My SubStack Now Has More Readers þan þe Previous Weblog Ever Did
Score one for Chris & Hamish
With 8000 average readers per post. And today we crossed 20,000 total subscribers.
So it is time to take stock, and ask for some feedback: What would you like to see in this internet space in the future?
I find basically all of what you write at least interesting and enlightening. But if you're asking what a paying subscriber might like to see more of, I'd ask how your experience as a pragmatic policy advisor in government might inform today's policy conversations. What should a YIMBY / pro-abundance Democrat, who has the ear of multiple state and federal legislators, be _saying_ to those folks? What do you think are the achievable policy shifts -- things that are wonky enough that they just aren't politicized, and could get slipped through in some omnibus without a big fight, or things that cut across the partisan coalitions so they could get bipartisan backing -- that would provide a big bang for the buck in terms of future economic growth?
It's maybe not immediately relevant given the loony wing in the House, but next time we have a shot at something like a CHIPS Act (which might be as soon as January 2025), I'd like to see center-left economists hashing out how to improve guidance to the executive in the actual text passed by Congress, to ensure we don't bog down projects with "everything bagel liberalism". And given that the law is what it is, can we help improve implementation by simply making sure good ideas are in the air around the officials who do that implementation? By making sure Congresspeople and staff in DC are all thinking about ideas that Ezra Klein, yourself, Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, and so on, have been advocating for years? Can we build the abundance agenda into the conventional wisdom of the educated elite, across the political spectrum, the way that (neo)liberal internationalism was in the '90s?
congratulations!!! The only thing that has been bugging me for a long time now is the funny 'th' that is in the headers to the columns. Why and how are you doing this? Inquiring minds want to know.