Speaking of NGOs and their funding: I read the other day that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation funded Norman Borlaug’s research that turned Mexico from a net importer to a net exporter of wheat. I recalled being in a room about 1990 when the president of the Ford Foundation walked through and proudly announced that she was going to meet with the leading independent film makers. How did the left move from using its resources to fund Norman Borlaug to supporting Michael Moore? Was the third republic that rotten, even as early as 1990?
I think if we invited a modern leftist to explain it, they would say that the whole era was bad because it was racist and sexist. The new era is better irrespective of outcomes because it holds to a purer doctrine of equality. So long as we are moving towards greater doctrinal purity, no outcomes matter. Once all dissent has been eliminated and all believe in the pure doctrine like a million points of burning light, the world will be pure and good.
Norman Borlaug had two concerns, seemingly equal in his mind: hunger; and population growth.
What interests me is how both the left and right "forgot" about the latter. Certainly the Ford and Rockefeller foundations both did, after a long focus on it.
I can think of a "good" reason and a "bad" reason.
The good reason is the success of Norman Borlaug and the rest of the Green Revolution. It had become obvious that there was not going to be mass starvation, in fact not any starvation at all unless war or a terrible government got in the way. The Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich were wrong, wrong, wrong. On both the right and the left, there was wishful thinking that proper economic policy (the Washington Consensus) would lead to prosperity for all, no matter how many people there were.
The bad reason has to do with where population was increasing quickly. In most European and east Asian countries, birth rates were falling and it looked like they would stabilize around 2.1, the requirement for a stable population (I don't think anyone predicted the fall to 1.5 or so that is now typical). Most all the people who were having 4 or 5 or 6 or more kids were People of Color and it was very bad manners to say they should be doing something different. To care about population was inevitably to be considered racist.
I agree with both of your points but I don't think they are big factors in why the left has moved from Borlaug to Moore. I think it is a bit like AK's story about hobbies such as dance and model building getting more focused on the most committed hobbyists. Excepting war and atrocious governments, as we make massive improvements in discrimination, basic healthcare, food availability, and eliminating extreme poverty, the most activist of the left must find new issues so they go places that fewer and fewer want to follow.
At the risk of putting words into luciaphile's mouth ... I think she would challenge your premise that we have made massive improvements in all our big problems. I think she would say that we are increasingly messing up natural systems, degrading natural areas, making it harder and harder for people to experience nature. Mining, over-fishing, urban areas that just keep growing and growing. We put extra carbon into the air and interfere with natural processes that take carbon out of the air. The more people there are, the harder it is to deal with any of these problems.
In the 1950s and '60s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations understood this. But today, even though the world population has gone from 3 billion in 1960 to 8 billion today, they have "forgotten" it.
The activist left doesn't "need" to go new places. These are problems that are, if anything, getting worse. And, indeed, the left cares when they can be blamed on "capitalism" or "colonialism" or rich people. But to put any blame on PoCs is anathema. So any concern with population increase is out.
The environmental problems we face are no doubt getting more complicated and difficult. On this we agree. But the reason is that we have made so much progress. When is the last time a river caught fire like the Cayahoga? The last time there were mass deaths from smog such as in Pittsburg in the early 1900's (as opposed to far less severe chronic issues)? As for activism, because
the issues have gotten smaller in scale and far more complex, they become far more difficult targets for activism. On top of that, the activists are far more likely to miss the mark. Keystone XL seems an excellent example of missing the mark.
I'm not exactly sure if or where it fits in this conversation but
as wonderful as Borlaug's work was, it being funded is a bit a fluke in many respects. And I don't think something like it not getting foundation funding today has nearly as much to do with a change in political lean of foundations as it does with them being more bureaucratic. Also there are increases in federal funding for that type of work but that's a different can of worms.
I completely agree that we have made massive improvements in air and water pollution. We are rich and largely have good waste disposal systems. Alas, much of the world isn't and doesn't. Humans create lots of waste, and the more people, the more waste. And the bigger the general "ecological footprint".
If you care about "climate change" and humanity's "carbon footprint", logic demands you be concerned how many people there are. And some activists are, but seemingly only about prosperous people having children.
Regarding DOGE, I think people who have never tried to cut waste in an organization, or find out what really happens, what matters, and what is done by whom, do not understand the process. If you ask people e.g. "Do you need this extra shift?" the answer is almost always "Yes, we need things to be how they are", sometimes "Well, we could do without these few people" and only rarely "Nah, they are superfluous. We've been paying them for no real reason." People who answer that last should be listened to and given follow up questions about why it persists. More often though, you just have to try without things and see what happens.
Likewise when looking at processes, people will claim a process or report or cover letter is super important, but if you just stop doing it, lo and behold, no one notices. That is why meetings always expand, bureaucracy always expands, dumb spending always expands: people get used to things, believe they matter, but rarely stop to test to see if that is true.
So sometimes you just have to go in, cut away lots of process and activities, being careful to try and avoid things that are obviously critical, see what stops working, then correct to get things working again. Nipping at the edges rarely works, especially when people have a lot of incentive to avoid being honest about what matters.
After reading Gasda I would have guessed you liked what he said even if I didn't already know from reading your comment. Other than his next to last paragraph, I mostly didn't think much of it. My thought was he mostly took something relatively small (not unimportant) and treated it as if it were way more than it is. I also doubt people have shifted right nearly as much as he suggests. A dislike of Harris and how she was nominated is not clearly a shift right at all. A shift right would have come with a House seat increase, not decrease. And his claim that Trump is popular is downright absurd. No polls I've seen give him an approval rating even close to 50%.
I would also guess you didn't like what Cass had to say while I thought he was spot on.
I agree with your take. It's true that Trump decisively beat Harris. If the presidential election were the only thing that happened in 2024, it might well be taken as a sea change away from wokeism, DEI, Affirmative Action, Identity Politics, and all the other absurdities of the last 10 or 15 years.
But this interpretation depends on two key assumptions: that the larger population has finally had enough of the nonsense, and that they hold Democrats responsible for it. Again, looking only at the presidential election, this could be a valid interpretation. In 2020, Harris went out of her way to paint herself as the wokeist far-left Democrat in the field, and she was decisively defeated in 2024. But she was even more decisively defeated in 2020, and withdrew before any primary votes were cast. She found herself the default Democratic candidate when Biden imploded in public, but was even more hapless as a candidate than she had been in 2020. Any competent Republican should have beaten her by landslide margins.
