I’m in 90% agreement here but I think the Michelle Wu case underscores the risks of assuming that getting on board with soft rent control ideas will halt the slide to more extreme ones. It seems to me that what she’s done in Boston has just shifted the window toward worse statewide policy.
He keeps insisting that inflation is over, I'm pretty sure, because he believes it. Same way he clearly believed that the random detainee with "MS-13" photoshopped onto his knuckles in Arial had an actual MS-13 tattoo; Trump is not some master gaslighter, he's a sundowning racist grandpa with a room temperature IQ who has an almost mystical visceral connection to America's worst and dumbest citizens.
The Vox article was paywalled, and I’m sure as hell not paying for Vox, but if I understand your argument, it is something like this: 1) Rent control is bad for reasons well understood by someone who passed Econ 101. 2) People like rent control because most humans are not capable of understanding Econ 101. 3) We should do a lite version of this bad policy, but gerrymander it to make it less bad.
I’m sorry, but this is foolish. No attempt to gerrymander policies that work against markets will eliminate the ill effects or reduce bad incentives. If we actually take your position seriously, it’s an argument that Yarvin is right and we should get rid of democracy.
I think gerrymandering implies it’s arbitrary or forced, but Jerusalem’s point is that we can provide short term relief to people who will be disproportionately harmed by rising rents—existing renters who made choices on the assumption that their rent wouldn’t go up 30% in two years. Combined with other policies, a version of modest rent control is good.
And that reduces the incentive to build new properties, because it means that if market conditions change, you can find yourself forced to receive below-market returns. Worse, the limits on rent control are politically driven and may change. So maybe you build the property expecting to reset rents with vacancies, but then that suddenly goes away. The lack of predictability reduces incentives to build.
If prices of anything go up by 30% in two years, it means either that there is artificial scarcity or that higher valued users are bidding on the product. If it’s the first, then the artificial scarcity should be eliminated; if it’s the second, then the higher valued users should get the product.
The problem with this is you can euphemistically call a poor family being forced to move much farther from their workplace "the higher valued users should get product" to make it sound nicer but the end result of what this looks like in the real world still makes people angry. angry people are more likely to support policies you don't like.
Why you want short term rent control is you cannot create a new building in 30 seconds like an RTS game or Simcity. You can crow all you want that this is a risk for developers, guess what there is like a billion public - private financial mechanisms that exist to offset risk.
Well part of Jerusalem’s version of such proposals is that new developments would be exempt, and the rent control would be combined with long term reforms to make building easier.
Right, but if you build something it might take twenty years for it to pay off. If a developer knows that in ten years the locality might decide the project is subject to rent control, it reduces anticipated returns.
These days most rent control is "rent stabilization" that allows rent to still go up, just not as quickly. The reason why you might want this in housing and say, not a random consumer good is that people losing their housing causes massive social problems while people not being able to buy the latest game console does not.
This is the same reason why social security, and Medicare exists. If old people had no financial income they would be a huge burden on their kids or just in the street (a huge problem in society before welfare for the elderly became a thing!) and without healthcare for old people they would be in the common market driving premiums WAY up for everyone else, or just die due to lack of coverage.
Theoretically you could delete social security and Medicare and in a vacuum this might lead to to more economic growth, in real life this would cause massive social issues and political upheaval.
That's why smart people propose compromise solutions to maintain a balance of social good, and economic development. Build more homes and apartments to increase supply, but make sure rents don't unreasonably rise for those who cannot magically double their income in 2 years.
I think there is a third reason that technocrats drive backlash, which is that they are forced to make value judgments that have very different impacts on different groups of people. For example, environmental regulators have to weigh the value of reducing some pollutant by "x" parts per million in the water supply of the people that rely on a certain lake or river versus the impact on the jobs and incomes of people who are employed in an industry that might be driven to move operations or reduce employment by the same regulations. These are political value judgments outside of their technical expertise. Rather than acknowledge that fact, regulators (and the interest groups who campaign for various regulations) often compound the problem by pretending the issues are purely technical and require deference to their expertise. People see through the ruse and it makes them angry.
