Grift: the project of gaining power/wealth from the existence of a problem without any interest in even remotely attempting to solve the problem.
If saying “the government is the problem” is an effective strategy for a person to gain political power, then that person is heavily incentivized to do everything in their power to make government ineffective.
See:
Complaining extensively about both high taxes and high gas prices yet uniformly voting against removing the gasoline tax.
Supporting the troops, yet voting against medical care for veterans.
See also: Calling for donations after the reversal of Roe v Wade.
Disavowing the role of the party in power to control gas prices when they’re rising and then tweeting about how much they’re doing to save Americans money when gas prices are falling.
As no fan of either major party, it’s amusing to me (and slightly sad) to watch true adherents point fingers at the other side.
> Disavowing the role of the party in power to control gas prices when they’re rising and then tweeting about how much they’re doing to save Americans money when gas prices are falling
If I measured all of what is said, spent, and done in national politics, I would probably conclude that national politics is more about messaging and money than policy.
After trying to read the podcast transcript (which was difficult to read, since it appears to be a direct automated transcript), then reading this Q&A, I have to thoroughly discount the 'Harvard Business School Professor of Management Practice' analysis of 'the problem'. Here's an excerpt:
>Could you pinpoint any reason as to why we’ve perhaps strayed from possibility government?
>Weiss: In part, it’s just by virtue of our age. Ageing organisations and ageing bureaucracies have a harder time being innovative. A second reason is [...] it’s a problem of overlearning.
Alright, so take a material problem like "filing taxes is needlessly complicated" and ask why? The issue certainly isn't 'aging', but a lobbying arm and capitalist interests that has forced people to pay the likes of Intuit $70+ per year just to do the thing. I struggle to understand how 'aging' and 'overlearning' is the culprit here.
The difference between academia and practice is that academia is only satisfied with a perfectly coherent theory and practice is perfectly satisfied with an incoherent but working solution.
Sometimes, it's more productive to use words, ideas, and objects that already exist to solve problems. Even if they're not ideally suited.
To answer the "filing taxes is needlessly complicated" actual problem, the "overlearning" (by which they seem to mean "over-optimizing for risk reduction") explanation would be that the individuals in government responsible for writing the tax code have all optimized for actions which will further/protect their careers.
And those actions inevitably lead to a more complicated tax code, because {adding tax code} generally makes important entities happy (exclusions! or more heavily targeting not-you!) and {removing tax code} only makes the people happy (in an abstract way, albeit often angry in a specific way).
An example of government policies that could help fight this are the "1-in-2-out" style regulatory reduction mandates. Where in order to implement a new regulation, previously standing ones have to be culled, which effectively incentivizes pruning useless or less important regulation.
The point raised by the parent wasn't "why is the tax code complicated", but "why is filing taxes so complicated". These are not the same question, and the answers, while related, are not the same either.
The bureaucracy is its own organism. The lobbying arm and capitalist interests are a bit like social gardeners, taking the growing bureaucracy and making sure it grows in ways that favour the entrenched interests (with the alternative, cynically, being destroying the market for everyone).
If the lobbying ceased, the bureaucracy wouldn't really change. It would ossify in its current form and keep working towards its current goals.
It's almost as if there were a decades-long campaign to make government ineffective so people would support dismantling and selling it off to private interests.
He talks about "new ideas" and "entrepreneurship" being the solution to societal problems. To me that shows such a lack of understanding of why we can't solve the problems we have.
The reason the problems don't get solved is not a lack of ideas. We know how to solve homelessness, global warming, and traffic deaths.
We know exactly what to do. Stop emitting CO2. Build houses, give people jobs, make sure wages keep up with housing. Slow down cars in city centers, build separate pedestrian infrastructure, encourage public transport.
The reason we don't do these things is political. More ideas won't solve anything.
If you can get people to agree on a what is a problem, it can get solved quite simply in many cases. For instance, illegal immigration could be solved trivially, but the bulk of the ruling class is in favor of it for various reasons, so it stays.
This boring person is so short on details that I suspect he is pretty comfortable with the way things are. He mentions Covid. Okay--the solution to Covid was to wait until it evolved into a cold-like disease as Coronaviruses seem to do. The short term solution was to isolate at-risk populations. Instead, we be-masked five year olds. We're still be-masking five year olds. I would consider that a public problem, and I suspect professor Weiss would disagree.
The CDC is right on top of a new public problem, however, and advises people to have clothes cover any rashes during sex and to clean their latex gear in between partners.
> The short term solution was to isolate at-risk populations.
We didn't know who they were. Even as it became clear, as with most things in life, it was gray, not black and white, and there was a gradient of risk, as well as pools of individuals who for reasons unknown were above-expected risk. Look at the death counts by age cohort. Sure, the elderly are up there, but it's not as if Covid killed just 1M old people in the US.
