If you want another good example, but in the energy/climate space, of something like the problem Breunig “found” start asking folks honest quest about how offshore wind’s costs are supposed to get capitalized (and eventually paid by ratepayers or subsidies) under our current system or how it’s LCOE (levelized cost of energy) that is projected actually works out given lease and plant costs divided by MWh over the lifespan of the turbines...
Be prepared to answer “why are you distracting from decarbonization?” Type questions...
One thing going on in the left “mood” generally is skepticism of the methods of rationality, the devil’s advocate, the just-asking-questions guy. If you ask the left-wing activists I went to school with, the dominance of the “policy wonk” mode of understanding the world is literally a conspiracy of the powerful. Given that these people are the ones working in politics now, it is not surprising that wonkish policy analysis has lost status in favor of more relationship- and righteousness-based activism.
Coalition Brain is definitely a problem, but policy analysis is also just hard! You have to know all the right data sources, have a grasp on their deficiencies, get into the policy details--and most models aren't transparent. Policy organizations can and should invest in analysts like Bruenig (though he sets a very high bar), but ideally policy modeling would be more accessible.
Dating back to FDR the core insight of the Democratic Party has been that corporations have too much power, and it is the job of government to step in and provide a counterbalance in favor of the little guy. I think this insight remains true and very useful, but on the left it has become an increasingly totalizing form of analysis, that corporations and wealthy people are the only agent preventing the correct or humane policy across a whole slew of issues. This has led to helpless and blinkered thinking on issues where Democrats need to ask for tradeoffs.
1. On climate change, the obstacle to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is clearly the general population that basically wants no climate policy that will cost anything.
Democrats and left aligned interests have tended to blame corporations (100 companies, etc) or the financial sector (Raskin fed appointment) for missing policy as opposed to trying to pass the maximum clean energy policy that will be tolerated by the people.
2. On paid childcare, the obstacle is actually hiring enough people to run centers that can accept all the subsidies we hand out. Corporations and rich people would be in favor of more people working and being able to afford daycare.
3. On the pandemic, public health policy is really not that well aligned with "capitalism." More socialist Sweden notoriously did minimal Covid interventions, and having a completely nationalized health system did not spare the UK from tons of cases/deaths (indeed their pandemic politics don't seem all that different from ours though maybe they have fewer anti-vaxxers). But since it's an argument Democrats are keen to listen to, I've seen tons of people blaming "capitalism" in a generic sense and "employers" for getting rid of NPIs...
There are a lot of issues similar to this, but my overall point is that generally what you should look for is a way to actually solve the problem at hand rather than tie the problem to greedy corporations. In some cases (like the 2008 financial crisis and union busting) corporations are the actual problem. But in many other cases, they are not. And attempting to loop the issue of mask wearing or climate change to "corporate greed" is not going to help identify a solution that works.
There were two sentences in this piece that stood out to me as truths that an increasing number on the left simply won't admit and perhaps don't believe and it's our own version of disinformation (admittedly of a far less serious and dangerous kind than on the right). (1) "Simply refusing to prioritize doesn’t change the fact that building a full European-scale welfare state would require very large, politically implausible tax increases." This drove me insane in the 2020 primary, the pretending that the wealth taxes on super rich people we don't even know would get us to Norway or Sweden when they have way higher taxes on consumption that fund their welfare states because we were destined to then disappoint people terribly (especially young people who were feeling the Bern) when this could never be accomplished politically in the US, not because of Joe Manchin, but because there is no real support for a VAT. (2) "Loan relief for recent law school grads will directly press up housing costs for working-class renters; you can’t just call it all stimulus." Isn't this the kind of claim that makes the twitter left hate MY so much. I think it's true, but I feel like you would not be able to get the NYT to acknowledge this in such stark terms.
In my career, so much of the value I've seen the most valuable employees contribute has come in the form of "kicking the tires" on ideas that other people just assume have been vetted or analyzed by someone else.
I see this all over the place: a story gets accepted without the details ever being really looked at. An example in the mainstream media was when Ron Rosenstein wrote that memo that Trump cited in firing James Comey. Most news reports described it as calling for Comey to be fired, which if you actually read the memo, Rosenstein was clearly careful not to do. Here and there, reports in the same exact publications acknowledged this, but there was no reconciliation of the contradiction. Maybe this was a small oversight, but it struck me at the time: everyone could read the document, and it just kind of didn't matter that what the reports assumed it said wasn't true.
