In defense of Peak Woke, I think the steelmanned version was that most normie wokesters just wanted there not to be absurdly arbitrary enforcement of absurdly arbitrary laws.
The thing about unoriginal ideas is that they have already failed to get through the political system and become policy. (If they had gotten through the political system then politicians wouldn't need to be proposing them.) For an unoriginal idea to become law, either the situation has to drastically change so the you can now get previously unobtainable stakeholders on board (like a Great Recession), or it's at the tail end of a long, long, slow boring effort to convince everyone (YIMBYism would be an example of this).
I think the reason politicians are looking for new ideas isn't so much a desire to be novel for its own sake as it is that a great solution that can't get moved through the political system is not a great solution. With new ideas, maybe they'll turn out to be more popular and more possible to get passed. A less-good policy that is enacted is better than a more-good policy that is not enacted.
So to turn to the "preparing for the AI job apocalypse" example, job-matching programs and wealth funds are great ideas, but they're great ideas that aren't happening right now. If there's an actual job apocalypse maybe they can be made to happen, but not before then. Whereas job guarantees might be a worse idea, but maybe it's a worse idea that will catch fire and be popular enough to get passed.
This is definitely a broader kludgeocracy problem. People don’t have the attention spans for abstract ideal policies, and all policy proposals suffer from “the baggage of polarization” — it’s reminiscent of the euphemistic treadmill.
That’s why we have so many people locked in on fighting for policies that they wanted when they were in their 20’s and 30’s. It’s classic anchoring bias! And the more that things stay gridlocked, the longer they spend ginning up a headcanon that everything would be perfect if they only had gotten their way.
Related to the problem of kludgeocracy, I think the bias for novelty stems from the basic observation that things are not good now, prompting the analytically unrigorous conclusion that only something new will cure what ails us. America's inability to get the details of implementation correct prompts people to conclude that the idea, rather than the implementation of the the idea, is bad; prompting the search for new ideas.
That’s not implausible, but I still lean more towards my “baggage of polarization plus stuck/anchored priors” analysis.
Take healthcare. The stuck prior is that it was abundantly clear by the 70’s that we needed universal healthcare. But the politics never worked, so the issue was successfully polarized into an immovable gridlock, and has only inched left over the intervening decades with the same slow logroll you describe YIMBY as having dealt with.
But NOW, even after Obamacare basically got all but the last quarter-mile of universal healthcare done — we’ve got coverage levels resembling other advance democracies, and the system itself isn’t wholly alien from systems like the Netherlands’ — the activist class is stuck on finishing the universal healthcare logroll, instead of fighting the NEW issue.
Because in that intervening time, we had a MAJOR consolidation of the healthcare industry, such that it more resembles a bunch of competing regional monopolies, like utilities. Enacting UHC would not change much of this — single-payer might be a significant headwind to the hospital monopolies, but won’t REMOTELY break their power — and yet, the activists have zero answer for it.
In this case… sure, proposing random things isn’t much better than proposing the same old things, but the bias towards novelty is at least directionally more likely to stumble on the next right answer.
That’s not me taking a side for or against the novelty bias, but I’m just saying that our system’s gridlock and atrophy PLUS anchoring bias, have created the conditions for novelty bias to even be preferable to the average voter.
That makes sense. As I understand your analysis, bad implementation can cut both ways. Just as it can lead people to conclude that an old but good idea which was poorly implemented is instead a bad idea, bad implementation can convince people that a bad idea - or at least an idea not well suited to solving the most relevant problem - only failed to produce the desired outcome because of bad implementation.
I suppose whether poor implementation produces novelty bias or anchoring bias is a function of how disengaged or engaged a particular contingent is, with more wonkish types prone to anchoring bias because they did the detailed analysis to know the old idea wasn't properly implemented and low engagement folks more prone to novelty bias for the more basic reasoning that what has been hasn't worked for them yet.
It’s not just bad implementation, tho that’s a valid failure mode. It’s mainly the obstruction of comprehensive implementations or implementations of ANY sort. It leads to a sort of “policy blue balls”.
Amen! The job guarantee is one of those things that sounds good at first glance, but falls apart upon just a bit of scrutiny. To wit, if we want the government to do stuff, we should… have the government do stuff in the ordinary course. If we only do those things when people can’t find jobs, and the people doing them are the first people out when the labor market turns down, it’s a recipe for getting needless things done shoddily. It amounts to make work, not much different from Keynes semi-facetiously pointing out that you can get to full employment by burying jars of cash in fields for unemployed people to dig up.
The reasons why more people don't work in the public sector are more complicated than the pay being lousy, though that's certainly a significant factor. Two major ones:
1. Politicians love to use public sector jobs to reward certain constituencies / affinity groups, which can make it effectively impossible for many in the general public to compete for them. Most federal jobs for instance give preference to military veterans, spouses of veterans, people with 3+ years of prior federal service, completion of a tour in the Peace Corps, etc.
2. Politicians (primarily but not exclusively Republicans) also love to slash government agencies and services, which are then often outsourced to contractors, meaning openings are often limited (which also exacerbates the effect of factor #1).
That doesn't mean public sector job guarantees supporting make-work programs are a good idea in practice, but conceptually I can understand the appeal of having able-bodied but otherwise unemployed adults build infrastructure and run services for the public good.
This is the second comment today I've seen about Laguna Beach and LA. Given how close I live to Laguna Beach, I assumed I would have heard something about this, but what does it mean?
In defense of Peak Woke, I think the steelmanned version was that most normie wokesters just wanted there not to be absurdly arbitrary enforcement of absurdly arbitrary laws.
