Wow, this is a great way to sum up something I think about all the time: "But the Democrats are less of a cohesive ideologically-driven party than a collection of interest groups that each feels marginalized and generally refuses to subordinate its own priorities."
Noah - you often go too deep in the weeds even for me, a 35-year wall street vet. But this one was simple, correct and utterly brilliant. Particularly the part of 'old man' Biden being the least loved but simply the absolutely only right man for the job right now - and likely never to receive the credit for it. Bravo.
This was really good, I think the perspective hindering pragmatist policies is: "My own read on this is that Americans have become afflicted with a scarcity mindset — so afraid that people they don’t like will get something good that they refuse to do things that are interest in the nation overall.". Informed people underrate how much the average voter sees the US government the same way they see their own household. We need to clieve away it this misconception.
There is NO MONEY for any of this. The country is running huge and structural fiscal and trade deficits. The endgame is a financial crisis much worse than 2008.
As I read through this piece I kept wondering why I subscribe to you. At least Freddie DeBoer understands his limitations and for that, I respect him. He even convinced me, an ardent opponent of student loan forgiveness, of the case for limited and targeted forgiveness (he's still for a blanket wipeout but his arguments had me meeting him halfway).
But this...this is simply talking points laid out one after the other, with no convincing arguments for any of them, to make the point that Americans just don't know what's good for them. Congrats, you just rewrote "What's the Matter With Kansas" in the worst and most simplistic of ways.
Much of the higher relative levels of science funding were due to the Cold War. In grad school (early 1980's) one of the DOD (Navy) financed research projects in our lab was working on the chemistry of Lithium batteries (we managed to have a good size lab fire). We also had access to the DarpaNet because of DOD funding. We never would have guessed how important Li batteries and the Internet would become. The point is it takes a lot of research and usually a long time for a few jewels to emerge from research. Investing in more research now won't be impactful economically for considerable time. It's not even clear with the massive drop off in foreign grad students if the system could absorb even 25% more funding, much less the 115% needed to get back to our 1960 level.
Both the research economy and the care economy are going to need more workers. Where do these come from today? The answer to both is more immigration. Although Noah has made this point before it is surprising it is not discussed here.
"I think Americans are generally unaware of the rapid progress in green energy, and still think that fighting climate change means making big economic sacrifices."
While it is true that the costs of wind and solar have plummeted, as have the costs of batteries, it is not true that we are have an affordable solution to the problem of intermittancy of wind and solar, especially long term intermittancy. Batteries and hydrogen synthesis remain far too expensive to solve this problem. The huge increases in electricity costs in Europe, especially countries with the highest renewable penetration like Denmark and Germany, reveal the costs of trying to reduce emissions mainly via renewables, and show that huge economic sacrifices ARE required. The most feasible way of reducing this sacrifice is returning to nuclear power. We already know from experience in many countries in the 20th century that we can reduce emissions very quickly at low cost by building nuclear. The problem is that this expansion was stopped because of excessive fear of nuclear power, a fear that history demonstrates is unfounded: nuclear power has a fantastic safety record, and nuclear waste has never done any harm to anyone. We continue to hinder expansion of nuclear power by retaining massive regulatory obstacles and spreading myth that 100% renewables is feasible and cheap.
It's unlikely that the average American voter looks at Europe's energy policies as a precautionary tale for the Green New Deal agenda, but certainly the problems that we've seen in Texas are a microcosm of the risks. There are trade-offs to be made among energy sources, but the one trade-off that is not going to be made by voters is to turn the lights out. That’s not an option. And that's what happened in Texas because of the intermittency problems presented by wind & solar. And so what we see is that if the choice for voters is between unreliable energy and carbon dioxide emissions, will get carbon dioxide emissions. The other problem is that the American economy has a natural competitive advantage in being largely self-sufficient in fossil fuels. Move further to renewables via things like, say, electrical vehicles, and you cede yet another huge competitive advantage to China, which has a near monopoly on crucial rare earths required for these vehicles.
Of course, the electorate might not see it in precisely those complex terms, but at some level they recognise there are trade-offs, even allowing for the technological advances that Noah cites in his analysis. These will always represent a challenge for the Democrats, who wish to advance an energy agenda with mixed support in exchange of an outcome that today's voters are unlikely to experience directly (i.e. it's a legacy that will be left for their children and grandchildren). I'm not suggesting that this isn't a worthy aspiration (it is), but the political payoff is unlikely to be great, which creates huge challenges in the immediate future (i.e. midterms and 2024 presidential election)
They're no less arbitrary than the offsets made every couple of years by the BLS. Let me ask you this: I linked the list of changes over the years. Do you believe that the federal government has an interest in keeping the CPI number lower rather than higher for ANY reason at all? ANY reason you can think of?
