We’ll agree that democratic failures are system failures, but disagree about whom accountability reasonably falls upon within the system. To me it’s stupid to hold an electorate accountable, it’s the people who take some greater role who can be usefully held to account. 1/

fatalism about the inevitability systems eventually break may be right or wrong, but is also useless. we all die, but our role is to try to live and live well as long as we can. 2/

i don’t know if what we’re now suffering is inevitable breakdown, but before it collapses all the way to postapocalyptic sticks and stones, i’ll be looking for ways to stabilize, reform, and reinvigorate it. 3/

which will plainly include much greater accountability for people in leadership and crucial institutional roles (as well as much higher pay in some of those roles, so individuals can reasonably be expected to resist venal incentives). /fin

yes. definitely. you could tax certain kinds of business spending, to reduce the current bid on resources by businesses. 1/

but it’s a ballsy approach! usually the presumption is business spending sows the seeds of increased production, so disincentivizing it would be counterproductive. you have to be really sure you think data centers or whatever you’re discouraging is toxic! 2/

the “orthodox” view would say this kind of taxation is ultimately inflationary, because it kneecaps the future supply side. /fin

if you think networks like the Epstein emails expose — not the pedophilia, the networks of incestuous careerism — if you think they are a thing of the past, think about Olivia Nuzzi and Bari Weiss. 1/

not in terms of the flawed individuals — i’m not interested in piling on — but in terms of how our institutions are bent to overlook, in Nuzzi’s case, or to serve, in Weiss’s, their misdeeds. /fin

cumulation is a bad model of intellectual life. every idea has to be constantly reinvented, remade as something fresh and real and relevant, live in contemporary minds. that is most of the work. 1/

it’s great that the growing frontier of firsts paves the way for somewhat — only somewhat — easier reinvention and transformation down the line. it’s like how the goose at the apex of the migration wedge does experience a bit more air resistance. 2/

but it’d also be a mistake to credit that vanguardist as having done most of the work. all the geese do the work. in intellectual life, successful reinvention, resurrection, reintegration require a great deal of creativity. /fin

when we adopt inflationary policy, we really accept a trade-off, higher interest rates or inflation, rather than necessarily inflation per se. but both are pretty unpleasant! 1/

until, say, 2021 the consensus was resources were not fully employed we (in the US, i can’t speak as much to Canada) were at near-zero interest rates and undershooting inflation targets. 2/

the post-COVID supply chain shocks, plus lagged spending of COVID financial supports, ended that moment. we might have largely recovered it by now, but geopolitics and trade wars — ramped up in the Biden eta, turned chaotic and more dangerous now — took that off the table. 3/

so now the consensus is we are near “full employment of resources” broadly, even as demand for the single most important resource, labor, softens! (that is to say, we are near stagflation.) 4/

the import-sensitive share of the economy (which is bigger than the share of imports in the economy) is on a pricing knife’s edge. 5/

so it’s hard to make the case for expenditures unfunded by middle class taxes, unless those expenditures are carefully targeted at the resources for which there is slack demand. 6/

ie to some degree, one could imagine labor stimulative expenditure—say New Deal style public works construction or a job guarantee—without it being too inflationary, bc labor is decreasingly fully employed and some of the income you pay workers just replaces other supports you’d otherwise provide.7/

but just buying more public services broadly probably does imply diverting resources, engendering that trade-off between higher rates and inflation if not financed to some degree from an increment in middle class taxes. /fin

welcome to dark Keynesianism. it’s not so much wealth vs income, but money that would otherwise have been spent vs money that would otherwise have been saved. 1/

to “finance” new real activity in a world where real resources are already fully deployed, you need to divert resources, not just employ them. to prevent spending from being inflationary, you have to tax money people would otherwise have spent not saved. 2/

the not-rich spend most of their income and save little. the rich mostly bank their wealth and any increase in their income. 3/

this means, when you want to divert activity to public purposes where resources are already fully deployed — and you don’t want the spending to be inflationary — you do in fact need to tax the nonrich (can be an income tax, can be a consumption tax) to reduce the pressure on real resources. 4/

taxes on the rich alone would have to be huge before it much affects the bid they place on real resources. 5/

in general you tax the middle class to finance public spending, you tax the rich to shape the distribution, because you don’t have a society if there’s an outrageously long right tail. 6/

you have to politically make the connection through an obligation of shared sacrifice: if we’re taxing the middle class who really feels the pain of that, whose lifestyle must actually change, then you should tax the rich much much more to get anything approaching a similar sacrifice. /fin