If you think Trump is the embodiment of the backlash against the woke excesses, you should come to grips with his low success rate in backing Republican candidates; he's had a lot of losses at both the primary and general level. If you think the population is turning to Republicans as the party of sanity, you should come to grips with the overall weakness of Republican results in Congress; the Republicans picked up 4 Senate seats, but 2 of those were in the cards, replacing incumbent Democrats in deep-red states. In the House, Republicans had a smaller majority than they had in 2022.
It may be that the identity-centered and censorious virtue-signaling is going away. If so, it is only because it collapses of its own weight when anyone talks honestly about it. But Republicans still don't have a coherent agenda.
Thank you. I was starting believe I was entirely alone on multiple issues among AK commenters. Clearly I'm not. You did a great job of adding to what I was thinking.
"He declares Martin Gurri’s revolt of the public over, replaced by a rotation of the elites."
Ahem, October 29, 2018:
" "The internet and social media offered a bit of a reprieve from the advancement of State power over social power. Recent moves show that the State is once again on the move with the “intellectuals” in the vanguard of speech repression."
Right. The Empire Strikes Back. Social media expression is increasingly controlled and regulated, and when the state cannot act directly, institutions with strong market positions will regulate on behalf of the prevailing elite orthodoxy anyway."
Speaking of ideas from 6 to 20 years ago, I cannot resist pointing out how the not-even-remotely-close-to-the-Overton-window set of proposals, concepts and conversations circulating amongst what were perhaps only a few thousand men in the broadly "very online dissident right" community are now being announced as actual policy or possibilities by Trump 2.0. The left is going on about "Project 2025", but half of what's in there is almost a verbatim copy of some notion I can find in my extensive archives that some rando quirky internet scribbler (actually including some quite accomplished intellectuals and scholars who had to write under pseudonyms) put out there back when - as I clearly remember - it was practically impossible to get anyone from the old Heritage crowd to even consider them.
For example, years ago there were historical and legal arguments about the lack of validity of "automatic birthright citizenship" for an infant born to an illegally present mother that are now practically copy-pasted into actual executive orders and motions headed to actual SCOTUS. Note, I am not taking -any- credit for introducing any of these ideas or influencing anybody about anything. To the extent I may have had a genuinely creative moment, I see it most as an instance of coincidental independent discovery of the solution to a math problem which by its nature only has one solution which is bound to be uncovered eventually by most of the people thinking seriously about it. It's not even clear to what extent the members or discourse of that online community had any direct influence on anyone or anything, more like putting things "in the water" far upstream of who drank them in.
Personally, I think I was only way ahead of the curve on one topic, thinking it was deeply underestimated in importance and scale, which I only knew due to my anecdotal personal experiences and exposures to it, and thus an extremely "high value target" for elimination.
But which I struggled in vain for years to get anyone to take it seriously. And that topic was ... um .... about the deep fraud at the heart of all the "grant programs", that many of these programs actually had no basis in statute, and the related extensive network of complex ways the Democratic party and broader left has discovered to convert public funds into partisan private political and pecuniary benefits for the larger progressive movement and coalition. And that any Republican administration that was actually being serious about its own survival and purported ideas should see all those grants and grant-awarding agencies for what they were, and that all those that could plausibly be eliminated should indeed be immediately burned to the ground as having been corrupted beyond any hope of salvaging. And, well ... about that ...
Actually, after thinking about it, there may have been just a few other occasions in which long ago I made a novel (or merely "ahead-of-the-curve") contribution to the discourse in that community in a way that is now - even to my own stunned surprise - manifesting in actual USG policy. Executive Order 14204 is a minor example, though, I suppose it's possible that Elon's being South African may have had something to do with that one in particular.
But one, and much more important, area in which I think I was way ahead of the curve was something which about 12 years ago I semi-jokingly called "Handle's Basilisk" (a term playing on the name of Roko's much, much more famous concept.)
Both Basilisks involve making threats today to do something harmful in the future, but which the threatener can't do today. Roko's Basilisk points out that if 'negotiating' with a bad AI today, just because it can't hurt you now doesn't mean it can't hurt "you" in the future, so it can still threaten actual-you with that right now, and intimidate or coerce you into helping it today, to include, ironically, helping it acquire that capacity to harm you. Handle's Basilisk points out that throughout most of human history, the prison-gang-politics nature of contests for social power has prevailed, and today's losers not only frequently threaten revenge when and if they are one day the winners, but when they do become the winners, they follow through!
One can get into the details of strategic game theory and Nash Equilibria for contests involving many and frequent re-iterated moves. But really, it's not complicated. It just means that if you tat me now, then just because I can't immediately tit for tat back at you today. it doesn't mean that you don't have to worry about me titting that tat somewhere down the line as soon as I am able to do so, and that, in fact, it is the -correct- move for me to make today to credibly threaten you with my intention to eventually certainly retaliate in exactly that way.
So, it just means, "Now that you've crossed the Rubicon, there is no going back, and No More Mr. Nice Guy. Current score marking for later score settling. Payback. Hard Ball. Revenge. Reprisals. Vendettas. Grudge Lists. Long memories and long knives. Stay out of the game, or else, if you live by the sword, be prepared to die by the sword."
The basic logic is that, if you are lucky enough to get a vacation from the condition of most humans in most of history and live in a nice political equilibrium, what keeps it stable and robust to entropic decay is the -fear- of deterioration into a worse equilibrium. That is, sticking to nice, civil norms and holding back from escalation not because of abstract moral commitments (which history teaches us are, let's face it, "fragile") but because of practical considerations and worries about the consequences when, inevitably, power changes hands and the shoe is on the other foot. Sometimes when your enemies win, they will offer truth and reconciliation. If you are not so lucky or deserving, then you probably won't get the truth, but you will definitely be on the receiving end of the retribution.
And what had happened was that the previous social equilibrium had completely broken down when the widespread adoption of smartphones and use of social media apps coincided with Obama second term, the left felt they could make these new aggressive moves with impunity, and after a few efforts appeared to prove that to the be the case, things predictably and rapidly started to spin way out of control.
See, a long time ago, I started actually keeping a list of prominent and egregiously unjust instances of what we might today call "cancellations", a project which - much in evidence of our cultural degradation and misfortune - soon became impossible to keep up with in the spare time of merely one individual as the numbers of such cases exploded. This coincided with a parallel explosion in what is now referred to as "lawfare" and "weaponization", which is the abuse of state institutions and authorities to go after the opposition and their ideas under the false cover stories of neutral professionals merely doing their jobs.