I live in the UK. It is not our experience that green energy equates to cheap energy; in fact, it’s just the opposite.
We need to move to more renewable sources, but it will take a long time and the lights must stay in in the meantime. Fossil fuels will be a vital contribution to energy security for many years to come.
The "children being thrown into poverty" talking point is somewhat misleading. It makes it sound like children are falling from the middle class into poverty, but really it's more a matter of their family incomes having temporarily been raised from slightly below the federal poverty standard to slightly above, and then falling back down.
This isn't nothing, but it's a long way from the night-and-day difference implied by the "falling into poverty" rhetoric. Families with incomes just above the federal poverty standard are still poor. We can't solve poverty for the price of the expanded child tax credit, only slightly ameliorate it.
The only hope for "Bidenonomics" is if the Republicans field mostly dinosaurian Republican candidates for Congress - that will be so actively incompetent as to take the mantle of "inflation creator" off Biden. Note actively incompetent as opposed to mostly absent.
The first part of the above is likely; the second part is highly unlikely.
So long as Biden is POTUS and inflation is a problem - which I think any reasonable person is going to say that this period is going to last well into 2023, if not longer given, likely Fed policy - the Republicans will j'accuse Biden in particular and Democrats in general for causing the inflation and will make it stick.
Noah, Thank you for this. Very insightful. The analogy to transformative presidents’ agendas being stymied and ultimately (at least in part) fulfilled by subsequent administrations is very helpful. I think Lincoln’s example may be the most difficult one to swallow, because, here we are more than a century and a half later, and still trying to win the “Black Lives Matter” fight.
And this has me wondering whether one can learn something even more fundamental about the sorts of issues that are most difficult to address and whether this is an indicator of how fundamental is the question of racism and the issues of racial justice . . .
Wow, this is a great way to sum up something I think about all the time: "But the Democrats are less of a cohesive ideologically-driven party than a collection of interest groups that each feels marginalized and generally refuses to subordinate its own priorities."
Noah - you often go too deep in the weeds even for me, a 35-year wall street vet. But this one was simple, correct and utterly brilliant. Particularly the part of 'old man' Biden being the least loved but simply the absolutely only right man for the job right now - and likely never to receive the credit for it. Bravo.
This was really good, I think the perspective hindering pragmatist policies is: "My own read on this is that Americans have become afflicted with a scarcity mindset — so afraid that people they don’t like will get something good that they refuse to do things that are interest in the nation overall.". Informed people underrate how much the average voter sees the US government the same way they see their own household. We need to clieve away it this misconception.
There is NO MONEY for any of this. The country is running huge and structural fiscal and trade deficits. The endgame is a financial crisis much worse than 2008.
As I read through this piece I kept wondering why I subscribe to you. At least Freddie DeBoer understands his limitations and for that, I respect him. He even convinced me, an ardent opponent of student loan forgiveness, of the case for limited and targeted forgiveness (he's still for a blanket wipeout but his arguments had me meeting him halfway).
But this...this is simply talking points laid out one after the other, with no convincing arguments for any of them, to make the point that Americans just don't know what's good for them. Congrats, you just rewrote "What's the Matter With Kansas" in the worst and most simplistic of ways.
>1. Investment (both government and private)
>2. Cash benefits
>3. Care jobs
1. Good
2. Good
3. Oh no cost disease hell
Much of the higher relative levels of science funding were due to the Cold War. In grad school (early 1980's) one of the DOD (Navy) financed research projects in our lab was working on the chemistry of Lithium batteries (we managed to have a good size lab fire). We also had access to the DarpaNet because of DOD funding. We never would have guessed how important Li batteries and the Internet would become. The point is it takes a lot of research and usually a long time for a few jewels to emerge from research. Investing in more research now won't be impactful economically for considerable time. It's not even clear with the massive drop off in foreign grad students if the system could absorb even 25% more funding, much less the 115% needed to get back to our 1960 level.
Both the research economy and the care economy are going to need more workers. Where do these come from today? The answer to both is more immigration. Although Noah has made this point before it is surprising it is not discussed here.