I just thought, All right, I'm going to publish this, and if we're going to go out with a bang, so be it. I had access to The New York Times and I thought I might as well end my career in The New York Times. I submitted the piece and I got lucky with an editor who didn't want me to hem and haw. I said, "Just think through this. It's not something that requires an advanced degree. It's a respiratory disease. We have the CDC and the WHO saying wear a mask if you're sick. Now we have tons of papers saying that there's pre- or asymptomatic spread. So on face value, you don't even know when you're sick and spreading it, so there should be no debate about this. I understand the mask shortage, but that's something we can talk about. Trust the public. Let's talk about the shortage and how to deal with it."
From SB..."Over time, the proposal became more generous (capping costs at 7 percent of income rather than 12 percent) and accrued various pro-labor provisions, as well as a plan for a multi-year transition from the current unsubsidized system to the new permanent vision. The problem, as Matt Bruenig pointed out (see more here and here), is that the transition plan was very poorly structured and would have pushed the cost structure of child care up before the subsidies kicked in" Yeah, the "Pro-Labor provisions" were basically, In order to provide child care and get this government money, you have to be a contributor to the Democratic party. What graft!
This article basically all goes back to the assymetry in modern politics. When you have one party that is earnestly trying to make things better and another that is nihilistically and cynically trying to make things worse for political gain, it’s awfully hard for thoughtful intra-party criticism to flourish. Republicans are never held to account because we de facto assume that they want to burn the house down, and not make improvements based on a principled but differing governing philosophy than Democrats. If your political opponents don’t support any policy, it’s awfully hard to pile on to your friends to criticize them for proposing sub-optimal policy.
I have nothing against Republican voters who I have no doubt disagree with me on certain issues in good faith.
But as evidenced by their actions when W. Bush and Trump were president, the reason that McConnell and the rest of the GOP leadership in DC blocked stimulus when Obama was president had nothing to do with genuinely-held differences of opinion on fiscal policy and everything to do with damaging a Democratic president politically. If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 and then Covid came around when the GOP controlled Congress, do you think they would have passed CARES? I don't.
The governor of Texas is actively trying to increase inflation. Republican senators are refusing to consider Defense Department nominees unless the Secretary of Defense resigns because they disagree with him. Republicans play chicken with defaulting on government bonds on the regular. When Republicans are in charge they seek tax cuts. When Democrats are in charge they seek to undermine the working of government.
What the governor of Texas (my governor!) did with the trucks at the border was indeed terrible. But it wasn't "Republicans" it was "the governor". For instance, the Republican Agriculture Commissioner blasted him for it.
Is the Republican Agriculture Commissioner going to endorse Beto over this? Of course not.
So, at the end of the day, the Republican Ag Commissioner and any other Republican thinks what Abbott is doing is better than having a Democrat in office who'd likely not get much done because the GOP would still have massive majorities in state government. So, I'm allowed to be upset at that?
It's hard to get rid of someone on _any_ one issue. Beto brings a whole host of other stances that Commissioner Miller wouldn't like. That's way too high a bar you're setting.
Public disapproval is still disapproval and still better than being silent.
The Biden Administration just extended the student loan repayment moratorium by four months and increased the royalties for oil and gas from federal lands by 50%. What effect do you think those policies has on inflation?
You don’t think Republicans support, for instance, protecting the lives of the unborn? You don’t think they support appointing judges that interpret the law as written and recognize the Constitutional limits on federal power?
The idea that all they want to do is “burn the house down” is absurd.
I'm pretty sure that this is closer to the normal state of affairs than the 2006-2010 period was. I think the weird thing was when lots of policymakers actually became well-versed in the details of, specifically, health care policy.
