There is the additional factor that right-leaning audiences have a complete, self-reinforcing media ecosystem to lure them away from the mainstream. Every defenestration at the NY Times or Facebook suppression of a story about Hunter Biden shunts more right-of-center media consumers to Earth 2.0. That phenomenon is working in the same direction as educational polarization.
I am currently in the only Republican congressional district in a blue state and it is very, very Trumpy. Very Trumpy. Like, sub-contractors go out of their way to tell you how Trumpy they are when they show up for a job, you know, just that's clear to my ECCO-wearing ass up front.
IMHO mainstream media outlets are totally unaware of just how alienating they can be to non-urban, non-diehard-liberals. (For the own-the-libs side of the coin, The Fox News Cinematic Universe, that is a feature, not a bug.) On paper, I am the exact demographic that the NY Times et al. is pursuing, yet I don't read it at all because it feels like a liberal echo chamber where city-dwelling millennials with liberal arts degrees vigorously inhale their own farts and then write condescending articles about how I am a bad person because I don't understand the subtle bouquet of artisanal fart-smell.
I read my local paper and a few substacks of differing ideological viewpoints. So, to me, there is no upside of education polarization because it isn't translating to cultural power, it is just empowering bad ideas from the left the way right-wing media translates into virtue-signalling legislation in Texas.
A recent example: Andrew Sullivan interviewed Brihana Joy on his podcast and it was delightful to hear two ridiculously intelligent people bat ideas around. That is the cultural hegemony I want; core liberal values of empiricism, debate and free speech. But when Andrew pointed out that 'defund the police' was a brilliant slogan to sweep Trumpy Republicans into power, Joy sternly lectured him, asserting that 'defund the police' actually means 'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community' and that he was willfully misunderstanding 'the movement'. Then she played the race card. In other words, fuck you for not adopting our faculty lounge lexicon of literal irony where words mean their opposite; also, you're racist.
To me, that is what the cultural hegemony of education polarization is delivering; a lefty purity spiral that aggressively and gleefully sics the Thought Police on anyone who deviates even slightly from The Party. That is the highly-educated mirror image of the dumb righty purity spiral that demands absolute fealty to the alternate reality where Trump won in 2020 and Democrats are a whisker from implementing full-blown socialist totalitarianism using Jewish space lasers and Italian satellites.
The commitment to using the right language rather than delivering the right results seems like the natural conclusion to the Twitterification of left-of-center society. It can be very challenging and require a lot of nuance to explain how some desirable individual outcome (say, a college degree, or home ownership) is seeing increased representation among some historically disadvantaged demographic.
Using the new in-term "equity" rather than "equality", and shouting at those who don't know the current correct codeword, correctly signals to those you want to signal to, and it fits easily into 140 characters.
I find that phenomenon deeply frustrating. If you really want to advocate for a cause, then you should use whatever language is necessary to build broad public support, not retweets. You know, like calling deficit-financed tax-cuts for the rich "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act". It isn't hard! And once the public experiences good policy, they will start punishing the party that wants to take it away. But no, we don't want to stick a fake horn on a pony, we want an actual unicorn and we're totally fine with pony genocide if we don't get our way, because the pony blood will be on your hands, you gendered-pronoun-using monster!
There is a chance that the Democrats drift from today's mostly-genuine commitment to pluralism and a broad-based middle class economy, albeit tinted with a neo-Puritanical version of middle class propriety, to running on nothing but the latter.
At which point they look like a Latin American liberal party, and the GOP starts looking like Fidesz or the PSUV, and we're into "uh-oh" territory.
One or another of the parties is going to come to represent working class interests. It's just a matter of whether they understand that mandate more like FDR or more like Hugo Chavez. Given the GOP's divorce from scientific expertise, evidence-based policy, and consensus/pluralism, I cannot conceive of them taking populism in a productive direction.
The GOP is a lost cost, for sure. The question is not whether or not Democrats can work with Republicans, it is whether they can deliver sufficient electoral shellackings that the GOP throws Trumpism overboard.
I totally agree that, in order to do that, Democrats need to figure out how to convey their commitment to pluralism and a broad-based middle class economy to voters. Right now the opposite is happening.
Tucker Carlson is branding the Democratic Party as foot soldiers for The Squad every night while social media reinforces that narrative with no push-back because liberals are too busy fighting with each other about when the country was founded. Meanwhile, elected Democrats are having public fights over SALT deductions—not exactly a great look to working-class voters—while beltway media vilifies centrists Democrats and attacks the Biden Administration for not reversing every, single policy enacted by the Trump Administration, no matter how popular they are with non-college educated / working-class / minority voters. And their messaging? "Nevermind the bi-partisan bill we already passed to fix roads and bridges, we're going to spend $3.5 trillion on asdlkjhasfiounwacv!"
Even when the Democrats are talking about popular shit, they keep wording it as if it should be unpopular. "We're going to lower the cost of drugs" somehow morphs, in certain circles, into "We'll make drugs more available to historically marginalized populations." FFS, poor white voters *are* a marginalized population, just perhaps not *quite* as marginalized as poor black voters are.
There's certainly no contest between the poor white voter who can't get their kid's diabetes under control because they can't afford insulin and the rich black voter who risks getting shot when the cops pull them over for no reason. And I don't mean that in the sense of "one is clearly worse," I mean it in the sense of "we can solve both, they don't need to jockey for priority with one another."
God forbid we use inclusive and hopeful rhetoric when confronting entrenched problems, instead of encouraging the electorate to think in terms of what's in it for their own narrow demographic slice. Solidarity is a necessary precursor to making life better for all of us, but since we're now home to a bunch of upper-middle class professionals who're here only to seek tribal reasons to look down on other people, we just can't make it stick.
As for the media... the fundamental problem of news media is that we pay full-timers jackshit to pontificate on weighty matters, instead of paying experts well to loan some of their time to discuss them. The overwhelming majority of the people who can afford to get into that gig are the scions of the professional and upper classes, and they mostly don't actually want to put the work in to understand complex issues well enough to be able to distill them to the audience. The state of reporting on the three topics for which I'm a passable subject matter expert (Chinese political economy, mega-project economics, and AEC process automation) is absolute, miserable, could-not-be-worse-if-actively-trying BULLSHIT. I assume that extends to everything else.
Of course, because the media draws its workforce from the same demographics as the new Democratic base, its biases mean that even when it's trying to be even-handed, it's ham-fisted about it.
Just as an example of the former issue, if there were experts in the media who actually spent time writing about what "asdlkjhasfiounwacv" is, we'd be in golden shape, because most of it is popular among working class voters of all stripes.
At the same time, they would have to avoid the IDpol framing for that to come across effectively to all audiences, and I'm not confident that even genuine SMEs could do that now, since it's almost required for academia.
"We'll make drugs more available to historically marginalized populations" perfectly captures the seemingly deliberate effort of Democrats and liberals to write attack ads against their own policies by injecting virtue signalling into absolutely everything. And I blame the Twitter Thought Police for that.
Republicans and conservatives are super good at this game—they routinely sponsor legislation that is nothing but virtue signalling. The difference is that the "Democrats want to raise your taxes so they can kill babies" energizes their base, while "historically marginalized people" drives a wedge between white college-educated liberals and historically marginalized people. How many focus groups do they need to figure out that the latter group tends to finds that language pointless and condescending?
I cannot wrap my head around the zeal with which Democrats and liberals rush to make own-goals with their messaging. Worse, when they get booed for it, they escort the dissenting fans from the stadium and tell them that they are part of the problem.
My expertise is in esoteric science stuff that was rarely reported on. That was before the pandemic. Now I encounter the same phenomenon as you—every time I see a good-faith journalistic effort to explain science to the masses, key details are missing, misunderstood or totally wrong. But that's ok, because they get the contours right and I'm not the target audience. What I don't like is how some substacks then use those journalistic efforts to criticize the liberal-media-industrial-complex by ascribing some nefarious purpose to the uneven spots in what is very difficult reporting.
"How many focus groups do they need to figure out that the latter group tends to finds that language pointless and condescending?"
"We" know this. The DNC knows this, most of the party understands it, and the leadership certainly does. But the Democratic Party is not a monolith, and it's just not possible to shut up the very large part of the wokeist faction for whom the snark, condescension, and feelings of superiority *are the point.* Just because they're "on our side" doesn't mean we share so much as a single motivating factor, or that they're right.
I occasionally wonder if we shouldn't simply spin off an urban/woke party and use it the same way the Canadian Liberals use the NDP, as a foil to highlight their sensible centrist bona fides, even as they govern with an informal confidence-and-supply arrangement. But again, if we could ram that through, we'd also be able to exert messaging discipline, and we can't.
"I cannot wrap my head around the zeal with which Democrats and liberals rush to make own-goals with their messaging"
Well... hard to do otherwise when a significant fraction of (loud) Democrats are in this solely for tribalistic kicks, nothing more. There is no avoiding that, and I'm not sure that the problems it causes can be solved or even mitigated very much. Without a full-court press to marginalize and silence those people, at least... and the Democrats simply don't have the ability to stare down half their donor base, say "Give us money and STFU already," and get on with it.
As for the media... I'm less charitable than you, because in my three sectors everything is still wrong in entirely predictable ways that the media has been told about for a decade or more.
As far as I can tell, a typical reporter just isn't brilliant but thinks they are, finds it very hard to swallow or even understand their own biases, and many have family money propping them up while their "career develops." There's no reason to do better, and their corporate masters have financial incentives that make their reporting even worse.
There are exceptions; many are found in obscure topic-specific publications or here on Substack.
Overall, I'm not sure the problems posed by the current alignment are solvable for Democrats. I suspect the only way out is to lose and for the GOP to fail to solve problems. That will speed the ongoing realignment quite handily.
If I'm right, the party system will continue shifting in a way that eventually makes the woke people less important. That, IMO, will initially redound to the benefit of the GOP, who may actually create a durable majority *without cheating* but be unable to govern effectively, and probably eventually to the Democrats, who will spend a long time in the wilderness purging the idiots while the GOP screws everything up, so that they can sweep back into power.
While the GOP would *love* to turn the US into a one-party state, the mechanisms are just not there, and I doubt they can do much more than give themselves (in current form) a few percentage points of lean in the House to match the ones in the EC and Senate.
If the party system shifts a lot, that will all be for naught.
There's a weird asymmetry there. Every crazy thing uttered by any self-proclaimed liberal or Democrat gets sucked into the right-wing media vortex, glowered about ad nauseum and irrevocably associated with the "D" next to a politician's name. I am always astonished by the ability of your median Trumper to rattle off the same, exact set of "ten crazy things liberals believe" at the drop of a hat.
For some reason, when Republicans—all the way up to His Orangeness—say completely batshit crazy stuff, up to and including direct threats of violence against individual voters, it gets repeated everywhere from late night to podcasts to newspapers to cable news to exactly zero effect.
The marginal voters who decide elections now seem to weigh "that one time AOC wore a dress that said 'Tax The Rich'" against literal threats to overthrow the government violently and decide that they'll just stay home on election day because they didn't get a pony. And I think that Matt's post gets at the reason for that. The mainstream media / discourse / national conversation / etc. is increasingly college-educated liberals talking to each other. They are just incapable of talking in a way that the median democratic voter that Matt always talks about (the non-college-educated white guy in his 50's) takes seriously.
I actually never realized that so many journalists were, in fact, trust fund kids trying to find themselves. It used to be the opposite—journalists used to be hungry and needed to do good reporting to, you know, earn a paycheck and keep the lights on. But through the magic of podcasts, I get glimpses into the backgrounds of journalists (many of whom I respect a great deal). It seems that they come in three flavors; the gruff old reporter who worked their way up from the mail room, the trust fund kid trying to prove something to mom and dad and the sad-sack millennial who can barely make rent and resents the other two flavors.
Wow, you said everything I wanted in that comment with wit and the right touch of polemic.
I would just add the controlling the commanding heights of the culture only goes so far. It doesn't actually control the culture.
And self-assured arrogance always - always - causes a reactionary response. And a big part of that reactionary response can be boiled down to the lyrical refrain in Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name" - "fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me"
I partially agree, but you can and do hear from the NYT that what most people mean by "defund the police" or more generally who want to see policing changed (I'll bet "defund the Police" has been uttered more times on Fox that in the NYT) IS "'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community." You would never hear that on Fox.
Anytime your slogan needs a detailed explanation for what it actually means...you've picked a bad slogan and should pick a new one. I've never understood why they didn't coop the pledge and choose "with liberty and justice for all" or even just "justice for all." Would have tied Fox hosts in knots trying to explain how the pledge was now bad.
They can say what they want, but when proggo bastions like San Francisco can’t keep Walgreens open because they have no will to police “victimless property crimes”, people will call BS.
I lived in a social democratic country for over a decade. It had it all; super high taxes, robust social programs, excellent public transportation, universal health care... and one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world, partly because they decriminalized petty crimes. In fact, if someone breaks into your home, you are supposed to let them take what they want and then file an insurance claim. (It will be denied if you didn't maintain your locks property.) If you try to interfere, you can be charged with assault. Ditto for shoplifting; ask them to put back the merchandise and if they don't, report it to the police, but do not intervene.
Now, I'm not saying those policies would work in the US, particularly because of the vast difference in gun laws, but not policing victimless property crimes can actually work just fine as a policy. It is not as crazy as Fox News makes it out to be. Nor is it as frictionless as they make it sound in 'proggo bastions'.
Once, an American friend of mine came home (to the house that he owned) and found his girlfriend (who didn't live with him) in bed with another man. He told the guy to get out of his house before he beat the shit out of him. The guy refused and said it was his right to be there. My friend proceeded to remove him from his home, with violence. The guy called the cops, who arrested my friend for assault and began deportation proceedings. It is quite a bit different than the "I can shoot you in the face if you knock on my door in a way I don't like" American attitude towards private property!
Frankly, despite being well to the left of the median American, I find that absolutely obscene and would never willingly reside in a country with that legal framework. How the hell am I to know at a glance whether someone poses a threat only to my property or to my life and those of my family?
Sure, I understand the incidence of violent crime to be considerably lower in most of Europe, but even so, I simply cannot know if the person prowling my kitchen is looking for my jewelry and wallet, or looking for my wife who he's been stalking for months.
It is entirely moral and good that anyone in that situation should receive a very, very strong benefit of the doubt, such that the onus in any legal setting should be on the intruder (or authorities) to prove they posed no threat to life or limb.
