There's also a big strain of paternalism in the general zeitgeist of, informed discourse right now. A lot of, "well, I can handle this information, but you have to be managed because, implicitly, you aren't smart enough to have the correct response."
I think that's why activists kept pushing defunding/abolishment despite not having significant support among most Black Americans. It really bugs me and it should be remembered as a paternalistic failure.
To me, this misses the real advantages of the concept of the Overton Window and misdiagnoses the problem with how people are thinking about it.
The original description of the Overton Window is meant to describe the range of acceptable public discourse, ideas that don't elicit visceral disgust (as Carlos Maza deftly illustrates). But David French makes a really great case in "Divided We Fall" that the discourse of the two parties has diverged so strongly, that each party is operating under separate Overton Windows that *don't even overlap anymore* on many topics. And each party spends so much time discussing and giving the benefit of the doubt to people at the far extremes of their own window, and distrusting anyone arguing from the moderate extreme of their own window as being potentially traitorous.
To me the problem is this asymmetry. If we could all be as open to thoughtful arguments from the moderate end of our own windows, or God forbid, thoughtful arguments from the other party, we could all expand our own windows. And when I say "your own window," I mean the range of policy ideas that you think have merit and are worth discussing. This leads to the second problem I see: We have a mental model of each choosing *A* position on a topic. An idea that there is an optimal solution, and we have found it due to our own logical prowess. I think the discourse would be a lot healthier if we made room for the possibility of a *range* of ideas that could work, and admitted it's hard to predict in advance which will be optimal, so a wide range of views collaborating in good faith is your best bet.
One final note to say that I probably give others the benefit of the doubt to a fault. I do not think there are all that many people running around advocating for ideas they secretly think are bad. I think there are people who feel energized by being able to understand and advocate for ideas that really push the envelope and get others thinking about problems in new ways, and I think the tendency is no less earnest on the right than the left. But again I may just be naive.
Part of the issue: In activist/academic circles it always seems to be OK, even encouraged, to go more and more radical. It makes people think you're taking the problem seriously and that you *get* that society is truly flawed/racist/oppressive. Advocate for "police reform" and get labeled a squish. Advocate for "defunding" or even better "abolition" and you're considered a serious ally.
Does it matter that the ideas are crazy? That they actually make things *less* likely that anything will happen? "No we're pushing the Overton Window".
As someone in academia I think that’s where a huge part of the problem lies. People are devoting a huge amount of their impressive education and intelligence to justifying ideas that don’t actually make sense—I know, I spent a lot of time doing this!—because that’s how you get cachet in those circles, not by advocating something common-sense and reasonable.
In academia itself, there's definitely an incentive to push more radical ideas, but you have to do it with well-defended arguments of the sort that people in your field recognize. It pays to be the person that everyone comes to when they want the weirdo position on the structure of epistemic justification, or the presence of phosphine in planetary atmospheres, or the role of retroviruses in human evolution.
But when academics step out of their specialties and into politics, they don't always keep to the well-defended arguments thing.
To be fair, a lot of the people who want "police reform" are actually squishes who just wish the whole issue would go away without having to change anything. How do you deal with that problem?
Call their bluff. Put legislation on the table and see if they are willing to support it. If they won't, then you have demonstrated that they don't really want anything to change.
In general, being suspicious that some people's hearts are not really into the policy they say they want does not seem like a problem that can be "dealt with" outside of that person's own head.
Legislative calendars are crowded and it's extremely hard to advance an issue to the point where it actually gets voted on, so this isn't a great solution IMHO (although I don't have a better one). Talk is cheap--a lot of legislators are willing to say "Sure, I support <good legislation x>" while not actually doing anything to advance it.
This seems like a solveable problem, though, have proper mechanisms to force motions off the agenda without which they eventually get to a vote.
For instance, allow "anti-sponsors" and if the legislation has more anti-sponsors than sponsors after X days, then it is dropped, and if it doesn't, then it automatically gets a vote.
This isn't my idea of course, but I suspect much of the donor class interest in this less about buying indulgences and more about pushing activist focus away from economic or class based issues.
Culture wars over racial issues are now sucking up most of the activist oxygen on the left and these are much less threatening to the donor class than fights about wealth redistribution, increasing the size/role of government, or making huge changes in the economy to protect the environment.
This reminds me of a negotiation class I took in grad school. They introduced the concept of anchoring... that in a negotiation, it’s often good to offer first and propose a number much better than you actually want. Saying “I’ll pay $5k” for the used car that’s worth $8k and that you’re willing to pay $7k for anchors the negotiation within a low range. The problem is that if you say “I’ll pay $2k” the person selling the car might just tell you to fuck off because you’re not a serious person.
I heard that at one point the highest priced wine at Chili's wasn't actually even stocked. If someone happened to ask for it, they said they were out. It was there just for the anchoring impact. Probably a myth but I like the story.
Yeah. It’s a balancing act. You don’t want to offer the worst deal you’d agree to up front, but you also shouldn’t give an offer that the other party to the negotiation will find completely ridiculous. Especially if it’s a situation where the other party can feasibly walk away from a deal.
Just a silly observation, but it seems the Overton Window of the Overton Window itself is shifting as a result of the Overton Window being observed and defined to begin with.
It's like the story/joke about a town in Ohio that always votes for the winning presidential candidate, so a campaign pours literally all of its resources into winning that town and is surprised when it subsequently loses the wider race.
When you are trying to persuade a person to support your policy position, it's good to emphasize the popular parts, and downplay the negative parts. What was weird to me about a lot of the Democratic policy debates, especially around 2019-2020, was that politicians would emphasize the unpopular parts of their proposal, like Bernie proudly declaring he would take private health insurance away from people who wanted it.
Insurance company costs are capped at 20% (thanks Obama!). Sure, the feds can do a better job (I think medicare is managed for like 5ish%?), but it's not the main cost driver. What IS politically unpopular and no one wants to honestly grapple with is that hospital spending will have to come down. This includes doctor pay, which isn't even in the mutant Overton window.
There is huge misunderstanding about what that 20% cap on costs means. That is the Medical Loss Ratio, which gets a bit complicated. It does not mean that there is a 20% profit margin, or even that 20% of insurance premiums go to insurance company costs.
A big chunk of that 20% goes to auditing, cost cutting measures and fraud detection. Medicare and Medicaid entities spend significantly less on this than other players. This is why Medicare and Medicaid fraud is a massive problem, but less of a problem in the ACA and ESHI space.
There is no indication that the feds can, or have, done a better job.
Thanks for the clarification, although just to be clear, that's why I said "costs" and not "profits". But you're right that even that has some ambiguity. My "thanks Obama" was not sarcastic!
I'm too lazy to look for data/studies on whether or not federally managed programs are more efficient than private insurance or not, but I think we're generally in agreement anyway: the insurance companies are not really the problem here.
One can look to federal funding of higher education through student loans and the eventual (consequent?) dramatic increase in tuition as an example of what happens when money is flowing without cost controls.
I think that’s essentially true, and education is a good parallel.
There are a bunch of ways to screw things up, but probably the worst is to have a complex essential service run by private profit seeking entities who can charge market rates and still receive federal money spent by the states with no effective oversight from anyone. That way the left blames the problem on corporations, the right blames the problem on socialism, and no one focuses on fixing the problem.