If there is anything at the very top of the "Capital Incompetence" charge sheet for the old National Review / GOPe crowd, it was their being completely asleep at the wheel while this cancer was growing and, not just refusing to wake up to the reality, but continuing to put their own reputations on the line and vouch "without evidence" for people who turned out to be true snakes and scumbags, much to these "conservatives" (hence, "c***servatives") eternal shame, discredit, and regret. Good riddance.
But what I pointed out was that all the people (at all social levels) who were gleefully engaging in all these cancellations, weaponizations, investigations, lawfare assaults, etc. were being -incredibly cavalier- about attaching their real-life identifies to such efforts. Of course, that makes a lot of sense when conspicuously taking a few enemy scalps was a great way to get status and prestige and climb the ranks. It makes sense when you never see anybody suffer any hard, real-world consequences for participation. It makes sense when even the other side's old guard political establishment has all but written you a get-out-of-jail-free card by making it clear that they were too oblivious and squeamish and did not have the spine or testicles to actually bring guns to your gun fight. And so yes of course when military leaders were ordered to impose and implement one party's ideological mandates and policies on the armed forces, they really believed that they would be able to claim they weren't political actors and were therefore entitled to retain their positions when the new bosses took over. When the head of the TSA put Gabbard in the Terrorist Suspect Database (as he was ordered to do) he really believed he would stay in his job after the inauguration.
When Intelligence officials and FBI agents concocted various Russia hoaxes and treated January 6 bums more severely than cartel gang hitmen, they really thought they would just keep counting down the days until they were eligible to retire with a pension.
But Handle's Basilisk says that, no, in fact, it doesn't make any political sense whatsoever for the right-wing party and its leadership to just -put up with this- and be expected to just forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones but then it all explodes in their faces again the next time the Democrats win. What actually makes sense is that, in order to try to stop the insanity now, one has to credibly threaten reprisal, that is, "Any time any one of them does any of this crap to any one of us, write that name down, and then, when it's our turn, well, payback's a bitch."
Now, it's possible to think through all this in the completely dispassionate, cold-blooded way of a neutral and disinterested strategist, that looks at it all as a kind of "more in sadness than in anger" tragic necessity, that doesn't hate the players but hates the game, and so forth. That's how I looked at it.
But you know, I'm a quirky internet rando. In actual human politics, this future-threat principle will be totally instinctive and will come completely naturally to those who are more driven by volcanic passions and sadistic vindictive emotions and who have a killer's instinct for exacting revenge, as ruthlessly and brutally as possible. After all, human emotional impulses and social-game political instincts are the product of evolution hard-wiring the correct game-theory move solutions into us, our ancestor could hardly have survived in merciless competition with each other over eons were it otherwise.
And, apparently, just such human politicians have taken power over the government of the richest and most powerful country in the world, and they have those lists they've obviously been maintaining for a while. And, with regard to the names on those lists, as HB-theory predicted those politicians would eventually do, they are ... shall we say ... "working their way down."
I spent a short stint at a company dealing with Medicare/medicaid fraud. My feeling is that it leans 99% towards overpayment and 1% towards fraud suppression. There are agents out there doing fraud work. They do occasionally arrest and prosecute people. But overall it’s hard to see the level of fraud and shit people get away with and not think that we are way to far in one direction.
The fundamental problem is that “not paying a legitimate claim” is taken way too seriously. When you’re trying to proof something is fraud basically “guilty until proven innocent”. I once watched someone shut down a fraud operation, open an identical operation down the street with the #2 at the end of the name like a movie sequel, and the entire arduous years long task of re-proving the fraud had to be done all over again.
There is also a much bigger pool of “shit that obviously does no good but we can’t prove 100% it does no good we are only 99% sure.” That isn’t technically fraud, but it’s a lot of wasted money.
You don't know if you've cut enough unless you need to put 10 percent back in. Nothing is permanent. It's possible to course correct and...oh my god, the difficulty...resubscribe to a legal opinion search engine.
“He is arguing that the same dynamic that caused the craziest social justice activists to drown out the voices of sanity on the left is now doing the equivalent on the right on Twitter. And he argues that what happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter.”
So River Page is a reasonable liberal. I believe that.
And one who has now clicked on enough right-fringe-coded stuff on X that the algorithm shows him more of it.
And I have no doubt that disgusting fringe right-wing Twitter not only exists, but that it is proportionately bigger in the last few months, especially as leftists *voluntarily* chose to go to leftist echo chamber BlueSky once Musk changed Twitter from an explicitly leftist platform that censored right- coded views, to one that is no longer explicitly leftist, it actually broadly neutral (like Substack!), and the leftist MSM started painting Musk as threat to their power #2.
I’ll also concede that Musk alone is prolific enough on the platform that he may well tilt it right.
But that’s tilt.
But sorry, the rest is projecting onto the right what the left has actually done. And the claim that it jumps beyond Twitter to the real world has no evidence, only leftist rhetoric talking points attached to it.
Is it theoretically plausible that what Page suggests *could* happen? IMO highly unlikely, but sure.
But to claim it has *already* happened, and will cause a backlash against the right - only 6 weeks into Trump’s presidency? Sorry, that is leftist talking point hopium written as push-polling, not reporting, and not fact-based argument.
I differ in that I don't know where X currently stands on the road to far right extremism but I have no doubt it will get there, barring some extreme events such as the previous change of ownership. It may be less intentional vs Twitter but it is bound to happen as liberals flee, likely followed by the middle to some degree.
I wasn't surprised to find when I clicked on the River Page link that it took me to The Free Press. Bari publishes some interesting articles, but I'm not going provide financial support to an outfit that is clearly trying to position itself as the premier 'gatekeeping' operation for the Trump Administration.
"I used to say that trying to interest an elite college student in what life is like working at a profit-seeking business was like trying to interest a teenager in the topic of death."
When was this? For the last 40+ years a healthy portion has gone to Wall St and some of the big consulting firms.
Yes, there is and likely always will be a sliver that chases the money. And that is ambitious, in the best sense of that term.
But AK is clearly correct that we have had at least a generation of miseducated, mostly but not entirely midwit college graduates who believe that free enterprise and profit are evil, and that only non-profits are good. And so the proportion who think that way is far larger than ever before.
We disagree that it is a sliver. I'd bet a majority work most of their careers at for profit businesses.
As for AK's statement, maybe I'm totally misinterpreting his intent. Unless one wants to argue elite college students haven't thought about working life AT ALL, which is still a stretch, clearly a sizable group is very interested in the for-profit side.
The slice I was referring to was specifically re Wall Street, not that there was just a sliver who would go work in the free market.
If you are talking absolutes, then of course Arnold is being too extreme.