If I find someone breaking into my home in the middle of the night, I'm shooting them and asking questions after.
If I feel secure enough, they might get a yelled warning to get out before I shoot them, but if I can't tell they're armed or not, I'm going to shoot them with no warning and will not feel much remorse.
Was his "visitor" correct in that he had a legal right to be there? Or was the expectation that your friend would call the police to have a trespasser removed?
Well, the type of crime is important in that comparison. Petty crimes like burglary, vandalism and pickpocketing are rampant. But where I was, there was virtually no violent crime. In the 12 years I was there, the entire province had zero murders. And in the cities (and this is true of much of Western Europe) violent crime mostly happens in the immigrant ghettos, i.e., the neighborhoods next to train tracks that are covered in satellite dishes all pointing the same direction.
You are 100% correctly that social democratic policy only works in homogeneous populations, which is a key detail that American socialists do not understand. People are only ok paying super-high taxes for super-great social benefits if they see those benefits as going to "people like me". (Those uber-progressive social policies also came with a very conservative and coercive culture, which is a byproduct of homogeneity.) The influx of Muslim and African immigrants into Europe—something mostly homogeneous modern Europe is not accustomed to—is jet fuel for the far-right populists parties that are gaining traction.
Personally, I did like being an "other" in such a homogeneous place and I found the culture paradoxically very tolerant and very constraining. But Singapore really creeps me out, especially when random people start professing their love of the quasi-dictator to you for no apparent reason. I like the American way of doing things.
Oh, to be sure, I agree with Joy completely and fully understand and support what 'the defund movement' is all about. But I'm not the one who needs to be persuaded!
People in under-policed neighborhoods forwarding bath-faith memes and chain emails about how Democrats want to abolish their police department are not likely to read a think piece in the NY Times. And yet, there is no shortage of liberals wagging their fingers and lecturing people who can't be bothered to dive into nuanced, long-form articles about municipal police budgets.
But if you need to have a NYT subscription to understand what a slogan "really means" then it's probably a bad slogan. Especially if the true meaning is in some ways the exact opposite of a literal reading.
True. DFP is a bad slogan. MY point was that most (not, unfortunately 100%) NYT readers a) probably knew all along what it meant and b) read things "explaining" what it meant. No one viewing Fox ever saw it explained.
Democrats believe as do their voters that they are the party that supports the working class (minimum wage, unions, etc…), but if the educational polarization continues, then s their an inflection point where Democrat voters abandon the working class and pivot to policies that only support themselves.
Student Loan Forgiveness is one of the issues on the forefront on this. Most blue collar workers don’t go to college and don’t obviously benefit from this, whereas the rising creative educated class will.
And I suppose the same question goes for Republicans… at what point do they alter.
As I have said before, I honestly think there’s a scenario where the parties switch sides at least economically.
I'm not sure the point of this comment. I'm talking about the future. Matt addresses the trends in working class votes with non-whites trending away from Democrats.
You are talking about "still". It's like saying, our climate temperature has only risen 1 degree. Sure, it's true, but we are worried about the future 1.5 vs 2.5 increase.
I think his point is that as long as non-whites are a big part of the Dem coalition, and non-whites are disproportionately working class, that reality will ensure Dems can't ignore working class issues. E.g., the $15 min wage
That still goes to the point that the trend is for non-white working class to drift away from the Democratic Party. And at a certain point, this trend accelerates (possibly... I don't know that it happens... just that it could happen). You are still talking about now or immediate future. I'm talking a decade or two from now.
You can't really claim to be the party of the working class when you don't represent the largest group of the working class. As of 2016, whites constitute 58% of all working class adults.
The question of "selfish grasping" strikes me as critical. At some level, politics has to be about "what's in it for me," hence the popularism thing. Politicians (& smart people like Matt) have the critical job of designing policies that highlight a broad definition of "me."
Which is why "I took out this big loan for a fun four years, please make it go away via policy or magic so the next generation can make exactly the same mistake" seems DOA forever, as it should be.
If it was just "a fun four years", then that would be a fair point. But we do actually need some graduates, and education has a value in itself.
The point is that, unless you think that university education is a mistake, then you have to have a way to fund it that doesn't financially cripple the minority of graduates who don't get well-paid jobs (even if the number of graduates is reduced by policy, there are still going to be people who have mental or physical health issues that prevent them working). That means either you restore the ability to discharge the loans in bankruptcy (though the problem is that the vast majority of graduates are technically bankrupt the day they graduate, so there is a risk of abuse), or you have to replace it with an income-based contribution system (or make all taxpayers pay).
It seems to me that the most logical approach is to contract for income-based contributions up-front, where the percentage of income can be based on the amount that the student receives. Remove the upper limit, ie get rid of the idea that this is a debt that can be repaid, and make it more like an equity investment that cannot be repaid, but where the ex-student pays out a percentage of income either for life or until Social Security eligibility. That way the small number of super-successful graduates can make up for those that don't earn enough to repay, which resolves the usual issue with income-based plans (that being that poor graduates don't pay off their debt, but no-one pays in more than their debt to make up for it).
I don't pretend to understand the scope of the problem, but I think a big part of it is that Big State U down the street correctly sees prospective students as prospective customers, and it needs to market itself to those customers with attractive amenities that surpass those at Big State U in the next state over. Some amount of this bloat (again, I don't pretend to know how much) is paying for increasingly opulent dorms and student unions and rec centers and other things that are legitimately nice things for students to have, but don't necessarily show up in black on the societal bottom line. And then if you're already taking out 100k for undergrad, or whatever, then why *not* spend a little extra to be in that nice new apartment building just off campus?
I say all of this as a proud thrice-graduate of Big State U.
Sure. And the administrative/management layers of Big State U are a lot bigger and a lot better paid than they used to be, which increases tuition.
And Big State is no longer contributing nearly as much to Big State U per in-state student, which has also driven tuition up.
But this gives you a system that can set real incentives: go live in that apartment building and you'll pay 0.5% more income tax for life. Go to Directional State U instead, and you'll pay 5% less income tax for life.
We’re talking about 17 year old kids entering into financial arrangements of which they don’t understand the implications, usually at the behest of trusted adults who tell them college is the only way to secure a decent future.
In context, it’s not the least bit unreasonable for many of these folks to feel this is not their fault, and it’s destroying the prospects of a large part of a whole generation.
At some point, the “reset” button will be pressed, it’s just a matter of how.
The thing is, when I read this characterization of the problem, I find it damning of every single party involved. It reminds me of the subprime mortgage bubble.
- The government is financing predatory financial arrangements that in total are insolvent. They know it's a failure and won't take the hit.
- Parents/guardians/trusted adults are deluded/swindled into convincing their children on the cusp of legal adulthood to sign away years of their future. They have responsibilities they are abdicating.
- 17/18-year-olds who are supposed to have learned some math to be in this situation are borrowing huge sums to buy lottery tickets and a huge portion aren't even trying to fill out the lotto ticket properly to have a shot at a return.
Yes, the reset button will be pressed. Just like in the subprime mortgage bubble, the borrowers' credit will likely still be devastated by that reset button. The lenders will need to be recapitalized, which will mean tax increases. Everyone will be to blame and we'll try to just forget how it happened.
When I say "reset button," I mean that there shouldn't be a market for "student debt" at all.
It requires both explicit (subsidized interest rates) and implicit (bankruptcy exemptions) to make it work at all and only exists because both higher education and banking lobbies have captured the regulatory apparatus.
For the amount of money the Federal government spends running this so-called "market" that it created and operates entirely on its own, we could instead make community and public 4-year degrees free for all current enrollees.
Obviously, doing so would provoke enrollment to increase, but we can actually resurrect a selective admissions process for state schools.
The whole damned thing needs to be burnt to the ground.
Without sweeping reform of the system that brought upon that debt, that would only make the problem worse. The next generation would *correctly* learn the lesson that they can be fairly casual about the educational debt they take on--if things get too bad, society will decide to wipe those debts away.
Trueness. I had my daughter max out her student loans, even though she was getting by without them. Worse case scenario, she just pays them back (the money is sitting there).
People's politics are always quite transparent when they're forced to reveal exactly *who* they feel are the crux of moral hazard problems.
I am simply not concerned about moral hazard applied to a bunch of stupid kids who were led by the nose into bad decisions.
I am concerned about moral hazard on the part of those who did the leading, most especially the higher education lobby and the politically connected finance interests involved in this so-called "market".
If we burn the latter badly enough, the whole "market" goes away, and the former problem solves itself with no moral hazard for students.
"it’s destroying the prospects of a large part of a whole generation." this is hyperbole. 85% of the population has no loans! The average student loan debt is 32k, but the median is 17k. Less than 4% of the population has student loans over 25k.
Large student loans are painful, but they are concentrated among a very small percentage of the population (who often have significant earning potential). We should definitely address the problem, but recognize that it doesn't have anywhere close to the impact that other issues have.
75% of the population is under 19 or over 40. If close to half of the remaining 25% have loans, as is born out by your statement, that is a "large part of a whole generation".
We're aware that 40% or so of each of my generation and the next one have student loans.
Approximately half of those are people who did not ultimately graduate, and for many or most of them a median burden of $17k is a near-impossible impediment to a stable life.
Approximately half of graduates are not realizing a significant value premium from their degree.
There's a large body of economic work showing that these debts are impacting home purchases and child-bearing. Not just their direct costs, but by forcing people to live in high-cost-of-living areas to earn the income to pay them down, and thereby subjecting themselves to high housing costs and delayed family formation.
Given the extent to which stable family structures and child-rearing are crucial to the next generation, it needs to be fixed.
And I maintain that the moral culpability here is not on the 17 year old, but on the college counselor, the parents, and the higher education lobby. Gut their ability to make this happen again, but fix the existing problem too.
I would argue that the cartel is only part of the problem. Without the Fed's easy money this would be much less of a problem.
No bank is going to loan someone $100k for a gender studies major. But with the Fed skies the limit.
I strongly support making total loan amounts contingent on average expected salary of the major. In addition, colleges should get tuition clawed back from bad loans. And student loans should be easier to discharge in bankruptcy
You've studied this so perhaps you have a reasoned opinion on it (as opposed to me who, like Jon Snow, knows nothing). Can't a goodly portion of the higher education funding problem be laid at the feet of state legislators who simply don't want to pay? Admittedly, they've got lots of reasons for this, but many of them are indeed extremely shortsighted or, in the grand scheme of things, not very important.
This assumes that millennials are a monolith. Taking it back to student loans. Only 39% of millennials have a bachelors degree, 42% have student loans.
That's not to say that there won't be some push towards democratic socialism, but I don't think its a given.
I do agree with you in the future that it won't be a straight flip-flopping of positions... it will be most likely two versions of more liberal positions.
But taxes on middle class are definitely one thing that has potential to flip.
If Democrats are overwhelmingly middle to upper middle class, then support on raising taxes on themselves will be... not so enthusiastic. The battle over the SALT reduction is a prime example of this.
Everyone self-selects their cohort and misinterprets them as being representative (no one I know voted for Nixon, etc.), but none of my mid-30s college-educated friends express a loan forgiveness view that doesn't include at least some pretty hefty public service requirements. Blanket forgiveness of any magnitude is not discussed.
"Only 39% of millennials have a bachelors degree, 42% have student loans."
It's worth pointing out that those figures shouldn't be interpreted the way we do at first glance. Half of those degree holders don't have debts, and half of debt-holders are blue collar kids who didn't finish their degree.
The biggest beneficiaries of wiping the slate clean would be blue collar folks who made a run at a degree and didn't grasp the brass ring, not actual graduates.
>>If the Boomers' descent from idealism into selfish grasping can teach us anything<<
As a Boomer growing up in the 1960s and was part of my generation's lumping every single one of my parent's generation into the category of stifling 1950s conformism, I confess I'm pleased to see the younger generations are eager to play the same trick on us as well.
However, recall that those folks condemned as hawks, conformists, racists and misogynists were then later transformed into the "Greatest Generation" and venerated perhaps a tad too much. What goes around, comes around, I guess. I await my generation's exoneration.
Demarcating the generations is a mugs game. The baby boomers could be defined to include people who became adults in the sixties and people who did so in the early eighties. This is all to say that spending too much energy on describing what a generation believes isn’t worth the effort.
I definitely agree that it's harder to get ahead now days. I've got my CPA, MBA. And am head of finance for a mid sized company. And without my wife working, I feel it's still a struggle to live a upper middle class lifestyle. 40 years ago, that would have been no problem. The primary driver of that is because of higher housing costs.
As for austerity politics. Nobody likes austerity. What people like is low taxes with lots of government benefits. But the problem is the real world doesn't work that way, at least not long term.
You mention "privatizing" Social Security as one of those awful ideas Republicans proposed. The GWB 2005 proposal was to allow people to divert part of their Social Security taxes into an investment account for their own benefit. It was soundly beaten back by Democrats and Progressives.
Since 1/1/2005, as measured by the VTI (an ETF tracking the total stock market), the stock market is up by 427%, for a CAGR of 10.4%. Thank goodness we didn't allow workers to participate in that growth and left it all to the rich.
But that’s not how it works in reality for most people. IIRC the average return on a 401k is negative as people buy high and then panic and sell low. Now you’re going to say, “What moron trades their 401k?” My point exactly.
This appears to be a myth; I didn't find any supportive sources and found a number of contradictory sources. And certainly the trend has been to default retirement savers into auto-investment target-date funds and let them forget about it. I'm sure some people still manage to actively buy and sell their retirement funds so badly that they make a negative return, but it doesn't make sense that a *majority* of people do that. Probably most people ignore it, as intended.
The Fed had a report a while back talking about how in an emergency, 40% of people wouldn't be able to come up with $600 without selling something they own or borrowing. (Crazier to me is that 20%+ of people making over 100k couldn't come up with 2k in an emergency).
A large portion of people only have their 401k account as savings. So if they lose their job, they take money out of it because its the only money they have. This often looks like > the economy tanks (2008) > people lose their job > access the only savings they have in their 401k,when its the absolute worst time to do so > lose money on their 401k.
This isn't true for everyone, or even the majority, but its a real thing for a lot of people. It also doesn't apply to SS.
I don’t know how easy that would be to include in the legislation. Certainly some people would argue that people should be able to access the money in various circumstances. The real estate lobby would certainly push to allow home buyers to access it.