I don’t think the public really supports cutting doctor pay. Doctors are one of the most trusted professions around. Doctors have effective lobbying *and* they’re widely considered sympathetic by the public.
There’s a reason why single payer advocates focus so heavily on private insurance companies as the villain.
I wonder if eliminating the cost of medical school (within a capped enrollment) and helping doctors with debt to pay it down in return for lower billing rates, would help?
Sure, knocking 15% off costs is a big deal; my only point is if we did it, we'd still have *much* more expensive health care than most (all?) other countries. Your point is fair, that many organizers are probably aware of these challenges, but I don't recall it being a major point of discussion (or maybe I just wasn't paying attention!).
… and, yup, someone has subtracted the 20% ACA MLR from the 5% Medicare admin cost and concluded that there is 15% cost savings from single payer. Apples and Oranges.
There is no indication whatsoever that that kind of cost savings are remotely possible. There have been numerous attempts to have state actors compete with private insurance, just has there have been numerous attempts to have private companies manage Medicare and Medicaid.
Neither monopsony nor the market can magically fix things.
I absolutely didn't mean to give the impression I took those numbers as gospel. Really, I should have said "up to 15%". I was just granting the most extreme possibility to demonstrate that it doesn't address even a majority of the cost difference.
Thinking in terms of percentages is misleading. If you do less to limit unnecessary and overpriced care, the percentage related to administrative costs goes down, but that's not a good thing.
"I think putting more of healthcare under federal government control would redound to cost controls being more likely though."
I would really like to understand why you think that. Could you provide me a couple of examples where government run programs cost less than private versions or they took over something and costs went down?
Private insurance has a cap on what it spends - it has to bring in enough money to cover it. Government spending is not so limited. In fact, for many other causes, people prefer the government to take over things because it pays more!
I think you can have a good argument for M4A being able to provide universal insurance. I have no faith in the government being able to restrain costs because I don't see them being able to resist lobbying from any politically sensitive group demanding more spending on their care whether it is rationale or not. E.g. Medicare currently spends ridiculous amounts of money on cancer care that has very poor quantity or quality of life return per dollar spent.
So separate from the actual Medicare for All debate which definitely needs it own's SB post ... I've read the polls a bit different here. I think people have very positive views of their *own* insurance. From this and from an incrementalist view, a public option makes a lot of sense and I hope we can move on it this year.
The polling has always been very clear. Single payer and M4A are popular in the abstract, but the details of specific plans are politically toxic.
This is probably because ESHI has created perverse incentives and no one has figured out how to implement it with MASSIVE regressive consequences.
Given that it has been politically popular with leftists AND centrists for the last fifty years, and that is (supposedly) is cheaper than our current system, how ELSE would you explain why it hasn’t happened yet? Omnipotent evil insurance companies?
What Bernie did that was completely revolutionary is to propose M4A, but absolutely REFUSE to provide any details on how it could be accomplished. Genius.
I'm not sure I follow some of these questions exactly ... but I don't support M4A, I think polling indicates people want to keep their private insurance, and in a post below outline how I really like my insurance company (BCBS of IL).
I would like to provide a solution to all uninsured children and where possible incrementally expand M&M.
Yeah… I agree something incremental is the best (possibly only) way forward.
My fantasy solution would be:
Implement ACA 2.0, fix the donut hole, allow Medicaid expansion in all States, and extend CHIP to everyone under 18. Everyone in the US should be able to afford to buy health insurance.
Spend the next decade implementing a national public option, build national data reporting standards, and standardize data exchange. Everyone should have choice of insurance company.
Build standardized rules for provider networks, and allow them to be open. All insurance providers should be able to support the same provider networks at the same price. Everyone should have to option of keeping their doctor and hospitals, even if they change plans or quit their job.
Send a yearly check to all legal US residents who have a specified level of health care coverage, regardless of provider, to help cover health care costs. If there is any money left over at the end of the year, it is yours to keep. Allow automatic same day health insurance enrollment at your doctors office for the uninsured, regardless of pre-existing condition or health status. Cover everyone, and reward people for helping keep prices low.
It’s a myth, in this case. Some health insurance lobbyists made a killer attack ad 26 years ago, and everyone still believes in the power of the insurance lobby.
Last time I crunched the numbers, the total profits for all private ESHI companies per year is roughly that of the American chocolate industry. They tried to put together a lobbying effort to counter M4A in the primaries, but it never got off the ground due to lack of funding or interest.
Health Insurance execs were terrified of Biden or Buttigieg’s ACA plans. Wall Street was terrified of Elizabeth Warren. Neither of them were bothered by Bernie and M4A.
I actually think it was a MOW advocacy and that's precisely the reason you saw AOC try and pivot to saying the quiet part out loud ("guys, we won't get M4A anytime soon so we will have to settle for a public option") and also why many leaders in the Leftist / DSA crowds are trying to turn on her with the whole #ForceTheVote fiasco....
It really all depends on how seriously you consider the transition timelines as proposed in current bills which are drafted to get Bernie elected, not drafted to fix downstream effects of M4A passing...
If M4A passing as is lead to a bunch of health industry folks losing jobs and this prolong Republicans in power because of otherwise avoidable / foreseeable downstream consequences of a transition to single payer...it might actually *be* worse.
Additionally, imagine giving everyone “access” to free health care... but then not doing anything to address supply constraints and the blowback that might come from that. You can easily see how it could be worse.
Obama basically dealt with this with the ACA and managed to stave off a 2012 loss and repeal...but none of that was ever guaranteed.
I would agree, except none of the “wonky math stuff” arguments for M4A that I have read are remotely reality based. The most reality-based argument I have seen was Warren’s plan, and even that was a total hot mess with toxic side effects.
Most of them misunderstand the medical loss ratio and assume that running ESHI through CMS gives a 20% cost savings, assume unrealistic progressive taxation or weird economy tricks, then double count the savings until the math kinda works on aggregate.
Even though they all do the same things, none of them are the “official” M4A plan. There is never anything that can be officially scored.
It’s a con.
The net effect is a “bad” Overton window. We spend all our time debating fantasy plans, leaving no space to build support for ACTUAL progressive health care.
To be specific, by “reality based” I mean a specific plan with enough details for people to understand how it would affect them. Ideally, it would have enough detail that it could be scored by the CBO.
There is no legislative barrier to getting a CBO score. Bernie could put it together with his own staff, even if Schumer doesn’t like it.
Warren showed that any plan that is sufficiently detailed is politically toxic.
HR 1387 doesn’t count. I think it is saying that we should eliminate private insurance, then hire some expert to fix things. I think they planned on hiring Hillary.
I don’t think Bernie actually cares that there is no plan, since it would require a revolution to pass.
It should be obvious that I am actually rather bitter about M4A. I spent a long time working in health care and insurance infrastructure trying to position myself for ACA 2.0. I figured Hillary had the chops to make a big push towards data standardization and reporting, which would lay the groundwork for national public option.
Trump delayed that, but I figured M4A would shake out before 2019 and there would be a big push for ACA 2.0 in the primaries. That didn’t happen. Although Biden has a pretty solid plan the progressive wing is not going to go all out for a non-M4A solution. There is no way anything big is going to happen without a strong united push, and that’s not going to happen this decade.