Your position is essentially a cost-benefit analysis, just like all the others, with the difference that you think that the cost of attempted to limit disease spread throughout the entire population was higher than any benefits accrued. It's likely not just Weiss who might disagree with you, but most of the relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbors of the million dead people. That doesn't mean you're definitively wrong (far from it), but the point is that nobody is "wrong" or "right" in this: everyone's doing cost/benefit analysis and coming to different conclusions.
the main reason illegal immigration exists is because it's better for our country than not having it. increasing legal immigration is politically unpopular currently, but immigrants are (on net) a massive benefit to society. add a result, Democratic policy is try to expand legal immigration and don't try too hard to stop illegal immigration, while Republican policy is spend a few billion dollars on an art project (a giant wall) that won't stop pretty much any illegal immigration because almost all illegal immigrants enter the country legally.
I think they need to define what they mean by a 'public entrepreneur'.
A private entrepreneur in a capitalist system is a fairly clear concept: someone who starts a business using funds that they are responsible for in some way, i.e. they bear the risk of failure. A successful entrepreneur is one whose business generates some degree of profit, i.e. it has a positive balance sheet. Note that a manager of someone else's money is not, by this definition, an entrepreneur, as they are not really bearing most of the risk of failure. In addition, most entrepreneurs turn to external sources of capital (VC funds, banks, etc.) to grow their businesses once they've demonstrated some degree of independent success.
So, what's a public entrepreneur? Someone who starts a program / business using public funds, but then puts the profits in their own pocket? Are we talking about private contractors who seek government contracts (I assume not)? Is a Congressperson who uses insider information about pending bills to make lucrative investments a 'public entrepreneur'? How about a government-funded academic trying to lever their state-financed IP into a lucrative side business?
Rather than public entrepreneurs, we'd be better off with reliable civil servants who are not corrupt, i.e. not taking kickbacks from private contractors, not altering regulations solely for the benefit of private parties who will later give them 'jobs', not using their academic positions as launching pads for government-funded 'public-private startups', etc.
In socialism, if you have power, you can print money
In capitalism, if you have money, you can get power and then you can print money
Given enough time, both systems evolve into something that cannot be easily distinguished. There are always going to be groups of people destined to be exploited through the similar mechanisms.
People who are attracted to capitalism believe that it is a system of equal chances, that they can participate in the economy and achieve success with their own hard work.
People who are attracted to socialism believe that the system is preventing them from having a chance due to their background that is outside of their control and they believe the state should intervene and help them participate and achieve success.
These two ways of thinking are ripe to be exploited by politicians, divide et impera. Politicians from both sides rather than trying to meet somewhere in the middle, they rather enforce the differences. Like "capitalist" will say "lazy" people shouldn't eat, and "socialist" will say the "Bourgeoisie" is not paying their fair share.
It is also interesting that the politicians who are for capitalism tend to be against social freedoms like gay marriage, abortions and politicians who are for socialism, tend to favour strict regulation of economy, but afford wide social freedoms.
As if they have created this these sort of red lines to further the divide of the society.
For instance, if you want to run your own business your option is to vote for a party that won't get in your way, but you'll have to consider you'll have to mess up with your friends who are same sex and want to get married.
There seems to be no party that would be good for small and medium business and at the same time acknowledge the needs of modern society.
Or am I missing something?
I understand that my comparison is a bit crude, but it's something that fascinates me. This is happening in many countries, this style of politics.
The one thing you left out is the variety of ways a powerful person can make money under a left-leaning system: lobbying, "public relations" (representing other countries here in the US, for instance), writing books, going on TV, or getting well-paid gigs with foundations or other charitable organizations.
In the last 10 years I’ve seen massive buildings constructed in the town I went to school in (Champaign). Literally sky scrapers all over.
So yes, we can solve a public problem (housing).
The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. On the ground most people agree on the issues, but half the population take the narrative at face value and push the same political ideology (which often doesn’t address the root issues).
To be frank, we have a cultural issue. Most of our institutions rely on a solid cultural basis. With the degrading of our culture (classically liberal, ie conservative values, but libertarian in policy) we no longer have a conservative value system being presented. So we have the libertarian “you do you” mentality, without the public shame that comes with certain actions (such as public displays of nudity, open drug use, etc).
To me, this comes across as many places in the United States have become unsafe for children - SF being one. I can’t let me kids walk down the street with needles, human waste and screaming homeless.
We don’t help those people because we don’t have the cultural foundation to.
In short, we can solve more problems than before, but the culture itself has the problem.
> The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues.
Ah yes, the beautiful naive dream of "non-political" ways of tackling things. There are very, very few things in this world that are not bound up in one's political views and values.