The incremental paycheck funding structure of a 401k makes it impossible to buy high. Some might sell low - IDK. As other have mentioned, [citation needed].
I can, and have, shifted investments between index funds and cash-equivalent funds.
Thanks to my China contacts, I had the advance warning to shift retirement holdings into cash-equivalent funds in Feb. 2020 and only moved them back into index funds later on.
I got it mostly right, but it's entirely possible to shift between asset classes in a way that's effectively buying high and selling low.
Sure. I have too. Different strategy, I reallocated a % of my cash position on 3/27/20 to AMZN. So we have n = 2. Still ... I'll defer to Thaler's research at UChicago on the inherent stickiness of 401k selection and allocations here. The TL:DR is people don't touch their 401k. That's the problem he was solving with the Save More Tomorrow (SMaRT) program.
You forgot the part about "incremental paycheck funding structure" which is accurate. Even if you trade the low - the next contribution comes in to dollar cost average.
I find that almost impossible to believe. You're pretty limited in when you can withdraw money from a 401k before retirement, so money tends to sit in 401ks with little meddling. Also, the government could prohibit withdraw money from the portion of SS that's privatized. In principle, you could lose money by rebalancing in dumb ways, but I doubt that's common.
I'll add that this is kind of a moot point for social security privatization. Just prohibit early withdraws. That's what current social security effectively does.
"More than half of workers in their 20s who have 401(k) plans cash out their holdings when they change jobs, partly because their balances are relatively low, according to a report from the benefits consultant Aon Hewitt. Only about a third of those who change jobs in their 50s do the same."
1/3 of people in their 50s!! are cashing out, paying taxes and a 10% penalty.
That said, it still doesn't mean that the ROI is negative --- either by how the actual funds do or simply comparing input to output. The 10% penalty sucks, but it's partly (more than?) offset by any employer match to 401k contributions. I can only speak to my personal experience: my previous employer would do a 1/3 match (up to 6% of salary) and my current employer does a 1/2 match (up to some high level). So 10% penalty + taxed as income vs taxed at capital gains (say 13% difference) vs 33% or 50% employer match. That comes out as positive --- especially if the stock market is doing well.
Also, given that 2/3 of people in their 50s don't cash out, I stick by my intuition that the average ROI is positive.
I don't think its negative but I have read that its VERY low, like maybe 3%? Because people do buy high and sell low. However I just Googled it and couldn't find any real info.
Sure they can. They choose the money market or bond option because they are worried about losing money. Then the market shoots up and they worry about missing out so they move it to equities. Then the market slide and they sell in a panic.
That's not at all what the "intelligent default choice" research indicates. The problem is people don't *look* at their 401k. That's why the set-up is so important.
I'm deeply incredulous that large numbers of people are actively moving money around in their 401Ks trying to time the market. I mean, I have a JD and a BS in economics and *I* don't know offhand how to move money around in my 401K -- the money is just going into whatever funds I designated when I set it up.
Hang on, to my knowledge "since Social Security already does that by investing its trust fund" is wrong.
They're statutorily required to invest *only* in US Treasuries. The Social Security Trust Fund is explicitly *not* permitted to act as a sovereign wealth fund, at all.
At the time I was marginally in favor of privatizing social security but couldn't get past the moral hazard issue.
Some of the plans either provided a minimum benefit no matter how your investment did. This can encourage risky stock market investment (assuming you weren't forced into some government managed index fund - which would be a HUGE index fund - unclear how that would distort the market), with the knowledge that it's not _really_ that risky because you've got guaranteed minimum payouts. So the right thing to do might be to put those in high risk accounts.
If the plans did _not_ provide a minimum benefit, and people went risky and lost it all... I did not believe that we as a country would not feel bad and end up giving them their money anyway down the road.
In general, I liked the _theory_ of letting people invest it, but the _practice_ seemed terribly fraught.
In sitting in Massachusetts, me and all my friends with doctorates and professional degrees, waiting for my blue state utopia. I’ve wondered why we don’t just go for it. We have a Republican governor now, but we didn’t a few years ago, so I don’t think it’s that. Plus, we got our “commonwealth care” during the Romney years.
How does the blue state utopia project intersect with Milan’s piece about state legislatures not working well?
It’s tough. You need a Governor with more vision and ambition than Charlie Baker; could be a D or an R but would have to tackle Massachusetts’ housing situation in a serious way.
There's an assumption that a majority of people in a blue state, or even most liberals, agree with what such a utopia should look like. They don't: see housing policy.
Yeah. One step forward during the Baker administration was altering state law so zoning can be changed by a simple majority of city councilors instead of a supermajority. It was really easy for people to block housing projects at the zoning level prior to that change. So a step in the right direction, but not exactly visionary…. And as we all know, housing projects tend to die by a thousand cuts.
One thing you could do is create YIMBY utopias *within* blue state utopias. Find some towns that are good places for YIMBYs to live, get more YIMBYs to move there, rewrite their zoning laws, and turn them all into mini Kowloons.
Interesting idea. I do wonder what would happen if a bunch of YIMBYs moved into a nice community, with leafy suburbs filled with SFH-zoned homes. Would they raise the drawbridge and decide that, hey, this quality of life is pretty good and we want to keep it this way? Or would they stay true to their YIMBYism?
The cynic in me says #1 will happen. The optimist in me suspects that #1 would happen anyway.
Though if it were me, I wouldn't choose a true leafy suburb for my colonization project. I'd choose a more urban suburb like, I don't know, New Rochelle NY or someplace like that.
Rich blue state politics have a large dose of nimbyism. Most of your well credentialed Massachusetts friends have a big chunk of their net worth tied up in overpriced houses, and they want to keep the price of their biggest asset high. This has the added benefit of keeping the unwashed out of the best public schools.
I think that people think of California as the one party state for Democrats, and they’re not doing anyone any favors at the moment in terms of perception. I really do wish that, at the least, they could put together a health care plan for the rest of us to envy. Makes Democrats look bad on what is probably (should be) their signature issue.
It's called utopia for a reason, it doesn't and can't exist. I would argue that CA is pretty much the result you always get when going for a blue state utopia. IE totally screwed up
I agree with all the points, but I still worry a little that we were better off when we had the totally misinformed "cracked" into small minorities in each party... By "packing" them into the GOP, they can actually win primaries with candidates who do not make sense from a policy perspective.
The old structures kept the elites in charge of two adversarial camps, so at the end of the day you would get elite-approved leaders who had the approval of their side. That was probably more a more effective way to run the country.
These elite approved leaders gave us three decades of austerity and median wage stagnation not to mention two decades of needless wars. Better Trump than W.
Better Trump than W. - No. I agree with MY's point that Bush had an somewhat unprecedented freedom to act after 9/11 and chose poorly. I can only imagine how bad Trump would have acted in such a situation. Worse, Trump has managed to exceed most of my imaginations on how bad he could be, so...
I'm on a different timeline from you - Dubya was the start of the fall, though Obama let us believe W was the aberration. I'm thinking of how well things went in the late 20th century, with the notable (bipartisan) exception of Vietnam.
I was a follower of the Free State Project, the libertarian effort to first identify a target and then get libertarians to move there and swing the state's politics to being a laboratory for libertarianism. They ended up picking New Hampshire and ran into some problems, such as bears, but it's an interesting idea.
So what about the liberal, high education utopia project? The Scandinavia of the United States? You can handwave at California and New York being larger than Finland, but would you really pick those large states?
Perhaps kill two birds with one stone and identify a small red state that still has some appeal to upscale liberals, and like with the Free State Project encourage liberals to move there so that you can both turn it into Scandinavia as well as swing a state blue?
Depending on your flavor of liberalism, Alaska already has a UBI, just funded by oil, so you could build on that.
I think Utah is the most highly educated consistently red state?
I think you'd get a lot more young liberals to move to this hypothetical red state if you made one of its cities into a really nice place to live with cool amenities and media buzz. Most people aren't *that* political, even young people who are automatic D votes. In their subjective minds, flipping a state is less of a priority than living in a city with a cool "scene" and good brunch.
So start with a city that's already reasonably cool in a hypothetically small red state. I think a lot of Rocky Mountain cities would already be on that list.
My parents retired to NH for tax reasons from 2006-2012. They were perfectly suited politically... it's just a very insular state. Distrustful of newcomers. Also ridiculously cold and snowy (144 inches of snowfall their first year).
They ended up in FL like the rest of their generation.
Even if this all came to pass, and enough liberal progressives moved to a small state (Idaho? Vermont? ) that they could run its politics however they pleased, does anyone think that would actually satisfy anybody? Why wouldn't the next generation of young liberals decide that it wasn't enough in various ways, it wasn't truly progressive, etc.
I mean... this is how politics works? Always has been?
Not even from the Whiggish "continuous progress" angle, but simply "everything you did created problems which are now apparent and we're going to blame you for them and pretend they were apparent then, Mom and Dad."
It's been like this for as long as there have been "politics."
Fair point, but then what's the point of the move if everyone in the future is just as dissatisfied as they are today, regardless of whether or not this "bluing of Montana" project happened?
The state politics of one state with much less than 1% of the population of the country has shifted leftward at the cost of half a million people moving to a place that wouldn't have been ideal for their lives otherwise. And so what? It better actually be a utopia that residents of nearby states really do want to imitate, otherwise I don't think it achieves much.
I'm not even sure it's guaranteed the moves would change the politics of the state, rather than the move changing the politics of the mover, as they may come to appreciate at least a few political points of view they didn't like when they were living in NYC or SF.
Maybe we're talking past one another, but I don't know how these are really concerns. No one is going to fund a program of left-leaning colonization of lightly-populated red states.
To the extent that this is a thing, it's going to be largely organic, and it's actually very tightly correlated to another demographic trend I think is going to speed a major realignment of the party system...
Without extensive subsidy, rural populations are going to continue to implode. Everyone will be living together in the suburbs and cities, and there's going to be a lot less scope for political self-segregation than is the case today. That means, almost necessarily, that the cultural issues are going to get back-burnered eventually, especially as real problems still won't be dealt with in the coming decades and will fester.
Unless we get impatient and start shooting one another before 2040, after that point the political spectrum is going to be unrecognizable.
I don't get the current fetish for thinking of the 2016-21 political alignment as an immutable fact of life. Christ knows it didn't look like this as late as 2012, and it won't look like this in 2028, let alone 2040.
"Without extensive subsidy, rural populations are going to continue to implode. Everyone will be living together in the suburbs and cities, and there's going to be a lot less scope for political self-segregation than is the case today."
What is the definition of rural here? I think its very possible that small to medium size towns across the country enjoy a bit of revival due to
1) increased WFH expanding the number of jobs available
2) housing costs continuing to rise dramatically in large urban areas
I expect those two trends to redound more to the benefit of the Pittsburghs, Fort Waynes, and Kansas Cities of the world than small towns, but if anything, wouldn't that further break down our current geographic sorting and polarization?
Rural populations are imploding because the economic rationale behind many of the places in which people used to live is either gone or much reduced:
- There's nowhere near as much of a "tail-end" to agriculture anymore thanks to automation and efficient distribution networks.
- Manufacturing employment is increasingly concentrated in larger towns or suburban areas because manufacturing is increasingly done at even greater scale.
- The logistics of moving goods and people are vastly better and faster than even 3 decades ago, so basically all "waypoints" are unneeded.
- Primary resource extraction is easier, more automated, and cheaper than ever before.
- The degree of economic opportunity offered by even semi-skilled labor in large markets is hugely increased relative to the same work elsewhere.
Many, many small towns are reprising the history of Cairo, Illinois.
Alongside the lingering hangover from slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, their death throes are one of the major sources of vitriol and hatred in modern politics. When they're finished dying, perhaps things will calm down, brutal as that sounds.
I'm only talking about "bluing" a red state through migration b/c that's what how I understood Harrison's original post. And I've seen the idea mentioned a few other times on this site, alongside the related idea of Black people trying to concentrate in a few states for political reasons.
To put it mildly, I think they are both ridiculous ideas. And it was a ridiculous idea when Libertarians tried it with Vermont but also sort of on brand for the US Libertarian party. I agree that organic growth is always how these things happen. Unless Biden can convince more Elon Musk's to move to Texas or the Federal Government starts moving major agencies to flyover country. Normal people don't move hundreds of miles for their political party.
I get what you're saying about rural areas. It's a very slow process, and just like the current political alignment, it could change at some point in the next couple decades for unforeseen reasons. So I'm not sure it guarantees a realignment anytime soon. Although demographics suggest to me the "rural implosion" trend may accelerate in 10 years or so.
Organically, there are plenty of states that will "turn blue" eventually. But the ground under our party system will shift before then, so there's not much point discussing it, IMO.
The current high-polarization, heavily geographically-sorted, culture-heavy paradigm is similar to the Gilded Age, and it simply isn't going to last because its unsustainable both from a policy perspective and a psychological one. Either the sorting mechanism breaks and parties go into serious flux, or a civil conflict breaks out. Given how lazy Americans are, the former is the likely outcome.
The only thing I think might short-circuit that, and its so terrifying that I hesitate to even mention it in public, is the prospect that the GOP manages to claw its way back into power in 2028 in a way that leaves it feeling as besieged and insecure as it does today, then just decides to say "Nope, wrong" to the 2030 Census results and cooks the books on rural areas in a way that lets it completely untether itself from electoral accountability.
At that point, we're edging into "cripple the cities economically and politically" territory, and the last several times that was tried (Pol Pot and the Cultural Revolution come to mind) it was... unfortunate for the societies which tried it.
Btw, an aside about the Free State Project - the problem with the bears wasn’t that, in the absence of government they couldn’t do anything about them. The problem was that the federal government made it a felony to shoot em, and they couldn’t do anything about that.
I would argue that what makes Nordic systems "work" is a homogenous society with a lot of trust in each other and in the government. Not to mention a very high cultural work ethic.
Progressives' cultural hegemony is way more useful than electoral majorities at getting their agenda enacted. They control the institutions that actually have power in the country. Consider how they won on transgender ideology, gay marriage, DACA, affirmative action, etc. Chris Caldwell explains in The Age of Entitlement:
Elites want something.
They use the institutions they control to advocate for that thing. One way they do this is having corporations or nonprofits they control sponsor a court case.
Federal judges, who are progressive elites, rule that civil rights law must be applied in a new way and the unpopular policy elites wanted is now the law.
Corporations, educators, and the media manufacture consent afterwards and it becomes normal.
