brainworms, and believe BS lies like "Prop 13 helps low-income people to afford homeownership". With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?!
Katie "a 1 million dollar house is modest in my district" Porter? I just can't believe these supposed progressives have no shame in their SALT advocacy.
I mean, a million-dollar house may well _be_ quite modest in her district. Certainly where I am it is. I live in a million dollar house. It was built in 1940, it's a 4 bed, 2 bath, single story, with a tiny yard. It's _significantly_ smaller than what I grew up in, with my dad working full-time and my mom having left the workforce to be a homemaker.
But, like, so what? The solution to housing affordability isn't to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. We need to make housing more affordable _broadly_, which means reforms to allow a LOT more housing to get built. And quite often, you'll find that exactly the people in my situation -- comfortably situated, but discontent because it's so much HARDER to achieve that comfort than it was for their parents' generation -- just want to pull up the ladder behind them. I've had multiple people tell me "The Bay Area is full, we should stop building."
I agree 100%. Housing cost burden in coastal areas that have pulled up the ladder through regulation and zoning is a huge burden on the productivity of the economy as discussed at length here.
All that being said, the optics of saying a "million dollar house is modest" to a national audience is not great! A person owning said "modest" house in Irvine may not feel rich spending 40% of their take home pay on their mortgage, but by definition their family income puts them well into the 90th percentile. And the appreciation of that house in the last year has definitely made them a big chunk of paper wealth.
Democrats could do a lot to help that person (reduce housing cost through zoning reform, college costs/debt, improve early childhood / school quality, etc. etc.), but like, aren't progressives here to help kids escape poverty? Make a fairer and more just society? Not pad the pockets of the already well off in the wealthiest areas of the country?
Agreed, the optics of rich people saying "but I don't feel rich!" is terrible.
I believe it was Brad DeLong who once paraphrased a whine from somebody on this topic as, "Well of course, it is objectively a very large sum of money, but it is so much smaller _after I have spent it_."
Thanks for your perspective. I don't begrudge people their wealth, so I didn't intend to suggest that the well-to-do are unworthy. But, given a choice between making the child tax credit permanent and offering what I understand to be a temporary increase of the SALT cap, I think our country is better served by reducing child poverty.
Crumbs??? It's the second largest tax expenditure! I could support their raising the cap a bit, but, as the article shows, only the tippy-top of the income distribution sees a significant tax savings on this, and, for the multi-millionaires, is $15k that big of a deal? People who earn less than $366,000 save ZERO or at most $1,300 per year. Raise the cap to $15k or $20k, but $80k? - no way!
I mean - we may all be getting spun up for nothing - I'm really hoping this SALT crap will get thrown out because it's gross and not even remotely the most important part of the bill.
But if it does end up passing, someone will write "What's the matter with New Jersey" - the democratic party will be a machine to convert progressive outrage at injustice into tax cuts for wealthy property owners in blue states.
In a 2022 red wave, Malinowski, Sherrill and probably even Porter and Gottheimer are going to lose anyway, so spending the biggest part of BBB on SALT to give semi-republicans a tax credit is truly the worst possible policy choice democrats can envision.
On climate change, I've gotten a lot more philosophical in recent years because of reading more on paleoclimatology, like "When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time," by Michael Benton and similar books and articles. I mean I'm still concerned about climate change and would like more to be done to combat it, especially through market incentives and more investment in R&D for non-hydrocarbon power sources and electricity storage/transmission, but I don't fear it the way I did when I was younger -- once you learn that the Earth has been dramatically warmer not just in the far distant past, but within the time that anatomically modern mammals have predominated on the planet (approx. last 55 million years or so), it puts the risks of anthropogenic climate change into perspective.
I am old now. And I find as I get older that I must struggle to keep caring about stuff that I have long cared about sometimes even for decades. Heavy metals in water supplies and distributed over the landscape via coal fired generation? I have been beating on that drum since you were a toddler. Some of your issues cited here seem amenable to political solutions. Child poverty? Give them money. I do not worry about AI because I think most of the discourse on this subject is overwrought dooming.