I gave up. I’m now in *shudder* fintech. At least the money is better.
From the conversations I’ve had with the "Bernie-sphere M4A advocacy”, they appear to believe the following:
Achieving M4A would be more progressive that the current system.
Incremental progress towards M4A makes the system incrementally more progressive.
Changes to the current system that do not lead to M4A are “small-bore” and “incremental”, and are not massively progressive.
M4A is primarily opposed by a “political economy of incumbent political forces that halt progress.”
Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies oppose M4A because they are interested in profit rather than helping people.
Passing M4A is a political problem, not a technical problem.
There is no point in discussing concrete plans for M4A, since it can’t actually be passed in the current political environment.
M4A advocates have a better understanding of health care than an average member of the public.
The general public can’t understand nuanced policy ideas about health care.
All of these, I believe, are completely false.
There are ways to make radical progressive changes to health care. They appear small bore, since the only way to fix the system is through incremental changes.
For the most part, all the players are genuinely trying to do the right thing. I’ve worked with a lot health insurance people, and all of them decided to work in health care because they wanted to help people. They were all underpaid, overworked, and desperately trying to keep things from exploding.
I recall one retired VP from UHC that I met at a woodshop who had spent his career as a small cog doing the same type of provider network deals. I happened to know about that part of the business, and mentioned a couple of people I’d met who were able to keep their doctor when they lost their job because of those type of deals. The guy actually started crying, because no one had ever told him that what he did actually helped people.
Every M4A advocate I’ve met has implied that the general public is not interested in policy nuance. But most people have an extremely solid understanding of their own health care situation, and are laser focused on changes that affect them personally.
Most of the libertarians I’ve met complain that the general public would agree with them if they understood basic economics. But their understanding of economics is blinded by their dogma, and they seem to have a worse understanding then average. Same Dunning Kruger process.
Totally agree MfA advocacy is good and Biden shifted left on healthcare because of it.
I'm more responding to these two arguments - and maybe I'm being overly narrow here: (1) "People don't have positive views of private insurance companies" and (2) "private insurance is bad".
Those two feel like the mutant version: (1) seems incorrect and (2) is debatable - there's an efficient market reason to pool risk even if the current structure is perverse.
Probably best to save most of this for - hopefully - a post on Biden's healthcare plan ... which there's been sadly crickets about from the administration.
I - personally - wouldn't draw much distinction between those two statements. I really like the access my insurance provides - it's world class (e.g., Prentice Hospital). Any structural disruption would only create downside risk.
On the insurance market side ... I don't have any data. I guess I would first question if cost is a primary objective. I'd focus more on access. In that respect, it's a bit of pick your position .... Do you want private insurance or private doctors / hospitals? I think insurance better pools risk and provides greater access. My last two GPs have gone fully private. They don't accept any insurance. Just a flat annual fee. My friends just chose to have their baby at a private hospital in London for a number of reasons but perceived better care was one of them.
I think it can make sense to try to convince people that private insurance is not helping us out relative to what public insurance would do. A *political candidate* taking that position before people are convinced of that premise is putting the cart before the horse, though.
Thank you for this! The more general rule here: don't play armchair psychologist with voters. Don't tell everyone masks aren't effective because you're worried they'll otherwise panic buy all the supplies. Don't try to wax poetic on what the internal motivations of your opponents are ("cling to guns and religion," "47%," "deplorables," etc.). And don't think you can do some sort of political jiu jitsu, where you push bad ideas hoping that some combination of momentum and political process will turn them into good policies.
I think this is a really good argument for saying what you sincerely mean and not making comments about the internal motivations of opponents -- it helps support trust for you and it avoids alienating the small fraction of opponent supporters who are persuadable.
The wiggle room you have is that the tweet says "gain power" which in this post you've noted is not what actually happens when truly insane ideas are pushed.
Text for accessibility purposes:
@mattyglesias: "Exactly!
I want the US policy status quo to move left, so I want wrong right-wing ideas to be discredited while wrong left-wing ideas gain power. There is a strong strategic logic to this it's not random hypocrisy."
I hope, based on this article, that Matt simply disavows that tweet and thinks he was wrong, not that he has some hair splitting equivocation about how that's still right.
Also possible that the flawed left-wing arguments in 2019 were more akin to "Amazon pays no tax and owes the treasury billions" and "The government is subsidising Walmart through tax credits" rather than "we should abolish the police".
Wait what? Walmart paying its rank-and-file employees so little (while making corporate profits) that they qualify for all sorts of government programs... that's a flawed argument? Explain.
First, Walmart actually pays hourly employees close to 2x federal minimum wage (yes, even in states without higher state minimums), I'm not sure why they're always the target in conversations like this.
Second, is the implication that welfare programs are inherently corporate subsidies? How else should I read the complaint that a low-wage worker is eligible for government programs? Isn't the point of anti-poverty policy to take people's situation before the policy, add resources, and improve their situation?
I am intrigued to see if Matt responds to that. Obviously he had a lot more pressure to accept dumb leftwing ideas a couple years ago than he does now.
I think its also possible that he had an empirical belief that was discredited and he no longer believes it, the former being discredited by something like the police reform debate last summer.
It seems to me Matt was probably referring to leftist ideas which are bad but politically popular. One can recognize that those ideas are bad but still want them to be implemented because (a) they're less bad than mistaken right-wing policies; (b) they help win elections so you get more of the good stuff and (c) they're a somewhat inevitable consequence of Democrats winning strong governing majorities, which is the thing we should be working for.
The mutant Overton Window strategy seems to be about pushing leftist ideas which are both bad *and* unpopular. There's no inconsistency in Matt's objecting to that approach
There is wiggle room as I noted. Taking the wiggle room is an easy choice in today's political climate. It is still a choice, and it will be interesting no matter what choice Matt takes (including not responding).
The most obvious explanation for Sanders' success in moving the Democrats left is that he got lefties to get over that "People like us are too pure to be part of something as corrupt as electoral politics" attitude that they had in the Occupy era and actually participate in it. Amazing they have so much more clout that way.
I feel like a lot of Matt's critics thought that (especially from the left) but the book is quite honest this would be a good idea to get to but it will take a while and is hard to do. Similarly, Caplan's Open Borders book is also a book where the author acknowledges that his actually good idea may not be possible but doesn't make the idea any less right.
Doesn't time frame matter here? Getting there in 20 years would require full, no-questions-asked open borders, but laying the groundwork so that we could have a billion in 50 or 100 years would require expanding immigration, housing supply, and family leave benefits, all of which are good ideas.
No-questions-asked open borders would not be nearly _enough_ to do it in 20 years. Everyone freaks out about potential logistical constraints to immigration on the _destination_ side, but rarely stops to think about constraints on the _departure_ side, which are much, much higher!
The largest cross-border migratory event in _all of human history_ was the partition of India. Quite possibly the greatest humanitarian disaster ever, partition involved the involuntary, at-gunpoint relocation of...
...20 million people, across a relatively nearby land border.