Your description of the loss of rigorous policy analysis by Democrats really bothers me. I got a BA in public affairs and almost chose to go to the Kennedy School and seek to become one of the people conducting rigorous policy analysis at a high a level in government. But my girlfriend (now wife) was in NYC, so I went to law school in NYC instead and ended up as a Wall Street corporate finance lawyer. This has left me with little time to inform myself about politics and policy to the degree necessary to do my own rigorous analysis of what’s really going on. But the thought that Democrats have more-or-less thrown rigor away is painful to learn. Why believe that government can improve lives if one doesn’t strain to act based on rigorous analysis? Are we just another party that picks its policy issues based on superstition, hidden biases and crowd mentality? Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone else reading the daily papers. Perhaps Larry Summers’ inflation warning should have tipped me off two years ago. But I didn’t get it. I am digesting it now, thanks to you. I am grateful to you for focusing on the point. But it really , really depresses me.
I'm not sure that the party has thrown rigour out the window, but they are clearly below where they should be. It would be interesting to try to evaluate how rigour in politics has changed over time and I suspect that we would still be better off than much of our history. Doesn't mean we can't do better. And people were screaming about inflation in 2009 who were so obviously wrong. It's always easy to forget the thousand predictions that don't come true and focus on the one that does.
Seems like you could have gone to a SUNY school or another school in New York and gotten an MPA and worked on city/state-level rigorous policy analysis? You gotta do you to live in NYC, and the cost of living there is so outrageous that it makes sense that one wants to only be a lawyer or a doctor to make ends meet, but NYC and the state of New York have problems with coalition brain even under one-party rule and could sure use some bright people. This is where I sometime wonder if our problems as a country come down to the best and the brightest choosing to make a ton of money when the best and the brightest in used to open settlement houses in the Progressive era or ran New Deal agencies in the 1930s or worked in the space program in the 1950s.
I went to a fancy undergrad school and now I'm a high school teacher in a cheap city. Feels good, man.
As an MPP holder, the pool of jobs doing "rigorous policy analysis" at the city or state level is incredibly small. I'm sure it's bigger in NYC but I guarantee the ratio of degree holders to jobs is still very unfavorable.
Also, I think most urban people wildly overate the capacity and interest of most local governments to handle complex policy discussions. I work with a lot of small local governments on their finances and you can't get a lot of them to do many things that seem extremely basic because the staff is so small without the skills necessary and the elected officials don't care. Basically, I think local policy analysis is really restricted to major cities.
I've been around the block on this issue for a lot of years. In the far distant past I served on several Congressional Office of Technology Assessment panels. That Office was well designed and provided excellent advice to Congress on a host of issues. The Office was eliminated following the Gingrich revolution and never replaced. The Joint Committee on Taxation does valuable work within the Congressional framework.
Most think tanks have political biases that have to be taken into account but it's pretty easy for discerning readers to separate the wheat from the chaff. I've seen good, bad, and indifferent work from such organizations from all sides of the political spectrum.
It all boils down to two pretty simple components: 1) is the proposed policy good for the American public as a whole (not factions of the whole!) and 2) is it politically achievable? If one cannot answer affirmatively to both of the questions, consign the proposal to the waste basket.
Matt, do you think there are just less wonks in these circles? I feel like my engagements recently with the policy folks (I work with the bureaucracy though not the Hill) are almost always non technical. These groups put out reports and recommendations and I’m always left scratching my head as to where they got these ideas from. The Obama years I think we’re remembered that way in part because of where journalism was at the time — focusing on policy details in an accessible way for the first time to a mass audience outside of newspapers. IIRC a lot of modern media outlets were founded around that time as well.
The media has often been criticized as being too focused on horse race coverage, and not focused on the substance of policies, or how they impact everyday Americans. A counter for that is stories on focusing on how a program will impact a given family.
I wonder if some of this has had the unintended consequence of raising the moral stakes of some of these policy debates, and making debate more fraught. Once you start humanizing proposals like that, prioritization can be much harder.
“A counter for that is stories on focusing on how a program will impact a given family”
That is the opposite of substance.
A great deal of bad public policy is rooted in the strategy of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. You are suggesting a narrative strategy of concentrated humanization and diffuse (and therefore ignored) harm.
Nail. Head. I direct a policy center and we are often called upon to wonk out on a proposal. We strive for objectivity but often we say amongst ourselves, “what on earth were they thinking?” And journalists seem more inclined to repeat the PR boiler plate that comes from one party or another. My hypothesis on why Paul Ryan earned the moniker “policy wonk” is that compared to other members of Congress and compared to the journalists that covered policy, the bar for being a wonk had gotten pretty low. I also blame academia because few journals leave space for detailed analyses of tax and policy implications, wanting more general, big headline journal articles using cutting edge statistical techniques. You won’t get tenure using Excel in a tax simulation although that’s how policy often best reveals itself.