Global warming on the other hand is the biggy when it comes to to both scale of the problem, possible solutions and implementation. And that problem is quite literally the most remote in time. I will, actuarial tables tell me, be dead before the consequences become severe. Long dead. Yet still I care. Perhaps that is because I do understand quite well the current state of technology and prospects for the future. I am not sanguine about this. I watch as people confidently express opinions of subjects where they are profoundly ignorant and I despair.
If you think, for example, that wind and solar power will ever be the primary sources of electrification then you better get used to the idea that that will be very very expensive power indeed. At least once you build a grid capable of getting it from where it is generated to where it needs to be. And the storage capacity necessary to get it there when it needs to be there. And I just watched as a plan to get carbon emissions free power from Quebec to the American north east go down in flames. The stupid hurts. And it never goes away.
Just as a side note I think you have overlooked a really big problem that is much more likely to plague humanity in near future although probably not the US so much. That would be fresh water suitable human uses. That is a real biggy.
I like the idea here of the 80 years on perspective. What will people remember about a given time 80 years later?
I'm imagining the folks back in 1941 wondering if people in 2021 will remember or think important, oh, the German invasion of the USSR and Pearl Harbor. Probably not, they'll conclude; they'll be too busy dodging other flying cars and planning their move to the lunar colonies.
But more seriously, this little exercise gives me hope. Matt's list is important but not *that* important: e.g., child poverty is bad but "the poor have always been with us." Instead, this gives me a welcome Pinkerian vibe: like it or not, we've come a helluva way since 1941 -- or 1861 or 1781 for that matter.
I think the biggest risk to AI is the social upheaval that will come as the day approaches where a machine/android can do anything a human can do only better and cheaper. Do we get luxury space communism or do we get an oligarchy exterminating the now redundant pesanty.
What elevates child poverty over poverty generally? I can think of a few guesses.
One, there are vague indications that growing up in a harsh / resource constrained environment flips some bits in personality and cognition that can cause trouble for the rest of your life. Scott Alexander's "fast life strategy." Perhaps if everyone grows up in a softer environment, they'll be able to retain the epigenetic or psychological benefits of relative plenty in childhood, even as they weather periods of deprivation in adulthood.
Two, having children will be a clear path out of poverty for adults of reproductive age. This could be a pretty powerful change to the social contract: even if you have little to contribute to the economy in terms of labor, you can still be a dignified and well-remunerated contributor to the society by making and raising the next generation. (However I would be worried about what happens to these adults in the interval between reproductive age and Social Security. It seems like we're setting them up for a crash).
Three, as a pragmatic concession to more right-leaning folks who feel that adults may "deserve" to be poor under some circumstances. We can all agree that labor-desert theory is obviously ridiculous as applied to a toddler. The sins of the father, etc. Even if you don't buy the pro-natalist angle, you may accept some "undeserved" comfort for the parents in exchange for fairness to the child.
Matt Bruenig has done a few posts on this but the fact is very few households without children or other people who are unable to work are poor in this country. Children cannot work but they do consume a lot of stuff and they also make it harder for adults to work, so children tend to cause their households to be poor...
Other groups who are disproportionately in poverty are households containing folks who have a disability or health issue which makes it difficult for them to work and also may require other household members to not work so they can care for them. Adults who have to stop working to care for a sick or disabled parent may also fall into poverty. But the largest of these groups by far is parents of little kids.
The number of people in poverty who are just like regular old adults is very small... I don't think you even have to get to the puritanical argument about whether adults "should" be poor if they aren't working. There just aren't that many able-bodied adults who are poor if they don't have kids in their household.
Here's a wacky idea for a model municipal zoning ordinance. Thoughts?
Anytime a small home gets torn down to develop dense apartments/condos, the developer can get a height bonus on top of whatever the limit would normally be IF the torn-down home had tenants and the developer reserves an apartment for those now-ex-tenants at some low rent figure, with options for the tenant to renew for x number of years.
