Taking irrational voters seriously
Plus an argument for being more contentious and this week's good news
I enjoyed Brian Deese’s piece in the Atlantic on “The Next Front in the War Against Climate Change,” which among other things helped me understand some of the details of utility regulation. At the same time, I think people are sometimes a little too reluctant to be contentious, and that can result in them underplaying the most provocative ideas. So, two lines from the piece that I think everyone should ponder:
“The climate movement must recognize that its primary target is no longer just Big Oil; it’s the regulatory barriers that keep clean energy from getting built and delivered efficiently to American homes.”
“The IRA didn’t fix these issues. We were working with a 50–50 Senate, with no Republican support. That meant we had to pass the law through the budget-reconciliation process, which doesn’t allow for rewriting regulations.”
Both sentences go down pretty smooth, I think, in terms of conventional progressive thinking. The climate movement has been psyching itself up to be more focused on saying yes to clean energy for a decade now. And the point about reconciliation bills is just a factual observation. But without putting words into Deese’s mouth, I think that if you consider the two ideas in tandem, the implications are pretty radical. If addressing regulatory barriers is more important than fighting Big Oil and addressing regulatory barriers requires bipartisanship, it follows that you need to be willing to make a deal on energy regulation that includes meaningful concessions to the fossil fuel industry.
I’m a disagreeable jerk so I’ll just fire off that hot take. It’s fine for others to be more gentle in what they are saying, but the fact is that the IRA is falling short of its clean electricity goals, largely because of deployment barriers that aren’t going to be addressed by a bill that focuses exclusively on renewables. There’s a real issue here that needs to be confronted.
Other recommendations: Brian Potter on World War II industrial mobilization, Jerusalem Demsas on issue polls versus public opinion, and Dylan Matthews’ magisterial profile of America’s best intelligence agency.
Some good news!
Record Memorial Day travel, is another reminder that despite inflation the economy is actually quite strong.
Ozempic seems to combat alcohol consumption.
YIMBY stuff happening in secret congress.
They found a bunch of lithium.
Comment of the week from Amy:
I’m a former staffer to a Blue Dog (who was really just a New Dem hanging out with Blue Dogs for fun rather than truly a Blue Dog) and a senior moderate Democrat. When I was on the Hill the Rorschach test was the bankruptcy bill and where your boss was on that. When I look back I’m frustrated that it felt like so much was “given away” but those critiques ignored the reality that the GOP was totally in charge. But back then there were a lot more moderates on both sides. The reason we have fewer Democratic centrists in Congress is because of gerrymandering, not because the country has shifted ideologically, and the moderate Dems that remain are truly New Dems who are the ones who win close elections. And some of the best ones are seeking new offices. So for the sake of getting things done rather than creating the conditions for more authoritarianism, I remain closer to the center than the left than ever before.
This week’s reader question comes from unreliabletags, who asks: What would it look like to take voters’ irrational preferences and non-evidence-based perceptions seriously? What policy program would make people happiest given human nature and biases? How different is it, really, from optimizing for material welfare?
To be a bit of a philosophy major about this, I think we should distinguish among a few different kinds of things that people might mean when they complain about voters being irrational.
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