But we were decidedly not talking about what they end up doing their whole careers, but about what they go into - and want to go into - first.
And if you don’t think there has been a substantial change among college students, and especially the leftist miseducated ones, away from the for-profit sector… then I can’t help you.
IDK. I have no doubt there there is more talk of the ones avoiding for-profit employment but I've seen no data supporting the conclusion that the numbers from elite schools has grown and I would bet you haven't either.
Oh yeah, like Oren Cass’s fastidious nit-picking involves any personal risk at all. Attention seeking ankle-biter. Unfortunately there is no DOGE for the sinecured kibbitzers in tax-exempt fantasy land. Cass and everyone like him are distortions produced by the tax code and the tax code needs serious reform that takes an axe to the corrupt 501(c)(3) wonderland.
Yup, the optimum amount of error is not 0, and if the cancellation of a subscription service which apparently the laws of physics prevent the SEC from resubscribing is the extent of DOGE error, then DOGE has yet to reach err enough to reach that optimum. My worry is that USAID will turn into a protracted struggle in the Congress and equally important, if not more so, ptitle riorities will be neglected.
In no particular order, the top priorities for Congress need to be:
(1) eliminating the budget deficit and bringing down the national debt;
(2) repealing section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code as well as the charitable donation deduction;
(3) repealing title 10 of the United States Code and transferring national defense operations to state militias with national policy left in a War Department with five positions (the Secretary at War, an assistant, a secretary, and two clerks) which was quite sufficient enough for the republic in its early years; and
(4) beginning to address the enormous administrative waste in US health care delivery:
“Findings The review yielded 71 estimates from 54 unique peer-reviewed publications, government-based reports, and reports from the gray literature. Computations yielded the following estimated ranges of total annual cost of waste: failure of care delivery, $102.4 billion to $165.7 billion; failure of care coordination, $27.2 billion to $78.2 billion; overtreatment or low-value care, $75.7 billion to $101.2 billion; pricing failure, $230.7 billion to $240.5 billion; fraud and abuse, $58.5 billion to $83.9 billion; and administrative complexity, $265.6 billion. The estimated annual savings from measures to eliminate waste were as follows: failure of care delivery, $44.4 billion to $97.3 billion; failure of care coordination, $29.6 billion to $38.2 billion; overtreatment or low-value care, $12.8 billion to $28.6 billion; pricing failure, $81.4 billion to $91.2 billion; and fraud and abuse, $22.8 billion to $30.8 billion. No studies were identified that focused on interventions targeting administrative complexity. The estimated total annual costs of waste were $760 billion to $935 billion and savings from interventions that address waste were $191 billion to $286 billion.”
As an incorrigible pessimist, I realize that this is all a pipe dream. On the other hand, the Speaker of the House has done some slight squeaking lately about maybe following through on a spending cut or two so maybe the hand basket’s arrival in Hades will be delayed a few seconds.
The government wants to be bigger and bigger but it can barely monitor the authenticity of payments. This is like a kid who wants to do more than he can take but unfortunately we area talking of unaccountable adults. Cut back, decentralize as much as possible…there are no economies of scales with bureaucracy, just bigger mess.
ChatGPT: The essay discusses the decline of the "Millennial virtue economy," a social and economic paradigm where Millennials defined their success through moral superiority, progressive ideals, and managerial roles in sectors like tech and education. Over time, this model has lost its appeal, especially as Millennials become disillusioned with the notion that "meaningful" work in corporate or managerial roles truly contributes to societal progress. The essay highlights a shift towards a more materialistic, practical approach, with a growing skepticism towards virtue signaling and a return to simpler, more traditional values in work and life.
Me: Perhaps, the important lesson here is the role of liberty and markets in producing and discovering things that people value. When our jobs are tied to governments-subsidies, sole-source government contracts, third-party payment medical insurance, higher ed cartels, we don't know whether we are creating value or how much value we are creating. When people pay for something directly with their own money, there is a higher likelihood that the producer is producing something that the buyer values. If someone else is paying for it, how much value does it have? Hard to know.
I don't think Gasda's description fits more than a tiny minority and whatever shift away from the Millennial virtue economy has happened is a tiny fraction of that. Maybe it will grow and become more significant but I'm more inclined to believe it will wither long before having real effect on more than a few. Far more will be impacted by an unfocused and mostly arbitrary slash and burn almost entirely unaligned with where Gasda sees things moving.
I was thinking similar thoughts before I commented. Tiny is the keyword there.
In the background here is a massive ideology of social justice. I don’t see that going away anytime soon. If Trump and Musk shake things up enough, certain universities and bureaucracies will go under, but this will be a gradual process, only made somewhat sudden by DOGE.
If and when longterm government funding to education changes to private funding I will believe the virtue signaling decline to be of more permanent nature.
Maybe. Only time will tell. Personally, even if what DOGE does turns out for the good, which I doubt, I don't see it more than minimally addressing these issues.
That said, while certain bureaucracies within universities are more susceptible to going away under changing circumstances, the universities getting nearly all the research funding aren't likely to go away with even the most severe govt funding cuts. They'll just downsize the research arm(s). Schools closing up will continue to be the smallest with the least resources and virtually no govt funding beyond some student grants and subsidized loans.
Gasda is a fine writer with many good phrases. And correct about a vibe shift BUT it’s still plenty popular enough to hate Trump & Republicans. And low caste whites, like from this tweet
Where I now go many days to see how the MAGA folk are crowing or complaining.
Cass is already wrong about DOGE, and the effort to reduce the power and number of bureaucrats. House prices in DC are dropping.
Muir’s public agreements & disagreements with Gurri are a very rare set of interesting takes on a complex set of non exclusive truths. It’s not clear how either would be falsified, because both are partly true.
When I was in the Peace corps in Bolivia, I saw a lot of bad policy and came back to get a PhD in economics to try to change that in developing countries. I guess I felt "virtuous" about it working at World Bank, USAID, and MCC, but mainly it just fun.
Thanks for the Cass link. It's nice to see that someone else has very similar opinions on DOGE, even if some of the evidence is a little thin.
Most of what I read on DOGE, or T more generally, seems too strongly tied to a like or dislike of the man. Cass does indeed seem an independent thinker.
Speaking of NGOs and their funding: I read the other day that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation funded Norman Borlaug’s research that turned Mexico from a net importer to a net exporter of wheat. I recalled being in a room about 1990 when the president of the Ford Foundation walked through and proudly announced that she was going to meet with the leading independent film makers. How did the left move from using its resources to fund Norman Borlaug to supporting Michael Moore? Was the third republic that rotten, even as early as 1990?