The reason this doesn't work man is that a small home is probably on a..... small lot, which is not going to support a particularly large building. You'd have to buy multiple homes all surrounding each other to get a big apartment building there, which is unlikely/impossible as annual turnover in low-density neighborhoods was 1-2% when I worked in development. They won't all want to sell at the same time. Upzoning is..... not going to do much of anything
Where does electoral instability in the US rank for you here? I’m referring to your recent, maybe not totally literal, tweet about the GOP stealing the 2024 election if it comes down to Wisconsin. Do you think of these conflicts, potential stolen elections, as relatively short-term issues? Not something we will look back on in 2100?
Abortion is seen by many on the right as unjust and immoral as slavery. If they win-the-day on public opinion in 2100--driven mainly by universal use of long-term birth control access, which reduces the percentage of pregnancies that are unwanted--I think the abortion question will be seen in the same light that we see slavery's defenders in the 19th century. That's one cultural fight that might be seen as important in 2100. But if the status quo remains, the fight will seem unimportant much as it might've seemed to someone in 1800. So, the importance is dependent on the outcome and then near universal acceptance of that outcome.
This is what is actually important. :-)
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/high-school-student-suspended-for-saying-there-are-only-two-genders-is-suing-school
We can significantly reduce both future pandemics and climate change with one move: end animal agriculture.
Kill two plant-based birds with one stone.
Sure the solution to the AI problem is massive investment in AI alignment research just as the solution for pandemics is massive investment in vaccine research/research into other countermeasures . If you announce the funding smart people will come forward with great ideas that you can support. There are many ways of better understanding and learning to control AI we should be able to master before it becomes too powerful. So long as we fund them adequately before it's too late.
Since I think part of our problem with climate change is thinking it is too hard, I like MY’s take. Still, it came across at a little too rosy in that it seems to imply that zero CO2 energy generation will continue to get cheaper. Sure, technology will continue to do its thing (with geothermal, too?), but is it not also possible that we have already grabbed the lowest hanging solar and wind fruit?
Without a tax on CO2 emissions (net to pay for carbon sequestration) I do not think green investment will do the trick. And without an understanding of why a tax on net emissions is the lowest cost way to minimize the losses of emissions, there is nothing to prevent negative NPV “green” investment.
Sort of related, I’m not impressed by adaptation policy. The incentive are not in place (forward looking insurance rates would be large part of this) for people to make investments that minimize climate generated losses.
"Concrete things are not only more important, but precisely because they are concrete, they are more amenable to compromises and win-win solutions than zero-sum symbolic battles over symbolism and social status."
Thank you for saying this, it's a really important point that I've been trying to make for years. I see it as a symptom of capitalist overproduction; in this "Age of Information" symbols are the commodities, and in order to sustain ever-expanding growth people need to be convinced that the symbols are really really important. It's not evil, but it's wrecking everything because it's displacing "normal" politics and blinding us to what really matters.
Really loved this post.
Re what matters, why are the Dems allotting $285 billion - the SECOND LARGEST PROGRAM in BBB - to helping out the well-to-do by lifting the $10,000 cap on state and local taxes (SALT)? I guess this shows that "working families" are less of a priority than they claim.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/11/16/second-biggest-program-democrats-budget-gives-billions-rich
My anger at this is never ending. The bill has ended up going from a lot of stuff I thought was good and exciting to one really good thing that doesn't help dems much politically (climate stuff), a bunch of temporary ~okay~ stuff that will just die in the 2023 majority-Republican house, and a massive awful thing in SALT. Honestly if SALT were part of the BBB of July, maybe I'd let it slide, but at this point it's a Climate bill with some temporary and moderately regressive tax changes.
Agree - better to do a few things well and 'permanently' than a lot of things half-assed and temporary.