State level utopias are harder to create than MY admits. If NY enacted sharply progressive taxes, its best taxpayers (rich people and corporations) could move to Connecticut or New Jersey. That just isn’t the case in Europe. Language ties many professional Europeans to their home country. If France soaks the rich, Koln is much further from Paris than Jersey City is from Manhattan and very few French speak German well enough to hold down professional jobs. Poland is the Texas of Europe, it has cheap labor, relatively light regulations and is happy to manufacture things, but moving to Warsaw is hardly appealing for the French haute bourgeoisie. Florida, on the other hand, has no income tax, a lovely climate for old people, and arguably better leisure amenities than New York. You might need to fly from Miami to NY for live theater, but that’s not a huge reason to stay.
NY is a tricky case in some ways. I wonder if Massachusetts might be running closest to a state-level utopia? And while they get some people commuting from NH, I don't think there's a massive problem with people fleeing their taxes.
If things are well-run (i.e. good on safety, education, healthcare) I think there are plenty of people who aren't that price-sensitive about their taxes. I didn't leave NYC because of the tax burden, but because I felt like the city was failing on safety & schools.
New York has a tax of 6.85% on income over $215k (professional couples) and 9.65% on income over $1.077M (executives and rentiers). That’s not enough to fund utopia.
It mentions a pretty simple change that would help: "New York City Department of Finance has blamed a state law that requires it to ignore the sale prices of condos and co-ops when determining their taxable value."
So there, simple suggestion: look at the fricking sale price!
Slightly more complicated: incorporate the research findings from Christopher Berry and others (like Cook county refused to do...)
Income over $21k is taxed at 5.97% and income over $81k at 6.33%. A professional couple making $700k a year has a marginal rate only 1% higher than a taxi driver.
People choose higher-tax jurisdictions when the services are worth it. And holding these kinds of programs accountable for delivering value-for-money is not such a terrible thing.
I think you can have high taxes if you have the benefits too. Imagine a world where NYC had converted the Long Island Railroad into subway lines (getting rid of conductors, massively increasing frequency) and forcing massive up zoning around stations. You’d have the ability to provide millions more people the ability to participate in the country’s top economic center without having to own a car. Probably also would have kept NY from losing a congressional seat. I think people would be willing to pay relatively higher taxes if you got ride of their car expenses. This is what Hong Kong did with the KCR - and super nerdy fact - they did it without the benefits of being able to through-run the trains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon-Canton_Railway_Corporation
The mistake is in thinking you create this through sharply progressive taxes. Taxes on the rich in the US in NY or California aren't that different from Sweden/France etc (often hitting or surpassing 50%). The difference is that those countries tax the middle class and especially the upper middle class much more heavily. E.g. you hit some of the top income tax rate bands (52%) in Sweden at around $62k.
[I believe the figure cited in that article is a significant undercount because it’s from driver’s license data and I see tons of NY, CT, NY, PA, and CA plates around my neighborhood. I hope the feet-dragging on registering their cars here means that a big chunk of them will go back.]
I'm curious what is your experience from living in Europe. Mine says that you don't need to speak German for a white collar job in Germany, if you speak English. Now, if the argument is that the French can't speak English, I see your point. :P
I’ve never lived in Europe but my uncle was an IT manager in Germany for 20 years. He speaks fluent German and married a German wife before coming back.
A lot of them! We all did Erasmus anyway, we needed a way to communicate! A slightly more provocative question is how many Germans speak English well enough to work in a big multinational in Germany.
Yeah, that's not an issue at all. Most professionals in Europe have English as their working language, one way or another. Your point about Germans and multinationals in Germany is well taken and a point of friction everywhere in Europe (with the possible exception of the Nordics and Benelux). Host country language matters more for managers than for professionals - you usually need some proficiency to have a managerial career.
Yeah, that’s silly. There might be some very specific scenarios where very high income folks could save by moving to NJ, but in general they’re both very high tax states. NYC has lower property taxes, though.
The reason people chose to live in NJ and commute to NYC (I did that for many years) is because real estate is much cheaper. $500K - $600K gets you, maybe, a tiny, tiny apartment in Manhattan in an older building (I haven’t checked prices in a long while). In parts of NJ a short drive (or possibly even walk or bike ride) to a train station the same sum gets you a 3 - 4 BR house with a yard and a good school system. The trade off is the commute.
I believe a number of European countries have still had to walk back super high taxes because of rich flight. Note for example that none of the Nordic countries have wealth taxes anymore.
As for the fact that many researchers now are on the left of center, I think another big factor is that most of the American Right just ceded that ideas ground and became more intransigent, and that's true for both MAGA folks and Never Trumpers, even the light ones. Many ideas current being sold as center or center-left could easily fit a reasonable definition of a center-right agenda, which is why in many respects Boris Johnson's agenda is closer to Biden's than to most conservatives in America.
For instance, I was struck by how relatively little tribute conservatives paid at the death of Brent Scowcroft a few years ago. The guy was a Republican and is generally recognized as one of the greatest minds in modern foreign policy, a Bismarck of our times, etc,etc....and alas, he wrote op-eds both opposing the Iraq War and defending the JCPOA. In different proportions I see similar stuff with Republicans like Jay Powell and John Roberts.....
The window for what is "true" conservatism in America today is just too narrow, so naturally some intellectuals today would rather be out of it than conform.
The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades. That's one of the main reasons that right leaning media like Rush and Fox News took off. I'll grant that its gotten worse lately.
As for the leftward bias in education. It's not just with the professors, it's also with the administration. Basically all of your universities have large diversity and inclusion departments now.
In addition, this starts before university, in particular at your top prep schools. They are all likely to have woke outreach as well.
“The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades.”
This bit made me chuckle:
“Conservatives, of course, have been whining about liberal media bias since long before I was born, and for the longest time these complaints struck me as almost pure bullshit. But that’s become markedly less true in recent years.”
It doesn’t occur to him, apparently, that he used to be wrong *and* it’s worse now.
I think I saw Alan Cole making the argument on twitter that while privatizing social security is anathema to voters, current retirees would have benefitted from the massive run-up in stock prices that have occurred since the great recession.
Looking back from the future, one narrative that might be told of the century in American politics that began somewhere between the 1930s and 1960s is that northern leaders of the Democrats, traditional American party of the unwashed uneducated masses, saw an opportunity to expand the party's working class base by bringing into the mainstream fold of American society the largest excluded group - black voters. But that alienated many white Democrats, and the Republican Party, which by then was no longer living on the fumes of its cultural progressive abolitionist roots, and had become merely about protecting wealth and power, took those working class voters in, in what at first seemed like a cynical bargain to shore up the plutocrats at the top with culture war distractions. But eventually the Republican party came to reflect the economic interests of it's new base of working class voters and racial division fades in importance compared to class and economic issues as the Civil Rights movement receded in the past. And the Democratic Party came to reflect the economic interests of its new base of educated, professional, managerial class voters. We'll see....
I question the extent to which the Republican Party represents the economic interests of working class whites. It has become reluctant to kill programs that help this group, but it’s hardly poised to give them anything new, other than deficits and rage.
My Karl Popper alarm is ringing. I’ve been reading these essays on education and they end up explaining too much. Dems win elections because of their education base. Dems lose elections because they can’t reach beyond their education base. Nice journalistic boiler plate. (This is common. Earlier this week at the start of the day the investment media was writing stocks rally on West Texas crude then at the end of the day it was stocks fell because of the same thing.) We ask people in exit polls lots of questions and our regressions have shown the education variable has a sig coefficient, but ed today is not the same as 40 years ago and neither are college classes or college students; employers are not using BAs to screen in the same ways, and political parties are very different. This smells like a sampling issue to me where we landed on a variable that is correlated with something simply because it is so big and noisy that something in it is jumping up and down with the voting variable. Until we know more what education means we are using it to over explain. We need a testable hypothesis and education is just too broad. It explains everything and is therefore … kinda useless.
I am listening, but unconvinced, that a segment of the left is interested in cultural hegemony even among their notional political allies. We can argue about how many of these people there are, but there definitely are people who have a sizeable personal stake in identifying just how liberal/progressive/left they are. Many of them do this in part by contrasting themselves with boring normie Democrats who don't know what DEI stands for, or still use the gross gendered "latino/latina", or aren't up to date with the latest inclusions in whatever LGBTQ has grown into.
These people could be safely ignored if they didn't appear to represent a dangerous fraction of low-level Congressional staffers.
Increasing factionalization just seems like a weird lift for a party that used to celebrate MLK's dream of a future where people would be valued by the content of their character rather than other demographic info. Alas.
This is a great point about advantages liberals/progressives enjoy in the United States—but it raises a question of universal applicability: the Center-left everywhere has had this issue of education polarization—from the socialists in Germany and France to probably most severely UK Labour. But the UK in particular does *not* have cultural or especially media support for Labour, progressive discourse or cultural openness.
The media in the UK are, perhaps uniquely in a Western democracy, avowedly Center-right if not Right.
What is the trade-off then for UK Labour? For languishing social democrats in Europe, which don’t enjoy cultural progressive hegemony in, e.g., Greece or Italy?
Has always been a huge mystery; the papers of record all explicitly endorse the Tories, without fail; compare to Le Monde in Paris and El PAÍS in Spain and there’s no parallel really.
It doesn’t help that the two biggest papers are owned by Murdoch, but it predates him. I don’t know but would love to read why somewhere from someone who does. Every other democracy has a large center or center left paper of record
Yeah, it’s what we got! Haha. It’s shocking how little role the Guardian plays in the discourse here, however. They never go on TV, their headlines never form the big discussions on Sunday shows. It feels at time like we Guardian readers are part of a secret clique. A bombshell long form report of unfairness or corruption just disappears the next day, never mentioned again.
"What I *do* think is knowable is that the GOP will struggle to maintain its non-college gains if it goes back to austerity politics."
I think this line, and your analysis, overestimates the extent to which the modern GOP base votes on policy, and underestimates the extent to which politicians are comfortable with cognitive dissonance. If the GOP pursues a wildly unpopular austerity campaign, they'll just tell their base it's because the Democrats spent all your money on healthcare for transgender immigrants or whatever. The marching orders are "animate the base with culture war chum" and I don't expect that to change based on policy outcomes or reality.
Counterpoint: Obama's 2012 results. Fox News said Obama was a socialist who was going to take away conservatives' guns and put gay marriage above family values. And yet, despite all that, Obama campaigned against Romney's austerity politics and performed very well with non-southern whites compared to Hillary or Biden, especially in the industrial midwest.
Just look at the results: Obama crushed Romney in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He even won Ohio, albeit by a narrower margin. He outright won many rural, white counties in the region, and even in the rural counties he lost he still received >40% in most. To take a random example, look at Pike County, Ohio. Obama received 48.9% of the vote there in 2012, but in 2020 Biden only won 25.1% of the vote. The point is, 2012 shows many of these voters are winnable, and 2012 wasn't that long ago.
You might be right, but I think a commenter above me made a good point about media polarization/enclosure over the last few years. In 2012, a Republican would at least see what Obama was saying on Fox News - OAN doesn't even air Biden's speeches. If the left media is better about this, it's not better by much. This tribal redefinition of "journalism" will only improve if it stops being profitable, and I'm not optimistic.
How long, though, till Republican primary voters realize they can have their cake and eat it too? Culture war populism -and- more friendly economic policies? That seems like part of the lesson of Trump - he was the only primary candidate in 2016 willing to say things that broke with Paul Ryan economic orthodoxy.
If they could do that, it would be a great thing for the country (the culture war stuff would suck, but darn it, we need somebody to cut spending, especially on the elderly. (They might never cut spending on the elderly, but ah well.))
There is the additional factor that right-leaning audiences have a complete, self-reinforcing media ecosystem to lure them away from the mainstream. Every defenestration at the NY Times or Facebook suppression of a story about Hunter Biden shunts more right-of-center media consumers to Earth 2.0. That phenomenon is working in the same direction as educational polarization.
I am currently in the only Republican congressional district in a blue state and it is very, very Trumpy. Very Trumpy. Like, sub-contractors go out of their way to tell you how Trumpy they are when they show up for a job, you know, just that's clear to my ECCO-wearing ass up front.
IMHO mainstream media outlets are totally unaware of just how alienating they can be to non-urban, non-diehard-liberals. (For the own-the-libs side of the coin, The Fox News Cinematic Universe, that is a feature, not a bug.) On paper, I am the exact demographic that the NY Times et al. is pursuing, yet I don't read it at all because it feels like a liberal echo chamber where city-dwelling millennials with liberal arts degrees vigorously inhale their own farts and then write condescending articles about how I am a bad person because I don't understand the subtle bouquet of artisanal fart-smell.
I read my local paper and a few substacks of differing ideological viewpoints. So, to me, there is no upside of education polarization because it isn't translating to cultural power, it is just empowering bad ideas from the left the way right-wing media translates into virtue-signalling legislation in Texas.
A recent example: Andrew Sullivan interviewed Brihana Joy on his podcast and it was delightful to hear two ridiculously intelligent people bat ideas around. That is the cultural hegemony I want; core liberal values of empiricism, debate and free speech. But when Andrew pointed out that 'defund the police' was a brilliant slogan to sweep Trumpy Republicans into power, Joy sternly lectured him, asserting that 'defund the police' actually means 'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community' and that he was willfully misunderstanding 'the movement'. Then she played the race card. In other words, fuck you for not adopting our faculty lounge lexicon of literal irony where words mean their opposite; also, you're racist.
To me, that is what the cultural hegemony of education polarization is delivering; a lefty purity spiral that aggressively and gleefully sics the Thought Police on anyone who deviates even slightly from The Party. That is the highly-educated mirror image of the dumb righty purity spiral that demands absolute fealty to the alternate reality where Trump won in 2020 and Democrats are a whisker from implementing full-blown socialist totalitarianism using Jewish space lasers and Italian satellites.
The commitment to using the right language rather than delivering the right results seems like the natural conclusion to the Twitterification of left-of-center society. It can be very challenging and require a lot of nuance to explain how some desirable individual outcome (say, a college degree, or home ownership) is seeing increased representation among some historically disadvantaged demographic.
Using the new in-term "equity" rather than "equality", and shouting at those who don't know the current correct codeword, correctly signals to those you want to signal to, and it fits easily into 140 characters.