"I think Americans are generally unaware of the rapid progress in green energy, and still think that fighting climate change means making big economic sacrifices."
While it is true that the costs of wind and solar have plummeted, as have the costs of batteries, it is not true that we are have an affordable solution to the problem of intermittancy of wind and solar, especially long term intermittancy. Batteries and hydrogen synthesis remain far too expensive to solve this problem. The huge increases in electricity costs in Europe, especially countries with the highest renewable penetration like Denmark and Germany, reveal the costs of trying to reduce emissions mainly via renewables, and show that huge economic sacrifices ARE required. The most feasible way of reducing this sacrifice is returning to nuclear power. We already know from experience in many countries in the 20th century that we can reduce emissions very quickly at low cost by building nuclear. The problem is that this expansion was stopped because of excessive fear of nuclear power, a fear that history demonstrates is unfounded: nuclear power has a fantastic safety record, and nuclear waste has never done any harm to anyone. We continue to hinder expansion of nuclear power by retaining massive regulatory obstacles and spreading myth that 100% renewables is feasible and cheap.
It is always that we need to spend more. Really we need to reallocate our spending before we begin spending more.
It's unlikely that the average American voter looks at Europe's energy policies as a precautionary tale for the Green New Deal agenda, but certainly the problems that we've seen in Texas are a microcosm of the risks. There are trade-offs to be made among energy sources, but the one trade-off that is not going to be made by voters is to turn the lights out. That’s not an option. And that's what happened in Texas because of the intermittency problems presented by wind & solar. And so what we see is that if the choice for voters is between unreliable energy and carbon dioxide emissions, will get carbon dioxide emissions. The other problem is that the American economy has a natural competitive advantage in being largely self-sufficient in fossil fuels. Move further to renewables via things like, say, electrical vehicles, and you cede yet another huge competitive advantage to China, which has a near monopoly on crucial rare earths required for these vehicles.
Of course, the electorate might not see it in precisely those complex terms, but at some level they recognise there are trade-offs, even allowing for the technological advances that Noah cites in his analysis. These will always represent a challenge for the Democrats, who wish to advance an energy agenda with mixed support in exchange of an outcome that today's voters are unlikely to experience directly (i.e. it's a legacy that will be left for their children and grandchildren). I'm not suggesting that this isn't a worthy aspiration (it is), but the political payoff is unlikely to be great, which creates huge challenges in the immediate future (i.e. midterms and 2024 presidential election)
They're no less arbitrary than the offsets made every couple of years by the BLS. Let me ask you this: I linked the list of changes over the years. Do you believe that the federal government has an interest in keeping the CPI number lower rather than higher for ANY reason at all? ANY reason you can think of?
I live in the UK. It is not our experience that green energy equates to cheap energy; in fact, it’s just the opposite.
We need to move to more renewable sources, but it will take a long time and the lights must stay in in the meantime. Fossil fuels will be a vital contribution to energy security for many years to come.
The "children being thrown into poverty" talking point is somewhat misleading. It makes it sound like children are falling from the middle class into poverty, but really it's more a matter of their family incomes having temporarily been raised from slightly below the federal poverty standard to slightly above, and then falling back down.
This isn't nothing, but it's a long way from the night-and-day difference implied by the "falling into poverty" rhetoric. Families with incomes just above the federal poverty standard are still poor. We can't solve poverty for the price of the expanded child tax credit, only slightly ameliorate it.
Two typos:
> because of it’s lack of focus
> a self-inflicted would
The only hope for "Bidenonomics" is if the Republicans field mostly dinosaurian Republican candidates for Congress - that will be so actively incompetent as to take the mantle of "inflation creator" off Biden. Note actively incompetent as opposed to mostly absent.
The first part of the above is likely; the second part is highly unlikely.
So long as Biden is POTUS and inflation is a problem - which I think any reasonable person is going to say that this period is going to last well into 2023, if not longer given, likely Fed policy - the Republicans will j'accuse Biden in particular and Democrats in general for causing the inflation and will make it stick.
Noah, Thank you for this. Very insightful. The analogy to transformative presidents’ agendas being stymied and ultimately (at least in part) fulfilled by subsequent administrations is very helpful. I think Lincoln’s example may be the most difficult one to swallow, because, here we are more than a century and a half later, and still trying to win the “Black Lives Matter” fight.
And this has me wondering whether one can learn something even more fundamental about the sorts of issues that are most difficult to address and whether this is an indicator of how fundamental is the question of racism and the issues of racial justice . . .