The “everything sucks” doomerism of the far left and right is wrong. Worse, it needlessly radicalizes people. Today is better than yesterday and tomorrow is going to be even better. So here’s a list of 50 areas where we're seeing progress. 1/ We have a breakthrough for Cystic Fibrosis. "A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live to 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta...those who begin taking the drug in adolescence can expect to survive to age 82." 2/

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Demand subsidies are to today’s Democrats what indulgences were to Renaissance Christians: an attempt to buy their way out of the consequences of their refusal to something hard. Short thread. 1/10 In 1500AD Europe, Christians wanted to go to Heaven and didn’t want to go to Hell, but they didn’t want to stop sinning because that would be hard- they liked sinning. So they would purchases indulgences that the Church said effectively pardoned them for that sin. 2/10

I said yesterday that I could go either way on the Chevron deference. @danielahanley asked me why. He supports it and has written a strong defense of it here. So let me present both sides of the Chevron Deference. A thread. 1/13

democracyjournal.org/arguments/how-… The best defense of the Chevron deference, to my mind, is that it delegates to experts the management of political matters. We have a politically independent central bank (the Federal Reserve) and the more we can make governance look like that the better. 2/13

Distributing malaria nets has saved millions of lives.
U.S. workers' job satisfaction is the highest it's been in decades.
LGBT acceptance continues to rise.
The govt. recently approved the first small-module nuclear reactor.
This "everything sucks" mentality is flat-out wrong.





The Deep South, and Mississippi in particular, are doing a SPECTACULAR job of helping low-income children learn to read and especially compared to the way they used to perform.

Here we have a blighted Pizza Hut in South Burlington. A developer wants to turn it into 30 housing units, commercial space, and a bank. The local review board is saying no. Mind blowing. It’s a perfect encapsulation of this area’s counterproductive politics on development. 1/12 The Pizza Hut has been closed since 2011. It’s next to this torn up gas station. There’s literally nothing on this property adding value to the community at all. You’d think anything would be better than this right? Not according to the local development review board. 2/12

This continues to be my great complaint about Biden.
I voted for Biden in order to stop Warren/Sanders and to have a third Obama administration.
I didn’t vote for Biden thinking I’d get an admin implementing Warren policies under a veneer of nice old man who likes ice cream.

https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1705998398518854123

The whole point of the establishment closing ranks around Biden pre-Super Tuesday 2020 was to block the populist left from gaining power. How is it that we did that and still got the most populist President in generations? It’s maddening.

Laura's got a question here on common law/civil law and housing crises. I don’t know about resources but here’s how I would explain the connection between common law in the Anglosphere and the more acute housing crises there. 1/
@AlecStapp @ArmandDoma @maxdubler

https://twitter.com/Laura_k_Duffy/status/1681657666081267712

In civil law, (what the blue countries in this map have) everything and I mean everything gets spelled out. I’m talking ‘how long can a cucumber be?’ kind of stuff. This seems weird and bossy at first if you're from a common law country. 2/

Here’s my brief attempt to explain this. During the Great Recession, it became politically expedient to say the economy was rigged. That took such hold that now, if you say anything positive about the economy, that gets read as invalidating people’s frustrations. 1/7

https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1673315942523101186

The populist right, as is its wont, thinks the country is inexorably in decline. The populist left, as is its wont, thinks the economy is an exploitation machine. Neither want to hear anyone say that, all things considered, the economy is performing fairly well right now. 2/7

Here’s how “nine birds, one stone liberalism” causes so much failure in transit procurement. A parable.

Scene I:
Govt. official: We need some new buses. That will help people get where they’re going, be especially good for the poor, and reduce pollution and traffic. 1/7

https://twitter.com/GaryWinslett/status/1661021889291247629

Scene II:
Environmental activist: shouldn’t the buses be electric?
Official: well, those are going to cost more and need to stop running for part of the day to charge.
Activist: We insist it be electric. Fossil fuel buses don't feel green enough to us.
Official: fine.
2/7

Between this and La Sombrita and SF's $1 million and all of the other examples in this vein, it's clear the public sector in America is slow, wasteful, and inefficient. What to do about it?
As Hirschman says, there are 3 responses to decline: exit, voice, and loyalty. 1/

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1660999567192489986

The loyalty option is to accept the status quo. Crazy as these examples are, a lot of the Dem Party doesn't seem to want to relax their ideological commitments to the public sector, activists, and process obsession, and so they blame neoliberalism, Republicans, or capitalism. 3/

It’s because many of them believe in political supremacy over markets. They’re committed to the idea that all market activity is and ought to be guided by political authority. They think of this as economic democracy. Deregulation, in any form, runs against that. 1/5

https://twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/1658436405037608962