I find that phenomenon deeply frustrating. If you really want to advocate for a cause, then you should use whatever language is necessary to build broad public support, not retweets. You know, like calling deficit-financed tax-cuts for the rich "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act". It isn't hard! And once the public experiences good policy, they will start punishing the party that wants to take it away. But no, we don't want to stick a fake horn on a pony, we want an actual unicorn and we're totally fine with pony genocide if we don't get our way, because the pony blood will be on your hands, you gendered-pronoun-using monster!
There is a chance that the Democrats drift from today's mostly-genuine commitment to pluralism and a broad-based middle class economy, albeit tinted with a neo-Puritanical version of middle class propriety, to running on nothing but the latter.
At which point they look like a Latin American liberal party, and the GOP starts looking like Fidesz or the PSUV, and we're into "uh-oh" territory.
One or another of the parties is going to come to represent working class interests. It's just a matter of whether they understand that mandate more like FDR or more like Hugo Chavez. Given the GOP's divorce from scientific expertise, evidence-based policy, and consensus/pluralism, I cannot conceive of them taking populism in a productive direction.
The GOP is a lost cost, for sure. The question is not whether or not Democrats can work with Republicans, it is whether they can deliver sufficient electoral shellackings that the GOP throws Trumpism overboard.
I totally agree that, in order to do that, Democrats need to figure out how to convey their commitment to pluralism and a broad-based middle class economy to voters. Right now the opposite is happening.
Tucker Carlson is branding the Democratic Party as foot soldiers for The Squad every night while social media reinforces that narrative with no push-back because liberals are too busy fighting with each other about when the country was founded. Meanwhile, elected Democrats are having public fights over SALT deductions—not exactly a great look to working-class voters—while beltway media vilifies centrists Democrats and attacks the Biden Administration for not reversing every, single policy enacted by the Trump Administration, no matter how popular they are with non-college educated / working-class / minority voters. And their messaging? "Nevermind the bi-partisan bill we already passed to fix roads and bridges, we're going to spend $3.5 trillion on asdlkjhasfiounwacv!"
Broadly agreed.
Even when the Democrats are talking about popular shit, they keep wording it as if it should be unpopular. "We're going to lower the cost of drugs" somehow morphs, in certain circles, into "We'll make drugs more available to historically marginalized populations." FFS, poor white voters *are* a marginalized population, just perhaps not *quite* as marginalized as poor black voters are.
There's certainly no contest between the poor white voter who can't get their kid's diabetes under control because they can't afford insulin and the rich black voter who risks getting shot when the cops pull them over for no reason. And I don't mean that in the sense of "one is clearly worse," I mean it in the sense of "we can solve both, they don't need to jockey for priority with one another."
God forbid we use inclusive and hopeful rhetoric when confronting entrenched problems, instead of encouraging the electorate to think in terms of what's in it for their own narrow demographic slice. Solidarity is a necessary precursor to making life better for all of us, but since we're now home to a bunch of upper-middle class professionals who're here only to seek tribal reasons to look down on other people, we just can't make it stick.
As for the media... the fundamental problem of news media is that we pay full-timers jackshit to pontificate on weighty matters, instead of paying experts well to loan some of their time to discuss them. The overwhelming majority of the people who can afford to get into that gig are the scions of the professional and upper classes, and they mostly don't actually want to put the work in to understand complex issues well enough to be able to distill them to the audience. The state of reporting on the three topics for which I'm a passable subject matter expert (Chinese political economy, mega-project economics, and AEC process automation) is absolute, miserable, could-not-be-worse-if-actively-trying BULLSHIT. I assume that extends to everything else.
Of course, because the media draws its workforce from the same demographics as the new Democratic base, its biases mean that even when it's trying to be even-handed, it's ham-fisted about it.
Just as an example of the former issue, if there were experts in the media who actually spent time writing about what "asdlkjhasfiounwacv" is, we'd be in golden shape, because most of it is popular among working class voters of all stripes.
At the same time, they would have to avoid the IDpol framing for that to come across effectively to all audiences, and I'm not confident that even genuine SMEs could do that now, since it's almost required for academia.
"We'll make drugs more available to historically marginalized populations" perfectly captures the seemingly deliberate effort of Democrats and liberals to write attack ads against their own policies by injecting virtue signalling into absolutely everything. And I blame the Twitter Thought Police for that.
Republicans and conservatives are super good at this game—they routinely sponsor legislation that is nothing but virtue signalling. The difference is that the "Democrats want to raise your taxes so they can kill babies" energizes their base, while "historically marginalized people" drives a wedge between white college-educated liberals and historically marginalized people. How many focus groups do they need to figure out that the latter group tends to finds that language pointless and condescending?
I cannot wrap my head around the zeal with which Democrats and liberals rush to make own-goals with their messaging. Worse, when they get booed for it, they escort the dissenting fans from the stadium and tell them that they are part of the problem.
My expertise is in esoteric science stuff that was rarely reported on. That was before the pandemic. Now I encounter the same phenomenon as you—every time I see a good-faith journalistic effort to explain science to the masses, key details are missing, misunderstood or totally wrong. But that's ok, because they get the contours right and I'm not the target audience. What I don't like is how some substacks then use those journalistic efforts to criticize the liberal-media-industrial-complex by ascribing some nefarious purpose to the uneven spots in what is very difficult reporting.
"How many focus groups do they need to figure out that the latter group tends to finds that language pointless and condescending?"
"We" know this. The DNC knows this, most of the party understands it, and the leadership certainly does. But the Democratic Party is not a monolith, and it's just not possible to shut up the very large part of the wokeist faction for whom the snark, condescension, and feelings of superiority *are the point.* Just because they're "on our side" doesn't mean we share so much as a single motivating factor, or that they're right.
I occasionally wonder if we shouldn't simply spin off an urban/woke party and use it the same way the Canadian Liberals use the NDP, as a foil to highlight their sensible centrist bona fides, even as they govern with an informal confidence-and-supply arrangement. But again, if we could ram that through, we'd also be able to exert messaging discipline, and we can't.
"I cannot wrap my head around the zeal with which Democrats and liberals rush to make own-goals with their messaging"
Well... hard to do otherwise when a significant fraction of (loud) Democrats are in this solely for tribalistic kicks, nothing more. There is no avoiding that, and I'm not sure that the problems it causes can be solved or even mitigated very much. Without a full-court press to marginalize and silence those people, at least... and the Democrats simply don't have the ability to stare down half their donor base, say "Give us money and STFU already," and get on with it.
As for the media... I'm less charitable than you, because in my three sectors everything is still wrong in entirely predictable ways that the media has been told about for a decade or more.
As far as I can tell, a typical reporter just isn't brilliant but thinks they are, finds it very hard to swallow or even understand their own biases, and many have family money propping them up while their "career develops." There's no reason to do better, and their corporate masters have financial incentives that make their reporting even worse.
There are exceptions; many are found in obscure topic-specific publications or here on Substack.
Overall, I'm not sure the problems posed by the current alignment are solvable for Democrats. I suspect the only way out is to lose and for the GOP to fail to solve problems. That will speed the ongoing realignment quite handily.
If I'm right, the party system will continue shifting in a way that eventually makes the woke people less important. That, IMO, will initially redound to the benefit of the GOP, who may actually create a durable majority *without cheating* but be unable to govern effectively, and probably eventually to the Democrats, who will spend a long time in the wilderness purging the idiots while the GOP screws everything up, so that they can sweep back into power.
While the GOP would *love* to turn the US into a one-party state, the mechanisms are just not there, and I doubt they can do much more than give themselves (in current form) a few percentage points of lean in the House to match the ones in the EC and Senate.
If the party system shifts a lot, that will all be for naught.
There's a weird asymmetry there. Every crazy thing uttered by any self-proclaimed liberal or Democrat gets sucked into the right-wing media vortex, glowered about ad nauseum and irrevocably associated with the "D" next to a politician's name. I am always astonished by the ability of your median Trumper to rattle off the same, exact set of "ten crazy things liberals believe" at the drop of a hat.
For some reason, when Republicans—all the way up to His Orangeness—say completely batshit crazy stuff, up to and including direct threats of violence against individual voters, it gets repeated everywhere from late night to podcasts to newspapers to cable news to exactly zero effect.
The marginal voters who decide elections now seem to weigh "that one time AOC wore a dress that said 'Tax The Rich'" against literal threats to overthrow the government violently and decide that they'll just stay home on election day because they didn't get a pony. And I think that Matt's post gets at the reason for that. The mainstream media / discourse / national conversation / etc. is increasingly college-educated liberals talking to each other. They are just incapable of talking in a way that the median democratic voter that Matt always talks about (the non-college-educated white guy in his 50's) takes seriously.
I actually never realized that so many journalists were, in fact, trust fund kids trying to find themselves. It used to be the opposite—journalists used to be hungry and needed to do good reporting to, you know, earn a paycheck and keep the lights on. But through the magic of podcasts, I get glimpses into the backgrounds of journalists (many of whom I respect a great deal). It seems that they come in three flavors; the gruff old reporter who worked their way up from the mail room, the trust fund kid trying to prove something to mom and dad and the sad-sack millennial who can barely make rent and resents the other two flavors.
Wow, you said everything I wanted in that comment with wit and the right touch of polemic.
I would just add the controlling the commanding heights of the culture only goes so far. It doesn't actually control the culture.
And self-assured arrogance always - always - causes a reactionary response. And a big part of that reactionary response can be boiled down to the lyrical refrain in Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name" - "fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me"
I partially agree, but you can and do hear from the NYT that what most people mean by "defund the police" or more generally who want to see policing changed (I'll bet "defund the Police" has been uttered more times on Fox that in the NYT) IS "'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community." You would never hear that on Fox.
Anytime your slogan needs a detailed explanation for what it actually means...you've picked a bad slogan and should pick a new one. I've never understood why they didn't coop the pledge and choose "with liberty and justice for all" or even just "justice for all." Would have tied Fox hosts in knots trying to explain how the pledge was now bad.
"All Lives Matter", "Justice for All", "Concerned Citizens for Better Cops"
This ain't hard.
I agree 100% about it being a bad slogan. "Re-fund the Police" would be closer. :)
They can say what they want, but when proggo bastions like San Francisco can’t keep Walgreens open because they have no will to police “victimless property crimes”, people will call BS.
I lived in a social democratic country for over a decade. It had it all; super high taxes, robust social programs, excellent public transportation, universal health care... and one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world, partly because they decriminalized petty crimes. In fact, if someone breaks into your home, you are supposed to let them take what they want and then file an insurance claim. (It will be denied if you didn't maintain your locks property.) If you try to interfere, you can be charged with assault. Ditto for shoplifting; ask them to put back the merchandise and if they don't, report it to the police, but do not intervene.
Now, I'm not saying those policies would work in the US, particularly because of the vast difference in gun laws, but not policing victimless property crimes can actually work just fine as a policy. It is not as crazy as Fox News makes it out to be. Nor is it as frictionless as they make it sound in 'proggo bastions'.
What did the police do upon being informed that someone was shoplifting or breaking into your home?
Make a report for your insurance claim.
Once, an American friend of mine came home (to the house that he owned) and found his girlfriend (who didn't live with him) in bed with another man. He told the guy to get out of his house before he beat the shit out of him. The guy refused and said it was his right to be there. My friend proceeded to remove him from his home, with violence. The guy called the cops, who arrested my friend for assault and began deportation proceedings. It is quite a bit different than the "I can shoot you in the face if you knock on my door in a way I don't like" American attitude towards private property!
Frankly, despite being well to the left of the median American, I find that absolutely obscene and would never willingly reside in a country with that legal framework. How the hell am I to know at a glance whether someone poses a threat only to my property or to my life and those of my family?
Sure, I understand the incidence of violent crime to be considerably lower in most of Europe, but even so, I simply cannot know if the person prowling my kitchen is looking for my jewelry and wallet, or looking for my wife who he's been stalking for months.
It is entirely moral and good that anyone in that situation should receive a very, very strong benefit of the doubt, such that the onus in any legal setting should be on the intruder (or authorities) to prove they posed no threat to life or limb.
If I find someone breaking into my home in the middle of the night, I'm shooting them and asking questions after.
If I feel secure enough, they might get a yelled warning to get out before I shoot them, but if I can't tell they're armed or not, I'm going to shoot them with no warning and will not feel much remorse.
Was his "visitor" correct in that he had a legal right to be there? Or was the expectation that your friend would call the police to have a trespasser removed?
Well, the type of crime is important in that comparison. Petty crimes like burglary, vandalism and pickpocketing are rampant. But where I was, there was virtually no violent crime. In the 12 years I was there, the entire province had zero murders. And in the cities (and this is true of much of Western Europe) violent crime mostly happens in the immigrant ghettos, i.e., the neighborhoods next to train tracks that are covered in satellite dishes all pointing the same direction.
You are 100% correctly that social democratic policy only works in homogeneous populations, which is a key detail that American socialists do not understand. People are only ok paying super-high taxes for super-great social benefits if they see those benefits as going to "people like me". (Those uber-progressive social policies also came with a very conservative and coercive culture, which is a byproduct of homogeneity.) The influx of Muslim and African immigrants into Europe—something mostly homogeneous modern Europe is not accustomed to—is jet fuel for the far-right populists parties that are gaining traction.
Personally, I did like being an "other" in such a homogeneous place and I found the culture paradoxically very tolerant and very constraining. But Singapore really creeps me out, especially when random people start professing their love of the quasi-dictator to you for no apparent reason. I like the American way of doing things.
Oh, to be sure, I agree with Joy completely and fully understand and support what 'the defund movement' is all about. But I'm not the one who needs to be persuaded!
People in under-policed neighborhoods forwarding bath-faith memes and chain emails about how Democrats want to abolish their police department are not likely to read a think piece in the NY Times. And yet, there is no shortage of liberals wagging their fingers and lecturing people who can't be bothered to dive into nuanced, long-form articles about municipal police budgets.
But if you need to have a NYT subscription to understand what a slogan "really means" then it's probably a bad slogan. Especially if the true meaning is in some ways the exact opposite of a literal reading.
True. DFP is a bad slogan. MY point was that most (not, unfortunately 100%) NYT readers a) probably knew all along what it meant and b) read things "explaining" what it meant. No one viewing Fox ever saw it explained.
Democrats believe as do their voters that they are the party that supports the working class (minimum wage, unions, etc…), but if the educational polarization continues, then s their an inflection point where Democrat voters abandon the working class and pivot to policies that only support themselves.