The largest _voluntary_ cross-border migration was the Italian disapora of 1880-1915, which involved 13 million people over the course of 35 years to a variety of destinations. (The _entire_ Irish diaspora since 1700 is not quite 10 million.)
Presuming that we are _not_ going to deliberately engineer a worse disaster than the partition of India to attempt to convince people to immigrate to the USA, we can _very_ safely assume that even given a return to entirely open borders that we would top out at a much lower number than that.
Emigrating is hard: it require money, it requires a willingness to leave the place where your family and social circles are, and it requires faith in one's ability to flourish in your new country. Even the most welcoming destination in the world struggles to overcome those limits, and even in relative great waves of immigration it's entirely possible for market forces to provide adequate housing etc on the receiving end as long as you don't do anything stupid like making that illegal.
Point taken. My point was that 1 billion is an aspirational, long term goal and that the steps it would take to get there are things we should be doing anyway.
It's a polemical title to attract attention to (frame?) a book about good (earnestly believed?) policy changes that would increase the number of americans.
I think the mutant Overton Window approach is more effective on those who already broadly agree with you, and can have the opposite effect on those who don't.
Sure, support for immigration is at an all time high because Trump drove most Dems and a plurality of Independents running in the other direction, but the GOP is as anti-immigration as ever.
Similarly, while Defund the Police is not in mainstream vogue as much as it was this summer, and stodgy Democratic leadership is strenuously avoiding have to talk about it, you don't exactly see Democrats disavowing it either, largely for fear of blowback from the left. If you polled Democrats secretly, I am sure most would say DtP is on net harmful, but ask them on the record and they would give a non-answer that would hedge against left blowback, if not outright endorse it.
So perhaps the Mutant Overton Window is real, but what it does is accelerate polarization by accreting power at the extremes.
I can't put my finger on exactly how, but I think this topic ties into some of the problems with social media and politics. I'm guessing a lot of politicians who have come up in the last decade have done so in large part because of savvy use of social media. Pair that with party primaries being a larger concern than generals, and you get a lot of practical, political incentives to make Overton Window-ish extreme, clickbaity arguments. Then, to get along with the whole caucus once you're elected, this is a nice theory to rationalize your behavior. Which is basically what you said, but as applied specifically to politicians. The thing I then wonder about is... what are the politicians responding to once they're in office? Is it a fear of being primaried? Is it the tortured Overton Window logic you've described? Or... are they just kind of... brainwashed by twitter? I haven't seen a lot of takes on how social media incentives brainwash the public (or at least pervert and polarize public discourse), but I haven't seen it applied to politicians. There is this underlying assumption in most reporting that they're all both maximally cynical, but also reasonable under the veneer of public persona. Maybe many of them are just case studies for being the most brainwashed by social media, because catering to its algorithms has, in some cases, literally been the backbone of their careers. To them, the hearts seem proximate to what causes electoral victory. In fact, this seems to be the area wherein lies Biden's biggest strength (which, Matt, you've alluded to): he doesn't dunk on people. But, maybe more specifically, he doesn't feel the pressure to react on a near-instant social media timeline, and he doesn't seem to think that virality of approval among his "base" is an important precondition to success. My pet theory might be something like: 1) much of the news is entertainment, masquerading as news, and has an extreme negativity bias (e.g. the 4 post-vaccine COVID cases in OR) then 2) a very vocal, irrational contingent of activists consumes low-quality, one-sided content and forms unhinged views 3) early-career politicians can ride the wave of virality from #2 into relevance, and harness that relevance to create a political movement 4) Those politicians from #3 mistakenly (or not-mistakenly) think that the social media pandering that got them there will both keep them there or contribute to governing, or its just the only skill set they have and 5) more rational participants in the system use the Overton Window concept to build a coalition
And maybe in step 6) the people in #5 like the smell of their own farts so much that they justify the concept as being rational, vs. just cynical and expedient. And then in step 7) that messaging filters back to those in step #2, who already loved the smell of their farts and are now being told yes, others agree, your farts smell good. So they start farting louder, more often, and more publicly than before
Gun control seems to be a very strong argument against the Mutant Overton Window thesis. When activists push extreme positions on the issue (such as "abolish the second amendment"), it doesn't cause less extreme gun control measures to come off as more moderate. It just makes an unpopular take on the issue more salient, forcing risk-adverse politicians to run away from it, often by emphasizing their pro-gun bona fides.
I would almost argue the reverse: if you can take large amounts of guns out of the hands of Americans, you could have a meaningful impact on the homicide rate, so maybe it's worth pushing for. Small, moderate reforms--which I support--are often a waste of political capital on a hot button issue that really riles up 40% of the country. It's not feasible to abolish the second amendment, but it is a good policy on the merits.
I think one weird thing about this is that while people often claim that they’re trying to “push the Overton Window”, it’s rare to *actually* use the strategy you call the mutant Overton Window.
For example, people often talk about Bernie Sanders’ advocacy of single payer healthcare as an Overton Window thing. But Sanders clearly genuinely believes in it. He doesn’t actually only support a public option while pretending to support single payer.
Most people who advocate for things genuinely believe in them at least to some extent. It’s unusual to deliberately pretend you support something you actually oppose as some kind of a strategy.
I agree but I don't think that you read the same post I did, or you are just disagreeing regardless. Yggy's saying lots of people tolerate crazy ideas on their side of the debate ($50 minimum wage) because it makes their idea more likely to happen. That's a deliberate strategy that seems to describe what I see in many areas.
There's a difference between "tolerate" and "agree with", which I think is the key distinction here. I think there's a strong case that if you want a $15 minimum wage, you should tolerate the people who want $50--you shouldn't spend a lot of time debunking their arguments, you shouldn't vocally define yourself as "not one of those crazy $50 people". Instead, you should train your rhetorical fire on the people who favor $7.25 (or $0). I also think Matt disagrees with this case, and wants $15 people to spend a lot more time arguing with the $50 people.
You have the true believers but then you have all the apologists who aren’t true believers but do believe the true believers are helping the overall cause. These are typically the people doing the sanewashing (the true believers will actually say, e.g., “no, we really mean abolish capitalism/the police”). It’s a similar dynamic to “belief in belief” where the object level and the optics level get mixed together.
It’s interesting to consider the difference between steelmanning and sanewashing weak ideas in a context like this.
"But it’s worth asking yourself if you see anyone on the other side in that light."
That's the most important sentence in this piece. So much political rhetoric seems to be about convincing people who already agree with you.
There's also a big strain of paternalism in the general zeitgeist of, informed discourse right now. A lot of, "well, I can handle this information, but you have to be managed because, implicitly, you aren't smart enough to have the correct response."
which is why the "Clubhouse is problematic because there's not a good way for it to be factchecked" sentiment came to a head these last couple weeks
AKA, "Clubhouse is problematic because there's no way for me to step into your conversation and inform you whether you are correct or not."
I think that's why activists kept pushing defunding/abolishment despite not having significant support among most Black Americans. It really bugs me and it should be remembered as a paternalistic failure.
To me, this misses the real advantages of the concept of the Overton Window and misdiagnoses the problem with how people are thinking about it.