Yes, the technocrats should be laying out the actual costs and benefits. The elected branches should be weighing those and making the value judgements and the decisions.
I agree with most of this, but I think there are weak incentives for technocrats to be transparent about these value judgements. Doing so means that politicians would likely curtail their independence. An apt example is cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which we discuss in the paper Jerusalem mentions in the article. The way CBA is currently conducted in the US is heavily skewed towards sweeping under the rug its redistributive implications. I'd argue that this is because making these explicit would make lawmakers nervous and reduce technocrats' leeway. Same with central bank independence (see the paper again). The result is that technocrats often redistribute through the backdoor.
Agreed - and thank you for the follow-up. In many instances, I think the lawmakers are complicit. They don't want to take the heat for redistributive value judgments and it can be an easy way out to pretend they are technocratic decisions.
This is why mass communication is important. Competency in regulation doesn't select for the best mass communicators it selects for those with the deepest understanding of policy and stakeholder interests.
It's also why addressing concerns at micro levels can have large effects. Imagine if every person displaced by a regulation, shifting technological trends, and so forth had a competent government worker (that most importantly, is not responsible for 50 caseloads at the same time) helped them through training, and finding a new job.
Open all the training centers, programs, etc you want. If you aren't sending people out to personally bring the people in and help them through it you aren't really trying and that can have enormous ripple effects.
That is all to say, to your point, a government that is exists purely to regulate and tell you what you cannot do X, and will not help you with Y, feels unjust.
This column rhymes with Robin Hanson's idea of "futarchy", the summary slogan of which is "Vote on values, bet on beliefs". The idea is that voters should feel in control of which economic goals the government is steering towards, but independent expertise (in Hanson's view, prediction markets where traders have "skin in the game") should be used to determine *how* to set policy to achieve those goals.
Right now we are falling short on both halves of that ideal. Voters don't feel like they actually get to determine the goals-- they feel like elite expert values different from their own determine those goals instead-- and experts are neither sufficiently empowered nor sufficiently competent to credibly show themselves to be reliable steersmen toward voter-approved goals.
I doubt futarchy is actually the right solution, but the basic principles of separating ends from means, having clearly specified democratic deliberations about ends, and systematically improving the institutions that choose the means, seem essential to any real progress on this problem.
Interesting article. I think there's a bit of a missing point here though. The rent control debate is a clear example of a popular policy being a bad one. Tariffs could be the same as well, arguably, though some tariffs are OK depending on what they are trying to do and a lot of tariffs poll badly so it's a more mixed picture.
I'd argue immigration is somewhat similar though I do not think immigration restrictionists in the general public actually believe restriction is good for the economy.
What you have in the Trump administration is not this in most cases. Yes there is a broad distrust of bureaucracy and there was a lot of frustration with public health officials but nothing Musk and RFK have done is at all responsive to any popular mandate.
I think this is very typical of populist parties, that since their electoral base is purged of all subject matter expertise large portions of policy implementation is done by people who have no idea what they are doing.
Finally, while "splitting the baby" is well and good for economic policy where you can literally just give up some economic growth/prosperity to give the people what they want. But it's totally unclear this is feasible in the military and law enforcement functions. Historically democrats have essentially bent over backwards to avoid "politicizing" the military and the FBI, which has meant frequently putting Republicans in charge. But with this being insufficient for the current right wing, how can society function?
While I agree with everything in the article, the problem of populism/need for administrative independence is 98% on the right but the article is about 50/50. Again, rent control is bad, but democracy can survive. Whereas selective prosecutions and political deployment of the military is existential for society.
