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?
I'd like to see people working out the "actual texts" to be considered by Congress, even long before the opportunity for such consideration arises. I'd like too see something like a progressive, liberal, democratic ALEC that works through a distributed debate process whose results are centrally recorded.
My ideal would be to see a list of slowly developing "bills in progress" that would form the focal point for debate and policy innovation. Ideally, think-tanks, policy-makers, students, etc. would address a well-known series of questions by presenting and arguing for or against proposed solutions or approaches. This would be a process of leveraging the SocialWeb to develop law.
They are aspiring to building up a network of local government officials to make local laws and regulations both more uniform, and simpler (easier to navigate for a wider array of small players). Eventually we could see something like that branch out to other states.
StrongTowns is also very active in the space of training local government participants on best practices for making their homes productive / self-sufficient.
Those are all good policies, but mainly local... I'm curious whether Brad thinks there are ideas for better state- and federal-level policies that would actually have an impact.
I am a Planning Commissioner myself, and talk with my City Councilmembers regularly. But I've also known a couple local state legislators for over a decade -- one was in Young Dems with me, when we were young enough to be Young Dems -- and I talk reasonably often with my Congressmember as well. Definitely CA is doing some good stuff at the state level already, though it's a slog getting big changes through. I wonder whether there might actually be a possibility for some kind of bipartisan reform in Congress, if you could sell ideas as "deregulatory" to GOP co-sponsors.
Local is the key. In most states, that's where the land use magic happens (for good and for evil). MT (deep red voters) is suddenly an abundant housing place. The key is the messaging & messenger. You can't have Klaus Schwab/WEF telling Montana to eliminate parking minimums & legalize housing. They're doing it for their own reasons.
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.
I have wondered why Brad uses the thorn in titles, but then not in the rest of his text.
Also, speaking as an insufferable pedant, it seems to me that if you're going to adopt thorn, you really should be using eth as well. Thorn represents the voiceless th sound, as in, well, thorn. Or thin, or throw. Eth is for the voiced equivalent, as in "the", or "bother".
(And yes, if you want to get _really_ pedantic, the details of what the two letters are used for has varied a good deal over time, and in some cases they're even used interchangeably, but "thorn for voiceless th" and "eth for voiced th" is a pretty common convention.)
The founders also often employed a variant of S, if it preceded another S, that looks a lot like the cursive lower-case F, giving us "the pursuit of hapinefs".
I use your posts and others as commentary on current news events, helping me to gain perspectives that I find helpful as a lifelong progressive activist. I subscribed because I was a fan of your book.. Slouching Towards Utopia. But can Utopias exist outside of small contained communities, constrained in both space and time. I think that for all the benefits of late capitalism in innovation and productivity, the failure to address externalities is glaring. I would like to see more discussion about externalities from an economist’s perspective. I fear the current US prosperity is increasingly dependent on a vast, mostly invisible, underclass who perform an economic role similar to slaves and captives in the Roman Empire, allowing the elites to aggrandize power. How can this be overturned without destroying capitalism itself. How can a system of entrenched plutocrats flexibly address climate change? Won’t they just retreat further and further from direct experience of its effects.
I really do not think that plutocrats are the root of the opposition to net taxation of CO2 and methane or other Pigou taxes on externalities like road use congestion/Western rivers and ground water pricing.
I would like to know if there are any economic theories ALL economists agree on. It seems to me there are none. Reputable economists are always arguing. You don't see this much discord in physics or biology.
I've been trying to think through when or how collective action rears its head. I live in Berkeley. My neighborhood will burn one day. Too many trees and no one will cut theirs down to avoid a fire unless their neighbors will cut theirs down. We will burn.
And then I think through nations and climate change. My conclusion is the same.
You're a historian. Can you point out a beacon for me. Tell me a story of when unequal countries will join up and take action. Does it require a war ? Thanks again.
Short answer - no reduction. We have 6 foot side lots in this neighborhood- My insurer can see all the trees at 100' radius and fewer than 40% do I control. The rest are on my neighbors property.... cute problem eh .
It is - since we are all under a single legal entity (Berkeley, Alameda county, State of California etc.) legislation could potentially deliver a solution . Tricky politics but not improbable... solving the collective action across countries as climate change seems to require seems at least a magnitude harder. I guess we shall see.
I think your problem is just a smidgen easier. It's stated as everyone benefitting sort of equally from the tree removal. The problem being that no one wants to reward the jerk that benefits from the reduced risk when ever9n else removes their trees while keeping theirs. You need a jerk proof procedure.
Climate change is trickier because benefits are not uniform. Siberian farmer may benefit while Bangladeshi farmers see there tiny plots disappear beneath the waves. It is can be made even trickier by the fact that different measures to reduce net CO2 and methane emissions have different distributions of cost. Fortunately, the least total cost policy -- a uniform tax on net CO2 and methane emission -- does not fall on the poorest countries, but on the biggest net exporters of CO2 generating fossil fuels and imputers of zero CO2emitting energy, if the latter is possible. but costs there are and any country might decide not to bear any of the cost of even that least cost policy. Border taxes on net CO2 intensive imports can partially create an incentive not to free ride, but it is not easy.
