The Populist Advantage
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The Snowden revelations of a few years later did not have as great of an impact as I would have wished, but I think that they too played some role in further discrediting elites. Given how much Trump's criticism of the Iraq War did to make criticism of that war a bi-partisan phenomenon, I find it unfortunate that he was too authoritarian to pair his criticism of that war with criticism of the NSA and that instead, he hinted that Snowden should be executed as a traitor.
IMO, this is what people tell themselves now because they don't want to admit that they genuinely supported to the war to begin with. The Iraq War and the War on Terror were very much populist wars motivated by American's wanting to get revenge on brown people. That's why Bush's approval skyrocketed after 9/11 and the capture of Saddam. Yes, a nonzero amount of elites supported or benefited from these wars, but you can say that about anything. You're not going to convince the government to spend trillions of dollars without a few experts on your side and others who profit off of it.
Saying Snowden's either a pariah or a hero is a very political stance either way, and I don't want to spout politics here on HN (That's not what HN is for, although political rants still slip through the cracks on HN).
That said, the leaks did leave some aftermath[0]. All the tinfoilers, pre-Snowden had their suspicions confirmed in real, tangible ways. Yeah we knew abut ECHELON[1] but the Snowden leaks were far more substantial IMHO, and leaked at a time when The Internet was really starting to ramp up (in terms of all the services/tooling now available, and social media making leaps and bounds).
You don't automatically get a 'good job' because you've earned certain credentials. IMHO PhDs and other credentials are a dice roll and you could potentially work very hard on your studies for nothing. This is why people research their chosen profession before studying so that, at least, it wasn't all in vain, and even then, the job market could be swayed against you when you've completed your studies.
People also need to look out for credentialism where people are overqualified for positions, or that PhDs etc are not even needed. Sometimes a simple aptitude test can filter out people who will lose you money when you've employed them.
https://www.ctdol.state.ct.us/lweab/Doucougliagos%20&%20Stan...
Micro: Cantillon Wealth Pump
Mandatory disclaimer: No, I'm not shilling bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't address the root of the problem which is that if you put rich people in charge of everything they immediately start implementing self-serving policy.
The AskEconomics thread there is a litany of issues with these charts. Ironically, this seems like a pretty good illustration of what the article author is saying.
> women into workforce
Great, when can we start working 1/2 time? 3 day workweeks allow 2-working-spouse families to raise their own kids, you know. Might help with those pesky fertility rates.
> total compensation vs. wages
Yeah, if you count medical inflation as additional compensation then only 80% of Americans are worse off instead of 90%.
Simplicity is a blunt instrument, but devils dance in the details and simplicity can bop them. Contrast to "just think harder," which grants victory to whoever can afford to spend more time thinking on it.
The deficiencies are as obvious as they always were and people should communicate this more stronlgy. It's actually insane how well the US economy is doing. Growth rates in countries that have a fraction of the per capital income of the US are now converging on similar rates before ever having gotten rich. Birth rates in most of those countries are tanking. People were claiming China will overtake the US economy in 2030, now that's being revised further and further back with 'not at all' becoming a distinct possibility. In Russia they're unironically bringing Kalashnikov lessons to school students, Soviet style. Liberal societies had their problems in dealing with Covid but behavior was responsive and driven by more and more data coming in, in China they bolted people into their homes for a year and then pretended the virus didn't matter from one day to the other.
Convincing people that liberalism still works basically only means pointing them to how the world factually really looks.
I never see people talk about protectionism in the eurozone. Are we just blinded by all the kumbaya rhetoric and hand-holding? Why the hell is that considered a triumph of liberal economics when the 50 states are not? There is some industrial-scale lying going on. It is as if the euro cartel has economically sanctioned everyone that isn't them.
The economy is doing insanely well while its people are doing insanely bad. The life has been dropping for two years in a row [1] and there were around 110k deaths of despair between February 2021 and February 2022 [2]. If those are the signs of an economy doing "insanely well" I dread to see what a recession will bring.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rising-physical-p...