The thing about unoriginal ideas is that they have already failed to get through the political system and become policy. (If they had gotten through the political system then politicians wouldn't need to be proposing them.) For an unoriginal idea to become law, either the situation has to drastically change so the you can now get previously unobtainable stakeholders on board (like a Great Recession), or it's at the tail end of a long, long, slow boring effort to convince everyone (YIMBYism would be an example of this).
I think the reason politicians are looking for new ideas isn't so much a desire to be novel for its own sake as it is that a great solution that can't get moved through the political system is not a great solution. With new ideas, maybe they'll turn out to be more popular and more possible to get passed. A less-good policy that is enacted is better than a more-good policy that is not enacted.
So to turn to the "preparing for the AI job apocalypse" example, job-matching programs and wealth funds are great ideas, but they're great ideas that aren't happening right now. If there's an actual job apocalypse maybe they can be made to happen, but not before then. Whereas job guarantees might be a worse idea, but maybe it's a worse idea that will catch fire and be popular enough to get passed.
This is definitely a broader kludgeocracy problem. People don’t have the attention spans for abstract ideal policies, and all policy proposals suffer from “the baggage of polarization” — it’s reminiscent of the euphemistic treadmill.
That’s why we have so many people locked in on fighting for policies that they wanted when they were in their 20’s and 30’s. It’s classic anchoring bias! And the more that things stay gridlocked, the longer they spend ginning up a headcanon that everything would be perfect if they only had gotten their way.
Related to the problem of kludgeocracy, I think the bias for novelty stems from the basic observation that things are not good now, prompting the analytically unrigorous conclusion that only something new will cure what ails us. America's inability to get the details of implementation correct prompts people to conclude that the idea, rather than the implementation of the the idea, is bad; prompting the search for new ideas.
That’s not implausible, but I still lean more towards my “baggage of polarization plus stuck/anchored priors” analysis.
Take healthcare. The stuck prior is that it was abundantly clear by the 70’s that we needed universal healthcare. But the politics never worked, so the issue was successfully polarized into an immovable gridlock, and has only inched left over the intervening decades with the same slow logroll you describe YIMBY as having dealt with.
But NOW, even after Obamacare basically got all but the last quarter-mile of universal healthcare done — we’ve got coverage levels resembling other advance democracies, and the system itself isn’t wholly alien from systems like the Netherlands’ — the activist class is stuck on finishing the universal healthcare logroll, instead of fighting the NEW issue.
Because in that intervening time, we had a MAJOR consolidation of the healthcare industry, such that it more resembles a bunch of competing regional monopolies, like utilities. Enacting UHC would not change much of this — single-payer might be a significant headwind to the hospital monopolies, but won’t REMOTELY break their power — and yet, the activists have zero answer for it.
In this case… sure, proposing random things isn’t much better than proposing the same old things, but the bias towards novelty is at least directionally more likely to stumble on the next right answer.
That’s not me taking a side for or against the novelty bias, but I’m just saying that our system’s gridlock and atrophy PLUS anchoring bias, have created the conditions for novelty bias to even be preferable to the average voter.
That makes sense. As I understand your analysis, bad implementation can cut both ways. Just as it can lead people to conclude that an old but good idea which was poorly implemented is instead a bad idea, bad implementation can convince people that a bad idea - or at least an idea not well suited to solving the most relevant problem - only failed to produce the desired outcome because of bad implementation.
I suppose whether poor implementation produces novelty bias or anchoring bias is a function of how disengaged or engaged a particular contingent is, with more wonkish types prone to anchoring bias because they did the detailed analysis to know the old idea wasn't properly implemented and low engagement folks more prone to novelty bias for the more basic reasoning that what has been hasn't worked for them yet.
It’s not just bad implementation, tho that’s a valid failure mode. It’s mainly the obstruction of comprehensive implementations or implementations of ANY sort. It leads to a sort of “policy blue balls”.
When do new ideas *ever* get passed? Doesn't *everything* have to go through the long, slow boring effort?
The pandemic legislation got through pretty quickly.
"But the goal of making policy is to do something that works."
Is it?
That's what you and I would like the goal to be. I'm not convinced it's what policymakers are aiming for.
Amen! The job guarantee is one of those things that sounds good at first glance, but falls apart upon just a bit of scrutiny. To wit, if we want the government to do stuff, we should… have the government do stuff in the ordinary course. If we only do those things when people can’t find jobs, and the people doing them are the first people out when the labor market turns down, it’s a recipe for getting needless things done shoddily. It amounts to make work, not much different from Keynes semi-facetiously pointing out that you can get to full employment by burying jars of cash in fields for unemployed people to dig up.
The reasons why more people don't work in the public sector are more complicated than the pay being lousy, though that's certainly a significant factor. Two major ones:
1. Politicians love to use public sector jobs to reward certain constituencies / affinity groups, which can make it effectively impossible for many in the general public to compete for them. Most federal jobs for instance give preference to military veterans, spouses of veterans, people with 3+ years of prior federal service, completion of a tour in the Peace Corps, etc.
2. Politicians (primarily but not exclusively Republicans) also love to slash government agencies and services, which are then often outsourced to contractors, meaning openings are often limited (which also exacerbates the effect of factor #1).
That doesn't mean public sector job guarantees supporting make-work programs are a good idea in practice, but conceptually I can understand the appeal of having able-bodied but otherwise unemployed adults build infrastructure and run services for the public good.
Is Laguna Beach about to take over LA!? I like Mahan and wish it wasn’t going to be Steyer? Red Wave coming for Cali!? :(
Disappointed in Calláis and Virginia need some hopium
This is the second comment today I've seen about Laguna Beach and LA. Given how close I live to Laguna Beach, I assumed I would have heard something about this, but what does it mean?