I think if we invited a modern leftist to explain it, they would say that the whole era was bad because it was racist and sexist. The new era is better irrespective of outcomes because it holds to a purer doctrine of equality. So long as we are moving towards greater doctrinal purity, no outcomes matter. Once all dissent has been eliminated and all believe in the pure doctrine like a million points of burning light, the world will be pure and good.
Norman Borlaug had two concerns, seemingly equal in his mind: hunger; and population growth.
What interests me is how both the left and right "forgot" about the latter. Certainly the Ford and Rockefeller foundations both did, after a long focus on it.
I can think of a "good" reason and a "bad" reason.
The good reason is the success of Norman Borlaug and the rest of the Green Revolution. It had become obvious that there was not going to be mass starvation, in fact not any starvation at all unless war or a terrible government got in the way. The Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich were wrong, wrong, wrong. On both the right and the left, there was wishful thinking that proper economic policy (the Washington Consensus) would lead to prosperity for all, no matter how many people there were.
The bad reason has to do with where population was increasing quickly. In most European and east Asian countries, birth rates were falling and it looked like they would stabilize around 2.1, the requirement for a stable population (I don't think anyone predicted the fall to 1.5 or so that is now typical). Most all the people who were having 4 or 5 or 6 or more kids were People of Color and it was very bad manners to say they should be doing something different. To care about population was inevitably to be considered racist.
I agree with both of your points but I don't think they are big factors in why the left has moved from Borlaug to Moore. I think it is a bit like AK's story about hobbies such as dance and model building getting more focused on the most committed hobbyists. Excepting war and atrocious governments, as we make massive improvements in discrimination, basic healthcare, food availability, and eliminating extreme poverty, the most activist of the left must find new issues so they go places that fewer and fewer want to follow.
At the risk of putting words into luciaphile's mouth ... I think she would challenge your premise that we have made massive improvements in all our big problems. I think she would say that we are increasingly messing up natural systems, degrading natural areas, making it harder and harder for people to experience nature. Mining, over-fishing, urban areas that just keep growing and growing. We put extra carbon into the air and interfere with natural processes that take carbon out of the air. The more people there are, the harder it is to deal with any of these problems.
In the 1950s and '60s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations understood this. But today, even though the world population has gone from 3 billion in 1960 to 8 billion today, they have "forgotten" it.
The activist left doesn't "need" to go new places. These are problems that are, if anything, getting worse. And, indeed, the left cares when they can be blamed on "capitalism" or "colonialism" or rich people. But to put any blame on PoCs is anathema. So any concern with population increase is out.
The environmental problems we face are no doubt getting more complicated and difficult. On this we agree. But the reason is that we have made so much progress. When is the last time a river caught fire like the Cayahoga? The last time there were mass deaths from smog such as in Pittsburg in the early 1900's (as opposed to far less severe chronic issues)? As for activism, because
the issues have gotten smaller in scale and far more complex, they become far more difficult targets for activism. On top of that, the activists are far more likely to miss the mark. Keystone XL seems an excellent example of missing the mark.
I'm not exactly sure if or where it fits in this conversation but
as wonderful as Borlaug's work was, it being funded is a bit a fluke in many respects. And I don't think something like it not getting foundation funding today has nearly as much to do with a change in political lean of foundations as it does with them being more bureaucratic. Also there are increases in federal funding for that type of work but that's a different can of worms.
I completely agree that we have made massive improvements in air and water pollution. We are rich and largely have good waste disposal systems. Alas, much of the world isn't and doesn't. Humans create lots of waste, and the more people, the more waste. And the bigger the general "ecological footprint".
If you care about "climate change" and humanity's "carbon footprint", logic demands you be concerned how many people there are. And some activists are, but seemingly only about prosperous people having children.
Thanks for the Gasda pointer.
Regarding DOGE, I think people who have never tried to cut waste in an organization, or find out what really happens, what matters, and what is done by whom, do not understand the process. If you ask people e.g. "Do you need this extra shift?" the answer is almost always "Yes, we need things to be how they are", sometimes "Well, we could do without these few people" and only rarely "Nah, they are superfluous. We've been paying them for no real reason." People who answer that last should be listened to and given follow up questions about why it persists. More often though, you just have to try without things and see what happens.
Likewise when looking at processes, people will claim a process or report or cover letter is super important, but if you just stop doing it, lo and behold, no one notices. That is why meetings always expand, bureaucracy always expands, dumb spending always expands: people get used to things, believe they matter, but rarely stop to test to see if that is true.
So sometimes you just have to go in, cut away lots of process and activities, being careful to try and avoid things that are obviously critical, see what stops working, then correct to get things working again. Nipping at the edges rarely works, especially when people have a lot of incentive to avoid being honest about what matters.
After reading Gasda I would have guessed you liked what he said even if I didn't already know from reading your comment. Other than his next to last paragraph, I mostly didn't think much of it. My thought was he mostly took something relatively small (not unimportant) and treated it as if it were way more than it is. I also doubt people have shifted right nearly as much as he suggests. A dislike of Harris and how she was nominated is not clearly a shift right at all. A shift right would have come with a House seat increase, not decrease. And his claim that Trump is popular is downright absurd. No polls I've seen give him an approval rating even close to 50%.
I would also guess you didn't like what Cass had to say while I thought he was spot on.
I agree with your take. It's true that Trump decisively beat Harris. If the presidential election were the only thing that happened in 2024, it might well be taken as a sea change away from wokeism, DEI, Affirmative Action, Identity Politics, and all the other absurdities of the last 10 or 15 years.
But this interpretation depends on two key assumptions: that the larger population has finally had enough of the nonsense, and that they hold Democrats responsible for it. Again, looking only at the presidential election, this could be a valid interpretation. In 2020, Harris went out of her way to paint herself as the wokeist far-left Democrat in the field, and she was decisively defeated in 2024. But she was even more decisively defeated in 2020, and withdrew before any primary votes were cast. She found herself the default Democratic candidate when Biden imploded in public, but was even more hapless as a candidate than she had been in 2020. Any competent Republican should have beaten her by landslide margins.
If you think Trump is the embodiment of the backlash against the woke excesses, you should come to grips with his low success rate in backing Republican candidates; he's had a lot of losses at both the primary and general level. If you think the population is turning to Republicans as the party of sanity, you should come to grips with the overall weakness of Republican results in Congress; the Republicans picked up 4 Senate seats, but 2 of those were in the cards, replacing incumbent Democrats in deep-red states. In the House, Republicans had a smaller majority than they had in 2022.