Thanks for this fascinating examination of the costs and benefits of technocratic governance. Yet the populist revolt against the expert class did not originate in 2016 with Trump’s entrance into politics. Its roots can be traced further back in history. American conservatism of the early 1950s was dominated by Joe McCarthy, who focused his ire on Ivy League colleges, the ‘Eastern establishment’ of the GOP, the media, and liberals. And, of course, who can forget William F. Buckley Jr saying “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
Regarding rent control, it is unsurprising that this policy is part of Mamdani’s agenda even when it will not solve the housing crisis. Sam Tanenhaus recently wrote an op-ed in the NYT in which he shows that populists like Mamdani adroitly recognise that politics is downstream from culture. Rather than voting on the basis of specific policy matters, voters are influenced by a higher belief, an inner sentiment which is not captured by polling on policy. Indeed, Tanenhaus writes: ‘the proposals matter less than the spirit in which they are made and the sentiments they rest on’.
Our constitution requires (and should require) the government to be under democratic control with a couple of exceptions (the judiciary is the big one.
Given the unique history of central banks there can be an argument made that the Fed also is unique, though I think it's a weak argument. Really we should pass a constitutional amendment codifying it's unique nature like we did with the judiciary.
As for the rest of it, it should be under the control of the elected branches, both as a constitutional matter, and as a policy matter.
Unelected and basically unaccountable bureaucrats running the majority of the country doesn't work.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a technocratic bureaucracy. But decisions MUST be made by the elected branches, because that gives voters a voice to throw the bums out if they don't like what's being done.
Also, major policy changes should be coming from congress NOT the executive branch. SCOTUS needs to really beef up the "major questions doctrine" and the "non delegation doctrine".
Then politicians and voters will need to do better. Democracy requires and informed and involved electorate.
And one thing I keep thinking about is, support of MAGA movement from tech right is essentially simultaneously denialism of expertise and technocrats as well as “we have the highest IQ therefore my idea for everything is great and everyone has to listen to me in everything ” type of thinking
I find it rather obvious that this line of thinking is absurd and ridiculous but it seems appealing to a not small number of people?
Like, technocrats often make mistakes too and their self interest often is conflated for public good but the alternative is imo more likely than not even worse…
(And fwiw, when it comes to how to manipulate and being charismatic, Trump is genius but when it comes to economy, I think he is more often than not an idiot including his tariff policy)
The real failure of expertise is that the experts haven't managed come up with a way to persuasively frame economically literate policies in a way that decisively dominates anti-market policies on the ideological battlefield, despite the huge advantages of living in a capitalist society where people are conditioned from birth to benefit from buying and selling things and clearly have a "majoritarian preference" to be able to do what they want with their property!
A big takeaway from the Biden administration, and even Obama’s midterm shellackings, for me is that voters demand immediate term relief for their economic concerns. Even if policies providing short-term relief are not optimal, we still need to do them as long as they won’t be catastrophic in the long-term.
Policies that will have diffuse, long-term benefits don’t resonate and no successful political movement can be based on these alone. We should to these long-term investments anyway because if we don’t we’ll create problems in the long-term, but they’re not going to be what wins elections.
I would argue that Biden's problem was that his own policies made any type of short term benefit (and often long term benefit) impossible.
This can most be clearly seen by the thicket of red tape that prevented rapid deployment of all the infrastructure spending that was improved.
Scott Lincome over at The Dispatch did an excellent analysis on how most of the IRA money was wasted and we could have gotten more renewable energy deployment by simply cutting red tape
"Well, for one, the short-term incentives are alluring. Cutting rates would be felt quickly by businesses and consumers alike as car loans, credit cards, and even mortgages became cheaper."
I actually want to challenge this statement. It is not at all clear that a long-term rate, like for mortgages, would come down in response to a change in short-term rates caused by this kind of political manipulation. After all, these are loans offered by private banks. They can set whatever rate they like. They don't _have_ to change it to match the Fed's overnight funds rate, nor to any particular duration of Treasury.
To a first approximation, a long-term fixed-rate security is going to have its rate set to approximate the average chained product of short-term rates across its duration, plus a premium for being locked in, losing the optionality of being able to respond to changes in rates. This means that regardless of what rates are today, if you think they're likely to be higher in the future, the rate at which you will accept loaning out funds for the long term will remain high.
