Eurostat: Activation policies are policies designed to encourage unemployed to step up their job search after an initial spell of unemployment, by making receipt of benefit conditional on participation in programmes.
One might think that they could also be designed to help the unemployed actually succeed in finding employment. If the latter, they would presumably need funding.
If on the other hand the point is to create a paper chase to keep costs down the way health insurers do, by denying valid claims, then not funding them seems like the right way to go, strategically.
Sting of Climate Risk: in Tails At the model level, these are not tails. The most "mean"-spirited model ought to be modeling the harms of the increase in the average number of mega wildfires, category 7 hurricanes, and 10,000 year droughts. If not, please re-estimate the model and give us a revised estimate of the optimal trajectory for the world tax on net CO2 emissions/CO2 concertation. [Could we call it the "natural" concentration? :)]
The Democrats' ads designed to "backfire" and help MAGA candidates aren't dishonest or unethical. However, they do improve the odds that the MAGA candidate is nominated and elected, albeit also improving the odds for the Democratic nominee. Democrats may, of course, do that. They want to win, after all. That said, such an approach puts the lie to the idea that Democrats *really* think the MAGA movement is an existential threat to Democracy. The only rational response to what is truly an existential threat is, first and foremost, to limit its likelihood.
Unsurprisingly the linked post addresses that concern -- you may not be convinced, but he does respond to that argument.
------------
"1st best: the Democrat wins. 2nd best: the moderate Republican wins. 3rd best: a crazy MAGA election-denier wins.
By boosting the crazies over the moderates, Dems are increasing the chances of 1 but also 3.
Is that obviously a stupid mistake? That is, is it obvious either that 1 isn’t much better than 2, or that 3 is much, much much worse than 2? (Or that otherwise the numbers just don’t work out.)
This is very far from clear to me. From a Dem perspective, a Dem is way better than a moderate Republican, who is likely to vote with R’s on almost everything except (by hypothesis) crazy overthrow-the-government-type insurrection and election denial stuff. Worse, I think there is a distinct risk that seeming-moderates would turn out to be squishes who break MAGA under pressure. That is, if you fail to boost an actual MAGA loon, against a moderate, you will only be accidentally boosting a MAGA-loon in moderate’s clothing. Better to fight against a clear crazy in the general than a crypto-crazy.
...
But another thing you want is for elections to make the stakes clear. We want the voters to have choices and be informed. If you think that it’s basically a crazy MAGA party against a sane Dem party, making clear that it’s a crazy MAGA party, by ensuring that the R candidate is unmistakably crazy from 50 yards away, is offering voters a clear and honest choice.
Now, the objection to this would be: it’s not for Dems to say whether the GOP is crazy or moderate! It’s not for Dems to nudge the GOP towards the crazy, just because the Dems think that’s where it’s actually going. (Self-fulfilling prophecy.) But the Dems can say: we are only conducting an honest experiment in democracy to see whether we are right. We predict that, given a clear choice, GOP voters themselves will freely choose the worse and refuse the better. So we are running informative ads to help them make sure not to accidentally pick the better choice, thereby obscuring the expression of their preference for the bad. Then, we predict that in the general the general public, seeing that the GOP is the party of picking the worse over the better, the general electorate will not follow suit, also picking the worse. They will vote Dem instead.
That was my original concern about the story -- and I'm still troubled by it.
But I think that John Holbo is correct to say that a non-MAGA republican, _in a district that would chose to elect a MAGA republican given the choice_ is not a significantly lower threat.
They are, by definition, in the position of needing to satisfy the MAGA base or lose the next primary. I do appreciate that Liz Cheney chose the path of anti-Trump --> lose primary, that seems to be an unusual choice.
TLDR; is the existential threat MAGA Republicans or the MAGA voters? If the latter than electing a different rep doesn't disarm the threat.