It may be that the identity-centered and censorious virtue-signaling is going away. If so, it is only because it collapses of its own weight when anyone talks honestly about it. But Republicans still don't have a coherent agenda.
Thank you. I was starting believe I was entirely alone on multiple issues among AK commenters. Clearly I'm not. You did a great job of adding to what I was thinking.
"He declares Martin Gurri’s revolt of the public over, replaced by a rotation of the elites."
Ahem, October 29, 2018:
" "The internet and social media offered a bit of a reprieve from the advancement of State power over social power. Recent moves show that the State is once again on the move with the “intellectuals” in the vanguard of speech repression."
Right. The Empire Strikes Back. Social media expression is increasingly controlled and regulated, and when the state cannot act directly, institutions with strong market positions will regulate on behalf of the prevailing elite orthodoxy anyway."
Speaking of ideas from 6 to 20 years ago, I cannot resist pointing out how the not-even-remotely-close-to-the-Overton-window set of proposals, concepts and conversations circulating amongst what were perhaps only a few thousand men in the broadly "very online dissident right" community are now being announced as actual policy or possibilities by Trump 2.0. The left is going on about "Project 2025", but half of what's in there is almost a verbatim copy of some notion I can find in my extensive archives that some rando quirky internet scribbler (actually including some quite accomplished intellectuals and scholars who had to write under pseudonyms) put out there back when - as I clearly remember - it was practically impossible to get anyone from the old Heritage crowd to even consider them.
For example, years ago there were historical and legal arguments about the lack of validity of "automatic birthright citizenship" for an infant born to an illegally present mother that are now practically copy-pasted into actual executive orders and motions headed to actual SCOTUS. Note, I am not taking -any- credit for introducing any of these ideas or influencing anybody about anything. To the extent I may have had a genuinely creative moment, I see it most as an instance of coincidental independent discovery of the solution to a math problem which by its nature only has one solution which is bound to be uncovered eventually by most of the people thinking seriously about it. It's not even clear to what extent the members or discourse of that online community had any direct influence on anyone or anything, more like putting things "in the water" far upstream of who drank them in.
Personally, I think I was only way ahead of the curve on one topic, thinking it was deeply underestimated in importance and scale, which I only knew due to my anecdotal personal experiences and exposures to it, and thus an extremely "high value target" for elimination.
But which I struggled in vain for years to get anyone to take it seriously. And that topic was ... um .... about the deep fraud at the heart of all the "grant programs", that many of these programs actually had no basis in statute, and the related extensive network of complex ways the Democratic party and broader left has discovered to convert public funds into partisan private political and pecuniary benefits for the larger progressive movement and coalition. And that any Republican administration that was actually being serious about its own survival and purported ideas should see all those grants and grant-awarding agencies for what they were, and that all those that could plausibly be eliminated should indeed be immediately burned to the ground as having been corrupted beyond any hope of salvaging. And, well ... about that ...
Actually, after thinking about it, there may have been just a few other occasions in which long ago I made a novel (or merely "ahead-of-the-curve") contribution to the discourse in that community in a way that is now - even to my own stunned surprise - manifesting in actual USG policy. Executive Order 14204 is a minor example, though, I suppose it's possible that Elon's being South African may have had something to do with that one in particular.
But one, and much more important, area in which I think I was way ahead of the curve was something which about 12 years ago I semi-jokingly called "Handle's Basilisk" (a term playing on the name of Roko's much, much more famous concept.)
Both Basilisks involve making threats today to do something harmful in the future, but which the threatener can't do today. Roko's Basilisk points out that if 'negotiating' with a bad AI today, just because it can't hurt you now doesn't mean it can't hurt "you" in the future, so it can still threaten actual-you with that right now, and intimidate or coerce you into helping it today, to include, ironically, helping it acquire that capacity to harm you. Handle's Basilisk points out that throughout most of human history, the prison-gang-politics nature of contests for social power has prevailed, and today's losers not only frequently threaten revenge when and if they are one day the winners, but when they do become the winners, they follow through!
One can get into the details of strategic game theory and Nash Equilibria for contests involving many and frequent re-iterated moves. But really, it's not complicated. It just means that if you tat me now, then just because I can't immediately tit for tat back at you today. it doesn't mean that you don't have to worry about me titting that tat somewhere down the line as soon as I am able to do so, and that, in fact, it is the -correct- move for me to make today to credibly threaten you with my intention to eventually certainly retaliate in exactly that way.
So, it just means, "Now that you've crossed the Rubicon, there is no going back, and No More Mr. Nice Guy. Current score marking for later score settling. Payback. Hard Ball. Revenge. Reprisals. Vendettas. Grudge Lists. Long memories and long knives. Stay out of the game, or else, if you live by the sword, be prepared to die by the sword."
The basic logic is that, if you are lucky enough to get a vacation from the condition of most humans in most of history and live in a nice political equilibrium, what keeps it stable and robust to entropic decay is the -fear- of deterioration into a worse equilibrium. That is, sticking to nice, civil norms and holding back from escalation not because of abstract moral commitments (which history teaches us are, let's face it, "fragile") but because of practical considerations and worries about the consequences when, inevitably, power changes hands and the shoe is on the other foot. Sometimes when your enemies win, they will offer truth and reconciliation. If you are not so lucky or deserving, then you probably won't get the truth, but you will definitely be on the receiving end of the retribution.
And what had happened was that the previous social equilibrium had completely broken down when the widespread adoption of smartphones and use of social media apps coincided with Obama second term, the left felt they could make these new aggressive moves with impunity, and after a few efforts appeared to prove that to the be the case, things predictably and rapidly started to spin way out of control.
See, a long time ago, I started actually keeping a list of prominent and egregiously unjust instances of what we might today call "cancellations", a project which - much in evidence of our cultural degradation and misfortune - soon became impossible to keep up with in the spare time of merely one individual as the numbers of such cases exploded. This coincided with a parallel explosion in what is now referred to as "lawfare" and "weaponization", which is the abuse of state institutions and authorities to go after the opposition and their ideas under the false cover stories of neutral professionals merely doing their jobs.
If there is anything at the very top of the "Capital Incompetence" charge sheet for the old National Review / GOPe crowd, it was their being completely asleep at the wheel while this cancer was growing and, not just refusing to wake up to the reality, but continuing to put their own reputations on the line and vouch "without evidence" for people who turned out to be true snakes and scumbags, much to these "conservatives" (hence, "c***servatives") eternal shame, discredit, and regret. Good riddance.