And what do we think is the likely path of rates, if Trump is allowed to manipulate them in the short term? Well, the last time something like that happened was when Richard Nixon got his pal at the Fed, Arthur Burns, to mess with rates to support his re-election effort. You might've heard about what happened with rates in the decade or so after that.
The thesis of this essay makes a huge assumption that the technocrats who have been tasked with policymaking are, in fact, truly independent.
Everyone is motivated by something, and no one is immune from the effects of bias, or… influence. There are many ways these technocrats might be "influenced", via their associations with a class of people who are inclined to… buy influence.
I make no accusations — I merely point up the existence of a rather large assumption, which was not acknowledged in the essay. It's a relevant omission which is, without a doubt, a part of the calculus.
On the topic of Powell and unelected but appointed technocrats like him, isn’t saying they are anti-majoritarian just saying literally anything that isn’t literal direct democracy is anti-majoritarian?
Powell was appointed and approved by democratically elected officials.
That also describes how literally every law is made at every level of government. It describes how every federal court decision is made. I could go on.
I get the broader point about advisers and the dichotomy between a government taking advice from experts that is not what the majority wants.
But having elected officials do things because they were elected without those things being individually approved by a majority is how every modern democracy works.
I’m in 90% agreement here but I think the Michelle Wu case underscores the risks of assuming that getting on board with soft rent control ideas will halt the slide to more extreme ones. It seems to me that what she’s done in Boston has just shifted the window toward worse statewide policy.
I think you're right about the risk but with or without Wu, rent control was back on the agenda.
Great essay, thank you. Two points:
- rent control (and housing generally) is a particularly tricky policy issue because we allocate votes by legal residence
- the concept of shearing layers, as popularized in the context of architecture, might be helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearing_layers
Note that the Constitution bakes shearing layers into governance:
- the Constitution is the foundation, lasting as many centuries as the polity will
- amendments to it are rare adjustments, generally separated by multiple decades
- the census happens every decade
- the executive turns over every four years
- Congress changes every two years
- various actions occur annually
- laws are passed regularly
- the executive acts constantly
"Trump isn’t an idiot.": citation needed
Yes, quite the opposite-- Trump is a complete idiot.
He keeps insisting that inflation is over, I'm pretty sure, because he believes it. Same way he clearly believed that the random detainee with "MS-13" photoshopped onto his knuckles in Arial had an actual MS-13 tattoo; Trump is not some master gaslighter, he's a sundowning racist grandpa with a room temperature IQ who has an almost mystical visceral connection to America's worst and dumbest citizens.
The Vox article was paywalled, and I’m sure as hell not paying for Vox, but if I understand your argument, it is something like this: 1) Rent control is bad for reasons well understood by someone who passed Econ 101. 2) People like rent control because most humans are not capable of understanding Econ 101. 3) We should do a lite version of this bad policy, but gerrymander it to make it less bad.
I’m sorry, but this is foolish. No attempt to gerrymander policies that work against markets will eliminate the ill effects or reduce bad incentives. If we actually take your position seriously, it’s an argument that Yarvin is right and we should get rid of democracy.
I think gerrymandering implies it’s arbitrary or forced, but Jerusalem’s point is that we can provide short term relief to people who will be disproportionately harmed by rising rents—existing renters who made choices on the assumption that their rent wouldn’t go up 30% in two years. Combined with other policies, a version of modest rent control is good.
And that reduces the incentive to build new properties, because it means that if market conditions change, you can find yourself forced to receive below-market returns. Worse, the limits on rent control are politically driven and may change. So maybe you build the property expecting to reset rents with vacancies, but then that suddenly goes away. The lack of predictability reduces incentives to build.
If prices of anything go up by 30% in two years, it means either that there is artificial scarcity or that higher valued users are bidding on the product. If it’s the first, then the artificial scarcity should be eliminated; if it’s the second, then the higher valued users should get the product.
The problem with this is you can euphemistically call a poor family being forced to move much farther from their workplace "the higher valued users should get product" to make it sound nicer but the end result of what this looks like in the real world still makes people angry. angry people are more likely to support policies you don't like.
