To be fair, Yglesias and I are roughly the same age (he is probably a year or two my junior) and we come from very similar backgrounds in terms of almost everything.
I grew up in a very upper-middle class to wealthy suburb of New York. He attended one of the tonier private schools in NYC (Dalton) but my suburban public high school was just as good at sending her students to elite universities. At least a quarter of my class (probably more) went on to an Ivy League or equally elite university including myself.
My problem with Yglesias is that he really represents my problem's with punditry at large and as I said previously on the League, he is to economics as David Brooks is to sociology. He doesn't really write in any depth, most of his pieces on Think Progress or Slate seem to be about two or three paragraphs long and basically regurgitate an academic paper or are super-anecdotal. He does not respond to criticism or recognize that there are other concerns beyond economics and the mantra of "growth, growth, growth"
Krugman at least has a real background in economics and while I might not agree with him all the time, I can recognize his expertise (though I think Krugman is more liberal than Yglesias and realizes that ne0-liberalism compromised too much of the welfare state).
I am a liberal who is not so-enamoured with the wonks are cute nerds aspect of current policy. We need experts and to come up with good policy but policy should not be completely technocratic. People are not just points of data, we have emotional and social needs that are not always rational but are absolutely necessary for us to lead complete and happy lives. Many wonks choose to ignore these needs because they are impossible to quantify or talk about in a white paper.
For the record, I turned 32 a few weeks ago. I think there are a lot of Ordinary Gentlemen around my age.
Completely unrelated to the topic, there is a roughly equal amount of distance older brother (born in 1972), me (born in 1980), and Elias born in 1988. However, I feel like I have much more in common with people born in 1972 (or as I call them prime Gen Xers) than people born in 88-89. I seem to have many more cultural references in common plus the ability to remember life before the internet.
1980 is technically the tale end of Gen X but I feel more like it is the purgatory between Gen X and Gen Y. This purgatory group is largely people who were born between 1978-1980 or 81.
As I said above, the problem with American neo-liberals is that they were willing to sell away all the welfare state stuff to make sure that the hedge funders gave to the Democratic Party instead of the Republicans.
See above for my thoughts on neo-liberals and education. Many of them seem to be just as enamoured with charter schools and constant standardized testing as Republicans and likely to ask questions like "Who needs a music program?"
I consider myself to be a liberal but not on the far-left. However, I do not under any circumstances consider myself to be a neo-liberal.
Neo-Liberals are people on the left who are more or less closet libertarians or moderate conservatives on economic issues. Some of them might say that they believe in the welfare state but they often sell the welfare state down the river in order to please their Gods at the Hedge Fund set.
Neo-liberals have adopted some very right-wing attitudes like a severe disregard and contempt for unions and a bizarre love for deregulation as the basic solution to all problems.
Matt Y of Think Progress and Slate.com is a super neo-liberal. His solutions always seem to be towards deregulation. There is a housing shortage? Deregulate and allow people to build below code or end the height restrictions. He does not seem to care about the character of a community or such questions as would San Francisco be San Francisco if all the Edwardians were replaced by concrete high rises. Hotel rooms are expensive? Deregulate and support Airbnb. Matt Y does not ask whether this would mean landlords would turn their apartments into mini-hotels and further increase the housing shortage.
Matt Y sees deregulation as a natural good without examining the consequences. He is more concerned about his future place as a TED Talk guy than about people. Though he does seem to have swallowed his own kool-aid.
Likewise on Education issues, neo-liberals are prone to see solutions in a school system that is all about charter schools and standardized test after standardized test. They were against the teachers in the strike and get suckered into right-wing docs and movies like Waiting for Superman and Won't Back Down because hedge-fund billionaires must know more about education than someone who studied it and spent years in the classroom. And hey, unions are just for stupid people anyway.
Call me an snob and but I would probably never trust a drug that someone made in their basement while following a patent application.
Unless said friend also had a PhD in biochem, nanotech, phramacology, etc. And even then I would be cautious. At least if a pharma-drug is defective, you can sue the company that made it. You can't recover as much from Bob's basement drugs.