The original description of the Overton Window is meant to describe the range of acceptable public discourse, ideas that don't elicit visceral disgust (as Carlos Maza deftly illustrates). But David French makes a really great case in "Divided We Fall" that the discourse of the two parties has diverged so strongly, that each party is operating under separate Overton Windows that *don't even overlap anymore* on many topics. And each party spends so much time discussing and giving the benefit of the doubt to people at the far extremes of their own window, and distrusting anyone arguing from the moderate extreme of their own window as being potentially traitorous.
To me the problem is this asymmetry. If we could all be as open to thoughtful arguments from the moderate end of our own windows, or God forbid, thoughtful arguments from the other party, we could all expand our own windows. And when I say "your own window," I mean the range of policy ideas that you think have merit and are worth discussing. This leads to the second problem I see: We have a mental model of each choosing *A* position on a topic. An idea that there is an optimal solution, and we have found it due to our own logical prowess. I think the discourse would be a lot healthier if we made room for the possibility of a *range* of ideas that could work, and admitted it's hard to predict in advance which will be optimal, so a wide range of views collaborating in good faith is your best bet.
One final note to say that I probably give others the benefit of the doubt to a fault. I do not think there are all that many people running around advocating for ideas they secretly think are bad. I think there are people who feel energized by being able to understand and advocate for ideas that really push the envelope and get others thinking about problems in new ways, and I think the tendency is no less earnest on the right than the left. But again I may just be naive.
Romney's child allowance plan is a great example of a proposal that pushes the GOP window in the moderate direction. We need more things like this.
I like this comment a lot, but I’m not sure I understand how this relates to Matt’s criticism.
Part of the issue: In activist/academic circles it always seems to be OK, even encouraged, to go more and more radical. It makes people think you're taking the problem seriously and that you *get* that society is truly flawed/racist/oppressive. Advocate for "police reform" and get labeled a squish. Advocate for "defunding" or even better "abolition" and you're considered a serious ally.
Does it matter that the ideas are crazy? That they actually make things *less* likely that anything will happen? "No we're pushing the Overton Window".
As someone in academia I think that’s where a huge part of the problem lies. People are devoting a huge amount of their impressive education and intelligence to justifying ideas that don’t actually make sense—I know, I spent a lot of time doing this!—because that’s how you get cachet in those circles, not by advocating something common-sense and reasonable.
In academia itself, there's definitely an incentive to push more radical ideas, but you have to do it with well-defended arguments of the sort that people in your field recognize. It pays to be the person that everyone comes to when they want the weirdo position on the structure of epistemic justification, or the presence of phosphine in planetary atmospheres, or the role of retroviruses in human evolution.
But when academics step out of their specialties and into politics, they don't always keep to the well-defended arguments thing.
To be fair, a lot of the people who want "police reform" are actually squishes who just wish the whole issue would go away without having to change anything. How do you deal with that problem?
Call their bluff. Put legislation on the table and see if they are willing to support it. If they won't, then you have demonstrated that they don't really want anything to change.
In general, being suspicious that some people's hearts are not really into the policy they say they want does not seem like a problem that can be "dealt with" outside of that person's own head.
Legislative calendars are crowded and it's extremely hard to advance an issue to the point where it actually gets voted on, so this isn't a great solution IMHO (although I don't have a better one). Talk is cheap--a lot of legislators are willing to say "Sure, I support <good legislation x>" while not actually doing anything to advance it.
"Legislative calendars are crowded".
This seems like a solveable problem, though, have proper mechanisms to force motions off the agenda without which they eventually get to a vote.
For instance, allow "anti-sponsors" and if the legislation has more anti-sponsors than sponsors after X days, then it is dropped, and if it doesn't, then it automatically gets a vote.
This isn't my idea of course, but I suspect much of the donor class interest in this less about buying indulgences and more about pushing activist focus away from economic or class based issues.
Culture wars over racial issues are now sucking up most of the activist oxygen on the left and these are much less threatening to the donor class than fights about wealth redistribution, increasing the size/role of government, or making huge changes in the economy to protect the environment.
This reminds me of a negotiation class I took in grad school. They introduced the concept of anchoring... that in a negotiation, it’s often good to offer first and propose a number much better than you actually want. Saying “I’ll pay $5k” for the used car that’s worth $8k and that you’re willing to pay $7k for anchors the negotiation within a low range. The problem is that if you say “I’ll pay $2k” the person selling the car might just tell you to fuck off because you’re not a serious person.
I heard that at one point the highest priced wine at Chili's wasn't actually even stocked. If someone happened to ask for it, they said they were out. It was there just for the anchoring impact. Probably a myth but I like the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlg3H1StHpQ
Gosh that's brilliant and bringing back some damn painful memories from my 20s.
Many self-purported 'Overton Window shifters' have a very Trumpian 'Art of the Deal' view on negotiations and anchoring.
Yeah. It’s a balancing act. You don’t want to offer the worst deal you’d agree to up front, but you also shouldn’t give an offer that the other party to the negotiation will find completely ridiculous. Especially if it’s a situation where the other party can feasibly walk away from a deal.
Just a silly observation, but it seems the Overton Window of the Overton Window itself is shifting as a result of the Overton Window being observed and defined to begin with.
As predicted by quantum theory.
It's like the story/joke about a town in Ohio that always votes for the winning presidential candidate, so a campaign pours literally all of its resources into winning that town and is surprised when it subsequently loses the wider race.
When you are trying to persuade a person to support your policy position, it's good to emphasize the popular parts, and downplay the negative parts. What was weird to me about a lot of the Democratic policy debates, especially around 2019-2020, was that politicians would emphasize the unpopular parts of their proposal, like Bernie proudly declaring he would take private health insurance away from people who wanted it.
Insurance company costs are capped at 20% (thanks Obama!). Sure, the feds can do a better job (I think medicare is managed for like 5ish%?), but it's not the main cost driver. What IS politically unpopular and no one wants to honestly grapple with is that hospital spending will have to come down. This includes doctor pay, which isn't even in the mutant Overton window.
There is huge misunderstanding about what that 20% cap on costs means. That is the Medical Loss Ratio, which gets a bit complicated. It does not mean that there is a 20% profit margin, or even that 20% of insurance premiums go to insurance company costs.
A big chunk of that 20% goes to auditing, cost cutting measures and fraud detection. Medicare and Medicaid entities spend significantly less on this than other players. This is why Medicare and Medicaid fraud is a massive problem, but less of a problem in the ACA and ESHI space.
There is no indication that the feds can, or have, done a better job.
Thanks for the clarification, although just to be clear, that's why I said "costs" and not "profits". But you're right that even that has some ambiguity. My "thanks Obama" was not sarcastic!
I'm too lazy to look for data/studies on whether or not federally managed programs are more efficient than private insurance or not, but I think we're generally in agreement anyway: the insurance companies are not really the problem here.
One can look to federal funding of higher education through student loans and the eventual (consequent?) dramatic increase in tuition as an example of what happens when money is flowing without cost controls.
I think that’s essentially true, and education is a good parallel.
There are a bunch of ways to screw things up, but probably the worst is to have a complex essential service run by private profit seeking entities who can charge market rates and still receive federal money spent by the states with no effective oversight from anyone. That way the left blames the problem on corporations, the right blames the problem on socialism, and no one focuses on fixing the problem.