Does your team every try to understand the source of the failures? Are the proposals created by people who lack the chops to do it, or are they trying to appeal to certain Congress members with idiosyncratic ideas, or something else entirely?
That’s a really good question. Sometimes a bill or order is boilerplate from something put out by a think tank. In one case I can think of it resembled parts of a senator’s stump speech although that senator wasn’t in the committee that was considering the bill. In either case, we just do the analysis. In one case, we did a tax analysis of a proposal that never made it out of committee and it surprised me because the end result just seemed like it so greatly benefited the other party, politically, who could use it against the majority if it passed. That was one case where I thought to myself, “has nobody run the numbers on this and seen who actually gets hit?” We just run the numbers, but it is surprising sometimes that it seems like others aren’t. Politicians always inflate benefits and harms, that isn’t a surprise. What’s surprising is that the people scrutinizing the assertions don’t know the details as well as they used to. The Trump and Biden administrations have asserted things about policy that make me go, “wait, what?” And while I read opinions about the grand themes, I’m not hearing as much discussion of minor but important details from either academics or journalists, other than our host, of course.
I share your Paul Ryan theory! When people are impressed that a high-ranking public official can...show a powerpoint with some numbers in it, the bar is indeed low. I also think the poor quality of journalism is a huge part of this problem, and I'm not sure whether it's the quality of the journalists, their incentives, or some combination.
If you want another good example, but in the energy/climate space, of something like the problem Breunig “found” start asking folks honest quest about how offshore wind’s costs are supposed to get capitalized (and eventually paid by ratepayers or subsidies) under our current system or how it’s LCOE (levelized cost of energy) that is projected actually works out given lease and plant costs divided by MWh over the lifespan of the turbines...
Be prepared to answer “why are you distracting from decarbonization?” Type questions...
So the backlash against the role of economists in policy analysis (e.g. the books by Elizabeth Popp Berman and Binya Applebaum) is ill timed?
One thing going on in the left “mood” generally is skepticism of the methods of rationality, the devil’s advocate, the just-asking-questions guy. If you ask the left-wing activists I went to school with, the dominance of the “policy wonk” mode of understanding the world is literally a conspiracy of the powerful. Given that these people are the ones working in politics now, it is not surprising that wonkish policy analysis has lost status in favor of more relationship- and righteousness-based activism.
Coalition Brain is definitely a problem, but policy analysis is also just hard! You have to know all the right data sources, have a grasp on their deficiencies, get into the policy details--and most models aren't transparent. Policy organizations can and should invest in analysts like Bruenig (though he sets a very high bar), but ideally policy modeling would be more accessible.
Democrats policymaking reminds me of Socrates suggesting his sentence in the Apology.
Dating back to FDR the core insight of the Democratic Party has been that corporations have too much power, and it is the job of government to step in and provide a counterbalance in favor of the little guy. I think this insight remains true and very useful, but on the left it has become an increasingly totalizing form of analysis, that corporations and wealthy people are the only agent preventing the correct or humane policy across a whole slew of issues. This has led to helpless and blinkered thinking on issues where Democrats need to ask for tradeoffs.
1. On climate change, the obstacle to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is clearly the general population that basically wants no climate policy that will cost anything.
Democrats and left aligned interests have tended to blame corporations (100 companies, etc) or the financial sector (Raskin fed appointment) for missing policy as opposed to trying to pass the maximum clean energy policy that will be tolerated by the people.
2. On paid childcare, the obstacle is actually hiring enough people to run centers that can accept all the subsidies we hand out. Corporations and rich people would be in favor of more people working and being able to afford daycare.
3. On the pandemic, public health policy is really not that well aligned with "capitalism." More socialist Sweden notoriously did minimal Covid interventions, and having a completely nationalized health system did not spare the UK from tons of cases/deaths (indeed their pandemic politics don't seem all that different from ours though maybe they have fewer anti-vaxxers). But since it's an argument Democrats are keen to listen to, I've seen tons of people blaming "capitalism" in a generic sense and "employers" for getting rid of NPIs...