Take your mention of the issue of homelessness and drugs. So there's the surface presentation version of this problem - visibly homeless people, visible drug use, visible drug paraphernalia lying around etc. We can all (more or less) agree that on this. But what are the causes of these issues? What are the best solutions? The answers to these questions are all bound up in political values.
So, I happen to believe that the USA has been on a journey for 50 years to transform the narrative about poverty and despair as societal failings into one in which they are personal failures arising from personal choices. If you see the world as I do, then you will see a different set of causes than someone who firmly believes that poverty and despair really do arise from personal failure and weak moral character. And that in turn will imply a different set of solutions.
You cannot separate out "issues" from "politics". Even the simple matter of the things you consider to be "issues" is all bound up in your "politics".
> The answers to these questions are all bound up in political values.
But they aren’t though, there is an objective truth. To cut through to said truth those with differing opinions have to be willing to accept they are wrong. Due to the media narrative and political leanings people are unwilling or unable to accept they’re wrong.
Take gun violence. It’s exclusively a cultural issue in one community in the United States.
To be clear, it’s an issue in the black male population. It’s not gangs generally (Hispanic community has a higher gang rate and lower firearm homicide rate). the white population has less gun violence than almost anywhere in the world; same with Hispanic and Asian.
But saying that breaks a narrative and no one will accept that as the truth. Once you can accept the truth, you can resolve the issues one-way-or-another.
Try saying what I just wrote in a classroom, town hall meeting, or floor of congress. Watch what the media does to you, watch what your community does to you. It’s the truth. But the media has made it such that we can’t discuss it.
If the media presented the truth or even a balanced view, we wouldn’t have so much of the issues because it would be okay to have the view of truth.
> But they aren’t though, there is an objective truth.
This is just nonsense. What is the objective truth about homelessness? About drug use? Is it the fault of individuals who make bad choices? Is it the fault of a society that doesn't truly care for many its members? Even if the answer is (obviously) a mixture of the two, the balance between them will affect what sort of solutions you would view as effective. There is no objective truth here.
> Take gun violence. It’s exclusively a cultural issue in one community in the United States.
This is so preposterous. Mass shootings (one aspect of the gun violence problem in the USA) are not particularly disposed to occur to one racial group or another, although the shooters are overwhelmingly white. Child-driven accidental shootings are relatively rare in the black community, and occur overwhelmingly in white rural populations. I could go on and on with refutations of this bullshit.
However, let's just reword it so that you can see the deeper point here:
"to be clear, gun violence occuring in cities among people who are either known to each other or are neighbors is overwhelmingly a problem involving poor black males"
So this much we could probably agree on. But it doesn't mean anything. It defines "an issue" that you consider to be important, and you're utterly entitled to do that. Other people who see gun violence through a different lens would regard it as a small part of a much larger issue (e.g. gun availability), or as a side-effect of a totally different issue (e.g. racism, poverty, structural inequality, (dis)investment etc).
So even if we could agree on a relatively simple statement of "facts", we would never agree on the framing of that as an "issue", nor on the solution.
> The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues.
Interesting. I actually have a completely opposite theory of media. In my experience and research, the way that news media effect change actually _is_ to make narratives and more importantly, bang on and on about them for quite possibly years.
Obviously, me being in the UK, it might be different. But I can find countless examples of the media just presenting issues neutrally and absolutely nothing happening. Because people presented with just an issue simply go "damn, that's crazy, someone should do something about that", and then forget it unless it's about dogs.
But the success cases of the media truly affecting change (I'd list some example but they're all UK cases. A big one is one of our papers spent years pushing for an investigation into a famous case of a mass death at a football match where the police blamed the victims for looting corpses and attacking people to deflect from them not acting in time.) But they all seem to include specifically _finding_ narratives to frame stories with and basically telling them again and again with constant calls to action and searching out every new detail about the story that can have anything done about it.
This is why the NRA are so incredibly effective at making change, they bang on and on about one thing and tell their members whenever anything they can show up to is happening and exactly what to say and do to disrupt or prevent it.
The media (assuming were talking news media) needs to be held to a higher standard imo. The search for truth is a difficult, nuanced, and incredibly important to our society. Using it as a tool to push any narrative erodes trust in it and leads to more relativist crap.
I opined on this is another thread and essentially despaired of ever being able to hold the media to a higher standard, because of the regulating-the-experts problem.
In my thinking, we'll cause more harm than good by trying to adjust the output, so why try?
Instead, we should focus on the economic input and make it more profitable to produce quality news. And notably, that is very much not the economic incentives in place for news now.
