1. It was recently announced that US debt would exceed 100% of GDP and that the 25 ppt surge in debt was the largest annual leap since the 1790s. This news provoked statements of serious concern by neither party and consternation among nobody, because...
2. ...none of the dire predictions debt hawks made about what would happen when we crossed this line have come true -- no interest rate spike, no inflationary spiral, no loss of confidence in the dollar. And austerity seems 100% wrong in a pandemic. But..
3. ...conservatism used to entail worrying about worst-case scenarios, which would have been helpful pre-pandemic. And we still face the political problem of raising funds for needed public investments in the face of rising debts
4. My @NiskanenCenter colleagues point out that Baumol's cost disease means spiraling prices of the most labor-intensive & highly regulated services -- incl child care, health care & education -- can pressure politicians into more anti-market actions
5. So @hamandcheese has announced a new Niskanen fiscal policy initiative to explore structural market reforms aimed at eliminating regulatory capture and exposing cost-diseased sectors to robust innovation and competition. Stay tuned...
It was evident two decades ago that academic historians were hollowing out their profession by elevating ideology & fads over the needs of students, public & long-term interests of univ & discipline. These figures are sad but reflect a generation of professional irresponsibility
Academics have long ceased to examine higher education as a field of sociological or political study — no surprise that the responses to the cutbacks in history positions are so intellectually unimpressive
But university leaders of a generation ago understood clearly that no liberal arts discipline, let alone the university itself, can be captured by one ideology or political party
It was a great experience and an honor to talk to Philip Zelikow on my most recent podcast -- he is both a scholar and practitioner of political problem-solving as well as a modern counterpart to the Wise Men of yesteryear
It was also quite humbling to realize that in this pandemic year he found time, along with all of his other responsibilities, to publish a book that overturned literally a century of historical consensus on the missed chance for peace in the Great War:
Professor Zelikow is also the director of the Covid Commission Planning Group, which is laying the groundwork for a national effort to understand lessons of the pandemic -- an independent but complementary effort to Niskanen's new State Capacity Project
2. I've already Tweeted about Packer's taxonomic breakdown of the four Americas: Free (libertarianism), Smart (meritocracy), Real (populism), and Just (social justice/critical theory), as summarized in his Atlantic piece
3. But I was esp. interested in the critique raised by @esaagar and @makosloff in their @RealignmentPod with Packer (41:32), viz: Just America *is* Smart America. CRT etc is most popular among Ivy grads and rich (& even Free America -- viz Bezos & Dimon)
1. A very nice salute from @TheEconomist's Lexington columnist to the Never Trumpers, the "most remarkable of all" the forces in the broad Biden coalition.
2. Lexington notes that "Not since Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964 have so many leading lights in one party backed the nominee of the other" -- for reasons that, btw, I explain in my latest @madebyhistory column in the @washingtonpost!
3. Lexington notes that by setting themselves against the sitting president of their own party, the NTs "have made themselves heretics on the right while taking on the mantle of truth-tellers, authenticated by a willingness to commit career suicide, to almost everyone else."
1. In case you missed it, @NiskanenCenter has put up a recording of today's webinar with myself and @jerry_jtaylor, @lindsey_brink, and @hamandcheese discussing Brink and Sam's new agenda paper, "Faster Growth, Fairer Growth." This is important because...
2. Policy ideas are in rather short supply on the right these days -- the GOP couldn't come up with a platform this year and its real animating ideas are, per @davidfrum, too loathsome to be expressed openly without sparking backlash
3. To be sure, "Faster Growth, Fairer Growth" is not a Republican or conservative platform; it's an eclectic synthesis of some of the best ideas of R and L that either party could take up to deal w/ the problems confronting our economy, society, & planet
1. My NYT piece on QAnon compared the current conspiracy to the John Birch Society in the '60s but argued the GOP & conservative movement condemned the latter while Trump embraced the former. This is part of a wider historical and political debate...
2. ...as seen in @jonathanchait's piece that came out the same day, on the "burn it all down" debate about whether a post-Trump GOP is worth saving. Jon sees conservatism as the real problem -- it hasn't been corrupted by Trump b/c it was always corrupt
3. Specifically, the idea that William F. Buckley Jr expelled the JBS from conservatism is the movement's foundational myth: "This small and seemingly esoteric point of historical interpretation is the root of the intellectual right’s systemic inability to face up to its problem"