There are a lot of issues similar to this, but my overall point is that generally what you should look for is a way to actually solve the problem at hand rather than tie the problem to greedy corporations. In some cases (like the 2008 financial crisis and union busting) corporations are the actual problem. But in many other cases, they are not. And attempting to loop the issue of mask wearing or climate change to "corporate greed" is not going to help identify a solution that works.
There were two sentences in this piece that stood out to me as truths that an increasing number on the left simply won't admit and perhaps don't believe and it's our own version of disinformation (admittedly of a far less serious and dangerous kind than on the right). (1) "Simply refusing to prioritize doesn’t change the fact that building a full European-scale welfare state would require very large, politically implausible tax increases." This drove me insane in the 2020 primary, the pretending that the wealth taxes on super rich people we don't even know would get us to Norway or Sweden when they have way higher taxes on consumption that fund their welfare states because we were destined to then disappoint people terribly (especially young people who were feeling the Bern) when this could never be accomplished politically in the US, not because of Joe Manchin, but because there is no real support for a VAT. (2) "Loan relief for recent law school grads will directly press up housing costs for working-class renters; you can’t just call it all stimulus." Isn't this the kind of claim that makes the twitter left hate MY so much. I think it's true, but I feel like you would not be able to get the NYT to acknowledge this in such stark terms.
In my career, so much of the value I've seen the most valuable employees contribute has come in the form of "kicking the tires" on ideas that other people just assume have been vetted or analyzed by someone else.
I see this all over the place: a story gets accepted without the details ever being really looked at. An example in the mainstream media was when Ron Rosenstein wrote that memo that Trump cited in firing James Comey. Most news reports described it as calling for Comey to be fired, which if you actually read the memo, Rosenstein was clearly careful not to do. Here and there, reports in the same exact publications acknowledged this, but there was no reconciliation of the contradiction. Maybe this was a small oversight, but it struck me at the time: everyone could read the document, and it just kind of didn't matter that what the reports assumed it said wasn't true.
Another great example: Zeynep Tufekci. She has said: (source: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/938808#vp_5 )
I just thought, All right, I'm going to publish this, and if we're going to go out with a bang, so be it. I had access to The New York Times and I thought I might as well end my career in The New York Times. I submitted the piece and I got lucky with an editor who didn't want me to hem and haw. I said, "Just think through this. It's not something that requires an advanced degree. It's a respiratory disease. We have the CDC and the WHO saying wear a mask if you're sick. Now we have tons of papers saying that there's pre- or asymptomatic spread. So on face value, you don't even know when you're sick and spreading it, so there should be no debate about this. I understand the mask shortage, but that's something we can talk about. Trust the public. Let's talk about the shortage and how to deal with it."
From SB..."Over time, the proposal became more generous (capping costs at 7 percent of income rather than 12 percent) and accrued various pro-labor provisions, as well as a plan for a multi-year transition from the current unsubsidized system to the new permanent vision. The problem, as Matt Bruenig pointed out (see more here and here), is that the transition plan was very poorly structured and would have pushed the cost structure of child care up before the subsidies kicked in" Yeah, the "Pro-Labor provisions" were basically, In order to provide child care and get this government money, you have to be a contributor to the Democratic party. What graft!
This article basically all goes back to the assymetry in modern politics. When you have one party that is earnestly trying to make things better and another that is nihilistically and cynically trying to make things worse for political gain, it’s awfully hard for thoughtful intra-party criticism to flourish. Republicans are never held to account because we de facto assume that they want to burn the house down, and not make improvements based on a principled but differing governing philosophy than Democrats. If your political opponents don’t support any policy, it’s awfully hard to pile on to your friends to criticize them for proposing sub-optimal policy.
"earnestly trying to make things better and another that is nihilistically and cynically trying to make things worse for political gain"
Man, gimme a break. You need to work on your ability to empathize with people who have different points of view.
I have nothing against Republican voters who I have no doubt disagree with me on certain issues in good faith.
But as evidenced by their actions when W. Bush and Trump were president, the reason that McConnell and the rest of the GOP leadership in DC blocked stimulus when Obama was president had nothing to do with genuinely-held differences of opinion on fiscal policy and everything to do with damaging a Democratic president politically. If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 and then Covid came around when the GOP controlled Congress, do you think they would have passed CARES? I don't.