I'm sure that is has been doing great for middle- to high-middle-class people active on this website, I had hoped though that some of those middle- to high-middle-class people would have opened their eyes to the reality around them, but apparently they don't.
Even dictatorial China has a better life expectancy than the US, Albania even, all this while middle-class people call this US economy as "insanely good"?
What can I say, I'm 100% sure that the next US populist president that will get elected (be it Trump or anyone else) will be blamed on either the Russians (like in 2016), the Chinese, the electorate being stupid (like in 2016) or on the aliens, not on the dreadful material conditions that are present throughout the US.
And wage slavery is a thing, it's no use if you have a job if it barely allows you to pay for (some) housing and some food, no matter what the unemployment statistics might say.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.
As just one example: "works", as in "liberalism works", is not a true/false binary, and there's little genuine reason to think our current designs are anywhere near optimal on an absolute scale.
Convincing people something is true can often be done simply by using language skilfully.
Populist-left economics focus on large-scale government spending. The first-order effect is that everybody gets a $2000 check, or a subsidized rail system, or whatever. The second-order effect is inflation and economic instability; you end up paying $10 for a loaf of bread.
Populism is the idea that there is a clear will of the people, or a clear set of policies in their interest. Policy debates aren't divided by left vs. right, or by supply-side Keynesianism. Rather, they're a division between the people and the elites. There isn't really room for a synthesis of multiple competing ideas (at least not until the people have taken over from the elites once again). It's the opposite of pluralism.
Populist economics, according to this author, is defined largely by ideas that are simple enough to sell to people who haven't studied economics enough to conceive of second- and third-order policy effects. Those ideas all fail in the real world, but we have to re-learn that periodically, because of periodic resurgences of populism.
(I believe some of this but not all of it and am really just trying to do my best to articulate what I thought the article was saying).
The problem is the effects don't stop at 3rd order, where economic models stop, yielding the consensus that trade liberalization is always good. The reality is different:
her work showed that trade liberalization had slowed the rate of poverty reduction in rural India. - the linked article
" ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
It turns out that our evolved instincts can be better guides than simplified mathematical models.
So somehow, China's economic policies can be identical to what is domestically ridiculed as "populist." On the other hand, everything authoritarian that Westerners do gets referred to as like what they would do in China.
Actual self-identified populists like Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage rail against the EU but would never call it populist, for obvious reasons. I imagine the same for the leader of Italy.
RR was the reason India's banks didn't collapse in 2017 when a bunch of massive infrastructure loans were defaulted on, as the reforms he initiated during his tenure at the RBI helped banks like the IDFC, HDFC, ICICI, PNB, etc fix their balance sheets.
I've also had the fortune of attending a couple talks and lectures of his before he went to India. The man is definetly one of the sharpest economists at UChicago currently.
During election years with close margins, Indian parties succumb to populist tactics to ensure their victory. The last time India saw a similar economic and political climate as 2022-Present was in 2011-2014 under the INC. The economic decisions made during the 2011-14 period were not the greatest (turning into the 2017 banking crisis), and a similar crisis could be accidentally enabled as parties battle to the death (sometimes literally) in 2023-24.
Furthermore, RR has recently been arguing that an East Asian style mass manufacturing revolution wouldn't help India succeed in becoming an upper income country, as Indian manufacturing skews either high value (eg. Cars, Pharmaceuticals, ONG) or low value (eg. Textiles, Cheap goods). According to RR, as Indian farm wages are high enough to meet middle income needs, there isn't an outside factor to push rural workers in most states (UP and Bihar excluded) to decide to become migrant low income workers in factories.
In all honesty, I tend to agree. Agricultural income is tax free in India, so assuming you are not landless (ie. Most rural residents in most Indian states that did land reform), you can net around $2-4k/yr in agricultural income, which means you'd need to earn $4-8k/yr in wage labor. These salaries are too high to support mass manufacturing, meaning supporting small businesses along with subsidizing high value manufacturing (with high profit margins to tax) would be better served. This is the same path to industrialization that Thailand took, and the results have been positive: 0.8 HDI in 2023 - higher than China, Brazil, or Mexico, all countries that were in a similar boat to Thailand in the 2000s-2010s.