For better or for worse, I am a large fan of most of those NPR cultural references and touchstones. Much of the culture I consume is baseline NPR to the more avant-garde. If anything, Matt Y is possibly more culturally populist than me.
The second point is well taken though especially the white paper part.
My brother takes a lot of dancing classes. There is no regulating body for this but there is a private association whose name I can't recall. From what my brother tells me, dance studios that do not have the private associations badge of approval fold quickly because potential and actual students look for association approval as somewhat of a short-hand for at quality.
I imagine the same would be true in many other industries. So in the end it becomes the same thing.
Perhaps barber was too low an example. How about esthecians who do things like waxing and chemical peels? This stuff can cause physical injury if done incorrectly. I would say that regulating physical safety is a traditional police power.
In the end consumer protection probably ranks a bit higher for me than opportunity if needing to make a judgment call though.
The problem is that there seems to be an unending fascination with being "wonky" and too clever by half instead of understanding the real wants and needs of people. Everyone is looking at graphs and charts because people are just too darn contradictory and messy
Ygesias seems to see deregulation as an axiomatic good. Like many neo-liberals, he would like to see it combined with a welfare state but this is not happening. I am also not sure whether deregulation is a natural good. Plus a private entity will just come in to fill the role previously done by government. I am not sure why private Barber licensing is better than government licensing.
I think that too many wealthy people on the left and the right live disconnected and in bubbles. The liberal variant are the Rhees and Yglesias' of the world. They grew up in a largely parallel universe of private school or super-good wealthy suburban public schools. They attend TED talks which amount to nothing more than a puppy pat on the head while avoiding really hard questions on income inequality.
What is wrong with it being too easy to divorce? Do conservatives think that some kind moral hazard is going to happen?
On the other hand, I think that there is much to lose by making it too hard to divorce. New York finally adopted No Fault Divorce in 2010 or 2011. Before then, couples would need to find fault and this was a long and difficult process even when there was fault. It tied up courts and families for years.
No Fault Divorce allows for speedy-resolutions (hopefully) especially now because there is a modern trend for many couples to use a mediator and psychologist instead of a social worker.
Sometimes couples just fall out of love and there is no fault. Perhaps this is the most common reason that people end relationship. How does it value society and the culture overall to make people live in loveless marriages and see other people on the side? Why should there be hoops into getting a divorce?
Possibly a bit of both but largely a habit that comes with familiarity.
I am fairly academically oriented but more in an arts, history, and humanities way. I love hitting the stacks but not for the ability to produce white papers with charts and graphs. But I am still a liberal.
Your argument for ACA is good but I prefer a more moral argument on a right to health care as a basic fact of human dignity and decency. To me universal healthcare is a moral and ethical issue, not a cost/economic one.
I agree that the increase in options leads to more niches in culture overall and now people can seek out various blogs, etc.
However I do think that one part of being a critic is exposing people to culture that they might have to seek out a bit. Yes critics need to review the mass culture stuff but they should also work as exposing agents and say "Hey, there is a Truffaut retrospective in Madison, Wisconsin and if you are in the area go see Jules and Jim and The Last Metro".
I also have the very unfashionable belief that it is good to nudge people into eating their "cultural spinach" and to try and watch something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or see a Richard Serra retrospective instead of sticking with comfort food culture. If there is value in work, there is also a value in wrestling with difficult art that encourages contemplation or different brain functions.
Fair enough and I largely agree that policy can be interesting and intellectually stimulating.
However we live in a representative democracy and the other (and possibly most important) half of the equation is going out and doing retail politics. You can't enact policy if you keep losing elections.
I will add that I have no desire to run for political office ever so this is a big fat hypocrisy on my point.
There is also the fact that I am not a neo-liberal which makes me a bit less than sympathetic to the Rhee's and Matt Y's of the world from time to time. Matt Y is not one of my bloggers and I don't understand how he became a rising star blogger or Andrew Sullivan's voice of braveness for speaking "truth to power."
That is a reasonable point. Liberals do not necessarily see divorce and recreational drug use as being immoral. At least in the sense that conservatives tend to use the phrase.