I don’t think the public really supports cutting doctor pay. Doctors are one of the most trusted professions around. Doctors have effective lobbying *and* they’re widely considered sympathetic by the public.
There’s a reason why single payer advocates focus so heavily on private insurance companies as the villain.
I wonder if eliminating the cost of medical school (within a capped enrollment) and helping doctors with debt to pay it down in return for lower billing rates, would help?
No, but the doctors will lobby and the public will support the government paying more, so there won't actually be any cost savings there.
Sure, knocking 15% off costs is a big deal; my only point is if we did it, we'd still have *much* more expensive health care than most (all?) other countries. Your point is fair, that many organizers are probably aware of these challenges, but I don't recall it being a major point of discussion (or maybe I just wasn't paying attention!).
… and, yup, someone has subtracted the 20% ACA MLR from the 5% Medicare admin cost and concluded that there is 15% cost savings from single payer. Apples and Oranges.
There is no indication whatsoever that that kind of cost savings are remotely possible. There have been numerous attempts to have state actors compete with private insurance, just has there have been numerous attempts to have private companies manage Medicare and Medicaid.
Neither monopsony nor the market can magically fix things.
I absolutely didn't mean to give the impression I took those numbers as gospel. Really, I should have said "up to 15%". I was just granting the most extreme possibility to demonstrate that it doesn't address even a majority of the cost difference.
Thinking in terms of percentages is misleading. If you do less to limit unnecessary and overpriced care, the percentage related to administrative costs goes down, but that's not a good thing.
"I think putting more of healthcare under federal government control would redound to cost controls being more likely though."
I would really like to understand why you think that. Could you provide me a couple of examples where government run programs cost less than private versions or they took over something and costs went down?
Private insurance has a cap on what it spends - it has to bring in enough money to cover it. Government spending is not so limited. In fact, for many other causes, people prefer the government to take over things because it pays more!
I think you can have a good argument for M4A being able to provide universal insurance. I have no faith in the government being able to restrain costs because I don't see them being able to resist lobbying from any politically sensitive group demanding more spending on their care whether it is rationale or not. E.g. Medicare currently spends ridiculous amounts of money on cancer care that has very poor quantity or quality of life return per dollar spent.
How do these good M4A organizers talk about this issue?
So separate from the actual Medicare for All debate which definitely needs it own's SB post ... I've read the polls a bit different here. I think people have very positive views of their *own* insurance. From this and from an incrementalist view, a public option makes a lot of sense and I hope we can move on it this year.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-want-the-health-care-system-to-change-just-not-their-own-health-care/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcare-quite-positively.aspx
The polling has always been very clear. Single payer and M4A are popular in the abstract, but the details of specific plans are politically toxic.
This is probably because ESHI has created perverse incentives and no one has figured out how to implement it with MASSIVE regressive consequences.
Given that it has been politically popular with leftists AND centrists for the last fifty years, and that is (supposedly) is cheaper than our current system, how ELSE would you explain why it hasn’t happened yet? Omnipotent evil insurance companies?
What Bernie did that was completely revolutionary is to propose M4A, but absolutely REFUSE to provide any details on how it could be accomplished. Genius.
I'm not sure I follow some of these questions exactly ... but I don't support M4A, I think polling indicates people want to keep their private insurance, and in a post below outline how I really like my insurance company (BCBS of IL).
I would like to provide a solution to all uninsured children and where possible incrementally expand M&M.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/uninsured-rate-for-children-in-2018.html
Yeah… I agree something incremental is the best (possibly only) way forward.
My fantasy solution would be:
Implement ACA 2.0, fix the donut hole, allow Medicaid expansion in all States, and extend CHIP to everyone under 18. Everyone in the US should be able to afford to buy health insurance.
Spend the next decade implementing a national public option, build national data reporting standards, and standardize data exchange. Everyone should have choice of insurance company.
Build standardized rules for provider networks, and allow them to be open. All insurance providers should be able to support the same provider networks at the same price. Everyone should have to option of keeping their doctor and hospitals, even if they change plans or quit their job.
Send a yearly check to all legal US residents who have a specified level of health care coverage, regardless of provider, to help cover health care costs. If there is any money left over at the end of the year, it is yours to keep. Allow automatic same day health insurance enrollment at your doctors office for the uninsured, regardless of pre-existing condition or health status. Cover everyone, and reward people for helping keep prices low.
It’s a myth, in this case. Some health insurance lobbyists made a killer attack ad 26 years ago, and everyone still believes in the power of the insurance lobby.
Last time I crunched the numbers, the total profits for all private ESHI companies per year is roughly that of the American chocolate industry. They tried to put together a lobbying effort to counter M4A in the primaries, but it never got off the ground due to lack of funding or interest.
Health Insurance execs were terrified of Biden or Buttigieg’s ACA plans. Wall Street was terrified of Elizabeth Warren. Neither of them were bothered by Bernie and M4A.
I actually think it was a MOW advocacy and that's precisely the reason you saw AOC try and pivot to saying the quiet part out loud ("guys, we won't get M4A anytime soon so we will have to settle for a public option") and also why many leaders in the Leftist / DSA crowds are trying to turn on her with the whole #ForceTheVote fiasco....
It really all depends on how seriously you consider the transition timelines as proposed in current bills which are drafted to get Bernie elected, not drafted to fix downstream effects of M4A passing...
If M4A passing as is lead to a bunch of health industry folks losing jobs and this prolong Republicans in power because of otherwise avoidable / foreseeable downstream consequences of a transition to single payer...it might actually *be* worse.
Additionally, imagine giving everyone “access” to free health care... but then not doing anything to address supply constraints and the blowback that might come from that. You can easily see how it could be worse.
Obama basically dealt with this with the ACA and managed to stave off a 2012 loss and repeal...but none of that was ever guaranteed.
I would agree, except none of the “wonky math stuff” arguments for M4A that I have read are remotely reality based. The most reality-based argument I have seen was Warren’s plan, and even that was a total hot mess with toxic side effects.
Most of them misunderstand the medical loss ratio and assume that running ESHI through CMS gives a 20% cost savings, assume unrealistic progressive taxation or weird economy tricks, then double count the savings until the math kinda works on aggregate.
Even though they all do the same things, none of them are the “official” M4A plan. There is never anything that can be officially scored.
It’s a con.
The net effect is a “bad” Overton window. We spend all our time debating fantasy plans, leaving no space to build support for ACTUAL progressive health care.
To be specific, by “reality based” I mean a specific plan with enough details for people to understand how it would affect them. Ideally, it would have enough detail that it could be scored by the CBO.
There is no legislative barrier to getting a CBO score. Bernie could put it together with his own staff, even if Schumer doesn’t like it.
Warren showed that any plan that is sufficiently detailed is politically toxic.
HR 1387 doesn’t count. I think it is saying that we should eliminate private insurance, then hire some expert to fix things. I think they planned on hiring Hillary.
I don’t think Bernie actually cares that there is no plan, since it would require a revolution to pass.
It should be obvious that I am actually rather bitter about M4A. I spent a long time working in health care and insurance infrastructure trying to position myself for ACA 2.0. I figured Hillary had the chops to make a big push towards data standardization and reporting, which would lay the groundwork for national public option.