Churches satisfied our need for tribe that seems to be a need of a large majority of humans. Churches weren't just about teaching values to aspire to, but also providing a ready made community that was stable and provided tribal activities in person. If you intend to turn anywhere, you need to understand what was without the cynicism of non-majority experiences of system breakdowns.
Online communities don't do that job well. Worse, online communities are not stable and people are inclined to be more hateful.
Humans need both sides of our nature satisfied. We are tribal but we must also have outlets for individual time, activities, and a achievement. We need to own things on our own too.
> providing a ready made community that was stable and provided tribal activities in person
Exactly! I'd also phrase it as "a consistent, nationally-shared narrative" (consistent, at least in a normal distribution sense).
We have effectively excluded god as a unifying cultural force in the West, on both liberal and conservative sides (pop-political "god" is no substitute for an apolitical, moral god).
And when our societies have subsequently fractured and cast around for any replacement unifying force, we've been puzzled about what's happening...
It may indeed be that religion (or national religion, in the cases of DPRK, China, and Russia) is the worst unifying force, except for all the others.
You paint a picture in which religion swept everyone up in its "unification", but this has hardly ever been true. Even in the societies that show the most "unification" around a given religion, there have always been alternatives, and there have always been non-believers. Every human religion has fractured into subsets and schisms (even Buddhism! even Catholicism!). The idea that it's a unifier comes mostly from those who benefit from widespread acceptance of that idea.
Religion as a force for cultural homogenization doesn't require a single religion.
A Catholic society with a pluralism of sects and opinions is still more homogeneous than a non-Catholic, more individually-independent alternative.
Even a Catholic / Anglican split society is more homogeneous in the sense of grand bargains being feasible, in the sense that there are fewer, discrete, and more hierarchical power centers who can bargain with each other.
One of the great failures of cultural liberalism in the 1960s to effect more change was an inability to organize into coherent, unified, large groups of voters that could function and bargain within a democracy.
If every asshole gets an opinion, it's hard to arrive at a "nobody is happy, but everyone is optimally least-sad" bargain.
Which one(s)? That's always the issue. Even people who nominally follow the same set can't agree on how to apply it down here on Earth. There's a reason the First Amendment says government and religion shouldn't meddle in each other's affairs.
But at the time the First Amendment was written, the "country" (read: voters) was much more culturally homogeneous and less diverse (effectively: western European, male, land-owning).
Which is to say, as a consequence of increased liberty and acceptance over the past 250ish years, we now have challenges that the framers didn't have to deal with.
> much more culturally homogeneous and less diverse (effectively: western European, male, land-owning).
While I'd agree that this is how we would view the composition of the early colonies today, I somehow doubt that they would have agreed. The very existence of the United States has changed the baseline for what cultural diversity looks like, so that you can now say things like "Western European" without blinking.
I think it probably does. If the founders saw themselves as already facing issues with a diverse population ("those scots-irish, jeesh"), then presumably they took that into account with the design of the government. If they didn't, then it would be correct to say that the Constitution (etc.) does not pay any attention to the implications of a more diverse population.
Ah. I'd say that by any definition of "diverse", we're more diverse now.
So whether they saw themselves as diverse or not, they weren't trying to solve the problem to the degree to which it now needs to be solved.
Or, in other words, they designed a flexible democracy for the world they perceived and the world they could imagine, but at some point imagination fails.
The one true god who created America as a shining city on a hill, through his apostles, the founding fathers. I think you'll find the 1st Amendment says no such thing; that was an interpretation recently corrected by the Supreme Court.
This is a great example of the issue. I don't have any issue with you being a bit of a nutter. I don't even mind you having representation in government!
I just
Don't want people like you you running the whole thing. I'd end up in a gas chamber quick, and I suspect most Christians would fail your test. I appreciate our tripartite system with all its goopy progress-slowing nonsense because while it slows down stuff I want, it gives people time to organize against stuff they don't. Like theocracy.
edit: since HN won't let me reply...
You misunderstand. It's about holding on to progress. It took decades for conservatives to dismantle the wins of the Civil Rights movement. Decades to start putting cracks in the progress for queer rights. And so on. Those wins were hard, and it took more work to undo them. And the undoing is so slow that there's still time to recover.
Have you considered that what you consider progress may be someone else's regress? And perhaps now we're back on the path of progress after decades of diversion?
Yes, in US both parties are conservative, it’s just that one is bit more extreme. Still: not having a proper drug prevention policy, or housing, are both staples of ring-wing philosophy.
If saying “the government is the problem” is an effective strategy for a person to gain political power, then that person is heavily incentivized to do everything in their power to make government ineffective.
See:
Complaining extensively about both high taxes and high gas prices yet uniformly voting against removing the gasoline tax.
Supporting the troops, yet voting against medical care for veterans.