But what I pointed out was that all the people (at all social levels) who were gleefully engaging in all these cancellations, weaponizations, investigations, lawfare assaults, etc. were being -incredibly cavalier- about attaching their real-life identifies to such efforts. Of course, that makes a lot of sense when conspicuously taking a few enemy scalps was a great way to get status and prestige and climb the ranks. It makes sense when you never see anybody suffer any hard, real-world consequences for participation. It makes sense when even the other side's old guard political establishment has all but written you a get-out-of-jail-free card by making it clear that they were too oblivious and squeamish and did not have the spine or testicles to actually bring guns to your gun fight. And so yes of course when military leaders were ordered to impose and implement one party's ideological mandates and policies on the armed forces, they really believed that they would be able to claim they weren't political actors and were therefore entitled to retain their positions when the new bosses took over. When the head of the TSA put Gabbard in the Terrorist Suspect Database (as he was ordered to do) he really believed he would stay in his job after the inauguration.
When Intelligence officials and FBI agents concocted various Russia hoaxes and treated January 6 bums more severely than cartel gang hitmen, they really thought they would just keep counting down the days until they were eligible to retire with a pension.
But Handle's Basilisk says that, no, in fact, it doesn't make any political sense whatsoever for the right-wing party and its leadership to just -put up with this- and be expected to just forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones but then it all explodes in their faces again the next time the Democrats win. What actually makes sense is that, in order to try to stop the insanity now, one has to credibly threaten reprisal, that is, "Any time any one of them does any of this crap to any one of us, write that name down, and then, when it's our turn, well, payback's a bitch."
Now, it's possible to think through all this in the completely dispassionate, cold-blooded way of a neutral and disinterested strategist, that looks at it all as a kind of "more in sadness than in anger" tragic necessity, that doesn't hate the players but hates the game, and so forth. That's how I looked at it.
But you know, I'm a quirky internet rando. In actual human politics, this future-threat principle will be totally instinctive and will come completely naturally to those who are more driven by volcanic passions and sadistic vindictive emotions and who have a killer's instinct for exacting revenge, as ruthlessly and brutally as possible. After all, human emotional impulses and social-game political instincts are the product of evolution hard-wiring the correct game-theory move solutions into us, our ancestor could hardly have survived in merciless competition with each other over eons were it otherwise.
And, apparently, just such human politicians have taken power over the government of the richest and most powerful country in the world, and they have those lists they've obviously been maintaining for a while. And, with regard to the names on those lists, as HB-theory predicted those politicians would eventually do, they are ... shall we say ... "working their way down."
I spent a short stint at a company dealing with Medicare/medicaid fraud. My feeling is that it leans 99% towards overpayment and 1% towards fraud suppression. There are agents out there doing fraud work. They do occasionally arrest and prosecute people. But overall it’s hard to see the level of fraud and shit people get away with and not think that we are way to far in one direction.
The fundamental problem is that “not paying a legitimate claim” is taken way too seriously. When you’re trying to proof something is fraud basically “guilty until proven innocent”. I once watched someone shut down a fraud operation, open an identical operation down the street with the #2 at the end of the name like a movie sequel, and the entire arduous years long task of re-proving the fraud had to be done all over again.
There is also a much bigger pool of “shit that obviously does no good but we can’t prove 100% it does no good we are only 99% sure.” That isn’t technically fraud, but it’s a lot of wasted money.
You don't know if you've cut enough unless you need to put 10 percent back in. Nothing is permanent. It's possible to course correct and...oh my god, the difficulty...resubscribe to a legal opinion search engine.
“He is arguing that the same dynamic that caused the craziest social justice activists to drown out the voices of sanity on the left is now doing the equivalent on the right on Twitter. And he argues that what happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter.”
So River Page is a reasonable liberal. I believe that.
And one who has now clicked on enough right-fringe-coded stuff on X that the algorithm shows him more of it.
And I have no doubt that disgusting fringe right-wing Twitter not only exists, but that it is proportionately bigger in the last few months, especially as leftists *voluntarily* chose to go to leftist echo chamber BlueSky once Musk changed Twitter from an explicitly leftist platform that censored right- coded views, to one that is no longer explicitly leftist, it actually broadly neutral (like Substack!), and the leftist MSM started painting Musk as threat to their power #2.
I’ll also concede that Musk alone is prolific enough on the platform that he may well tilt it right.
But that’s tilt.
But sorry, the rest is projecting onto the right what the left has actually done. And the claim that it jumps beyond Twitter to the real world has no evidence, only leftist rhetoric talking points attached to it.
Is it theoretically plausible that what Page suggests *could* happen? IMO highly unlikely, but sure.
But to claim it has *already* happened, and will cause a backlash against the right - only 6 weeks into Trump’s presidency? Sorry, that is leftist talking point hopium written as push-polling, not reporting, and not fact-based argument.
I think we mostly agree here. (Surprise!)
I differ in that I don't know where X currently stands on the road to far right extremism but I have no doubt it will get there, barring some extreme events such as the previous change of ownership. It may be less intentional vs Twitter but it is bound to happen as liberals flee, likely followed by the middle to some degree.
I wasn't surprised to find when I clicked on the River Page link that it took me to The Free Press. Bari publishes some interesting articles, but I'm not going provide financial support to an outfit that is clearly trying to position itself as the premier 'gatekeeping' operation for the Trump Administration.
"I used to say that trying to interest an elite college student in what life is like working at a profit-seeking business was like trying to interest a teenager in the topic of death."
When was this? For the last 40+ years a healthy portion has gone to Wall St and some of the big consulting firms.
You are of course each correct in this case.
Yes, there is and likely always will be a sliver that chases the money. And that is ambitious, in the best sense of that term.
But AK is clearly correct that we have had at least a generation of miseducated, mostly but not entirely midwit college graduates who believe that free enterprise and profit are evil, and that only non-profits are good. And so the proportion who think that way is far larger than ever before.
We disagree that it is a sliver. I'd bet a majority work most of their careers at for profit businesses.
As for AK's statement, maybe I'm totally misinterpreting his intent. Unless one wants to argue elite college students haven't thought about working life AT ALL, which is still a stretch, clearly a sizable group is very interested in the for-profit side.
The slice I was referring to was specifically re Wall Street, not that there was just a sliver who would go work in the free market.
If you are talking absolutes, then of course Arnold is being too extreme.
But we were decidedly not talking about what they end up doing their whole careers, but about what they go into - and want to go into - first.
And if you don’t think there has been a substantial change among college students, and especially the leftist miseducated ones, away from the for-profit sector… then I can’t help you.