Student Loan Forgiveness is one of the issues on the forefront on this. Most blue collar workers don’t go to college and don’t obviously benefit from this, whereas the rising creative educated class will.
And I suppose the same question goes for Republicans… at what point do they alter.
As I have said before, I honestly think there’s a scenario where the parties switch sides at least economically.
The Democratic Party is still the party of the working class, just not the white working class
I'm not sure the point of this comment. I'm talking about the future. Matt addresses the trends in working class votes with non-whites trending away from Democrats.
You are talking about "still". It's like saying, our climate temperature has only risen 1 degree. Sure, it's true, but we are worried about the future 1.5 vs 2.5 increase.
I think his point is that as long as non-whites are a big part of the Dem coalition, and non-whites are disproportionately working class, that reality will ensure Dems can't ignore working class issues. E.g., the $15 min wage
And if that was not his point, it's mine :-)
That still goes to the point that the trend is for non-white working class to drift away from the Democratic Party. And at a certain point, this trend accelerates (possibly... I don't know that it happens... just that it could happen). You are still talking about now or immediate future. I'm talking a decade or two from now.
You can't really claim to be the party of the working class when you don't represent the largest group of the working class. As of 2016, whites constitute 58% of all working class adults.
The question of "selfish grasping" strikes me as critical. At some level, politics has to be about "what's in it for me," hence the popularism thing. Politicians (& smart people like Matt) have the critical job of designing policies that highlight a broad definition of "me."
Which is why "I took out this big loan for a fun four years, please make it go away via policy or magic so the next generation can make exactly the same mistake" seems DOA forever, as it should be.
If it was just "a fun four years", then that would be a fair point. But we do actually need some graduates, and education has a value in itself.
The point is that, unless you think that university education is a mistake, then you have to have a way to fund it that doesn't financially cripple the minority of graduates who don't get well-paid jobs (even if the number of graduates is reduced by policy, there are still going to be people who have mental or physical health issues that prevent them working). That means either you restore the ability to discharge the loans in bankruptcy (though the problem is that the vast majority of graduates are technically bankrupt the day they graduate, so there is a risk of abuse), or you have to replace it with an income-based contribution system (or make all taxpayers pay).
It seems to me that the most logical approach is to contract for income-based contributions up-front, where the percentage of income can be based on the amount that the student receives. Remove the upper limit, ie get rid of the idea that this is a debt that can be repaid, and make it more like an equity investment that cannot be repaid, but where the ex-student pays out a percentage of income either for life or until Social Security eligibility. That way the small number of super-successful graduates can make up for those that don't earn enough to repay, which resolves the usual issue with income-based plans (that being that poor graduates don't pay off their debt, but no-one pays in more than their debt to make up for it).
I don't pretend to understand the scope of the problem, but I think a big part of it is that Big State U down the street correctly sees prospective students as prospective customers, and it needs to market itself to those customers with attractive amenities that surpass those at Big State U in the next state over. Some amount of this bloat (again, I don't pretend to know how much) is paying for increasingly opulent dorms and student unions and rec centers and other things that are legitimately nice things for students to have, but don't necessarily show up in black on the societal bottom line. And then if you're already taking out 100k for undergrad, or whatever, then why *not* spend a little extra to be in that nice new apartment building just off campus?
I say all of this as a proud thrice-graduate of Big State U.
Sure. And the administrative/management layers of Big State U are a lot bigger and a lot better paid than they used to be, which increases tuition.
And Big State is no longer contributing nearly as much to Big State U per in-state student, which has also driven tuition up.
But this gives you a system that can set real incentives: go live in that apartment building and you'll pay 0.5% more income tax for life. Go to Directional State U instead, and you'll pay 5% less income tax for life.
We’re talking about 17 year old kids entering into financial arrangements of which they don’t understand the implications, usually at the behest of trusted adults who tell them college is the only way to secure a decent future.
In context, it’s not the least bit unreasonable for many of these folks to feel this is not their fault, and it’s destroying the prospects of a large part of a whole generation.
At some point, the “reset” button will be pressed, it’s just a matter of how.
The thing is, when I read this characterization of the problem, I find it damning of every single party involved. It reminds me of the subprime mortgage bubble.
- The government is financing predatory financial arrangements that in total are insolvent. They know it's a failure and won't take the hit.
- Parents/guardians/trusted adults are deluded/swindled into convincing their children on the cusp of legal adulthood to sign away years of their future. They have responsibilities they are abdicating.
- 17/18-year-olds who are supposed to have learned some math to be in this situation are borrowing huge sums to buy lottery tickets and a huge portion aren't even trying to fill out the lotto ticket properly to have a shot at a return.
Yes, the reset button will be pressed. Just like in the subprime mortgage bubble, the borrowers' credit will likely still be devastated by that reset button. The lenders will need to be recapitalized, which will mean tax increases. Everyone will be to blame and we'll try to just forget how it happened.
When I say "reset button," I mean that there shouldn't be a market for "student debt" at all.
It requires both explicit (subsidized interest rates) and implicit (bankruptcy exemptions) to make it work at all and only exists because both higher education and banking lobbies have captured the regulatory apparatus.
For the amount of money the Federal government spends running this so-called "market" that it created and operates entirely on its own, we could instead make community and public 4-year degrees free for all current enrollees.
Obviously, doing so would provoke enrollment to increase, but we can actually resurrect a selective admissions process for state schools.
The whole damned thing needs to be burnt to the ground.
Without sweeping reform of the system that brought upon that debt, that would only make the problem worse. The next generation would *correctly* learn the lesson that they can be fairly casual about the educational debt they take on--if things get too bad, society will decide to wipe those debts away.
Trueness. I had my daughter max out her student loans, even though she was getting by without them. Worse case scenario, she just pays them back (the money is sitting there).
People's politics are always quite transparent when they're forced to reveal exactly *who* they feel are the crux of moral hazard problems.
I am simply not concerned about moral hazard applied to a bunch of stupid kids who were led by the nose into bad decisions.
I am concerned about moral hazard on the part of those who did the leading, most especially the higher education lobby and the politically connected finance interests involved in this so-called "market".
If we burn the latter badly enough, the whole "market" goes away, and the former problem solves itself with no moral hazard for students.
"it’s destroying the prospects of a large part of a whole generation." this is hyperbole. 85% of the population has no loans! The average student loan debt is 32k, but the median is 17k. Less than 4% of the population has student loans over 25k.
Large student loans are painful, but they are concentrated among a very small percentage of the population (who often have significant earning potential). We should definitely address the problem, but recognize that it doesn't have anywhere close to the impact that other issues have.
"85% of the population has no loans!"
75% of the population is under 19 or over 40. If close to half of the remaining 25% have loans, as is born out by your statement, that is a "large part of a whole generation".
We're aware that 40% or so of each of my generation and the next one have student loans.
Approximately half of those are people who did not ultimately graduate, and for many or most of them a median burden of $17k is a near-impossible impediment to a stable life.
Approximately half of graduates are not realizing a significant value premium from their degree.
There's a large body of economic work showing that these debts are impacting home purchases and child-bearing. Not just their direct costs, but by forcing people to live in high-cost-of-living areas to earn the income to pay them down, and thereby subjecting themselves to high housing costs and delayed family formation.
Given the extent to which stable family structures and child-rearing are crucial to the next generation, it needs to be fixed.
And I maintain that the moral culpability here is not on the 17 year old, but on the college counselor, the parents, and the higher education lobby. Gut their ability to make this happen again, but fix the existing problem too.
I would argue that the cartel is only part of the problem. Without the Fed's easy money this would be much less of a problem.
No bank is going to loan someone $100k for a gender studies major. But with the Fed skies the limit.
I strongly support making total loan amounts contingent on average expected salary of the major. In addition, colleges should get tuition clawed back from bad loans. And student loans should be easier to discharge in bankruptcy
You've studied this so perhaps you have a reasoned opinion on it (as opposed to me who, like Jon Snow, knows nothing). Can't a goodly portion of the higher education funding problem be laid at the feet of state legislators who simply don't want to pay? Admittedly, they've got lots of reasons for this, but many of them are indeed extremely shortsighted or, in the grand scheme of things, not very important.
This assumes that millennials are a monolith. Taking it back to student loans. Only 39% of millennials have a bachelors degree, 42% have student loans.
That's not to say that there won't be some push towards democratic socialism, but I don't think its a given.
I do agree with you in the future that it won't be a straight flip-flopping of positions... it will be most likely two versions of more liberal positions.
But taxes on middle class are definitely one thing that has potential to flip.
If Democrats are overwhelmingly middle to upper middle class, then support on raising taxes on themselves will be... not so enthusiastic. The battle over the SALT reduction is a prime example of this.
Everyone self-selects their cohort and misinterprets them as being representative (no one I know voted for Nixon, etc.), but none of my mid-30s college-educated friends express a loan forgiveness view that doesn't include at least some pretty hefty public service requirements. Blanket forgiveness of any magnitude is not discussed.
True... but there are plenty of blanket forgiveness advocates out there... at least on twitter.
"Only 39% of millennials have a bachelors degree, 42% have student loans."
It's worth pointing out that those figures shouldn't be interpreted the way we do at first glance. Half of those degree holders don't have debts, and half of debt-holders are blue collar kids who didn't finish their degree.
The biggest beneficiaries of wiping the slate clean would be blue collar folks who made a run at a degree and didn't grasp the brass ring, not actual graduates.
Maybe true.... but the key factor is its under 50% of people no matter how you look at it.
Find-replace "millennials"->"very #online millennials" for a great many of these comments.
>>If the Boomers' descent from idealism into selfish grasping can teach us anything<<
As a Boomer growing up in the 1960s and was part of my generation's lumping every single one of my parent's generation into the category of stifling 1950s conformism, I confess I'm pleased to see the younger generations are eager to play the same trick on us as well.
However, recall that those folks condemned as hawks, conformists, racists and misogynists were then later transformed into the "Greatest Generation" and venerated perhaps a tad too much. What goes around, comes around, I guess. I await my generation's exoneration.
Demarcating the generations is a mugs game. The baby boomers could be defined to include people who became adults in the sixties and people who did so in the early eighties. This is all to say that spending too much energy on describing what a generation believes isn’t worth the effort.
I definitely agree that it's harder to get ahead now days. I've got my CPA, MBA. And am head of finance for a mid sized company. And without my wife working, I feel it's still a struggle to live a upper middle class lifestyle. 40 years ago, that would have been no problem. The primary driver of that is because of higher housing costs.
As for austerity politics. Nobody likes austerity. What people like is low taxes with lots of government benefits. But the problem is the real world doesn't work that way, at least not long term.
You mention "privatizing" Social Security as one of those awful ideas Republicans proposed. The GWB 2005 proposal was to allow people to divert part of their Social Security taxes into an investment account for their own benefit. It was soundly beaten back by Democrats and Progressives.
Since 1/1/2005, as measured by the VTI (an ETF tracking the total stock market), the stock market is up by 427%, for a CAGR of 10.4%. Thank goodness we didn't allow workers to participate in that growth and left it all to the rich.
But that’s not how it works in reality for most people. IIRC the average return on a 401k is negative as people buy high and then panic and sell low. Now you’re going to say, “What moron trades their 401k?” My point exactly.
I'm hoping my child's first words are "buy and hold"
"HODL"
This appears to be a myth; I didn't find any supportive sources and found a number of contradictory sources. And certainly the trend has been to default retirement savers into auto-investment target-date funds and let them forget about it. I'm sure some people still manage to actively buy and sell their retirement funds so badly that they make a negative return, but it doesn't make sense that a *majority* of people do that. Probably most people ignore it, as intended.
I think they included cashing out when switching jobs which apparently more than half of 20 somethings do as well as over 1/3 of 50 somethings.
The Fed had a report a while back talking about how in an emergency, 40% of people wouldn't be able to come up with $600 without selling something they own or borrowing. (Crazier to me is that 20%+ of people making over 100k couldn't come up with 2k in an emergency).
A large portion of people only have their 401k account as savings. So if they lose their job, they take money out of it because its the only money they have. This often looks like > the economy tanks (2008) > people lose their job > access the only savings they have in their 401k,when its the absolute worst time to do so > lose money on their 401k.
This isn't true for everyone, or even the majority, but its a real thing for a lot of people. It also doesn't apply to SS.
easy solution then: no cash out early. Same as with current Social Security.
I don’t know how easy that would be to include in the legislation. Certainly some people would argue that people should be able to access the money in various circumstances. The real estate lobby would certainly push to allow home buyers to access it.
The incremental paycheck funding structure of a 401k makes it impossible to buy high. Some might sell low - IDK. As other have mentioned, [citation needed].
I mean...
I can, and have, shifted investments between index funds and cash-equivalent funds.
Thanks to my China contacts, I had the advance warning to shift retirement holdings into cash-equivalent funds in Feb. 2020 and only moved them back into index funds later on.
I got it mostly right, but it's entirely possible to shift between asset classes in a way that's effectively buying high and selling low.
Sure. I have too. Different strategy, I reallocated a % of my cash position on 3/27/20 to AMZN. So we have n = 2. Still ... I'll defer to Thaler's research at UChicago on the inherent stickiness of 401k selection and allocations here. The TL:DR is people don't touch their 401k. That's the problem he was solving with the Save More Tomorrow (SMaRT) program.
I'm not claiming anything with regards to prevalence, because I have no idea.
But "makes it impossible to buy high" is not accurate.
You forgot the part about "incremental paycheck funding structure" which is accurate. Even if you trade the low - the next contribution comes in to dollar cost average.
"IIRC the average return on a 401k is negative"
[Citation Needed]
I find that almost impossible to believe. You're pretty limited in when you can withdraw money from a 401k before retirement, so money tends to sit in 401ks with little meddling. Also, the government could prohibit withdraw money from the portion of SS that's privatized. In principle, you could lose money by rebalancing in dumb ways, but I doubt that's common.
I believe something like 70% of 20 somethings cash out their 401ks and pay the penalty when they switch jobs.
I'll add that this is kind of a moot point for social security privatization. Just prohibit early withdraws. That's what current social security effectively does.
Citation needed here.
Here is a better one:
"More than half of workers in their 20s who have 401(k) plans cash out their holdings when they change jobs, partly because their balances are relatively low, according to a report from the benefits consultant Aon Hewitt. Only about a third of those who change jobs in their 50s do the same."
1/3 of people in their 50s!! are cashing out, paying taxes and a 10% penalty.