The governor of Texas is actively trying to increase inflation. Republican senators are refusing to consider Defense Department nominees unless the Secretary of Defense resigns because they disagree with him. Republicans play chicken with defaulting on government bonds on the regular. When Republicans are in charge they seek tax cuts. When Democrats are in charge they seek to undermine the working of government.
What the governor of Texas (my governor!) did with the trucks at the border was indeed terrible. But it wasn't "Republicans" it was "the governor". For instance, the Republican Agriculture Commissioner blasted him for it.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/12/sid-miller-greg-abbott-border-inspections/
And I don't think the goal was "increase inflation" it was "grandstand about immigration"
Is the Republican Agriculture Commissioner going to endorse Beto over this? Of course not.
So, at the end of the day, the Republican Ag Commissioner and any other Republican thinks what Abbott is doing is better than having a Democrat in office who'd likely not get much done because the GOP would still have massive majorities in state government. So, I'm allowed to be upset at that?
It's hard to get rid of someone on _any_ one issue. Beto brings a whole host of other stances that Commissioner Miller wouldn't like. That's way too high a bar you're setting.
Public disapproval is still disapproval and still better than being silent.
The Biden Administration just extended the student loan repayment moratorium by four months and increased the royalties for oil and gas from federal lands by 50%. What effect do you think those policies has on inflation?
...and...and...Republicans hate puppies! And Republicans made me stub my toe...
You don’t think Republicans support, for instance, protecting the lives of the unborn? You don’t think they support appointing judges that interpret the law as written and recognize the Constitutional limits on federal power?
The idea that all they want to do is “burn the house down” is absurd.
I'm pretty sure that this is closer to the normal state of affairs than the 2006-2010 period was. I think the weird thing was when lots of policymakers actually became well-versed in the details of, specifically, health care policy.
It's not that the policymakers need to be well-versed, it's that the people in the policy analysis jobs need to actually do the analysis.
Your description of the loss of rigorous policy analysis by Democrats really bothers me. I got a BA in public affairs and almost chose to go to the Kennedy School and seek to become one of the people conducting rigorous policy analysis at a high a level in government. But my girlfriend (now wife) was in NYC, so I went to law school in NYC instead and ended up as a Wall Street corporate finance lawyer. This has left me with little time to inform myself about politics and policy to the degree necessary to do my own rigorous analysis of what’s really going on. But the thought that Democrats have more-or-less thrown rigor away is painful to learn. Why believe that government can improve lives if one doesn’t strain to act based on rigorous analysis? Are we just another party that picks its policy issues based on superstition, hidden biases and crowd mentality? Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone else reading the daily papers. Perhaps Larry Summers’ inflation warning should have tipped me off two years ago. But I didn’t get it. I am digesting it now, thanks to you. I am grateful to you for focusing on the point. But it really , really depresses me.
I'm not sure that the party has thrown rigour out the window, but they are clearly below where they should be. It would be interesting to try to evaluate how rigour in politics has changed over time and I suspect that we would still be better off than much of our history. Doesn't mean we can't do better. And people were screaming about inflation in 2009 who were so obviously wrong. It's always easy to forget the thousand predictions that don't come true and focus on the one that does.
Seems like you could have gone to a SUNY school or another school in New York and gotten an MPA and worked on city/state-level rigorous policy analysis? You gotta do you to live in NYC, and the cost of living there is so outrageous that it makes sense that one wants to only be a lawyer or a doctor to make ends meet, but NYC and the state of New York have problems with coalition brain even under one-party rule and could sure use some bright people. This is where I sometime wonder if our problems as a country come down to the best and the brightest choosing to make a ton of money when the best and the brightest in used to open settlement houses in the Progressive era or ran New Deal agencies in the 1930s or worked in the space program in the 1950s.
I went to a fancy undergrad school and now I'm a high school teacher in a cheap city. Feels good, man.
As an MPP holder, the pool of jobs doing "rigorous policy analysis" at the city or state level is incredibly small. I'm sure it's bigger in NYC but I guarantee the ratio of degree holders to jobs is still very unfavorable.
Also, I think most urban people wildly overate the capacity and interest of most local governments to handle complex policy discussions. I work with a lot of small local governments on their finances and you can't get a lot of them to do many things that seem extremely basic because the staff is so small without the skills necessary and the elected officials don't care. Basically, I think local policy analysis is really restricted to major cities.