I wouldn't say we necessarily think divorce or drug use are good though. Just inevitable products of human history and things that have always been around. People have been trying to get intoxicated for pleasure since the dawn of civilization. There have also been couples who have fallen out of love since the dawn of civilization and split up? What good does it do to be draconian against either?
My fellow liberals often seem more comfortable about producing white papers and doing research than going out and talking to voters. There is a certain technocracy streak that I find disconcerting as if the Rhee and Ygelias types would like to just produce a peer-reviewed white paper that says "X is the best policy and we should enact it" and then have the voters say okay.
I think these people are honest and sincere in their desire to find good policy but they seem to find retail politics distasteful like an old law professor might find the study of law to be divine but the actual practice of law to be vulgar. Many of the more wonky liberals seem to not always understand that good policy is not necessarily good politics.
I would say that every American has some kind of basic imprinting that says it is bad to be elitist. We tend to react very strongly against the word. Plus there are all sorts of loaded images into American imagery.
Your last paragraph on social elitism seems to fit right into the heart of a GOP cartoon of liberals. I don't know anything about your politics and take it on face value that you are not making a judgment call. However, the last paragraph makes Democratic Party supporters look like Louis the XVI and the rest of the Bourbons. We are just decadent partiers while the plain folk work honestly.
Does the Democratic platform encourage drug use? Many liberals might support liberalizing the harsh and wasteful drug laws but that is a far cry from advocating for recreational narcotics as a political idea.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Failures of Neoliberalism”
To be fair, Yglesias and I are roughly the same age (he is probably a year or two my junior) and we come from very similar backgrounds in terms of almost everything.
I grew up in a very upper-middle class to wealthy suburb of New York. He attended one of the tonier private schools in NYC (Dalton) but my suburban public high school was just as good at sending her students to elite universities. At least a quarter of my class (probably more) went on to an Ivy League or equally elite university including myself.
My problem with Yglesias is that he really represents my problem's with punditry at large and as I said previously on the League, he is to economics as David Brooks is to sociology. He doesn't really write in any depth, most of his pieces on Think Progress or Slate seem to be about two or three paragraphs long and basically regurgitate an academic paper or are super-anecdotal. He does not respond to criticism or recognize that there are other concerns beyond economics and the mantra of "growth, growth, growth"
Krugman at least has a real background in economics and while I might not agree with him all the time, I can recognize his expertise (though I think Krugman is more liberal than Yglesias and realizes that ne0-liberalism compromised too much of the welfare state).
I am a liberal who is not so-enamoured with the wonks are cute nerds aspect of current policy. We need experts and to come up with good policy but policy should not be completely technocratic. People are not just points of data, we have emotional and social needs that are not always rational but are absolutely necessary for us to lead complete and happy lives. Many wonks choose to ignore these needs because they are impossible to quantify or talk about in a white paper.
"
And turn down that blasted music!
"
For the record, I turned 32 a few weeks ago. I think there are a lot of Ordinary Gentlemen around my age.
Completely unrelated to the topic, there is a roughly equal amount of distance older brother (born in 1972), me (born in 1980), and Elias born in 1988. However, I feel like I have much more in common with people born in 1972 (or as I call them prime Gen Xers) than people born in 88-89. I seem to have many more cultural references in common plus the ability to remember life before the internet.
1980 is technically the tale end of Gen X but I feel more like it is the purgatory between Gen X and Gen Y. This purgatory group is largely people who were born between 1978-1980 or 81.
"
Damn you are young.
"
As I said above, the problem with American neo-liberals is that they were willing to sell away all the welfare state stuff to make sure that the hedge funders gave to the Democratic Party instead of the Republicans.
See above for my thoughts on neo-liberals and education. Many of them seem to be just as enamoured with charter schools and constant standardized testing as Republicans and likely to ask questions like "Who needs a music program?"
"
Not quite.
I consider myself to be a liberal but not on the far-left. However, I do not under any circumstances consider myself to be a neo-liberal.