Why you want short term rent control is you cannot create a new building in 30 seconds like an RTS game or Simcity. You can crow all you want that this is a risk for developers, guess what there is like a billion public - private financial mechanisms that exist to offset risk.
Well part of Jerusalem’s version of such proposals is that new developments would be exempt, and the rent control would be combined with long term reforms to make building easier.
Right, but if you build something it might take twenty years for it to pay off. If a developer knows that in ten years the locality might decide the project is subject to rent control, it reduces anticipated returns.
"Combined with other policies, a version of modest rent control is good."
No it's still bad. What if inflation is 15% a year? Should rents be going down?
These days most rent control is "rent stabilization" that allows rent to still go up, just not as quickly. The reason why you might want this in housing and say, not a random consumer good is that people losing their housing causes massive social problems while people not being able to buy the latest game console does not.
This is the same reason why social security, and Medicare exists. If old people had no financial income they would be a huge burden on their kids or just in the street (a huge problem in society before welfare for the elderly became a thing!) and without healthcare for old people they would be in the common market driving premiums WAY up for everyone else, or just die due to lack of coverage.
Theoretically you could delete social security and Medicare and in a vacuum this might lead to to more economic growth, in real life this would cause massive social issues and political upheaval.
That's why smart people propose compromise solutions to maintain a balance of social good, and economic development. Build more homes and apartments to increase supply, but make sure rents don't unreasonably rise for those who cannot magically double their income in 2 years.
Better would be adults in both parties that tell voters the truth and actually push for good policies.
One can dream I suppose.
I think there is a third reason that technocrats drive backlash, which is that they are forced to make value judgments that have very different impacts on different groups of people. For example, environmental regulators have to weigh the value of reducing some pollutant by "x" parts per million in the water supply of the people that rely on a certain lake or river versus the impact on the jobs and incomes of people who are employed in an industry that might be driven to move operations or reduce employment by the same regulations. These are political value judgments outside of their technical expertise. Rather than acknowledge that fact, regulators (and the interest groups who campaign for various regulations) often compound the problem by pretending the issues are purely technical and require deference to their expertise. People see through the ruse and it makes them angry.
Yes, the technocrats should be laying out the actual costs and benefits. The elected branches should be weighing those and making the value judgements and the decisions.
I agree with most of this, but I think there are weak incentives for technocrats to be transparent about these value judgements. Doing so means that politicians would likely curtail their independence. An apt example is cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which we discuss in the paper Jerusalem mentions in the article. The way CBA is currently conducted in the US is heavily skewed towards sweeping under the rug its redistributive implications. I'd argue that this is because making these explicit would make lawmakers nervous and reduce technocrats' leeway. Same with central bank independence (see the paper again). The result is that technocrats often redistribute through the backdoor.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1999224274582720740.html
Yes this is probably very similar to agency problems in the corporate world. The people doing the work can have different incentives from the owners.
Same probably applies here. Probably no perfect solution.
But I think the technocrats need to understand their job is to serve the interests of the people through their elected representatives.
The technocrats are not in charge.
Agreed - and thank you for the follow-up. In many instances, I think the lawmakers are complicit. They don't want to take the heat for redistributive value judgments and it can be an easy way out to pretend they are technocratic decisions.
This is why mass communication is important. Competency in regulation doesn't select for the best mass communicators it selects for those with the deepest understanding of policy and stakeholder interests.
It's also why addressing concerns at micro levels can have large effects. Imagine if every person displaced by a regulation, shifting technological trends, and so forth had a competent government worker (that most importantly, is not responsible for 50 caseloads at the same time) helped them through training, and finding a new job.
Open all the training centers, programs, etc you want. If you aren't sending people out to personally bring the people in and help them through it you aren't really trying and that can have enormous ripple effects.
That is all to say, to your point, a government that is exists purely to regulate and tell you what you cannot do X, and will not help you with Y, feels unjust.
