We are live on Zoom to discuss open societies in partnership with @TakshashilaInst (featuring @khilldavis, @RuleandRuin, and Narayan Ramachandran). You can watch right now on YouTube. We’ll also be tweeting out the highlights here!
Narayan Ramachandran: In India, the politics of frequent elections is to use division for political gain. The Indian government is similar to that of the U.S. now. One could say that where the U.S. pampers the elites, India pampers the majority.
.@RuleandRuin: In a broad sense, the US Civil Rights movement has never ended. The difference between now and then: it was possible to believe that both parties would support the movement. Today, as Republicans have mostly become a party of whites, this is not what we are seeing.
Narayan Ramachandran: These battles and debates seem to be much more challenging now because you’re combatting an attitude and state of being rather than a law (as was the case in the 1960s).
.@RuleandRuin: Every advance we have made as a society has been through debate. If today’s Civil Rights movement is to succeed we need to see a mix of radicalism and conservatism.
Narayan Ramachandran: When social media started about 10 years ago, we all celebrated the transparency of it. But now, it’s more of a double-edged sword. We need to evolve the practices of how we use it, rather than trying to stop the practice of using it altogether.
.@RuleandRuin: What were seeing now with the Trump administration’s populism, is that maybe as things get worse, extremism isn’t the way forward. This is what the moderate path has going for it.
Thanks to everyone that tuned in! For some further resources based on this morning’s discussion, refer to @lindsey_brink's essays on the failure of libertarianism in the face of the pandemic.
1: niskanencenter.org/what-the-pande…
.@heritage publishes regular iterations of its “Mandate for Leadership” with an agenda for the next Republican administration. The prior Trump admin implemented nearly 64% of its recommendations in its 1st year.
First, the Mandate would effectively close many avenues of legal immigration by:
❌Halting H2 visa programs
❌Closing the H-1B visa program to most recent grads
❌Leveraging entire visa categories as collateral in foreign policy negotiations
It would sabotage U.S. humanitarian relief by:
❌Repealing all TPS designations, stripping almost 700,000 of legal protection + work authorization.
❌Forbidding use of DHS staff time on DACA, Uniting for Ukraine, etc.
❌Prohibiting refugee vetting, ending refugee resettlement.
NEW PAPER: Manufactured housing is an affordable option in rural areas where land prices are low. They even promise to ease the housing crunch in coastal cities where land prices are high!
To clarify, we’re not talking about vacation trailers, or 1970’s-era mobile homes. Modern manufactured homes have strict standards for structural integrity and safety. They often look like homes built on-site, but they were assembled in a factory, like a car or an airplane.
Benefits of manufactured homes include: (1) They’re safer and more efficient to make, their materials don’t have to be exposed to the elements until the house is fully assembled, and (3) they can help improve quality of housing while driving costs down.
Before we enact any reform, we have to understand the political economy of our system: whom it empowers, whom it enriches, etc.
Answering these questions will rally opinion shapers around reform, protect reforms against backlash, and help avoid unintended consequences.
Here's how the conventional wisdom explains the political economy of housing: single-family homes and large lot sizes restrict the availability of housing to buyers who will pay at least as much in local taxes as they consume in public services, such as schools.
THREAD: The cost of building public transit is out of control. We can do something about that:
Stop relying on outside consultants to do the work of government agencies. slate.com/business/2023/…
In the name of cutting costs, we’ve hollowed out government agencies, asking full-time employees to handle impossible tasks.
The result? Chaos. And lots of wasted taxpayer dollars. (After all, government contractors arguably cost even more money).
.@alon_levy produced a report for us outlining some solutions:
(1) The federal government should require that state/local transportation agencies demonstrate they already have the capacity to oversee big infrastructure projects before releasing funds. niskanencenter.org/report-so-you-…