Yikes, that statistic is worse than I expected.
That said, it still doesn't mean that the ROI is negative --- either by how the actual funds do or simply comparing input to output. The 10% penalty sucks, but it's partly (more than?) offset by any employer match to 401k contributions. I can only speak to my personal experience: my previous employer would do a 1/3 match (up to 6% of salary) and my current employer does a 1/2 match (up to some high level). So 10% penalty + taxed as income vs taxed at capital gains (say 13% difference) vs 33% or 50% employer match. That comes out as positive --- especially if the stock market is doing well.
Also, given that 2/3 of people in their 50s don't cash out, I stick by my intuition that the average ROI is positive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/your-money/what-to-do-with-your-retirement-plan-if-you-change-jobs.html
“And yet, nearly half of employees cash out their 401(k) balance when they move to a new job, according to a survey by Hewitt Associates.”
It’s higher for 20 somethings but I can’t find that statistic.
https://diversyfund.com/blog/what-should-i-do-with-my-401-k-when-my-job-ends/?utm_source=www.google.com
I don't think its negative but I have read that its VERY low, like maybe 3%? Because people do buy high and sell low. However I just Googled it and couldn't find any real info.
401k funding = dollar cost averaging. They literally can't "buy high".
Sure they can. They choose the money market or bond option because they are worried about losing money. Then the market shoots up and they worry about missing out so they move it to equities. Then the market slide and they sell in a panic.
That's not at all what the "intelligent default choice" research indicates. The problem is people don't *look* at their 401k. That's why the set-up is so important.
I'm deeply incredulous that large numbers of people are actively moving money around in their 401Ks trying to time the market. I mean, I have a JD and a BS in economics and *I* don't know offhand how to move money around in my 401K -- the money is just going into whatever funds I designated when I set it up.
Hang on, to my knowledge "since Social Security already does that by investing its trust fund" is wrong.
They're statutorily required to invest *only* in US Treasuries. The Social Security Trust Fund is explicitly *not* permitted to act as a sovereign wealth fund, at all.
Do you have a link to support your lockbox claim? I don’t recall that being part of the proposal.
leave the stock market growth to us rich folk
At the time I was marginally in favor of privatizing social security but couldn't get past the moral hazard issue.
Some of the plans either provided a minimum benefit no matter how your investment did. This can encourage risky stock market investment (assuming you weren't forced into some government managed index fund - which would be a HUGE index fund - unclear how that would distort the market), with the knowledge that it's not _really_ that risky because you've got guaranteed minimum payouts. So the right thing to do might be to put those in high risk accounts.
If the plans did _not_ provide a minimum benefit, and people went risky and lost it all... I did not believe that we as a country would not feel bad and end up giving them their money anyway down the road.
In general, I liked the _theory_ of letting people invest it, but the _practice_ seemed terribly fraught.
Crazy that people prefer a defined benefit to a savings account.
In sitting in Massachusetts, me and all my friends with doctorates and professional degrees, waiting for my blue state utopia. I’ve wondered why we don’t just go for it. We have a Republican governor now, but we didn’t a few years ago, so I don’t think it’s that. Plus, we got our “commonwealth care” during the Romney years.
How does the blue state utopia project intersect with Milan’s piece about state legislatures not working well?
It’s tough. You need a Governor with more vision and ambition than Charlie Baker; could be a D or an R but would have to tackle Massachusetts’ housing situation in a serious way.
There's an assumption that a majority of people in a blue state, or even most liberals, agree with what such a utopia should look like. They don't: see housing policy.
Yeah. One step forward during the Baker administration was altering state law so zoning can be changed by a simple majority of city councilors instead of a supermajority. It was really easy for people to block housing projects at the zoning level prior to that change. So a step in the right direction, but not exactly visionary…. And as we all know, housing projects tend to die by a thousand cuts.
One thing you could do is create YIMBY utopias *within* blue state utopias. Find some towns that are good places for YIMBYs to live, get more YIMBYs to move there, rewrite their zoning laws, and turn them all into mini Kowloons.
Interesting idea. I do wonder what would happen if a bunch of YIMBYs moved into a nice community, with leafy suburbs filled with SFH-zoned homes. Would they raise the drawbridge and decide that, hey, this quality of life is pretty good and we want to keep it this way? Or would they stay true to their YIMBYism?
The cynic in me says #1 will happen. The optimist in me suspects that #1 would happen anyway.
Only one way to find out!
Though if it were me, I wouldn't choose a true leafy suburb for my colonization project. I'd choose a more urban suburb like, I don't know, New Rochelle NY or someplace like that.
Sure, perhaps a good overview of existing zoning laws, which states already have good frameworks that a YIMBY utopia could be built on.
Gotta be careful that in your road to utopia you don't get tripped up by taxing rain water.
Rich blue state politics have a large dose of nimbyism. Most of your well credentialed Massachusetts friends have a big chunk of their net worth tied up in overpriced houses, and they want to keep the price of their biggest asset high. This has the added benefit of keeping the unwashed out of the best public schools.
I think that people think of California as the one party state for Democrats, and they’re not doing anyone any favors at the moment in terms of perception. I really do wish that, at the least, they could put together a health care plan for the rest of us to envy. Makes Democrats look bad on what is probably (should be) their signature issue.
Don't forget that blue states have outrageous housing costs. You practically have to be an overworked professional to have a nice place to stay.
It's called utopia for a reason, it doesn't and can't exist. I would argue that CA is pretty much the result you always get when going for a blue state utopia. IE totally screwed up
I agree with all the points, but I still worry a little that we were better off when we had the totally misinformed "cracked" into small minorities in each party... By "packing" them into the GOP, they can actually win primaries with candidates who do not make sense from a policy perspective.
The old structures kept the elites in charge of two adversarial camps, so at the end of the day you would get elite-approved leaders who had the approval of their side. That was probably more a more effective way to run the country.
These elite approved leaders gave us three decades of austerity and median wage stagnation not to mention two decades of needless wars. Better Trump than W.
Better Trump than W. - No. I agree with MY's point that Bush had an somewhat unprecedented freedom to act after 9/11 and chose poorly. I can only imagine how bad Trump would have acted in such a situation. Worse, Trump has managed to exceed most of my imaginations on how bad he could be, so...
I'm on a different timeline from you - Dubya was the start of the fall, though Obama let us believe W was the aberration. I'm thinking of how well things went in the late 20th century, with the notable (bipartisan) exception of Vietnam.
I was a follower of the Free State Project, the libertarian effort to first identify a target and then get libertarians to move there and swing the state's politics to being a laboratory for libertarianism. They ended up picking New Hampshire and ran into some problems, such as bears, but it's an interesting idea.
So what about the liberal, high education utopia project? The Scandinavia of the United States? You can handwave at California and New York being larger than Finland, but would you really pick those large states?
Perhaps kill two birds with one stone and identify a small red state that still has some appeal to upscale liberals, and like with the Free State Project encourage liberals to move there so that you can both turn it into Scandinavia as well as swing a state blue?
Depending on your flavor of liberalism, Alaska already has a UBI, just funded by oil, so you could build on that.
I think Utah is the most highly educated consistently red state?
I think you'd get a lot more young liberals to move to this hypothetical red state if you made one of its cities into a really nice place to live with cool amenities and media buzz. Most people aren't *that* political, even young people who are automatic D votes. In their subjective minds, flipping a state is less of a priority than living in a city with a cool "scene" and good brunch.
So start with a city that's already reasonably cool in a hypothetically small red state. I think a lot of Rocky Mountain cities would already be on that list.
Isn't this essentially what has happened to Colorado over the last couple of decades? Denver is a reasonably cool city, and you have skiing as well.
So we've already demonstrated it works in principle! Now invade Idaho!
It's already happening!
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/growing-idaho/idaho-attracts-californians-migration-growing/277-5c2a35b2-d3be-46fa-8565-faf024a16f7c
I'm pretty sure that most of those Californians are Republicans fleeing the state though.
My parents retired to NH for tax reasons from 2006-2012. They were perfectly suited politically... it's just a very insular state. Distrustful of newcomers. Also ridiculously cold and snowy (144 inches of snowfall their first year).
They ended up in FL like the rest of their generation.
Isn't California already this state? I see them making their own rules all the time.
You could argue California is a little too large and unwieldy, and it's recall provisions are pretty problematic.
Even if this all came to pass, and enough liberal progressives moved to a small state (Idaho? Vermont? ) that they could run its politics however they pleased, does anyone think that would actually satisfy anybody? Why wouldn't the next generation of young liberals decide that it wasn't enough in various ways, it wasn't truly progressive, etc.
I mean... this is how politics works? Always has been?
Not even from the Whiggish "continuous progress" angle, but simply "everything you did created problems which are now apparent and we're going to blame you for them and pretend they were apparent then, Mom and Dad."
It's been like this for as long as there have been "politics."
Fair point, but then what's the point of the move if everyone in the future is just as dissatisfied as they are today, regardless of whether or not this "bluing of Montana" project happened?
The state politics of one state with much less than 1% of the population of the country has shifted leftward at the cost of half a million people moving to a place that wouldn't have been ideal for their lives otherwise. And so what? It better actually be a utopia that residents of nearby states really do want to imitate, otherwise I don't think it achieves much.
I'm not even sure it's guaranteed the moves would change the politics of the state, rather than the move changing the politics of the mover, as they may come to appreciate at least a few political points of view they didn't like when they were living in NYC or SF.
Maybe we're talking past one another, but I don't know how these are really concerns. No one is going to fund a program of left-leaning colonization of lightly-populated red states.
To the extent that this is a thing, it's going to be largely organic, and it's actually very tightly correlated to another demographic trend I think is going to speed a major realignment of the party system...
Without extensive subsidy, rural populations are going to continue to implode. Everyone will be living together in the suburbs and cities, and there's going to be a lot less scope for political self-segregation than is the case today. That means, almost necessarily, that the cultural issues are going to get back-burnered eventually, especially as real problems still won't be dealt with in the coming decades and will fester.
Unless we get impatient and start shooting one another before 2040, after that point the political spectrum is going to be unrecognizable.
I don't get the current fetish for thinking of the 2016-21 political alignment as an immutable fact of life. Christ knows it didn't look like this as late as 2012, and it won't look like this in 2028, let alone 2040.
"Without extensive subsidy, rural populations are going to continue to implode. Everyone will be living together in the suburbs and cities, and there's going to be a lot less scope for political self-segregation than is the case today."
What is the definition of rural here? I think its very possible that small to medium size towns across the country enjoy a bit of revival due to
1) increased WFH expanding the number of jobs available
2) housing costs continuing to rise dramatically in large urban areas
I expect those two trends to redound more to the benefit of the Pittsburghs, Fort Waynes, and Kansas Cities of the world than small towns, but if anything, wouldn't that further break down our current geographic sorting and polarization?
Rural populations are imploding because the economic rationale behind many of the places in which people used to live is either gone or much reduced:
- There's nowhere near as much of a "tail-end" to agriculture anymore thanks to automation and efficient distribution networks.
- Manufacturing employment is increasingly concentrated in larger towns or suburban areas because manufacturing is increasingly done at even greater scale.
- The logistics of moving goods and people are vastly better and faster than even 3 decades ago, so basically all "waypoints" are unneeded.
- Primary resource extraction is easier, more automated, and cheaper than ever before.
- The degree of economic opportunity offered by even semi-skilled labor in large markets is hugely increased relative to the same work elsewhere.
Many, many small towns are reprising the history of Cairo, Illinois.
Alongside the lingering hangover from slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, their death throes are one of the major sources of vitriol and hatred in modern politics. When they're finished dying, perhaps things will calm down, brutal as that sounds.
I'm only talking about "bluing" a red state through migration b/c that's what how I understood Harrison's original post. And I've seen the idea mentioned a few other times on this site, alongside the related idea of Black people trying to concentrate in a few states for political reasons.
To put it mildly, I think they are both ridiculous ideas. And it was a ridiculous idea when Libertarians tried it with Vermont but also sort of on brand for the US Libertarian party. I agree that organic growth is always how these things happen. Unless Biden can convince more Elon Musk's to move to Texas or the Federal Government starts moving major agencies to flyover country. Normal people don't move hundreds of miles for their political party.
I get what you're saying about rural areas. It's a very slow process, and just like the current political alignment, it could change at some point in the next couple decades for unforeseen reasons. So I'm not sure it guarantees a realignment anytime soon. Although demographics suggest to me the "rural implosion" trend may accelerate in 10 years or so.
It was NH, but agreed, never happening.
Organically, there are plenty of states that will "turn blue" eventually. But the ground under our party system will shift before then, so there's not much point discussing it, IMO.
The current high-polarization, heavily geographically-sorted, culture-heavy paradigm is similar to the Gilded Age, and it simply isn't going to last because its unsustainable both from a policy perspective and a psychological one. Either the sorting mechanism breaks and parties go into serious flux, or a civil conflict breaks out. Given how lazy Americans are, the former is the likely outcome.
The only thing I think might short-circuit that, and its so terrifying that I hesitate to even mention it in public, is the prospect that the GOP manages to claw its way back into power in 2028 in a way that leaves it feeling as besieged and insecure as it does today, then just decides to say "Nope, wrong" to the 2030 Census results and cooks the books on rural areas in a way that lets it completely untether itself from electoral accountability.
At that point, we're edging into "cripple the cities economically and politically" territory, and the last several times that was tried (Pol Pot and the Cultural Revolution come to mind) it was... unfortunate for the societies which tried it.
Btw, an aside about the Free State Project - the problem with the bears wasn’t that, in the absence of government they couldn’t do anything about them. The problem was that the federal government made it a felony to shoot em, and they couldn’t do anything about that.
As I recall, an earlier Slow Boring post made the argument for offering up Maine to play this role.
Sure, add implementing multiparty democracy to the to do list when taking over the state.
I would argue that what makes Nordic systems "work" is a homogenous society with a lot of trust in each other and in the government. Not to mention a very high cultural work ethic.
Progressives' cultural hegemony is way more useful than electoral majorities at getting their agenda enacted. They control the institutions that actually have power in the country. Consider how they won on transgender ideology, gay marriage, DACA, affirmative action, etc. Chris Caldwell explains in The Age of Entitlement:
Elites want something.
They use the institutions they control to advocate for that thing. One way they do this is having corporations or nonprofits they control sponsor a court case.