This column rhymes with Robin Hanson's idea of "futarchy", the summary slogan of which is "Vote on values, bet on beliefs". The idea is that voters should feel in control of which economic goals the government is steering towards, but independent expertise (in Hanson's view, prediction markets where traders have "skin in the game") should be used to determine *how* to set policy to achieve those goals.
Right now we are falling short on both halves of that ideal. Voters don't feel like they actually get to determine the goals-- they feel like elite expert values different from their own determine those goals instead-- and experts are neither sufficiently empowered nor sufficiently competent to credibly show themselves to be reliable steersmen toward voter-approved goals.
I doubt futarchy is actually the right solution, but the basic principles of separating ends from means, having clearly specified democratic deliberations about ends, and systematically improving the institutions that choose the means, seem essential to any real progress on this problem.
Interesting article. I think there's a bit of a missing point here though. The rent control debate is a clear example of a popular policy being a bad one. Tariffs could be the same as well, arguably, though some tariffs are OK depending on what they are trying to do and a lot of tariffs poll badly so it's a more mixed picture.
I'd argue immigration is somewhat similar though I do not think immigration restrictionists in the general public actually believe restriction is good for the economy.
What you have in the Trump administration is not this in most cases. Yes there is a broad distrust of bureaucracy and there was a lot of frustration with public health officials but nothing Musk and RFK have done is at all responsive to any popular mandate.
I think this is very typical of populist parties, that since their electoral base is purged of all subject matter expertise large portions of policy implementation is done by people who have no idea what they are doing.
Finally, while "splitting the baby" is well and good for economic policy where you can literally just give up some economic growth/prosperity to give the people what they want. But it's totally unclear this is feasible in the military and law enforcement functions. Historically democrats have essentially bent over backwards to avoid "politicizing" the military and the FBI, which has meant frequently putting Republicans in charge. But with this being insufficient for the current right wing, how can society function?
While I agree with everything in the article, the problem of populism/need for administrative independence is 98% on the right but the article is about 50/50. Again, rent control is bad, but democracy can survive. Whereas selective prosecutions and political deployment of the military is existential for society.
Thanks for this fascinating examination of the costs and benefits of technocratic governance. Yet the populist revolt against the expert class did not originate in 2016 with Trump’s entrance into politics. Its roots can be traced further back in history. American conservatism of the early 1950s was dominated by Joe McCarthy, who focused his ire on Ivy League colleges, the ‘Eastern establishment’ of the GOP, the media, and liberals. And, of course, who can forget William F. Buckley Jr saying “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
Regarding rent control, it is unsurprising that this policy is part of Mamdani’s agenda even when it will not solve the housing crisis. Sam Tanenhaus recently wrote an op-ed in the NYT in which he shows that populists like Mamdani adroitly recognise that politics is downstream from culture. Rather than voting on the basis of specific policy matters, voters are influenced by a higher belief, an inner sentiment which is not captured by polling on policy. Indeed, Tanenhaus writes: ‘the proposals matter less than the spirit in which they are made and the sentiments they rest on’.
Our constitution requires (and should require) the government to be under democratic control with a couple of exceptions (the judiciary is the big one.
Given the unique history of central banks there can be an argument made that the Fed also is unique, though I think it's a weak argument. Really we should pass a constitutional amendment codifying it's unique nature like we did with the judiciary.
As for the rest of it, it should be under the control of the elected branches, both as a constitutional matter, and as a policy matter.
Unelected and basically unaccountable bureaucrats running the majority of the country doesn't work.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a technocratic bureaucracy. But decisions MUST be made by the elected branches, because that gives voters a voice to throw the bums out if they don't like what's being done.
Also, major policy changes should be coming from congress NOT the executive branch. SCOTUS needs to really beef up the "major questions doctrine" and the "non delegation doctrine".
Then politicians and voters will need to do better. Democracy requires and informed and involved electorate.
Great article!
And one thing I keep thinking about is, support of MAGA movement from tech right is essentially simultaneously denialism of expertise and technocrats as well as “we have the highest IQ therefore my idea for everything is great and everyone has to listen to me in everything ” type of thinking
I find it rather obvious that this line of thinking is absurd and ridiculous but it seems appealing to a not small number of people?
