our economy is being artificially propped up by consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports

A lot of conservatives have anxiety about a lack of cultural influence despite being ~half of the country. The personality cult is partially about trying to milk Trump's cultural imprint, their biggest cultural 'hit' in recent years, while they still can. He's the GOP Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Having a bunch of crooks, rapists, & scumbags in leadership positions is incredibly corrosive to society. But the effect is diffuse & time-lagged enough that it's easy to dismiss relative to lower tax rates and cheaper oil prices You can only maintain a quarantine w/ cross-partisan elite consensus

The politically hyperengaged are more willing to overlook character issues than normies. If you believed X,Y,Z policies would be better for society, and candidate A to be more effective at achieving them, then under most moral frameworks it's easy to vote A despite them being a piece of shit

Ever since the release of Abundance and the general rise of YIMBYism the center-right punditocracy has complained about how particular the supply-side lib vision is (urbanism and trains). Why not supply-side policy in general? But IMO this reveals a common failure of the center-right in America 1/

Cooperatives are as profit-seeking as for-profit corps, they just have a different ownership structure & disburse profits differently (patronage dividend in the case of a consumer coop like S Group). Grocery coops in EU/JP/ROK vs for-profit grocers in the US is more due to path dependency tbh

Despite our weak party system, outsiders & insurgents still act like the Democratic Party is a stifling top-down bureaucracy instead of a thin abstraction over a mass of primary voters. "The party establishment" is mostly rando resistlibs volunteering their free time & money.

Applying some level of social pressure to married couples to have kids is desirable since there is no way to make the decision rationally ex ante but the vast majority of parents are glad they had kids ex post

A load-bearing pillar of pluralism was apparently the average person *not being all that aware of how other people lived*. Once you sees someone else's radically different consumption choices and beliefs via social media, you're tempted to snuff them out to preempt any cognitive dissonance.

99 times out of 100 "enshittification" is a firm moving from a free/cheap tier only to a free tier & a premium tier. The premium tier is often quite nice & reasonably priced while the free tier expands access to lower income users. Everyone hates being charged for something that used to be free tho

The reactionary worldview is very often the refuge of people with a strong sense of disgust and a limited capacity for self-control. They obsessively seek to control their social environment because they need intense social pressure to act in the way they want to, and are miserable otherwise.

“Look how those right wing freaks cooked their brains on crime videos” says the guy who spends 2 hours a day watching videos called “The K-Shaped Economy Explains Everything You Hate About Your Life” and “17 Fast Food Orders That Used to Cost Under 5 Dollars”

This is part of the S corporatization of American capitalism. More and more corporate managers are turning public firms into quasi-sole proprietorships via dual-class shares & retail investor personality cults. They want us to become a nation of car dealerships

The dirtbag left media ecosystem is way more comprehensible when you realize it's comprised of sole proprietor small business owners who have no idea how capitalism works

Embrace enlightened centrism: AI will vastly expand the size of firms by reducing coordination costs, _increasing_ white collar employment. The trend since the "control revolution" has been new tech enabling larger and larger firms. AI is like Excel or the punch card (laudatory)

I used to get way more angry about this kind of ignorant Ludditism but I've realized that the socialist left is just the mirror of the libertarian right in that they take an absolutist stance (new tech is always riddled with externalities/total safe and fine) as an opening negotiating position.

it's getting annoying how much of American politics is driven by people who are basically house cats in regards to policy; they are completely unaware of the support structure that fills their food bowl and only interested in knocking things down or chasing laser pointers

The incessant ingroup/outgroup dynamics of social media is causing people to believe There Are Only Two Types of Guys. "Super religious trad wife" and "Promiscuous liberal harpy" are the only two types of millennial women, sorry! And yes, one is 100% good and the other is 100% bad.

This article is bugfuck insane. Dating around in your 20s, settling down, & having kids describes millions of Americans. It's not a "luxury belief". Not that IFS had much credibility anyway but sheesh Evangelicals have no idea how out-of-touch they are ifstudies.org/blog/alex-co...

People need to be way more selfish about how they expend their intellectual effort. On Twitter right now people are arguing against TPOT morons who are defending Jim Crow and segregation. At a certain point you need to write off interlocutors as unsalvageable and preserve your own mind.

This is exactly why unions end up becoming sclerotic aristocracies though. They represent incumbent workers, esp senior ones, over younger/new workers. Labor market regs should be neutral to the entire workforce & not create legally-sanctioned monopolies for a narrow subset of workers.

Dissatisfaction with capitalism is often just dissatisfaction with modernity in the Weberian sense. Top-down, rationalized bureaucracies with extreme specialization of labor - whether C corps, nonprofits, government agencies, etc - are what young leftists viscerally dislike.

Fun thought experiment based on today's discourse: would it be permissible for governments to try to *persuade* couples to have kids? No coercion, no abrogation of rights, just a never-ending ad campaign to encourage more children, like the ad campaigns to end smoking or wear seatbelts.

AI labor market disruptions, public pension crises, fertility collapse. Honestly climate change too. The left of center is increasingly uninterested in trying to solve long-term problems if they involve any tradeoffs whatsoever.