“good” might be overstating things — i think our axioms here are extremely pessimistic — but i might agree that 90% good / 10% might be defensible. 1/

but i don’t think that’s empirically defensible. “democratic revulsion” here means overthrowing a system, not merely a party losing an election. 2/

i can’t speak for Matt, but i think under the worldview he’s expressing, it was a feature not a bug that the US pre-Trump was governed by coalitions with highly overlapping technocracies and technocratic ideas (ideas i think Matt still supports). 3/

pre-Trump, democracy’s capacity for mischief was largely neutralized by this overlap. the two-party technocracy would win either way. 4/

it was better if Democrats won — they were the more competent, less corrupt set of technocrats — but the system gave voters an outlet to confer legitimacy for a pretty consistent underlying technocracy. 5/

“democratic revulsion” — democracy actually taking a substantive role in shaping government rather that merely rubberstamping legitimacy — are events like Trump or Brexit, or Hitler wrt Weinar, maybe Erdogan in Turkey (overthrowing enforced secularism) or Modi in India has in my view… 6/

a pretty awful empirical history. In my view, democratic outcomes are best when they provoke gradual shifts over time rather than radical shifts in an instant. 7/

But the “democracy as failsafe if a manipulative technocracy is too ridiculously bad” justification basically leaves democracy’s only substantive role as imposing radical shifts. /fin

sure. unfortunately reality is very complicated! 1/

still, the motivating question here is “why democracy?” if your worldview is something like what @mattyglesias.bsky.social confesses at the top of the thread. so far, the responses (not by Matt) have been it’s a failsafe against really really bad technocracy. 2/

particularly given actual experience of what follows when the demos rejects a longstanding establishment, i’ve argued this might not be so compelling a case for democracy. 3/

but i think it turns on this question of the distribution of successors, when technocracy fails sufficiently to impose a radical break despite technocrats’ pandering and manipulation, is there a reasonable shot something good results, 4/

the whole view strikes me as entirely indefensible if the ex ante expectation is something *worse* (which experience does i think largely suggest). 5/

if democratic revulsion leads to worse, then under technocratic utilitarian ethics (where this thought experiment begins) we should prefer authoritarian technocracy that the demos is not permitted to overthrow. 6/

if you have a more sanguine view of the distribution if successors, then a case can be made for this view. if successors are typically bad, but a bit better than what they replace, you could support this version of democracy under a pessimistic “worst except all the alternatives” philosophy. 7/

you’d be hard-pressed to make any kind of enthusiastic, positive case for this version of democracy unless successors following democratic revulsion tend positively to be good. i find that a hard case to make, but YMMV! /fin

i guess the case would be removing the bad without contributing to the good replaces the bad with a roll of the dice? so under some distributional assumptions (say 50/50 good/bad in similar degrees) that has net positive expected value? (we are acting as democracy technocrats here, no?) 1/

but if the distribution is skewed, then it could be net bad. if throwing out the bastards without preparing anything better has a *tendency* to mean sociopaths or fascists or tyrants fill the gap, then the case for this kind of check-the-negative-with-no-positive-capacity democracy gets weak, no? 2/

so do you think it’s reasonable to believe “let an establishment technocracy mostly manipulate and thwart the electorate, ostensibly for its own good, but let the electorate throw it off in extremis, beyond certain bounds” would *not* have a sharp negative skew in subsequent regimes? /fin