Funnily enough, Summers was also wrong
He had said (paraphrasing, I suppose) 33% chance of stagflation, 33% chance of recession, 33% chance of rapid growth with no surge in inflation
We got rapid growth with a surge in inflation 🤷🏿♂️
I've been around the block on this issue for a lot of years. In the far distant past I served on several Congressional Office of Technology Assessment panels. That Office was well designed and provided excellent advice to Congress on a host of issues. The Office was eliminated following the Gingrich revolution and never replaced. The Joint Committee on Taxation does valuable work within the Congressional framework.
Most think tanks have political biases that have to be taken into account but it's pretty easy for discerning readers to separate the wheat from the chaff. I've seen good, bad, and indifferent work from such organizations from all sides of the political spectrum.
It all boils down to two pretty simple components: 1) is the proposed policy good for the American public as a whole (not factions of the whole!) and 2) is it politically achievable? If one cannot answer affirmatively to both of the questions, consign the proposal to the waste basket.
Matt, do you think there are just less wonks in these circles? I feel like my engagements recently with the policy folks (I work with the bureaucracy though not the Hill) are almost always non technical. These groups put out reports and recommendations and I’m always left scratching my head as to where they got these ideas from. The Obama years I think we’re remembered that way in part because of where journalism was at the time — focusing on policy details in an accessible way for the first time to a mass audience outside of newspapers. IIRC a lot of modern media outlets were founded around that time as well.
The media has often been criticized as being too focused on horse race coverage, and not focused on the substance of policies, or how they impact everyday Americans. A counter for that is stories on focusing on how a program will impact a given family.
I wonder if some of this has had the unintended consequence of raising the moral stakes of some of these policy debates, and making debate more fraught. Once you start humanizing proposals like that, prioritization can be much harder.
“A counter for that is stories on focusing on how a program will impact a given family”
That is the opposite of substance.
A great deal of bad public policy is rooted in the strategy of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. You are suggesting a narrative strategy of concentrated humanization and diffuse (and therefore ignored) harm.
I was not suggesting that as a strategy. I was saying some people took that as an approach.
Nail. Head. I direct a policy center and we are often called upon to wonk out on a proposal. We strive for objectivity but often we say amongst ourselves, “what on earth were they thinking?” And journalists seem more inclined to repeat the PR boiler plate that comes from one party or another. My hypothesis on why Paul Ryan earned the moniker “policy wonk” is that compared to other members of Congress and compared to the journalists that covered policy, the bar for being a wonk had gotten pretty low. I also blame academia because few journals leave space for detailed analyses of tax and policy implications, wanting more general, big headline journal articles using cutting edge statistical techniques. You won’t get tenure using Excel in a tax simulation although that’s how policy often best reveals itself.
Does your team every try to understand the source of the failures? Are the proposals created by people who lack the chops to do it, or are they trying to appeal to certain Congress members with idiosyncratic ideas, or something else entirely?
That’s a really good question. Sometimes a bill or order is boilerplate from something put out by a think tank. In one case I can think of it resembled parts of a senator’s stump speech although that senator wasn’t in the committee that was considering the bill. In either case, we just do the analysis. In one case, we did a tax analysis of a proposal that never made it out of committee and it surprised me because the end result just seemed like it so greatly benefited the other party, politically, who could use it against the majority if it passed. That was one case where I thought to myself, “has nobody run the numbers on this and seen who actually gets hit?” We just run the numbers, but it is surprising sometimes that it seems like others aren’t. Politicians always inflate benefits and harms, that isn’t a surprise. What’s surprising is that the people scrutinizing the assertions don’t know the details as well as they used to. The Trump and Biden administrations have asserted things about policy that make me go, “wait, what?” And while I read opinions about the grand themes, I’m not hearing as much discussion of minor but important details from either academics or journalists, other than our host, of course.
Your last sentence implies you are seeing this across the ideological spectrum. Am I reading that fairly?
I share your Paul Ryan theory! When people are impressed that a high-ranking public official can...show a powerpoint with some numbers in it, the bar is indeed low. I also think the poor quality of journalism is a huge part of this problem, and I'm not sure whether it's the quality of the journalists, their incentives, or some combination.