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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

His argument is that the govt had more control of a smaller media (a few networks and papers from which everyone got their news) that acted as gatekeepers and narrative creators.

OK, and my argument is that the government never had "control" in any sense of a smaller media. As I've said here before, when media technology (printing presses, TV stations) was relatively expensive, you tended to have fewer outlets and they had financial incentives to be centrist to capture broad audiences and sell ads. More recently, the costs of publication have dropped, and you have media outlets chasing niche audiences instead, which changes their incentives. None of that has anything to do with government control.

He touches on this, but not directly. His assessment is that this sort of thing (2008 bailouts) could have been gotten away with in a pre-Internet age. Post-Internet, however, the govt can't bullshit the public with some story about how the bailouts were equitable or morally defensible. The "public," as he describes the people in opposition to the govt and hierarchical institutions generally, can easily find information online to debunk such govt and industry spin, and then they can package counter-arguments which go viral. The result is a loss of control by authorities. This includes what you cite -- a loss of credibility and moral validity.

Government failures on important issues are not easily bullshitted away. See, e.g., Vietnam or the Great Depression. It's not like people were stupid and then the internet came along.

He's not a conservative. His admitted aim is to save democracy.

I wasn't saying he was a conservative or even talking about him. His "admitted aim" is to save democracy? That's not much of an admission. I think most conservatives believe they are saving democracy, but they also have convinced themselves that democracy has been hijacked by a bunch of people who are not legitimately part of the community. There is a strong conviction that Democrats are stealing elections by letting illegal immigrants vote.

He sees authoritarian creep and nihilism among both the masses and the "elites." He thinks the problem is that the public believes - delusionally - that it can demand and receive "fixes" for complex problems from the govt. The Trump voter thinks protectionism will bring back jobs. The progressive believes we can fix inequality and poverty other than at the margins by simply throwing money and govt intervention at them.

Do they? Is the problem that the public expects too much from the government, or is the problem that hard problems are hard to solve?

Bringing back jobs is hard. They went somewhere else for a reason.

Fixing inequality and poverty is hard. A lot of people like inequality.

These things can be attempted, sure, but they will not succeed all or even a small fraction of the time. Gurri argues that govt has been lying to a credulous public about how much it can do for a long time and thus given the public unrealistic expectations of its capabilities. This creates an angry public that operates like George Steinbrenner - throwing out the Manager every four years when it doesn't get everything it wants.

This is a nice story, but have you considered an alternative explanation? Some voters like change, and will vote for the opposition. Some voters always vote for the same party, but they are more energized to vote against the opposition than to vote for their own party, so they turn out more when the other party is in power. Both of those are real phenomena that explain why elections go back and forth.

Also, your "every four years" point needs some thought. Presidents who run for re-election usually get re-elected. Trump was an exception, because he was so terrible, but before him you have to go back to 1992 and George H.W. Bush. And I would wager that Obama would have beat Trump in 2016, if he hadn't been term-limited.

What does go back and forth is Congress. Part of that is that off-year elections favor Republicans, because a lot of people turn out to vote only in presidential elections, and they skew Democratic. But that's another feature explaining flip-flop results that has nothing to do with your guy's theory.

Gurri thinks this is abetted by "Intellectuals Yet Idiots" (policy wonks who think in the abstract but fail in the practical and concrete) who populate a lot of govt and institutions. These people can never admit being wrong or having limitations because their brand is being right about everything (smartest guys in the room syndrome). Secondly, politicians generally can't admit being fallible because the deluded public - again, unrealistically - will not accept that. No one can tell the truth: "This is a policy we think will work, but there's a chance it will fail."

Is it a newsflash that politicians oversell? Is this not a feature of most advertising? Do people lose faith in companies and consumer goods because the products they buy have been oversold?

He argues that what we need most from our leaders is humility. And what we need most from the public is circumspect thinking, tolerance for failure, and maturity.

That's an excellent idea. Let's elect a new public.

He writes on this problem. But if you really want to see someone attack this issue in a comprehensive manner, Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit is the book for you. Sandel asserts that merit is becoming a back door into which something like an old school English class system, aiding exclusively the upper middle to affluent classes, is infecting American society, masked as defensible and just based on arbitrary metrics, a crooked education system, and legacy hierarchies (industry and govt) in which the same people with the same badges hand each other positions.

At the risk of outing myself (ha), I have taken a class from Sandel. He's smart. But is the problem "merit"? If you think for a second about what you say about, the problem is not "merit," it's that the upper middle class (etc.) have real advantages because they have more money. If you go to Scarsdale H.S., you're going to get a better education and better opportunities than if you go to P.S. 123 in the Bronx. How many kids from Scarsdale go to Harvard (hi Hank!), and how many from your average public school in the Bronx go there? The issue is not a Harvard degree is an arbitrary metric, the issue is that a Harvard degree tends to signal some measure of qualification, Jared Kushner aside. (Is it a perfect measure of merit? Of course not. But nothing is.) Everyone pays lip service to merit, but there are an awful lot of policies out there that undercut it, like funding public education locally, which ensures that people who live in expensive neighborhoods don't have to share their schools. The problem is not merit, it's an insufficient commitment to it.