sometimes with respect to places like Singapore or China you hear arguments of the form they are democracies, it's just the democracy takes place intraparty rather than between. 1/

i don't think it works, as the fraction of the public that participates in intraparty democracy is small, and the boundaries for what is legitimately contestable are very tight. 2/

but it's an interesting question whether there aren't or couldn't be substantive democracies who institutional dissimilarity to what we expect democracies look like makes it hard for us to say-so. 3/

(again China pretty overtly makes this kind of claim, but i don't think that it's persuasive.) /fin

i think the best way to put it is poor people are less insulated from inflation shocks. in dollar terms, stockholders may see sharper immediate losses (as eg rate hikes crash stocks). 1/

but asset holders tend to have means by which they can cushion the shock without changing their actual consumption behavior, while those without assets are forced to very painfully "adjust". 2/

eventually, both groups tend to recover, wages tend to match inflation, share prices rebound to levels consistent with the current price level when rates decline again. 3/

but the less wealthy will have really suffered in the meantime, while the more wealthy will have had to sweat through some anxiety but otherwise live as usual. 4/

middle class people with big mortgages are the big winners from inflation shocks. the poor borrow too little or on terms too miserable to really benefit from the reduced real debt burden. the rich are creditors who take real (but not nominal) losses in fixed income securities. 5/

but middle to upper middle class people with big mortgages and professions whose wages do track inflation can end up with a lot of debt relief! /fin

Singapore is not a democracy in the sense we usually mean it, it is arguably a “consultative democracy” and has been governed effectively as such, but political contestation is very limited. 1/

I’m not arguing for single-party states, but for effective parties or other mediating institutions through which politics can be prosecuted. 2/

Our Constitution “tries to” provide such institutions in the form of the Senate+Electoral College, which were mostly compromises necessary to get the thing ratified, but were justified to the degree they were justified as providing more reasoned fora for contestation than shifting public passions.3/

But in general we see that a heuristic the Constitution’s framers used a lot of— longer tenure means greater reason (see judges, senators)—basically doesn’t work. An individual insulated from frequent elections can have incentives and interests other than “reason” to guide them. 4/

Plus, those institutions hope to attain not merely reason as in rational contestation in the interest of a faction, but reason as in pursuing some true public interest, rising above all factional dispute. That’s a lot to ask for, and predictably mere tenure fails to deliver it. 5/

The Constitution’s arrangement of a House often unwise in its passions and a Senate + judiciary to serve as “cooling saucer” and impose rationality hasn’t worked. 6/

It’s particularly broken now, as party supercedes all other institutions and the political parties are defined by ideological and unrepresentative primary voters. Our two political parties are not designed to contest any interest rationality except for the interests of electoral candidates. /fin

if democracy is conceived of rule by an atomized public informed by engagement-focused media, it will be a form of misrule. you can’t exhort media to be different to fix it. you have to reconfigure the polity to be something more rational than an atomized, distractable mass public. 1/

specifically, the democratic public has to rule by participating in institutions that both meaningfully enfranchise them and act rationally, rather than reactively, on behalf of their interests and values. 2/

usually when democracy has worked, these institutions have taken the form of political parties. but there are other possibilities. /fin

Yeah, inflation tends to be good for debtors, bad for creditors and also bad for equity holders. In theory stocks are a claim on real flows and should be an inflation hedge. In practice, only over very long horizons. 1/

But usually shares grow faster than inflation, which can represent an increase in real production, but can also represent, and often does represent, a transfer TO assetholders from those with fewer assets. 2/

When shares rise independently of an increase in quantity (broadly understood) produced, assetholders are able to claim a greater share of total real production. and those with few assets have to pay into the burgeoning flows that become share “fundamentals”, if it’s not just multiple expansion./fin

No, I think it is Polanyi’s embedding, which is a distinct concept from Polanyi’s double movement. 1/

If I understand correctly (I may not! I have not read the original, Polanyi is a token of conversations I’ve been a part of, and my understanding derives from those), the double movement is basically reaction to a society overtaken by markets, whose markets are not properly contained, embedded. 2/

As this thread has pointed out, that is often a fascist turn. But the point of Polanyi’s embedding is precisely to let markets form a managed part of a stable and civilized society, to forestall reaction in whatever direction it might take. 3/

Again, I’m speaking from loose familiarity (confirmed as one does in these times with a quick, unreliable Claude check). 4/

But my understanding remains that embedding does mean what I intended it to mean, a cabining of markets so they are consistent with social values, rather than destabilizing of society and yielding “double movement”, an often ugly reaction. /fin