Trump delayed that, but I figured M4A would shake out before 2019 and there would be a big push for ACA 2.0 in the primaries. That didn’t happen. Although Biden has a pretty solid plan the progressive wing is not going to go all out for a non-M4A solution. There is no way anything big is going to happen without a strong united push, and that’s not going to happen this decade.
I gave up. I’m now in *shudder* fintech. At least the money is better.
From the conversations I’ve had with the "Bernie-sphere M4A advocacy”, they appear to believe the following:
Achieving M4A would be more progressive that the current system.
Incremental progress towards M4A makes the system incrementally more progressive.
Changes to the current system that do not lead to M4A are “small-bore” and “incremental”, and are not massively progressive.
M4A is primarily opposed by a “political economy of incumbent political forces that halt progress.”
Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies oppose M4A because they are interested in profit rather than helping people.
Passing M4A is a political problem, not a technical problem.
There is no point in discussing concrete plans for M4A, since it can’t actually be passed in the current political environment.
M4A advocates have a better understanding of health care than an average member of the public.
The general public can’t understand nuanced policy ideas about health care.
All of these, I believe, are completely false.
There are ways to make radical progressive changes to health care. They appear small bore, since the only way to fix the system is through incremental changes.
For the most part, all the players are genuinely trying to do the right thing. I’ve worked with a lot health insurance people, and all of them decided to work in health care because they wanted to help people. They were all underpaid, overworked, and desperately trying to keep things from exploding.
I recall one retired VP from UHC that I met at a woodshop who had spent his career as a small cog doing the same type of provider network deals. I happened to know about that part of the business, and mentioned a couple of people I’d met who were able to keep their doctor when they lost their job because of those type of deals. The guy actually started crying, because no one had ever told him that what he did actually helped people.
Every M4A advocate I’ve met has implied that the general public is not interested in policy nuance. But most people have an extremely solid understanding of their own health care situation, and are laser focused on changes that affect them personally.
Most of the libertarians I’ve met complain that the general public would agree with them if they understood basic economics. But their understanding of economics is blinded by their dogma, and they seem to have a worse understanding then average. Same Dunning Kruger process.
Totally agree MfA advocacy is good and Biden shifted left on healthcare because of it.
I'm more responding to these two arguments - and maybe I'm being overly narrow here: (1) "People don't have positive views of private insurance companies" and (2) "private insurance is bad".
Those two feel like the mutant version: (1) seems incorrect and (2) is debatable - there's an efficient market reason to pool risk even if the current structure is perverse.
Probably best to save most of this for - hopefully - a post on Biden's healthcare plan ... which there's been sadly crickets about from the administration.
I - personally - wouldn't draw much distinction between those two statements. I really like the access my insurance provides - it's world class (e.g., Prentice Hospital). Any structural disruption would only create downside risk.
On the insurance market side ... I don't have any data. I guess I would first question if cost is a primary objective. I'd focus more on access. In that respect, it's a bit of pick your position .... Do you want private insurance or private doctors / hospitals? I think insurance better pools risk and provides greater access. My last two GPs have gone fully private. They don't accept any insurance. Just a flat annual fee. My friends just chose to have their baby at a private hospital in London for a number of reasons but perceived better care was one of them.
I think it can make sense to try to convince people that private insurance is not helping us out relative to what public insurance would do. A *political candidate* taking that position before people are convinced of that premise is putting the cart before the horse, though.
Thank you for this! The more general rule here: don't play armchair psychologist with voters. Don't tell everyone masks aren't effective because you're worried they'll otherwise panic buy all the supplies. Don't try to wax poetic on what the internal motivations of your opponents are ("cling to guns and religion," "47%," "deplorables," etc.). And don't think you can do some sort of political jiu jitsu, where you push bad ideas hoping that some combination of momentum and political process will turn them into good policies.
I think this is a really good argument for saying what you sincerely mean and not making comments about the internal motivations of opponents -- it helps support trust for you and it avoids alienating the small fraction of opponent supporters who are persuadable.
Interesting almost-reversal from just a couple of years ago: https://i.imgur.com/7quUIlz.png
The wiggle room you have is that the tweet says "gain power" which in this post you've noted is not what actually happens when truly insane ideas are pushed.
Text for accessibility purposes:
@mattyglesias: "Exactly!
I want the US policy status quo to move left, so I want wrong right-wing ideas to be discredited while wrong left-wing ideas gain power. There is a strong strategic logic to this it's not random hypocrisy."
I hope, based on this article, that Matt simply disavows that tweet and thinks he was wrong, not that he has some hair splitting equivocation about how that's still right.
Also possible that the flawed left-wing arguments in 2019 were more akin to "Amazon pays no tax and owes the treasury billions" and "The government is subsidising Walmart through tax credits" rather than "we should abolish the police".
Wait what? Walmart paying its rank-and-file employees so little (while making corporate profits) that they qualify for all sorts of government programs... that's a flawed argument? Explain.
First, Walmart actually pays hourly employees close to 2x federal minimum wage (yes, even in states without higher state minimums), I'm not sure why they're always the target in conversations like this.
Second, is the implication that welfare programs are inherently corporate subsidies? How else should I read the complaint that a low-wage worker is eligible for government programs? Isn't the point of anti-poverty policy to take people's situation before the policy, add resources, and improve their situation?
Is there any good reason to think that Walmart is paying their employees less than they are worth?
I am intrigued to see if Matt responds to that. Obviously he had a lot more pressure to accept dumb leftwing ideas a couple years ago than he does now.
Aside from any professional motivations, it’s also remarkable what we’ll find ourselves endorsing in the heat of a social media argument.
Yeah, absolutely. We all find ourselves saying things that we don't quite believe on sober reflection in the middle of a debate.
I think its also possible that he had an empirical belief that was discredited and he no longer believes it, the former being discredited by something like the police reform debate last summer.
It seems to me Matt was probably referring to leftist ideas which are bad but politically popular. One can recognize that those ideas are bad but still want them to be implemented because (a) they're less bad than mistaken right-wing policies; (b) they help win elections so you get more of the good stuff and (c) they're a somewhat inevitable consequence of Democrats winning strong governing majorities, which is the thing we should be working for.
The mutant Overton Window strategy seems to be about pushing leftist ideas which are both bad *and* unpopular. There's no inconsistency in Matt's objecting to that approach
There is wiggle room as I noted. Taking the wiggle room is an easy choice in today's political climate. It is still a choice, and it will be interesting no matter what choice Matt takes (including not responding).
The most obvious explanation for Sanders' success in moving the Democrats left is that he got lefties to get over that "People like us are too pure to be part of something as corrupt as electoral politics" attitude that they had in the Occupy era and actually participate in it. Amazing they have so much more clout that way.
One Billion Americans struck me as a mutant Overton frame for more kids and immigrants.
I feel like a lot of Matt's critics thought that (especially from the left) but the book is quite honest this would be a good idea to get to but it will take a while and is hard to do. Similarly, Caplan's Open Borders book is also a book where the author acknowledges that his actually good idea may not be possible but doesn't make the idea any less right.
Agree - I read the book, and it is clearly a good faith argument, not a postiure.