Like, technocrats often make mistakes too and their self interest often is conflated for public good but the alternative is imo more likely than not even worse…
(And fwiw, when it comes to how to manipulate and being charismatic, Trump is genius but when it comes to economy, I think he is more often than not an idiot including his tariff policy)
The real failure of expertise is that the experts haven't managed come up with a way to persuasively frame economically literate policies in a way that decisively dominates anti-market policies on the ideological battlefield, despite the huge advantages of living in a capitalist society where people are conditioned from birth to benefit from buying and selling things and clearly have a "majoritarian preference" to be able to do what they want with their property!
I think there is a way, it's teaching this stuff in school, both high school and college.
The problem is that much of education is dominated with a leftist slant that is at odds with economics and how the world actually works.
So instead of our education system actually educating the populace they fill their heads with a bunch of nonsense that is just wrong.
A big takeaway from the Biden administration, and even Obama’s midterm shellackings, for me is that voters demand immediate term relief for their economic concerns. Even if policies providing short-term relief are not optimal, we still need to do them as long as they won’t be catastrophic in the long-term.
Policies that will have diffuse, long-term benefits don’t resonate and no successful political movement can be based on these alone. We should to these long-term investments anyway because if we don’t we’ll create problems in the long-term, but they’re not going to be what wins elections.
I would argue that Biden's problem was that his own policies made any type of short term benefit (and often long term benefit) impossible.
This can most be clearly seen by the thicket of red tape that prevented rapid deployment of all the infrastructure spending that was improved.
Scott Lincome over at The Dispatch did an excellent analysis on how most of the IRA money was wasted and we could have gotten more renewable energy deployment by simply cutting red tape
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/capitolism/inflation-reduction-act-failures-2/
"Well, for one, the short-term incentives are alluring. Cutting rates would be felt quickly by businesses and consumers alike as car loans, credit cards, and even mortgages became cheaper."
I actually want to challenge this statement. It is not at all clear that a long-term rate, like for mortgages, would come down in response to a change in short-term rates caused by this kind of political manipulation. After all, these are loans offered by private banks. They can set whatever rate they like. They don't _have_ to change it to match the Fed's overnight funds rate, nor to any particular duration of Treasury.
To a first approximation, a long-term fixed-rate security is going to have its rate set to approximate the average chained product of short-term rates across its duration, plus a premium for being locked in, losing the optionality of being able to respond to changes in rates. This means that regardless of what rates are today, if you think they're likely to be higher in the future, the rate at which you will accept loaning out funds for the long term will remain high.
And what do we think is the likely path of rates, if Trump is allowed to manipulate them in the short term? Well, the last time something like that happened was when Richard Nixon got his pal at the Fed, Arthur Burns, to mess with rates to support his re-election effort. You might've heard about what happened with rates in the decade or so after that.
The thesis of this essay makes a huge assumption that the technocrats who have been tasked with policymaking are, in fact, truly independent.
Everyone is motivated by something, and no one is immune from the effects of bias, or… influence. There are many ways these technocrats might be "influenced", via their associations with a class of people who are inclined to… buy influence.
I make no accusations — I merely point up the existence of a rather large assumption, which was not acknowledged in the essay. It's a relevant omission which is, without a doubt, a part of the calculus.
https://a.co/d/hJXq3sS
On the topic of Powell and unelected but appointed technocrats like him, isn’t saying they are anti-majoritarian just saying literally anything that isn’t literal direct democracy is anti-majoritarian?
Powell was appointed and approved by democratically elected officials.
That also describes how literally every law is made at every level of government. It describes how every federal court decision is made. I could go on.
I get the broader point about advisers and the dichotomy between a government taking advice from experts that is not what the majority wants.
But having elected officials do things because they were elected without those things being individually approved by a majority is how every modern democracy works.
As to economists' advising on rent control, I'm reminded of Schumpeter's quote "better a doctor be present if someone is going to commit suicide."