My sole request would be, when you are eliding various bits of text whilst quoting from it, that you provide more context or simply keep more of the original work. I often find your summaries valuable (especially in helping me know if I'd like to know more), but as they are often from paywalled sources, a lack of context can very much reduce my understanding of your point.
What is the source of the South Korean economic development mystery? GDP/capita of 89 USD/year in 1967 to >$35,000/year today. An agrarian economy to a modern industrial powerhouse. Can the lessons learned (democracy did not exist for a large part of this period) be applied?
Also, Lol! ...that inflection in subscriptions in February 2022 looks a lot like 1870.... May Grasping have a long 21st century that slouches more and more toward something better than utopia ;)
Congratulations! Well deserved success. Also an indication that Substack (and its category, which also includes Patreon) is a valuable social innovation -- financially valuable to authors like you, but even more valuable for its incentives and externalities than its financial rewards.
I'd very much like to see you discuss externalities more -- though you already discuss them more than most. As abundance becomes more dominant, I think purely financial metrics tend to mislead worse. Economics gives us a good handle on driving social decisions from our individual judgements of monetary value. I don't think we know how to generate metrics for externalities (i.e. non-financial values) that can be used to drive social decisions anywhere near as effectively. This will be an increasingly serious problem as scarcity recedes.
Descriptive is good. Prescriptive is good, too. With my vast knowledge of these things (that’s code for “I don’t have a clue”) we might be facing problems a tad larger than Pharsalis (sp?), 1648, germ theory, and the interwebs. I’d welcome sentences that began, “If we want x, weneed less y and more z. Here’s why.”
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?
I'd like to see people working out the "actual texts" to be considered by Congress, even long before the opportunity for such consideration arises. I'd like too see something like a progressive, liberal, democratic ALEC that works through a distributed debate process whose results are centrally recorded.
My ideal would be to see a list of slowly developing "bills in progress" that would form the focal point for debate and policy innovation. Ideally, think-tanks, policy-makers, students, etc. would address a well-known series of questions by presenting and arguing for or against proposed solutions or approaches. This would be a process of leveraging the SocialWeb to develop law.
Especially in the area of taxes where we need many percentages of GDP to achieve minimal structural deficits.
If you're interested in "ALEC, but for Good, not Evil!" I recommend checking out Effective Government California / Modern Power.
https://modernpower.substack.com/
They are aspiring to building up a network of local government officials to make local laws and regulations both more uniform, and simpler (easier to navigate for a wider array of small players). Eventually we could see something like that branch out to other states.
StrongTowns is also very active in the space of training local government participants on best practices for making their homes productive / self-sufficient.
My 2 cents on the YIMBY / pro-abundance one-liners:
- It's illegal to build a townhouse. Do you support that type of restriction?
- The planning dept is still practicing segregation. Will you support zoning abolition?
- Home-based businesses are illegal. Will you support land use policy reform?
- It's 2023, and the government is still kicking people out of their homes to make room for roads that just bring more traffic.
- Short-term rentals are still outlawed. Do you think it's ok for my neighbors to decide who sleeps in my home?
- It's illegal for me to convert a shed to an apartment.
Those are all good policies, but mainly local... I'm curious whether Brad thinks there are ideas for better state- and federal-level policies that would actually have an impact.
I am a Planning Commissioner myself, and talk with my City Councilmembers regularly. But I've also known a couple local state legislators for over a decade -- one was in Young Dems with me, when we were young enough to be Young Dems -- and I talk reasonably often with my Congressmember as well. Definitely CA is doing some good stuff at the state level already, though it's a slog getting big changes through. I wonder whether there might actually be a possibility for some kind of bipartisan reform in Congress, if you could sell ideas as "deregulatory" to GOP co-sponsors.
Local is the key. In most states, that's where the land use magic happens (for good and for evil). MT (deep red voters) is suddenly an abundant housing place. The key is the messaging & messenger. You can't have Klaus Schwab/WEF telling Montana to eliminate parking minimums & legalize housing. They're doing it for their own reasons.
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.
It’s one of the letters of the Icelandic alphabet, equivalent of “th”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
I have wondered why Brad uses the thorn in titles, but then not in the rest of his text.
Also, speaking as an insufferable pedant, it seems to me that if you're going to adopt thorn, you really should be using eth as well. Thorn represents the voiceless th sound, as in, well, thorn. Or thin, or throw. Eth is for the voiced equivalent, as in "the", or "bother".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth
(And yes, if you want to get _really_ pedantic, the details of what the two letters are used for has varied a good deal over time, and in some cases they're even used interchangeably, but "thorn for voiceless th" and "eth for voiced th" is a pretty common convention.)
Thorn survived a lot longer than eth did,,,
Depends on what language you're talking about, no? There's a current-day Icelandic business newspaper called Viðskiptablaðið.
But in any case, I think your fans are curious why you use thorn. An Alexander Hamilton tribute?