Doesn't time frame matter here? Getting there in 20 years would require full, no-questions-asked open borders, but laying the groundwork so that we could have a billion in 50 or 100 years would require expanding immigration, housing supply, and family leave benefits, all of which are good ideas.
No-questions-asked open borders would not be nearly _enough_ to do it in 20 years. Everyone freaks out about potential logistical constraints to immigration on the _destination_ side, but rarely stops to think about constraints on the _departure_ side, which are much, much higher!
The largest cross-border migratory event in _all of human history_ was the partition of India. Quite possibly the greatest humanitarian disaster ever, partition involved the involuntary, at-gunpoint relocation of...
...20 million people, across a relatively nearby land border.
The largest _voluntary_ cross-border migration was the Italian disapora of 1880-1915, which involved 13 million people over the course of 35 years to a variety of destinations. (The _entire_ Irish diaspora since 1700 is not quite 10 million.)
Presuming that we are _not_ going to deliberately engineer a worse disaster than the partition of India to attempt to convince people to immigrate to the USA, we can _very_ safely assume that even given a return to entirely open borders that we would top out at a much lower number than that.
Emigrating is hard: it require money, it requires a willingness to leave the place where your family and social circles are, and it requires faith in one's ability to flourish in your new country. Even the most welcoming destination in the world struggles to overcome those limits, and even in relative great waves of immigration it's entirely possible for market forces to provide adequate housing etc on the receiving end as long as you don't do anything stupid like making that illegal.
Point taken. My point was that 1 billion is an aspirational, long term goal and that the steps it would take to get there are things we should be doing anyway.
in 50 or 100 years, "A billion's not what it used to be."
It's a polemical title to attract attention to (frame?) a book about good (earnestly believed?) policy changes that would increase the number of americans.
Presumably different than what's discussed here.
I think the mutant Overton Window approach is more effective on those who already broadly agree with you, and can have the opposite effect on those who don't.
Sure, support for immigration is at an all time high because Trump drove most Dems and a plurality of Independents running in the other direction, but the GOP is as anti-immigration as ever.
Similarly, while Defund the Police is not in mainstream vogue as much as it was this summer, and stodgy Democratic leadership is strenuously avoiding have to talk about it, you don't exactly see Democrats disavowing it either, largely for fear of blowback from the left. If you polled Democrats secretly, I am sure most would say DtP is on net harmful, but ask them on the record and they would give a non-answer that would hedge against left blowback, if not outright endorse it.
So perhaps the Mutant Overton Window is real, but what it does is accelerate polarization by accreting power at the extremes.
I can't put my finger on exactly how, but I think this topic ties into some of the problems with social media and politics. I'm guessing a lot of politicians who have come up in the last decade have done so in large part because of savvy use of social media. Pair that with party primaries being a larger concern than generals, and you get a lot of practical, political incentives to make Overton Window-ish extreme, clickbaity arguments. Then, to get along with the whole caucus once you're elected, this is a nice theory to rationalize your behavior. Which is basically what you said, but as applied specifically to politicians. The thing I then wonder about is... what are the politicians responding to once they're in office? Is it a fear of being primaried? Is it the tortured Overton Window logic you've described? Or... are they just kind of... brainwashed by twitter? I haven't seen a lot of takes on how social media incentives brainwash the public (or at least pervert and polarize public discourse), but I haven't seen it applied to politicians. There is this underlying assumption in most reporting that they're all both maximally cynical, but also reasonable under the veneer of public persona. Maybe many of them are just case studies for being the most brainwashed by social media, because catering to its algorithms has, in some cases, literally been the backbone of their careers. To them, the hearts seem proximate to what causes electoral victory. In fact, this seems to be the area wherein lies Biden's biggest strength (which, Matt, you've alluded to): he doesn't dunk on people. But, maybe more specifically, he doesn't feel the pressure to react on a near-instant social media timeline, and he doesn't seem to think that virality of approval among his "base" is an important precondition to success. My pet theory might be something like: 1) much of the news is entertainment, masquerading as news, and has an extreme negativity bias (e.g. the 4 post-vaccine COVID cases in OR) then 2) a very vocal, irrational contingent of activists consumes low-quality, one-sided content and forms unhinged views 3) early-career politicians can ride the wave of virality from #2 into relevance, and harness that relevance to create a political movement 4) Those politicians from #3 mistakenly (or not-mistakenly) think that the social media pandering that got them there will both keep them there or contribute to governing, or its just the only skill set they have and 5) more rational participants in the system use the Overton Window concept to build a coalition
And maybe in step 6) the people in #5 like the smell of their own farts so much that they justify the concept as being rational, vs. just cynical and expedient. And then in step 7) that messaging filters back to those in step #2, who already loved the smell of their farts and are now being told yes, others agree, your farts smell good. So they start farting louder, more often, and more publicly than before
defund the Sunrise Movement
> But that’s the slow boring of hard boards, not an arbitrary framing effect.
Hey look it’s the name of the thing!
Gun control seems to be a very strong argument against the Mutant Overton Window thesis. When activists push extreme positions on the issue (such as "abolish the second amendment"), it doesn't cause less extreme gun control measures to come off as more moderate. It just makes an unpopular take on the issue more salient, forcing risk-adverse politicians to run away from it, often by emphasizing their pro-gun bona fides.
I would almost argue the reverse: if you can take large amounts of guns out of the hands of Americans, you could have a meaningful impact on the homicide rate, so maybe it's worth pushing for. Small, moderate reforms--which I support--are often a waste of political capital on a hot button issue that really riles up 40% of the country. It's not feasible to abolish the second amendment, but it is a good policy on the merits.
I think one weird thing about this is that while people often claim that they’re trying to “push the Overton Window”, it’s rare to *actually* use the strategy you call the mutant Overton Window.
For example, people often talk about Bernie Sanders’ advocacy of single payer healthcare as an Overton Window thing. But Sanders clearly genuinely believes in it. He doesn’t actually only support a public option while pretending to support single payer.
Most people who advocate for things genuinely believe in them at least to some extent. It’s unusual to deliberately pretend you support something you actually oppose as some kind of a strategy.
I agree but I don't think that you read the same post I did, or you are just disagreeing regardless. Yggy's saying lots of people tolerate crazy ideas on their side of the debate ($50 minimum wage) because it makes their idea more likely to happen. That's a deliberate strategy that seems to describe what I see in many areas.
There's a difference between "tolerate" and "agree with", which I think is the key distinction here. I think there's a strong case that if you want a $15 minimum wage, you should tolerate the people who want $50--you shouldn't spend a lot of time debunking their arguments, you shouldn't vocally define yourself as "not one of those crazy $50 people". Instead, you should train your rhetorical fire on the people who favor $7.25 (or $0). I also think Matt disagrees with this case, and wants $15 people to spend a lot more time arguing with the $50 people.
You have the true believers but then you have all the apologists who aren’t true believers but do believe the true believers are helping the overall cause. These are typically the people doing the sanewashing (the true believers will actually say, e.g., “no, we really mean abolish capitalism/the police”). It’s a similar dynamic to “belief in belief” where the object level and the optics level get mixed together.
It’s interesting to consider the difference between steelmanning and sanewashing weak ideas in a context like this.