I think the argument is essentially: MAGA is an existential threat, and (supposedly) "non-MAGA" Republicans are a part of that threat. This because these (supposedly) "non-MAGA" Republicans will fall in line with MAGA if they are elected. (With perhaps a tiny number of exceptions in the most extreme cases.)
Note that even with something like the January 6 committee, only 35 of 210 Republicans voted for it in the House.
The evidence that it is false that, "non-MAGA Republicans" are just as much of a threat is, essentially Matt Yglesias's description of secret congress -- that politicians are capable of working together on bipartisan legislation on less public issues ( https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret )
I am of three minds about this:
1) I think it's always wise to allow one's political opponents some room to change their minds (or even room for hypocrisy). Contemporary politics rewards taking extreme positions and you want people to be able to walk that back when circumstances change.
2) If you think there are 10% of MAGA voters who might not vote if Trump was off the stage, you want to have politicians who prefer that outcome over ones that most want to continue courting those voters.
3) However, I find more persuasive the argument that, while there is some merit in the previous items, it is very bad to create an environment in which people are rewarded by power for successfully calibrating exactly how MAGA to be. It would be better to have a couple of election cycles in which running as a Republican was not a path to political power, to select for people who take a longer-term view.
But, of course, that may not be an option, even if it would be the best case.
Without having done a careful reading of Yglesias's article, it seems to me that it is not exactly relevant to the argument.
His point seems to be that, on certain issues without MAGA salience, then Republican representatives may support bipartisan measures. But if the (supposedly) "non-MAGA" Republicans fall in behind their MAGA peers for all of the important issues, this is not really a point in their favour.
This paragraph needs an AI bot rewrite :-) "But what happens when the network allows people who wish to be bad actors the present you with a broad spectrum of games? What happens when the government when your employer decides that it wants to use these tools, and he was these tools not for your good or in some win-win scenario but for its good and your detriment?"
Could someone clarify what "activation policies" mean in this context?
Eurostat: Activation policies are policies designed to encourage unemployed to step up their job search after an initial spell of unemployment, by making receipt of benefit conditional on participation in programmes.
One might think that they could also be designed to help the unemployed actually succeed in finding employment. If the latter, they would presumably need funding.
If on the other hand the point is to create a paper chase to keep costs down the way health insurers do, by denying valid claims, then not funding them seems like the right way to go, strategically.
Yes. Exactly. Thanks…
Brad
Sting of Climate Risk: in Tails At the model level, these are not tails. The most "mean"-spirited model ought to be modeling the harms of the increase in the average number of mega wildfires, category 7 hurricanes, and 10,000 year droughts. If not, please re-estimate the model and give us a revised estimate of the optimal trajectory for the world tax on net CO2 emissions/CO2 concertation. [Could we call it the "natural" concentration? :)]
The Democrats' ads designed to "backfire" and help MAGA candidates aren't dishonest or unethical. However, they do improve the odds that the MAGA candidate is nominated and elected, albeit also improving the odds for the Democratic nominee. Democrats may, of course, do that. They want to win, after all. That said, such an approach puts the lie to the idea that Democrats *really* think the MAGA movement is an existential threat to Democracy. The only rational response to what is truly an existential threat is, first and foremost, to limit its likelihood.
Unsurprisingly the linked post addresses that concern -- you may not be convinced, but he does respond to that argument.
------------
"1st best: the Democrat wins. 2nd best: the moderate Republican wins. 3rd best: a crazy MAGA election-denier wins.
By boosting the crazies over the moderates, Dems are increasing the chances of 1 but also 3.
Is that obviously a stupid mistake? That is, is it obvious either that 1 isn’t much better than 2, or that 3 is much, much much worse than 2? (Or that otherwise the numbers just don’t work out.)
