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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.

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I'm not a political scientist, but it doesn't seem too far fetched? What OP seems to be saying is that it's easier to capture a small but strong follower base with focused effort, than a large (or any) follower base with diffuse effort. If the current social and political climate is any indication, people (at society level) genuinely don't seem to be receptive to efforts of unification and the betterment of mankind.

The agendas that are most successful are those which are laser focused to benefit particular groups, or even worse, to ensure that certain vilified groups have it worse. In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people. Even worse, some of the most ardent opposition is from the social class would most stands to benefit from liberal policies.

The whole game theoretic aspect of rational actors is out the window. Instead we have ever more isolated groups of people who don't care that they have it bad as long as their presumed opposition has it worse.

In light of all that, I'm actually inclined to agree with OP that a campaign that would benefit north of 50% of the population could easily be unpopular as a punchy opposition riles up the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires to vote against their own interests.

> In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people.

I don't think it's certain that it would benefit the majority of people. In fact, I think it's unlikely.

One of the tremendous advantages of the US (and why we're so rich compared to almost all EU countries) is that our cultural programming includes the implicit understanding that higher taxes introduce deadweight loss and other higher-order losses of efficiency. Taxes aren't as simple as "taking from A and giving to B" except in the very short term. Over time, it results in less efficient resource allocation, capital resources leaving to less distorted markets, etc.

This happens on both a personal and institutional level. The gamble you're taking when you raise taxes is that "stickiness" (social ties, pre-existing legal and technical infrastructure, procedural momentum, etc.) won't just cause your tax base to leave. However, stickiness only slows the process down, rather than stopping it entirely.

This is encoded in American culture's sense of economic fairness, which precludes aggressively shafting people with more stuff just because you want their stuff.

When would you say this cultural identity developed? Because there are millions of people in this country that can remember a time when the top marginal tax rate was above 90%.

It dates at least back to the earliest Scots-Irish immigrants to the US. The wartime stuff was an aberration and not sustainable.

What is considered "wartime stuff"? Because the US has been preparing for, engaging in, or recovering from war for basically the entire history of the country including today as we are currently engaged in the longest war in US history.

Obviously that's referring to WW2, when the peak marginal income tax rate was temporarily raised to 94%. That was unsustainable because, absent a worldwide violent conflict, the highest income people will just emigrate to lower tax countries.

All of our wars since WW2 have been wars of choice. The survival of our nation hasn't been at stake.

So what about when the marginal rate was over 60% in the 1930s or when it stayed at 70% into the 1980s?

> All of our wars since WW2 have been wars of choice. The survival of our nation hasn't been at stake

As if any of the world wars had the US' survival at stake. Being separated by other powers by oceans on both sides, and having enormous amounts of resources and manpower meant that the last time the US was at any legitimate threat was 1812.

I assume the hypothesis is that the potential benefits would be spread too thin across the population to be considered particularly valuable.

I listened to a Tulsi Gabbard interview, and she said that was one of the reasons Obamacare seems half-assed. She said that the Democrats and Republicans both had opportunities to make compromises that would have benefited everyone, but they decided not to work together because it gives both parties something simple to argue about during election season. Democrats get to say "Obamacare sucks because Republicans are holding it back", and Republicans get to say "Obamacare is another big government program that doesn't even do what they said it would". Both parties are right, and both parties have no desire to fix it.

In a democracy, where votes are there to be bought, but perhaps not other regimes have this specific flaw.

You can analyze this from the perspective of Public Choice theory. I think the claim would not quite be that the policy would be unpopular _with the population_ - just that it wouldn’t be in the individual interest of any politician, and therefore, as rational actors, they wouldn’t take the action to enact the policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interest...

On the contrary, it's a straightforward application of selectorate theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory

That doesn't make it correct, but it's not 'wild' at all.

The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has done some very significant work in showing exactly that, and has built robust and successful empirical models demonstrating and predicting it. His book “The Logic of Political Survival” covers it in fascinating detail.

It’s not really that rare, there’s a reason for the common saying in public choice, “concentrated benefits, dispersed costs”.

Think subsidies. Industry specific subsidies (e.g. farmer subsidies) are popular, while industry wide subsidies (e.g. tax cuts for business) aren’t.

They are talking about dilution.

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