The SALT limitation raised my federal taxes 60%, not the biggest deal in the world, but pretty eye-opening at the time. I'm sure it did the same for a lot of other taxpayers in high tax states. Not surprising their representatives are responding to complaints, just as they would to higher gas and food prices.
Eye-popping, I'd say. As I wrote somewhere in this thread, I'd support doubling the SALT cap, just not raising it to 8 times its former limit.
You and I agree. What I was surprised by was how big an impact the limit had on my tax bill. I thought I was under-taxed before, and not complaining now. But a simple change to the tax code that changes your bill 60% makes no sense.
Wait is SALT exemption still part of BBB haggling? It hasn't been thrown out yet?
According to the WaPo article from Nov. 16, yes. A Forbes article today indicates a couple possibilities: https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2021/11/18/how-an-80000-salt-cap-stacks-up-against-a-full-deduction-for-those-making-400000-or-less/?sh=30b89e35704e
(Bashes head on desk repeatedly.)
I think MY's critique of BBB (tries to do everything poorly, does nothing well) was already pretty damning, but putting SALT deductions in it is gross.
I get where the Biden administration is coming from ("we're comfortable with this crap sandwich because we're not gonna get the votes otherwise" - slight paraphrase by me) even though it's stupid and bankrupt. I'm disappointed in Pelosi for not cracking the whip and killing this thing - it's a bad idea and it undermines democrats among the progressive base and swing state centrist democrats.
Also from that Atlantic article: "The scope of the SALT provision within the overall bill is also enormous; over the first five years of the bill, it is the single largest piece of the proposal, Furman told me, costing more money over that period than the Democrats’ spending on climate change, education, or health care."
This in The Atlantic today:
For a party that campaigned on raising taxes on the rich as a way of reducing inequality, the existence of the costly SALT proposal in the middle of an ambitious progressive bill sticks out like a sore, hypocritical thumb. The policy is no minor throw-in or pet project; its cost as a tax expenditure represents a significant portion of the overall bill and undercuts Biden’s goal of reducing inequality by shifting the tax burden from the poor and working class toward the wealthy. Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who served as the chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, remarked earlier this month that the proposed giveaway for wealthy taxpayers was “obscene.” Households making several million dollars a year “could get a $25,900 tax cut,” wrote Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/11/salt-tax-cut-democrats-build-back-better/620754/
Yeah, MY's critique was spot on imho.
YES. This makes me SO MAD. I personally will benefit from it -- I did some back of the envelope math back in the year of Trump's tax cut, and found that on net it cost my family about four grand, primarily because of the SALT limitation.
The thing is, I was _completely fine with that_. While I live in an incredibly expensive market, and I live basically an upper-middle-class lifestyle, it is just an objective fact that we are rich. Our net worth cracks seven figures, and our income is around the second or third percentile. We aren't _quite_ The One Percent, but getting close. We should be paying more taxes.
The fact that even progressive Democrats like Katie Porter from SoCal felt they had to go all-in on a tax cut for people like me makes me just despair. I assume she felt like she had to, because so many self-styled SoCal "progressives" are infected with Jarvis brainworms, and believe BS lies like "Prop 13 helps low-income people to afford homeownership". With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?!
Katie "a 1 million dollar house is modest in my district" Porter? I just can't believe these supposed progressives have no shame in their SALT advocacy.
I mean, a million-dollar house may well _be_ quite modest in her district. Certainly where I am it is. I live in a million dollar house. It was built in 1940, it's a 4 bed, 2 bath, single story, with a tiny yard. It's _significantly_ smaller than what I grew up in, with my dad working full-time and my mom having left the workforce to be a homemaker.
But, like, so what? The solution to housing affordability isn't to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. We need to make housing more affordable _broadly_, which means reforms to allow a LOT more housing to get built. And quite often, you'll find that exactly the people in my situation -- comfortably situated, but discontent because it's so much HARDER to achieve that comfort than it was for their parents' generation -- just want to pull up the ladder behind them. I've had multiple people tell me "The Bay Area is full, we should stop building."
