@Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (other than “culture”—a nonexplanation explanation—or random path dependence, i wonder why union solidarity in DE is expressed as spread-the-pain where in the US it’s pay-your-dues-and-you’ll-get-your-turn.)
@Alon @ddayen (i think the politics now tilt towards what is not now made in america should be made in america. it’s hard to find a reasonable balance between “offshoring has been a catastrophe for america” and “some reliance on international specialization and trade remains desirable” under a politics as polarized as ours have become.)
@SteveRoth @djc https://www.centreforoptimism.com/pessimism-of-the-intellect-optimism-of-the-will
(gramsci died i believe in the prison where he wrote this, alas.)
@BenRossTransit @Alon @ddayen (i) things should be done, (ii) things should be done efficiently in terms of actual resource use, (iii) things should be done in ways that distribute surplus broadly and protect or else reasonably compensate various interests.
(iii) can become—has ubiquitously become—a pretext to prevent (i) and undermine (ii). but it’s no answer to simply throw (iii) away. we have to find ways to render it consistent with (i) and (ii).
@SteveRoth @djc omg no, gramsci allusion!
@Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (it’s interesting how much inefficient gerontocracy is a through-line in US institutions. US households tend to leverage themselves on the assumption wages don’t decline, so absent stong seniority protections, they become very precarious. in places where people leverage themselves less, can rely more on non-labor benefits, are in general more equal, maybe unions and other institutions can be less gerontocratic.)
@Alon @ddayen i’m not sure how fruitful it is to argue over what the everything bagel story *really* is. they’ve complained about permitting, but also a great deal about what are really naggings (not requirements) in eg the CHIPS act, to consider childcare, DEI-style equity in hiring, provisioning by small and minority owned businesses, etc. it’s easy to mock that stuff! but these naggings are not a source of the hold-up costs that require budgets be tripled. 1/
@Alon @ddayen but requirements that lead to better pay and conditions for a workforce, or naggings that may gesture at social goals and build political support, that seem annoying but don’t actually cost much, can remain on the bagel. (then there are “buy american” requirements, which are kind of a mix but probably politically nonnegotiable, although hopefully sometimes waivable.) /fin
@SteveRoth @djc of the will, baybee.
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen in Europe, it seems possible for unions to act according to a long-term interest in successful projects. there does not seem to be a serious conflict between unionization and socially efficient use of labor.
in the US, failure — or at least the plutocratically purchased appearance of failure — is the expectation. so maybe negotiations are more transactional. maximize worker remuneration here, now, regardless of social efficiency. one-shot, zero-sum game thinking.
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen it requires that in-house experts dedicated to mission make high-quality, soft-information judgment calls. we backseat drivers from the outside will never know enough to be able to tell the difference and not get snowed by interested players. but it is clearly possible! european public works exist!
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen (btw, ISTM?)
@Alon @ddayen totally with you! consultants, ranging from the openly predatory McKinsey types to the crunchy NGO types are a plague on state capacity. a state requires in-house expertise and institutional memory to retain it. Noah, in contradistinction to say Matt and Ezra, has been good on emphasizing in-house capacity. but the everything-bagel story mostly focuses on labor costs, direct and indirect. apparently it’s commentators as well as managers everyone hates.
@Alon @ddayen i think we all agree with this. but overpaid, 50-first-date consultants aren’t what the everything-bagel progressivists critique. somehow it’s not the actors who have, in real life, successfully grabbed the surplus and eviscerated public-sector state capacity who are the problem. it’s anything that might hinder a race-to-the-bottom in wages and working conditions? 1/
@Alon @ddayen you know better than i do the degree to which, eg featherbedding by public sector unions harms the economics of transit in the US. you read egregious stories about unnecessary hang-alongs in NYC subway construction, and if those are right, they are, well, egregious. we absolutely need an efficient public sector, and efficiency in the private-sector actors that we subsidize. 2/
@Alon @ddayen but it’s worth distinguishing between efficiency and exploitation. featherbedding is inefficient: someone is “working” and being paid a nice union salary, for useless or unnecessary activities. the social cost is not the money, but the opportunity cost of the wasted labor. that is a real inefficiency, and the public sector should be merciless about eliminating that. (easier said than done, i know.) 3/
@Alon @ddayen i think @ddayen’s deep point is that over anything but a very immediate term, financial pseudoefficiency that really means transferring wealth from workers to other stakeholders (including consultants, shareholders, potentially but i think rarely the fisc) undermines the distributed democratic power that state capacity and a consensus to build as a public rely upon. /fin
“Supply-side progressives like Yglesias and Klein are skilled at detecting the structural problems in American government. They’re less concerned with the problem of power as an impediment to progress. And they’re certainly not interested in equalizing that power, aligning the interests of labor and capital, as the clearest path to deal everyone into a next-generation economy.” @ddayen https://prospect.org/economy/2023-05-25-liberalism-that-builds-power/
trust autopilot.
@eARCwelder if that’s the case, we have no business reelecting a shifting cadre of rival courtesans to the office where a president should be.
Is it really true, as seems to be the implication of some commentary I've read, that the way the debt ceiling is playing out reflects a peaceful transfer of power from the Klain administration to the Zients administration?
I've mostly been favorably surprised by the Biden administration. I hope that continues.
But this moment is a test, I think, of whether there in fact is a Biden administration.
We don't need another hero.
Sad about #TinaTurner. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tina-turner-dead-obit-192002/
“The eerie thing about this hyper-technologized world is that it’s very difficult to separate fantasies of persecution from its objectively shitty logic. The phones serve us ads that seem like we are being listened to. Are we? Maybe it’s just ‘the algorithm.’” #JohnGanz https://johnganz.substack.com/p/update-on-twitter-ban
it’s weird, kind of ironic, that there seems to be growing overlap between transhumanist and anti-trans communities.
or am i unfairly stereotyping “TESCREALists”?