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/07/jeebus-alexander-hamilton-used-thorn-in-official-documents.html
The founders also often employed a variant of S, if it preceded another S, that looks a lot like the cursive lower-case F, giving us "the pursuit of hapinefs".
Touché...
Congratulations and props to you on crossing the 20,000 subscriber milestone, BDL.
Thanks much...
More cowbell
I use your posts and others as commentary on current news events, helping me to gain perspectives that I find helpful as a lifelong progressive activist. I subscribed because I was a fan of your book.. Slouching Towards Utopia. But can Utopias exist outside of small contained communities, constrained in both space and time. I think that for all the benefits of late capitalism in innovation and productivity, the failure to address externalities is glaring. I would like to see more discussion about externalities from an economist’s perspective. I fear the current US prosperity is increasingly dependent on a vast, mostly invisible, underclass who perform an economic role similar to slaves and captives in the Roman Empire, allowing the elites to aggrandize power. How can this be overturned without destroying capitalism itself. How can a system of entrenched plutocrats flexibly address climate change? Won’t they just retreat further and further from direct experience of its effects.
I really do not think that plutocrats are the root of the opposition to net taxation of CO2 and methane or other Pigou taxes on externalities like road use congestion/Western rivers and ground water pricing.
I would like to know if there are any economic theories ALL economists agree on. It seems to me there are none. Reputable economists are always arguing. You don't see this much discord in physics or biology.
Brad- Congrats-
I've been trying to think through when or how collective action rears its head. I live in Berkeley. My neighborhood will burn one day. Too many trees and no one will cut theirs down to avoid a fire unless their neighbors will cut theirs down. We will burn.
And then I think through nations and climate change. My conclusion is the same.
You're a historian. Can you point out a beacon for me. Tell me a story of when unequal countries will join up and take action. Does it require a war ? Thanks again.
Has your fire insurer been pricing the increasing risk? How much of a discount would you get to reduce the hazard?
Short answer - no reduction. We have 6 foot side lots in this neighborhood- My insurer can see all the trees at 100' radius and fewer than 40% do I control. The rest are on my neighbors property.... cute problem eh .
True collective action problem.
It is - since we are all under a single legal entity (Berkeley, Alameda county, State of California etc.) legislation could potentially deliver a solution . Tricky politics but not improbable... solving the collective action across countries as climate change seems to require seems at least a magnitude harder. I guess we shall see.
I think your problem is just a smidgen easier. It's stated as everyone benefitting sort of equally from the tree removal. The problem being that no one wants to reward the jerk that benefits from the reduced risk when ever9n else removes their trees while keeping theirs. You need a jerk proof procedure.
Climate change is trickier because benefits are not uniform. Siberian farmer may benefit while Bangladeshi farmers see there tiny plots disappear beneath the waves. It is can be made even trickier by the fact that different measures to reduce net CO2 and methane emissions have different distributions of cost. Fortunately, the least total cost policy -- a uniform tax on net CO2 and methane emission -- does not fall on the poorest countries, but on the biggest net exporters of CO2 generating fossil fuels and imputers of zero CO2emitting energy, if the latter is possible. but costs there are and any country might decide not to bear any of the cost of even that least cost policy. Border taxes on net CO2 intensive imports can partially create an incentive not to free ride, but it is not easy.
My sole request would be, when you are eliding various bits of text whilst quoting from it, that you provide more context or simply keep more of the original work. I often find your summaries valuable (especially in helping me know if I'd like to know more), but as they are often from paywalled sources, a lack of context can very much reduce my understanding of your point.
Can you discuss this?
https://wapo.st/3DaPTBF
What is the source of the South Korean economic development mystery? GDP/capita of 89 USD/year in 1967 to >$35,000/year today. An agrarian economy to a modern industrial powerhouse. Can the lessons learned (democracy did not exist for a large part of this period) be applied?
Congrats, sir
Thx...
Also, Lol! ...that inflection in subscriptions in February 2022 looks a lot like 1870.... May Grasping have a long 21st century that slouches more and more toward something better than utopia ;)
Congrats! You're doing just fine. More people will find their way here the way pollinators find blooms.
Congratulations! Well deserved success. Also an indication that Substack (and its category, which also includes Patreon) is a valuable social innovation -- financially valuable to authors like you, but even more valuable for its incentives and externalities than its financial rewards.
I'd very much like to see you discuss externalities more -- though you already discuss them more than most. As abundance becomes more dominant, I think purely financial metrics tend to mislead worse. Economics gives us a good handle on driving social decisions from our individual judgements of monetary value. I don't think we know how to generate metrics for externalities (i.e. non-financial values) that can be used to drive social decisions anywhere near as effectively. This will be an increasingly serious problem as scarcity recedes.
Descriptive is good. Prescriptive is good, too. With my vast knowledge of these things (that’s code for “I don’t have a clue”) we might be facing problems a tad larger than Pharsalis (sp?), 1648, germ theory, and the interwebs. I’d welcome sentences that began, “If we want x, weneed less y and more z. Here’s why.”
Congrats!