I agree 100%. Housing cost burden in coastal areas that have pulled up the ladder through regulation and zoning is a huge burden on the productivity of the economy as discussed at length here.
All that being said, the optics of saying a "million dollar house is modest" to a national audience is not great! A person owning said "modest" house in Irvine may not feel rich spending 40% of their take home pay on their mortgage, but by definition their family income puts them well into the 90th percentile. And the appreciation of that house in the last year has definitely made them a big chunk of paper wealth.
Democrats could do a lot to help that person (reduce housing cost through zoning reform, college costs/debt, improve early childhood / school quality, etc. etc.), but like, aren't progressives here to help kids escape poverty? Make a fairer and more just society? Not pad the pockets of the already well off in the wealthiest areas of the country?
Agreed, the optics of rich people saying "but I don't feel rich!" is terrible.
I believe it was Brad DeLong who once paraphrased a whine from somebody on this topic as, "Well of course, it is objectively a very large sum of money, but it is so much smaller _after I have spent it_."
Thanks for your perspective. I don't begrudge people their wealth, so I didn't intend to suggest that the well-to-do are unworthy. But, given a choice between making the child tax credit permanent and offering what I understand to be a temporary increase of the SALT cap, I think our country is better served by reducing child poverty.
You need to throw some crumbs to your donor class to win elections. You can't take a principled stand on everything.
Crumbs??? It's the second largest tax expenditure! I could support their raising the cap a bit, but, as the article shows, only the tippy-top of the income distribution sees a significant tax savings on this, and, for the multi-millionaires, is $15k that big of a deal? People who earn less than $366,000 save ZERO or at most $1,300 per year. Raise the cap to $15k or $20k, but $80k? - no way!
I mean - we may all be getting spun up for nothing - I'm really hoping this SALT crap will get thrown out because it's gross and not even remotely the most important part of the bill.
But if it does end up passing, someone will write "What's the matter with New Jersey" - the democratic party will be a machine to convert progressive outrage at injustice into tax cuts for wealthy property owners in blue states.
In a 2022 red wave, Malinowski, Sherrill and probably even Porter and Gottheimer are going to lose anyway, so spending the biggest part of BBB on SALT to give semi-republicans a tax credit is truly the worst possible policy choice democrats can envision.
Yeah I do have some hope for it getting thrown out considering Manchin is against it, and he's much more likely to tank the bill than Katie Porter.
On climate change, I've gotten a lot more philosophical in recent years because of reading more on paleoclimatology, like "When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time," by Michael Benton and similar books and articles. I mean I'm still concerned about climate change and would like more to be done to combat it, especially through market incentives and more investment in R&D for non-hydrocarbon power sources and electricity storage/transmission, but I don't fear it the way I did when I was younger -- once you learn that the Earth has been dramatically warmer not just in the far distant past, but within the time that anatomically modern mammals have predominated on the planet (approx. last 55 million years or so), it puts the risks of anthropogenic climate change into perspective.
Also need to solve the local journalism problem. No one has eyes on the majority of state legislatures.
I am old now. And I find as I get older that I must struggle to keep caring about stuff that I have long cared about sometimes even for decades. Heavy metals in water supplies and distributed over the landscape via coal fired generation? I have been beating on that drum since you were a toddler. Some of your issues cited here seem amenable to political solutions. Child poverty? Give them money. I do not worry about AI because I think most of the discourse on this subject is overwrought dooming.
Global warming on the other hand is the biggy when it comes to to both scale of the problem, possible solutions and implementation. And that problem is quite literally the most remote in time. I will, actuarial tables tell me, be dead before the consequences become severe. Long dead. Yet still I care. Perhaps that is because I do understand quite well the current state of technology and prospects for the future. I am not sanguine about this. I watch as people confidently express opinions of subjects where they are profoundly ignorant and I despair.