This is very far from clear to me. From a Dem perspective, a Dem is way better than a moderate Republican, who is likely to vote with R’s on almost everything except (by hypothesis) crazy overthrow-the-government-type insurrection and election denial stuff. Worse, I think there is a distinct risk that seeming-moderates would turn out to be squishes who break MAGA under pressure. That is, if you fail to boost an actual MAGA loon, against a moderate, you will only be accidentally boosting a MAGA-loon in moderate’s clothing. Better to fight against a clear crazy in the general than a crypto-crazy.
...
But another thing you want is for elections to make the stakes clear. We want the voters to have choices and be informed. If you think that it’s basically a crazy MAGA party against a sane Dem party, making clear that it’s a crazy MAGA party, by ensuring that the R candidate is unmistakably crazy from 50 yards away, is offering voters a clear and honest choice.
Now, the objection to this would be: it’s not for Dems to say whether the GOP is crazy or moderate! It’s not for Dems to nudge the GOP towards the crazy, just because the Dems think that’s where it’s actually going. (Self-fulfilling prophecy.) But the Dems can say: we are only conducting an honest experiment in democracy to see whether we are right. We predict that, given a clear choice, GOP voters themselves will freely choose the worse and refuse the better. So we are running informative ads to help them make sure not to accidentally pick the better choice, thereby obscuring the expression of their preference for the bad. Then, we predict that in the general the general public, seeing that the GOP is the party of picking the worse over the better, the general electorate will not follow suit, also picking the worse. They will vote Dem instead.
TL;DR: "MAGA isn't an *existential* threat."
I disagree.
That was my original concern about the story -- and I'm still troubled by it.
But I think that John Holbo is correct to say that a non-MAGA republican, _in a district that would chose to elect a MAGA republican given the choice_ is not a significantly lower threat.
They are, by definition, in the position of needing to satisfy the MAGA base or lose the next primary. I do appreciate that Liz Cheney chose the path of anti-Trump --> lose primary, that seems to be an unusual choice.
TLDR; is the existential threat MAGA Republicans or the MAGA voters? If the latter than electing a different rep doesn't disarm the threat.
I think the argument is essentially: MAGA is an existential threat, and (supposedly) "non-MAGA" Republicans are a part of that threat. This because these (supposedly) "non-MAGA" Republicans will fall in line with MAGA if they are elected. (With perhaps a tiny number of exceptions in the most extreme cases.)
Note that even with something like the January 6 committee, only 35 of 210 Republicans voted for it in the House.
Yes. And is there any evidence that that argument is false?
Very little, and nothing compelling, in my view.
The evidence that it is false that, "non-MAGA Republicans" are just as much of a threat is, essentially Matt Yglesias's description of secret congress -- that politicians are capable of working together on bipartisan legislation on less public issues ( https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret )
I am of three minds about this:
1) I think it's always wise to allow one's political opponents some room to change their minds (or even room for hypocrisy). Contemporary politics rewards taking extreme positions and you want people to be able to walk that back when circumstances change.
2) If you think there are 10% of MAGA voters who might not vote if Trump was off the stage, you want to have politicians who prefer that outcome over ones that most want to continue courting those voters.
3) However, I find more persuasive the argument that, while there is some merit in the previous items, it is very bad to create an environment in which people are rewarded by power for successfully calibrating exactly how MAGA to be. It would be better to have a couple of election cycles in which running as a Republican was not a path to political power, to select for people who take a longer-term view.
But, of course, that may not be an option, even if it would be the best case.
Without having done a careful reading of Yglesias's article, it seems to me that it is not exactly relevant to the argument.
His point seems to be that, on certain issues without MAGA salience, then Republican representatives may support bipartisan measures. But if the (supposedly) "non-MAGA" Republicans fall in behind their MAGA peers for all of the important issues, this is not really a point in their favour.
This paragraph needs an AI bot rewrite :-) "But what happens when the network allows people who wish to be bad actors the present you with a broad spectrum of games? What happens when the government when your employer decides that it wants to use these tools, and he was these tools not for your good or in some win-win scenario but for its good and your detriment?"