Federal judges, who are progressive elites, rule that civil rights law must be applied in a new way and the unpopular policy elites wanted is now the law.
Corporations, educators, and the media manufacture consent afterwards and it becomes normal.
Some of what you write here is correct, but the majority of current federal judges are Republicans.
You can tell which particular axe we’re grinding based on the phrase “transgender ideology.”
Just not being put in the gulag would be amazing at this point.
State level utopias are harder to create than MY admits. If NY enacted sharply progressive taxes, its best taxpayers (rich people and corporations) could move to Connecticut or New Jersey. That just isn’t the case in Europe. Language ties many professional Europeans to their home country. If France soaks the rich, Koln is much further from Paris than Jersey City is from Manhattan and very few French speak German well enough to hold down professional jobs. Poland is the Texas of Europe, it has cheap labor, relatively light regulations and is happy to manufacture things, but moving to Warsaw is hardly appealing for the French haute bourgeoisie. Florida, on the other hand, has no income tax, a lovely climate for old people, and arguably better leisure amenities than New York. You might need to fly from Miami to NY for live theater, but that’s not a huge reason to stay.
New York already has sharply progressive taxes though
NY is a tricky case in some ways. I wonder if Massachusetts might be running closest to a state-level utopia? And while they get some people commuting from NH, I don't think there's a massive problem with people fleeing their taxes.
If things are well-run (i.e. good on safety, education, healthcare) I think there are plenty of people who aren't that price-sensitive about their taxes. I didn't leave NYC because of the tax burden, but because I felt like the city was failing on safety & schools.
Build the utopia in Hawaii so people can't easily flee.
New York has a tax of 6.85% on income over $215k (professional couples) and 9.65% on income over $1.077M (executives and rentiers). That’s not enough to fund utopia.
What would be?
Doesn't look terribly progressive to me https://itep.org/whopays/new-york/
How would you adjust sales and property taxes to address that?
Sales and property taxes are intrinsically regressive, but property tax implementations are even more regressive in practice than they are in theory: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-09/racial-inequality-broken-property-tax-system-blocks-black-wealth-building?sref=ujjUxZdM
Here's a NY specific example that came out yesterday (" How a $2 Million Condo in Brooklyn Ends Up With a $157 Tax Bill"): https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-new-york-property-tax-benefits-rich/?srnd=premium&sref=ujjUxZdM
It mentions a pretty simple change that would help: "New York City Department of Finance has blamed a state law that requires it to ignore the sale prices of condos and co-ops when determining their taxable value."
So there, simple suggestion: look at the fricking sale price!
Slightly more complicated: incorporate the research findings from Christopher Berry and others (like Cook county refused to do...)
Income over $21k is taxed at 5.97% and income over $81k at 6.33%. A professional couple making $700k a year has a marginal rate only 1% higher than a taxi driver.
Right, like the 4% state income tax on your first dollar and the 3% NYC income tax on your first dollar.
People choose higher-tax jurisdictions when the services are worth it. And holding these kinds of programs accountable for delivering value-for-money is not such a terrible thing.
I think you can have high taxes if you have the benefits too. Imagine a world where NYC had converted the Long Island Railroad into subway lines (getting rid of conductors, massively increasing frequency) and forcing massive up zoning around stations. You’d have the ability to provide millions more people the ability to participate in the country’s top economic center without having to own a car. Probably also would have kept NY from losing a congressional seat. I think people would be willing to pay relatively higher taxes if you got ride of their car expenses. This is what Hong Kong did with the KCR - and super nerdy fact - they did it without the benefits of being able to through-run the trains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon-Canton_Railway_Corporation
Imagine a NYC without a history of public sector unions.
The mistake is in thinking you create this through sharply progressive taxes. Taxes on the rich in the US in NY or California aren't that different from Sweden/France etc (often hitting or surpassing 50%). The difference is that those countries tax the middle class and especially the upper middle class much more heavily. E.g. you hit some of the top income tax rate bands (52%) in Sweden at around $62k.
“If NY enacted sharply progressive taxes, its best taxpayers (rich people and corporations) could move to Connecticut or New Jersey.”
CT and NJ also have very high taxes. In order to escape the ridiculous NY taxes people are moving to Florida:
https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2021/08/31/nycs-exodus-to-florida-big-businesses-residents-fleeing-at-record-levels-despite-rosy-census-data/
[I believe the figure cited in that article is a significant undercount because it’s from driver’s license data and I see tons of NY, CT, NY, PA, and CA plates around my neighborhood. I hope the feet-dragging on registering their cars here means that a big chunk of them will go back.]
I'm curious what is your experience from living in Europe. Mine says that you don't need to speak German for a white collar job in Germany, if you speak English. Now, if the argument is that the French can't speak English, I see your point. :P
I’ve never lived in Europe but my uncle was an IT manager in Germany for 20 years. He speaks fluent German and married a German wife before coming back.
It might be a generational thing then! I don't believe the language barrier in Europe is important any more, IF you are working a white collar job.
How many Italians, French and Spanish speak English well enough to get by professionally?
A lot of them! We all did Erasmus anyway, we needed a way to communicate! A slightly more provocative question is how many Germans speak English well enough to work in a big multinational in Germany.
Yeah, that's not an issue at all. Most professionals in Europe have English as their working language, one way or another. Your point about Germans and multinationals in Germany is well taken and a point of friction everywhere in Europe (with the possible exception of the Nordics and Benelux). Host country language matters more for managers than for professionals - you usually need some proficiency to have a managerial career.
How high would New York tax rates have to be for Manhattan's rich to decamp to Jersey City?
What makes you believe that New Jersey’s taxes are any lower?
Not a damn thing.
Just riffing on the funny hypothetical of rich New Yorkers deciding to live in Jersey City even if they could save a few bucks
Yeah, that’s silly. There might be some very specific scenarios where very high income folks could save by moving to NJ, but in general they’re both very high tax states. NYC has lower property taxes, though.
The reason people chose to live in NJ and commute to NYC (I did that for many years) is because real estate is much cheaper. $500K - $600K gets you, maybe, a tiny, tiny apartment in Manhattan in an older building (I haven’t checked prices in a long while). In parts of NJ a short drive (or possibly even walk or bike ride) to a train station the same sum gets you a 3 - 4 BR house with a yard and a good school system. The trade off is the commute.
I believe a number of European countries have still had to walk back super high taxes because of rich flight. Note for example that none of the Nordic countries have wealth taxes anymore.
As for the fact that many researchers now are on the left of center, I think another big factor is that most of the American Right just ceded that ideas ground and became more intransigent, and that's true for both MAGA folks and Never Trumpers, even the light ones. Many ideas current being sold as center or center-left could easily fit a reasonable definition of a center-right agenda, which is why in many respects Boris Johnson's agenda is closer to Biden's than to most conservatives in America.
For instance, I was struck by how relatively little tribute conservatives paid at the death of Brent Scowcroft a few years ago. The guy was a Republican and is generally recognized as one of the greatest minds in modern foreign policy, a Bismarck of our times, etc,etc....and alas, he wrote op-eds both opposing the Iraq War and defending the JCPOA. In different proportions I see similar stuff with Republicans like Jay Powell and John Roberts.....
The window for what is "true" conservatism in America today is just too narrow, so naturally some intellectuals today would rather be out of it than conform.
The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades. That's one of the main reasons that right leaning media like Rush and Fox News took off. I'll grant that its gotten worse lately.
As for the leftward bias in education. It's not just with the professors, it's also with the administration. Basically all of your universities have large diversity and inclusion departments now.
In addition, this starts before university, in particular at your top prep schools. They are all likely to have woke outreach as well.
“The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades.”
This bit made me chuckle:
“Conservatives, of course, have been whining about liberal media bias since long before I was born, and for the longest time these complaints struck me as almost pure bullshit. But that’s become markedly less true in recent years.”
It doesn’t occur to him, apparently, that he used to be wrong *and* it’s worse now.
I think I saw Alan Cole making the argument on twitter that while privatizing social security is anathema to voters, current retirees would have benefitted from the massive run-up in stock prices that have occurred since the great recession.
that's a fun use of hindsight.
Shocking that we didn't buy that dip for our retirees
Looking back from the future, one narrative that might be told of the century in American politics that began somewhere between the 1930s and 1960s is that northern leaders of the Democrats, traditional American party of the unwashed uneducated masses, saw an opportunity to expand the party's working class base by bringing into the mainstream fold of American society the largest excluded group - black voters. But that alienated many white Democrats, and the Republican Party, which by then was no longer living on the fumes of its cultural progressive abolitionist roots, and had become merely about protecting wealth and power, took those working class voters in, in what at first seemed like a cynical bargain to shore up the plutocrats at the top with culture war distractions. But eventually the Republican party came to reflect the economic interests of it's new base of working class voters and racial division fades in importance compared to class and economic issues as the Civil Rights movement receded in the past. And the Democratic Party came to reflect the economic interests of its new base of educated, professional, managerial class voters. We'll see....
I question the extent to which the Republican Party represents the economic interests of working class whites. It has become reluctant to kill programs that help this group, but it’s hardly poised to give them anything new, other than deficits and rage.
True but the story isn't over.
Give it another 8 years or so for the realignment to get further along.
My Karl Popper alarm is ringing. I’ve been reading these essays on education and they end up explaining too much. Dems win elections because of their education base. Dems lose elections because they can’t reach beyond their education base. Nice journalistic boiler plate. (This is common. Earlier this week at the start of the day the investment media was writing stocks rally on West Texas crude then at the end of the day it was stocks fell because of the same thing.) We ask people in exit polls lots of questions and our regressions have shown the education variable has a sig coefficient, but ed today is not the same as 40 years ago and neither are college classes or college students; employers are not using BAs to screen in the same ways, and political parties are very different. This smells like a sampling issue to me where we landed on a variable that is correlated with something simply because it is so big and noisy that something in it is jumping up and down with the voting variable. Until we know more what education means we are using it to over explain. We need a testable hypothesis and education is just too broad. It explains everything and is therefore … kinda useless.
I am listening, but unconvinced, that a segment of the left is interested in cultural hegemony even among their notional political allies. We can argue about how many of these people there are, but there definitely are people who have a sizeable personal stake in identifying just how liberal/progressive/left they are. Many of them do this in part by contrasting themselves with boring normie Democrats who don't know what DEI stands for, or still use the gross gendered "latino/latina", or aren't up to date with the latest inclusions in whatever LGBTQ has grown into.
These people could be safely ignored if they didn't appear to represent a dangerous fraction of low-level Congressional staffers.
If they keep adding letters, I’m quite confident they’ll just succeed in getting people to make up their own acronyms…
Increasing factionalization just seems like a weird lift for a party that used to celebrate MLK's dream of a future where people would be valued by the content of their character rather than other demographic info. Alas.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/07/justin-trudeau-mocked-after-using-2slgbtqqia-acronym/
Hate to agree with the haters at eg the New York Post but . . . 2SLGBTQQIA+?
This is a great point about advantages liberals/progressives enjoy in the United States—but it raises a question of universal applicability: the Center-left everywhere has had this issue of education polarization—from the socialists in Germany and France to probably most severely UK Labour. But the UK in particular does *not* have cultural or especially media support for Labour, progressive discourse or cultural openness.
The media in the UK are, perhaps uniquely in a Western democracy, avowedly Center-right if not Right.
What is the trade-off then for UK Labour? For languishing social democrats in Europe, which don’t enjoy cultural progressive hegemony in, e.g., Greece or Italy?
Why do you think the UK media leans to the right as opposed to the left tilt that we see in the US? That’s pretty interesting.
Has always been a huge mystery; the papers of record all explicitly endorse the Tories, without fail; compare to Le Monde in Paris and El PAÍS in Spain and there’s no parallel really.
It doesn’t help that the two biggest papers are owned by Murdoch, but it predates him. I don’t know but would love to read why somewhere from someone who does. Every other democracy has a large center or center left paper of record
I suppose Guardian plays that role? Sweden is similar actually, the media is center right with the exception of the leading tabloid.
Counterpoint, this is the political editor of the Guardian— https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/17/fireworks-offstage-as-sunak-stands-guard-on-public-purse?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Yeah, it’s what we got! Haha. It’s shocking how little role the Guardian plays in the discourse here, however. They never go on TV, their headlines never form the big discussions on Sunday shows. It feels at time like we Guardian readers are part of a secret clique. A bombshell long form report of unfairness or corruption just disappears the next day, never mentioned again.
Curious if the BBC plays that role or do you feel like its also right of center?
"What I *do* think is knowable is that the GOP will struggle to maintain its non-college gains if it goes back to austerity politics."
I think this line, and your analysis, overestimates the extent to which the modern GOP base votes on policy, and underestimates the extent to which politicians are comfortable with cognitive dissonance. If the GOP pursues a wildly unpopular austerity campaign, they'll just tell their base it's because the Democrats spent all your money on healthcare for transgender immigrants or whatever. The marching orders are "animate the base with culture war chum" and I don't expect that to change based on policy outcomes or reality.
Counterpoint: Obama's 2012 results. Fox News said Obama was a socialist who was going to take away conservatives' guns and put gay marriage above family values. And yet, despite all that, Obama campaigned against Romney's austerity politics and performed very well with non-southern whites compared to Hillary or Biden, especially in the industrial midwest.
Just look at the results: Obama crushed Romney in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He even won Ohio, albeit by a narrower margin. He outright won many rural, white counties in the region, and even in the rural counties he lost he still received >40% in most. To take a random example, look at Pike County, Ohio. Obama received 48.9% of the vote there in 2012, but in 2020 Biden only won 25.1% of the vote. The point is, 2012 shows many of these voters are winnable, and 2012 wasn't that long ago.
You might be right, but I think a commenter above me made a good point about media polarization/enclosure over the last few years. In 2012, a Republican would at least see what Obama was saying on Fox News - OAN doesn't even air Biden's speeches. If the left media is better about this, it's not better by much. This tribal redefinition of "journalism" will only improve if it stops being profitable, and I'm not optimistic.
How long, though, till Republican primary voters realize they can have their cake and eat it too? Culture war populism -and- more friendly economic policies? That seems like part of the lesson of Trump - he was the only primary candidate in 2016 willing to say things that broke with Paul Ryan economic orthodoxy.
If they could do that, it would be a great thing for the country (the culture war stuff would suck, but darn it, we need somebody to cut spending, especially on the elderly. (They might never cut spending on the elderly, but ah well.))