If you think, for example, that wind and solar power will ever be the primary sources of electrification then you better get used to the idea that that will be very very expensive power indeed. At least once you build a grid capable of getting it from where it is generated to where it needs to be. And the storage capacity necessary to get it there when it needs to be there. And I just watched as a plan to get carbon emissions free power from Quebec to the American north east go down in flames. The stupid hurts. And it never goes away.
Just as a side note I think you have overlooked a really big problem that is much more likely to plague humanity in near future although probably not the US so much. That would be fresh water suitable human uses. That is a real biggy.
I like the idea here of the 80 years on perspective. What will people remember about a given time 80 years later?
I'm imagining the folks back in 1941 wondering if people in 2021 will remember or think important, oh, the German invasion of the USSR and Pearl Harbor. Probably not, they'll conclude; they'll be too busy dodging other flying cars and planning their move to the lunar colonies.
But more seriously, this little exercise gives me hope. Matt's list is important but not *that* important: e.g., child poverty is bad but "the poor have always been with us." Instead, this gives me a welcome Pinkerian vibe: like it or not, we've come a helluva way since 1941 -- or 1861 or 1781 for that matter.
I think the biggest risk to AI is the social upheaval that will come as the day approaches where a machine/android can do anything a human can do only better and cheaper. Do we get luxury space communism or do we get an oligarchy exterminating the now redundant pesanty.
What elevates child poverty over poverty generally? I can think of a few guesses.
One, there are vague indications that growing up in a harsh / resource constrained environment flips some bits in personality and cognition that can cause trouble for the rest of your life. Scott Alexander's "fast life strategy." Perhaps if everyone grows up in a softer environment, they'll be able to retain the epigenetic or psychological benefits of relative plenty in childhood, even as they weather periods of deprivation in adulthood.
Two, having children will be a clear path out of poverty for adults of reproductive age. This could be a pretty powerful change to the social contract: even if you have little to contribute to the economy in terms of labor, you can still be a dignified and well-remunerated contributor to the society by making and raising the next generation. (However I would be worried about what happens to these adults in the interval between reproductive age and Social Security. It seems like we're setting them up for a crash).
Three, as a pragmatic concession to more right-leaning folks who feel that adults may "deserve" to be poor under some circumstances. We can all agree that labor-desert theory is obviously ridiculous as applied to a toddler. The sins of the father, etc. Even if you don't buy the pro-natalist angle, you may accept some "undeserved" comfort for the parents in exchange for fairness to the child.
Matt Bruenig has done a few posts on this but the fact is very few households without children or other people who are unable to work are poor in this country. Children cannot work but they do consume a lot of stuff and they also make it harder for adults to work, so children tend to cause their households to be poor...
Other groups who are disproportionately in poverty are households containing folks who have a disability or health issue which makes it difficult for them to work and also may require other household members to not work so they can care for them. Adults who have to stop working to care for a sick or disabled parent may also fall into poverty. But the largest of these groups by far is parents of little kids.
The number of people in poverty who are just like regular old adults is very small... I don't think you even have to get to the puritanical argument about whether adults "should" be poor if they aren't working. There just aren't that many able-bodied adults who are poor if they don't have kids in their household.
Interesting, but in that case it would seem not much more expensive to eradicate poverty writ large. Why don't we do that?
probably wouldn't be that hard... so yeah i don't disagree with that.
Oregon deserves credit for making improvements on the YIMBY front as well. It's still a struggle, but we're getting there!
Here's a wacky idea for a model municipal zoning ordinance. Thoughts?
Anytime a small home gets torn down to develop dense apartments/condos, the developer can get a height bonus on top of whatever the limit would normally be IF the torn-down home had tenants and the developer reserves an apartment for those now-ex-tenants at some low rent figure, with options for the tenant to renew for x number of years.
The reason this doesn't work man is that a small home is probably on a..... small lot, which is not going to support a particularly large building. You'd have to buy multiple homes all surrounding each other to get a big apartment building there, which is unlikely/impossible as annual turnover in low-density neighborhoods was 1-2% when I worked in development. They won't all want to sell at the same time. Upzoning is..... not going to do much of anything