Neo-Liberals are people on the left who are more or less closet libertarians or moderate conservatives on economic issues. Some of them might say that they believe in the welfare state but they often sell the welfare state down the river in order to please their Gods at the Hedge Fund set.
Neo-liberals have adopted some very right-wing attitudes like a severe disregard and contempt for unions and a bizarre love for deregulation as the basic solution to all problems.
Matt Y of Think Progress and Slate.com is a super neo-liberal. His solutions always seem to be towards deregulation. There is a housing shortage? Deregulate and allow people to build below code or end the height restrictions. He does not seem to care about the character of a community or such questions as would San Francisco be San Francisco if all the Edwardians were replaced by concrete high rises. Hotel rooms are expensive? Deregulate and support Airbnb. Matt Y does not ask whether this would mean landlords would turn their apartments into mini-hotels and further increase the housing shortage.
Matt Y sees deregulation as a natural good without examining the consequences. He is more concerned about his future place as a TED Talk guy than about people. Though he does seem to have swallowed his own kool-aid.
Likewise on Education issues, neo-liberals are prone to see solutions in a school system that is all about charter schools and standardized test after standardized test. They were against the teachers in the strike and get suckered into right-wing docs and movies like Waiting for Superman and Won't Back Down because hedge-fund billionaires must know more about education than someone who studied it and spent years in the classroom. And hey, unions are just for stupid people anyway.
On “Mitt Romney for President”
+2
On “The Future of Gun Ownership”
Ugh....
"
I think that will be a long-time coming. Drugs are a lot more complicated to produce than firearms and a 3-D printer won't cut it.
Though I am surprised at what the 3-D printers can do.
"
Honestly, no one.
I've smoked in the past but not that often and it usually does not do anything for me.
My preferred intoxicants are beer and wine. Largely for taste reasons.
"
Call me an snob and but I would probably never trust a drug that someone made in their basement while following a patent application.
Unless said friend also had a PhD in biochem, nanotech, phramacology, etc. And even then I would be cautious. At least if a pharma-drug is defective, you can sue the company that made it. You can't recover as much from Bob's basement drugs.
On “What’s the Matter with New York?”
For better or for worse, I am a large fan of most of those NPR cultural references and touchstones. Much of the culture I consume is baseline NPR to the more avant-garde. If anything, Matt Y is possibly more culturally populist than me.
The second point is well taken though especially the white paper part.
"
My brother takes a lot of dancing classes. There is no regulating body for this but there is a private association whose name I can't recall. From what my brother tells me, dance studios that do not have the private associations badge of approval fold quickly because potential and actual students look for association approval as somewhat of a short-hand for at quality.
I imagine the same would be true in many other industries. So in the end it becomes the same thing.
Perhaps barber was too low an example. How about esthecians who do things like waxing and chemical peels? This stuff can cause physical injury if done incorrectly. I would say that regulating physical safety is a traditional police power.
In the end consumer protection probably ranks a bit higher for me than opportunity if needing to make a judgment call though.
"
Interestingly I do like NPR.
The problem is that there seems to be an unending fascination with being "wonky" and too clever by half instead of understanding the real wants and needs of people. Everyone is looking at graphs and charts because people are just too darn contradictory and messy
Ygesias seems to see deregulation as an axiomatic good. Like many neo-liberals, he would like to see it combined with a welfare state but this is not happening. I am also not sure whether deregulation is a natural good. Plus a private entity will just come in to fill the role previously done by government. I am not sure why private Barber licensing is better than government licensing.
I think that too many wealthy people on the left and the right live disconnected and in bubbles. The liberal variant are the Rhees and Yglesias' of the world. They grew up in a largely parallel universe of private school or super-good wealthy suburban public schools. They attend TED talks which amount to nothing more than a puppy pat on the head while avoiding really hard questions on income inequality.
"
How about liberals simply prefer social nontraditionalism?
"
At Will,
What is wrong with it being too easy to divorce? Do conservatives think that some kind moral hazard is going to happen?
On the other hand, I think that there is much to lose by making it too hard to divorce. New York finally adopted No Fault Divorce in 2010 or 2011. Before then, couples would need to find fault and this was a long and difficult process even when there was fault. It tied up courts and families for years.