IDK. I have no doubt there there is more talk of the ones avoiding for-profit employment but I've seen no data supporting the conclusion that the numbers from elite schools has grown and I would bet you haven't either.
Oh yeah, like Oren Cass’s fastidious nit-picking involves any personal risk at all. Attention seeking ankle-biter. Unfortunately there is no DOGE for the sinecured kibbitzers in tax-exempt fantasy land. Cass and everyone like him are distortions produced by the tax code and the tax code needs serious reform that takes an axe to the corrupt 501(c)(3) wonderland.
Yup, the optimum amount of error is not 0, and if the cancellation of a subscription service which apparently the laws of physics prevent the SEC from resubscribing is the extent of DOGE error, then DOGE has yet to reach err enough to reach that optimum. My worry is that USAID will turn into a protracted struggle in the Congress and equally important, if not more so, ptitle riorities will be neglected.
In no particular order, the top priorities for Congress need to be:
(1) eliminating the budget deficit and bringing down the national debt;
(2) repealing section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code as well as the charitable donation deduction;
(3) repealing title 10 of the United States Code and transferring national defense operations to state militias with national policy left in a War Department with five positions (the Secretary at War, an assistant, a secretary, and two clerks) which was quite sufficient enough for the republic in its early years; and
(4) beginning to address the enormous administrative waste in US health care delivery:
“Findings The review yielded 71 estimates from 54 unique peer-reviewed publications, government-based reports, and reports from the gray literature. Computations yielded the following estimated ranges of total annual cost of waste: failure of care delivery, $102.4 billion to $165.7 billion; failure of care coordination, $27.2 billion to $78.2 billion; overtreatment or low-value care, $75.7 billion to $101.2 billion; pricing failure, $230.7 billion to $240.5 billion; fraud and abuse, $58.5 billion to $83.9 billion; and administrative complexity, $265.6 billion. The estimated annual savings from measures to eliminate waste were as follows: failure of care delivery, $44.4 billion to $97.3 billion; failure of care coordination, $29.6 billion to $38.2 billion; overtreatment or low-value care, $12.8 billion to $28.6 billion; pricing failure, $81.4 billion to $91.2 billion; and fraud and abuse, $22.8 billion to $30.8 billion. No studies were identified that focused on interventions targeting administrative complexity. The estimated total annual costs of waste were $760 billion to $935 billion and savings from interventions that address waste were $191 billion to $286 billion.”
(Shrank WH, Rogstad TL, Parekh N. Waste in the US Health Care System: Estimated Costs and Potential for Savings. JAMA. 2019;322(15):1501–1509. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.13978 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2752664 )
As an incorrigible pessimist, I realize that this is all a pipe dream. On the other hand, the Speaker of the House has done some slight squeaking lately about maybe following through on a spending cut or two so maybe the hand basket’s arrival in Hades will be delayed a few seconds.
The government wants to be bigger and bigger but it can barely monitor the authenticity of payments. This is like a kid who wants to do more than he can take but unfortunately we area talking of unaccountable adults. Cut back, decentralize as much as possible…there are no economies of scales with bureaucracy, just bigger mess.
Me to ChatGPT: Please summarize the vibe shift in this essay: https://unherd.com/2025/02/the-millennial-virtue-economy-is-dead/
ChatGPT: The essay discusses the decline of the "Millennial virtue economy," a social and economic paradigm where Millennials defined their success through moral superiority, progressive ideals, and managerial roles in sectors like tech and education. Over time, this model has lost its appeal, especially as Millennials become disillusioned with the notion that "meaningful" work in corporate or managerial roles truly contributes to societal progress. The essay highlights a shift towards a more materialistic, practical approach, with a growing skepticism towards virtue signaling and a return to simpler, more traditional values in work and life.
Me: Perhaps, the important lesson here is the role of liberty and markets in producing and discovering things that people value. When our jobs are tied to governments-subsidies, sole-source government contracts, third-party payment medical insurance, higher ed cartels, we don't know whether we are creating value or how much value we are creating. When people pay for something directly with their own money, there is a higher likelihood that the producer is producing something that the buyer values. If someone else is paying for it, how much value does it have? Hard to know.
I don't think Gasda's description fits more than a tiny minority and whatever shift away from the Millennial virtue economy has happened is a tiny fraction of that. Maybe it will grow and become more significant but I'm more inclined to believe it will wither long before having real effect on more than a few. Far more will be impacted by an unfocused and mostly arbitrary slash and burn almost entirely unaligned with where Gasda sees things moving.
I was thinking similar thoughts before I commented. Tiny is the keyword there.
In the background here is a massive ideology of social justice. I don’t see that going away anytime soon. If Trump and Musk shake things up enough, certain universities and bureaucracies will go under, but this will be a gradual process, only made somewhat sudden by DOGE.
If and when longterm government funding to education changes to private funding I will believe the virtue signaling decline to be of more permanent nature.
Maybe. Only time will tell. Personally, even if what DOGE does turns out for the good, which I doubt, I don't see it more than minimally addressing these issues.
Too hard to predict. The financial situation of the universities is obscure, and much depends on their sensitivity to government funding.
Another crisis will come.
Yes, yes, and yes.
That said, while certain bureaucracies within universities are more susceptible to going away under changing circumstances, the universities getting nearly all the research funding aren't likely to go away with even the most severe govt funding cuts. They'll just downsize the research arm(s). Schools closing up will continue to be the smallest with the least resources and virtually no govt funding beyond some student grants and subsidized loans.
Gasda is a fine writer with many good phrases. And correct about a vibe shift BUT it’s still plenty popular enough to hate Trump & Republicans. And low caste whites, like from this tweet
https://x.com/_sn_n/status/1895536219855208951
Where I now go many days to see how the MAGA folk are crowing or complaining.
Cass is already wrong about DOGE, and the effort to reduce the power and number of bureaucrats. House prices in DC are dropping.
Muir’s public agreements & disagreements with Gurri are a very rare set of interesting takes on a complex set of non exclusive truths. It’s not clear how either would be falsified, because both are partly true.
When I was in the Peace corps in Bolivia, I saw a lot of bad policy and came back to get a PhD in economics to try to change that in developing countries. I guess I felt "virtuous" about it working at World Bank, USAID, and MCC, but mainly it just fun.
Gett Cass off of trade policy and he makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for the Cass link. It's nice to see that someone else has very similar opinions on DOGE, even if some of the evidence is a little thin.
Most of what I read on DOGE, or T more generally, seems too strongly tied to a like or dislike of the man. Cass does indeed seem an independent thinker.