In some areas, their case is sound to the point of being obvious. We, as a political community, agree that child labor below 15 should be banned so we have laws prohibiting that kind of market exchange. The problem is that some leftists want to apply that logic to everything. 2/5

This bill is a small step in the right direction but it’s most important aspect (Act 250 reform) was gutted and it continues to treat maintaining bucolic view scapes as the #1 priority and housing supply as secondary. We won’t fully fix our housing crisis until we reverse that.

https://twitter.com/vtdigger/status/1642214742876909574

If you’re a middle class family that wants to own a single family home in a suburban neighborhood, Vermont’s housing policy continues to treat you with scorn and hostility and sees your suburban American Dream as an unsightly contamination. This bill doesn’t fix that. 2/

I came across this Sandel quote in a recent @maiamindel piece and I think it help clarifies one of the things that market-skeptics get wrong about neoliberal capitalism. They think we live in an unfettered market-dominated society. We don’t. 1/6 Sandel is implying that virtually all interactions these days are market-oriented and that market-skeptics are fighting a rearguard action to preserve some ethically superior last bastion of non-market activity. Where is that the case? 2/6

Hey Housing Twitter,
There’s a *great* new paper out on tax policy and housing by @casey_dawkins!
Everyone interested in this policy space needs to understand 3 key points it makes. 1/4
@ebwhamilton @mattyglesias @mnolangray

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… First, the way we structure tax deductions for homeownership helps the people who have already reaped tons of benefits from the increased geographic clustering that characterizes today’s economy while hurting the rural areas that have not gotten those benefits. 2/4

Housing and Georgist Twitter, with a big assist from @mattyglesias, I think I have a good estimate of land value in the U.S.
Drumroll……..the total value of the privately held commercial and residential land is roughly...$35.97 trillion.
Here’s how I got that number. 1/ I looked around for a good estimate of all land value in the United States and couldn’t find one. All the estimates I found seemed unreliable, very dated, or were about all real estate, not just land. Even ChatGPT didn’t give me what I was looking for. 2/

The @FTC is suing to stop @Microsoft from acquiring Activision and @Meta from acquiring Within. This is based on this notion that acquisitions in the tech sector are anti-competitive. But they mostly aren’t. Let’s review the evidence. Thread. 1/

https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1600931104504315904

Here’s a paper showing that merger-friendly regulations are strongly correlated with venture capital activity, which suggests that the possibility of exiting through an acquisition acts as a powerful promoter of venture capital investment in start-ups. 2/
nber.org/papers/w24082

Earlier this week, U.S. and EU trade representatives met as part of the Trade and Technology Council. They do not seem to be putting much energy or ambition into liberalizing trade in digitally-facilitated services, which is a real shame. 1/2

lppapers.substack.com/p/lp-32-promot… "These 2 trends (work from home and the increasing trade in digital services), esp. when combined, are going to expand economic freedom, drive prosperity, and further knit the world together in new ways, and we’re just getting started. It is a very exciting time!" 2/2

Capital is mobile.
Be mad about that if you like but, if you want to economically prosper, you need to adopt capital-attractive rather than capital-repellent attitudes and policies. 1/ This is why the labor unions in coordinated market economies (CMEs) in continental Europe are so much more effective than their counterparts in liberal market economies (LMEs) in Anglo-Saxon countries. The former are capital-collaborative. The latter are capital-combative. 2/

One of the anti-tech bills that Congress is considering, is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). This is a poorly thought-out bill that would do a lot more harm than good. Thread 1/ The AICOA prohibits ‘covered platforms’ from preferencing their own products over those of 3rd parties or to use data gathered from 3rd parties on the platform to offer products that compete with those 3rd parties. 2/

I am once again begging people to understand that there is a *huge* difference between Social Security (where it’s basically money-in money-out) and Medicare/Medicaid (where you could cut a lot of spending without meaningfully harming patient care). 1/2

https://twitter.com/lauralitvan/status/1597722555863138304

Given our aging population, to fund this level of spending on the >65, you have to:
-significantly increase immigration of young people
-raise taxes
-spend less on everything for people <65, and/or
-burden the next generation with huge debt.

There’s no magic solution here! 2/2

So, if Twitter is going down and you want to keep up with my brand of pro-market progressive libertarianism, here's my substack: lppapers.substack.com

We're 42 essays in, with 43 to go. Perfect time to start following. I wrote the first essay. @senatorshoshana wrote #2 on occupational licensing. @Transliberalism wrote #3 on librertarianism for transgender issues. (These are still two of my favorites- *everyone* should be able to have good work and dignity) And these 2 are wonderful people!!