The above is a very heterodox argument in top economics programs in the US currently (excluding MIT), and RR and plenty of others have been facing flak for it, but has been gaining traction within ASEAN, China, and India ime, and is similar to FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-restricts-import-l...
How does RR explains rural and urban unemployment if he thinks wages are high enough? RR is excellent economist and his arguments might be valid considering the data but the data itself doesn't reflect the ground reality so conclusions are flawed as well.
If you erect steel tariffs, initially steel will be more expensive and of lower quality, but it will allow your smelting industry to develop until it is eventually on par with foreign offerings. Otherwise you'll be stuck exporting ore and importing steel. This is even more true of industries where the added value is higher, such as automotive and semiconductors.
That is what the simple analysis misses - a country's efficiency at some economic endeavor is not static. Protectionism is what allows fledgling industries to develop to a point where opening trade won't see them immediately crushed by foreign competitors.
More convincing is perhaps the simple empirical observation that none of the most successful trading countries reached their status through liberal trade rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37229422
I'm not an AskEconomics anti-Chang person (I don't know enough about economics to have a real opinion about any of this; I can just read stuff and make some sense about it). AskEconomics bristles at the idea that developing economies should use protectionism as a tool to establish industries, and liberalize only when they're situated to capture the advantages of free trade. But that seems totally reasonable to me.
But that's not the proposition this article is really talking about!
This simply isn’t true. To the extent that fledgling economies eschew protectionism it is generally a condition of trade agreements and “aid” imposed by rich countries. That some rich countries are returning to protectionism for critical sectors shows the dire consequences of deindustrialization, both politically and materially (as the pandemic laid bare).
I knew it.
Just one more ignorant poor sod who will talk about Argentinian politics without actually understanding the context at all.
Stop trying to fit your left-right Anglo worldview to everyone else.
It's pathetic and incredibly tiring. Go throw temper tantrums about your Tories and your republicans like you love to and leave the south American country politics to people who actually know them in depth or live their realities.
Edit: pointing out Milei as populism while implying the "so called left peronism" isn't is laughable to the extreme. The quip about "adopting the dollar (again!) Shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the maneuver by Carlos Menem to force a constant parity between the ARS and the USD.
If we're restricting ourselves to the United States (the article is overwhelmingly not about the US), it's a 50/50 polity. The people want an incoherently overlapping set of ideas from an incoherently-left-liberal party and an incoherently-conservative-right party. It's what you'd expect as an organically reached steady state based on Duverger's Law.
Populism is a philosophy that looks at that set of circumstances and says, nah, fuck that. It's obvious what the people want: precisely X, Y, and Z set of policies. If the people are voting in obstacles to policy X, it's because the system is corrupted by elites. There aren't competing ideas of the good of the people; there is only the good of the people and the interests of those elites.
If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come up (1) with something coherent and (2) without bruises, that would be evidence of a valid populist argument. But you can't do that, because those 200 people will disagree sharply on everything from economic protectionism to the importance of university educations.
i read this as saying not that populism is bad, but that it doesn't _exist_. to someone trying to intuit the meaning of "populism", encountering the word for the first time, it looks like "populism" means "the will of the people". both from its root and from the things which it's used to label (movements with popular support).
and there's no correction for this misunderstanding. you just see more and more leaders critiquing popular movements simply _for being popular_ ("populist") and that _amplifies_ the impression that those in power wish to suppress the will of the people.
it's just a bad phrase. another commenter positioned populism as contrary to pluralism, which was helpful for me to understand the negative connotation. the actual problem with these "populist" movements is that they _appear_ to represent a unified will of the people, but the unification doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. if (following your example) you could put the whole populace in a room and hammer out policy from start to finish without disagreement or compromising, then we could have an actual unified will of the people; populism would be true, and good. populism doesn't really seem like a thing i should be against in the extremely rare circumstance i find it, _illusory_ populism seems to be the actual thing i should fight against.