No Fault Divorce allows for speedy-resolutions (hopefully) especially now because there is a modern trend for many couples to use a mediator and psychologist instead of a social worker.
Sometimes couples just fall out of love and there is no fault. Perhaps this is the most common reason that people end relationship. How does it value society and the culture overall to make people live in loveless marriages and see other people on the side? Why should there be hoops into getting a divorce?
"
Possibly a bit of both but largely a habit that comes with familiarity.
I am fairly academically oriented but more in an arts, history, and humanities way. I love hitting the stacks but not for the ability to produce white papers with charts and graphs. But I am still a liberal.
Your argument for ACA is good but I prefer a more moral argument on a right to health care as a basic fact of human dignity and decency. To me universal healthcare is a moral and ethical issue, not a cost/economic one.
"
I agree that the increase in options leads to more niches in culture overall and now people can seek out various blogs, etc.
However I do think that one part of being a critic is exposing people to culture that they might have to seek out a bit. Yes critics need to review the mass culture stuff but they should also work as exposing agents and say "Hey, there is a Truffaut retrospective in Madison, Wisconsin and if you are in the area go see Jules and Jim and The Last Metro".
I also have the very unfashionable belief that it is good to nudge people into eating their "cultural spinach" and to try and watch something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or see a Richard Serra retrospective instead of sticking with comfort food culture. If there is value in work, there is also a value in wrestling with difficult art that encourages contemplation or different brain functions.
"
Fair enough and I largely agree that policy can be interesting and intellectually stimulating.
However we live in a representative democracy and the other (and possibly most important) half of the equation is going out and doing retail politics. You can't enact policy if you keep losing elections.
I will add that I have no desire to run for political office ever so this is a big fat hypocrisy on my point.
There is also the fact that I am not a neo-liberal which makes me a bit less than sympathetic to the Rhee's and Matt Y's of the world from time to time. Matt Y is not one of my bloggers and I don't understand how he became a rising star blogger or Andrew Sullivan's voice of braveness for speaking "truth to power."
"
I think almost everyone realizes that divorce is going to be around and we are not going back. Plus plenty of Republicans get divorced.
I just used it as an example because Pinky used it. Generally my thoughts are the same as yours and that they really don't care about marriage.
"
Okay. My apologies as well.
"
That is a reasonable point. Liberals do not necessarily see divorce and recreational drug use as being immoral. At least in the sense that conservatives tend to use the phrase.
I wouldn't say we necessarily think divorce or drug use are good though. Just inevitable products of human history and things that have always been around. People have been trying to get intoxicated for pleasure since the dawn of civilization. There have also been couples who have fallen out of love since the dawn of civilization and split up? What good does it do to be draconian against either?
"
My fellow liberals often seem more comfortable about producing white papers and doing research than going out and talking to voters. There is a certain technocracy streak that I find disconcerting as if the Rhee and Ygelias types would like to just produce a peer-reviewed white paper that says "X is the best policy and we should enact it" and then have the voters say okay.
I think these people are honest and sincere in their desire to find good policy but they seem to find retail politics distasteful like an old law professor might find the study of law to be divine but the actual practice of law to be vulgar. Many of the more wonky liberals seem to not always understand that good policy is not necessarily good politics.
"
How often do conservatives arrive at a non-private/business solution to any social or economic problem?
"
On your parenthesis:
I would say that every American has some kind of basic imprinting that says it is bad to be elitist. We tend to react very strongly against the word. Plus there are all sorts of loaded images into American imagery.
Your last paragraph on social elitism seems to fit right into the heart of a GOP cartoon of liberals. I don't know anything about your politics and take it on face value that you are not making a judgment call. However, the last paragraph makes Democratic Party supporters look like Louis the XVI and the rest of the Bourbons. We are just decadent partiers while the plain folk work honestly.
Does the Democratic platform encourage drug use? Many liberals might support liberalizing the harsh and wasteful drug laws but that is a far cry from advocating for recreational narcotics as a political idea.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.