The deranged responses to this guy's post make more sense when you realize Bluesky has a large childless/unmarried user base and they feel personally called out whenever you bring this up (they shouldn't, but they do). Literally no different from conservatives and climate change.

The reason utilitarians will inherit the Earth is that they're the only ones who can dispassionately reason about both climate change and the fertility crisis without turning it into a proxy culture war.

You can hate the discourse all you want but all of us millennials are going to age under miserable conditions if late 21st C dependency ratios are as bad as current trends anticipate.

Just realized this is nonprofits cargo culting mid-20th century membership orgs. Membership orgs actually could disseminate elite opinion to normal people pretty efficiently.

US universities genuinely are like “welcome to Tennessee Agricultural College in Bumfuck Nowheresville. We invented the modern potato and our facilities include a particle accelerator, nuclear reactor, and TOP500 supercomputer. Tuition is $12,000 for instate students and we have 40,000 of them”

We underestimate that the most pressing problems of the 21st century are genuinely *new*. There's no blueprint for the state solving low coupling rates, smartphone addiction, & social media making deliberative democracy impossible. And climate change is way harder than all prev. environmental issues

Oh my god, New York State legislators are trying to ban e-ink price tags, which the grocery workers’ union seems to have convinced them to do based on insane online conspiracy theories about the tags changing depending on who’s looking at them! Why is the NYT sanewashing this?!

& when you threaten "the dems" with not voting, you might have in mind party leadership primary voters hear you as threatening *them*

Can we start treating humanities professors talking about random public policy issues they have no real expertise in the same way we treat anti-vaxxers?

I think the better comparison for Starmer is Biden 2020 Evidence for this: Twitter rightists is already delusionally wishcasting that Reform will somehow support technocratic pro-growth policy despite Reform's slopulist platform, just as the Tech Right did for Trump in the lead up to 2024.

This is quickly becoming conventional wisdom, & I'm sure some GOP hacks think this way, but it's also untrue. Trump's arson of the administrative state has not produced a more libertarian policy environment, only patrimonial corruption and arbitrary regs replacing consistent ones (see: wind permits)

I haven't seen any mention of it yet but Dems need to have an ask ready for when we get close to the debt ceiling limit next year

There's a conservative pundit I occasionally check in on who remains convinced that each US party has a single immutable lineage (Jefferson (D) & Hamilton (R)) that is descriptive of all current party behavior, if you wanted to know how the center-right elite are rationalizing the Trump admin

WW1 and WW2 proved it was virtually impossible to run a mobilized modern state out of manpower. 21st-century warfare is far *less* manpower-intensive (infantry with bolt-action rifles have no purpose) and so it's even more true now. The actual way manpower losses lead to defeat is internal revolt.

There is a significant time lag between elite persuasion/change in policy intent and electeds actually implementing it. Took a >decade after the emergence of the YIMBY movement for Dems to begin righting the ship on housing. We're in a similar spot re: procedural ratfucking.

GOP pundits have bleated for years that public health institutions and academia lost their public legitimacy due to their partisan lean but for whatever reason they didn't think through what would happen when the judiciary was overtly pro-Republican

I think a lot of people are underestimating just how politically radicalizing this stuff is, when you see what the right is getting away with, including with the blessing of the Supreme Court majority

Discussion on Starmer focuses on mod v left infighting but it's poor lens to interpret his gov. There's been a fair bit of left-wing slopulism from his gov (Renters Rights Act). The UK, like the US, needs deeper institutional reforms that the dominant center-left party is uninterested in.

Given that the world has become addicted to politics, we really need the public policy equivalent to science YouTube. Imagine a Veritasium-caliber channel explaining concepts like collective action problems, time value of money, Coasean bargaining etc. in an engaging manner. Could be high impact!

There's a ~5-10 year lag between initial attempts at elite persuasion and and the first incremental policy changes. Institutional reform in 2026 is like housing policy in 2013. You should price in failure for '29-'30 and start working on standing up a YIMBY-like movement for multimember PR

It's amazing how the conservative movement's approach to salami-slicing the APA has resulted in a substantially more arbitrary, inflexible regulatory status quo than if rule changes could occur under notice-and-comment in a reasonable timeframe.

"Biologists still don't understand why American men following The Calamity developed an unusually strong preference for hops, or the increased prevalence of live music venues across the continent, but some suspect it was related to the warmer climate" -Kwame Zhang, historian, year 3154

Since recent fertility declines are attributed to lower rates of coupling, does that mean that smart phones and social media are selecting for any genes that makes humans more social? Are we undergoing a slow-moving mass extinction event and only the unusually extroverted will survive?

Shor is sharp guy but his whole crusade is doomed to fail. Socially liberal PMC voters are a sizable constituency who have the desire and means to achieve political representation. You could get every center-left party in the OECD to fine-tune their messaging and their base would just move.

To a large extent the problem is Dems (and really both parties) assuming deep institutional problems can be solved in two years. The GOP will win back at least one house of Congress in '30 and possibly both in '32. We should prioritize reforms that are robust to partisan turnover.

Call me naive but I think Trump's Schmittian friend/enemy shit is distasteful to most Americans. Most conservatives know and are interpersonally friendly to some liberals in their lives. Saying that liberals are a tiny rump minority with no organic support is a "lying eyes" type statement