1/I haven't yet read @mattyglesias' book, "One Billion Americans". But this book review, by @jakebackpack, contains what I think are a number of conceptual mistakes, so I thought it would be useful to go through some of these.
2/Bacharach faults Yglesias for not presenting a "theory of political power or change" -- a road map for turning his vision into political reality.
But that seems like it's far too much to expect of any book about policy.
3/First of all, policy thinkers may not understand politics well. And the people who are good at turning ideas into reality may not be the best at coming up with ideas in the first place.
It's OK to have a division of labor between policy people and politics people!
4/Much of the review is a personal criticism of Yglesias. But when Bacharach does level a specific criticism of Yglesias' acumen, it turns out to be something that EZRA KLEIN, not Yglesias, got wrong!
How does that make sense? Ezra Klein is not Matt Yglesias!
5/When addressing the substance of the book, Bacharach asserts that Yglesias' idea to upgrade 2nd-tier research universities with federal funding (something I've long argued for) won't help the surrounding regions. But no actual evidence is presented!
6/Bacharach has anecdotes for regions that (supposedly) have not been revitalized by the nearby presence of universities.
And yet it's easy to find examples of regions that *have* been revitalized, even by small low-ranked universities.
10/In other words, something that Bacharach assumes is politically impossible is not only possible, but JUST HAPPENED. (It also came close to happening in California but failed.)
11/Finally, I would like to note that when writing a book review, before I assert that a phrase does not appear in the book, I make sure to do a word search.
If I have a physical copy, I avoid making strong claims about what does not appear. ;-)
12/To sum up, this review:
1. is an impressionistic personal broadside against Yglesias,
2. stumbles badly when discussing specific policy issues, and
3. demands a "theory of change" yet ignores the reality of actual change now taking place.
1/Here's something I've been wondering about recently: How did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?
With every other technological revolution, we anticipated it well in advance, and as a result we were the first -- or one of the first -- to take advantage of it.
2/The U.S. invented the computer, the internet, and modern AI. On all three of those, we were (or are) the leading nation. We talked ad infinitum about the benefits of those digital technologies long before they became a reality, allowing us to shape their eventual use.
3/We did the Human Genome Project. We invented mRNA vaccines. We did most of the research that drove down the costs of solar power. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House more than 30 years before it became economical.
Russia's empire is a nested hierarchy. At the center is Moscow. Under them are mid-tier Russian cities and rural areas, then subject peoples like the Buryats, Sakha, and these African folks.
The closer you are to the center, the less fighting you do, and the more money you get.
In fact, the circles of Russian hierarchy don't stop at Moscow. There are privileged subgroups of Muscovites, then more privileged groups inside that circle, all the way up to the Tsar himself.
The principle still holds: Closer to the center = less fighting, more money.
The advantage of this organizational structure is that the more power you have, the less likely you are to ever suffer negative consequences from adverse shocks or bad decisions. All the losses from failed wars, bad economic decisions, etc. get taken by the less powerful.
In fact, it's not law even now. This executive order is (sadly) AGAINST the law and will probably be struck down, because our asylum law says we can't discriminate against asylum claimants for crossing the border illegally. That law needs to be changed by Congress.
The problem is that the U.S. is a party to the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which says that your asylum system can't discriminate against people for being in the country illegally. We wrote our domestic law to comply with that treaty.
The non-discrimination provision is obviously stupid, so what we need to do is flout the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, and simply amend our domestic law to say "You can't claim asylum if you crossed illegally". But this would require an act of Congress.
About 8% of students have participated in the protests on one side or the other. That's a substantial number, but less than the 21% who joined BLM protests in May/June 2020 (and the latter were pretty much all on one side of the issue).
The Palestine protesters have created a dream Palestine that is almost entirely disconnected from the real place, in which all of their fantasies of a perfect society are realized.
Most weebs don't actually want to live in Japan. They want to live in a local subculture of their own creation, whose values are based on gentleness and romance -- the ideals that attracted them to Japanese fantasies and made those fantasies resonate.