Thread by @mattyglesias

This week’s free post — policymaking for a low trust world:

Rather than getting tied down in an endless cycle of process, targeting, and compliance checks you need simple, crude ideas that clearly do what they say they do.

slowboring.com/p/making-polic…

The $2,000 checks are a great model. The policy says there will be checks, and then there are checks.

Vaccine prioritization by age is similar — it’s not optimal but it does exactly what it says on the tin and you can show people that.

slowboring.com/p/making-polic…

The Bad Place is programs like PPP that work through complicated and indirect mechanisms, or “trust before streets” concepts that try to address trust deficits with new layers of process that only degrade performance.

slowboring.com/p/making-polic…

Another relevant contrast here is between the success of Medicaid expansion — taking an existing program and just giving it to more people — and the relative failure of the ACA exchanges which were much more hyped up but have delivered smaller and less durable benefits.

Reasonable people can disagree on the wisdom of bigger vs more timid expansions of Medicare and Medicaid but that’s where all the effort should go — take the programs people have heard of and like and make them bigger.

slowboring.com/p/making-polic…