i’m completely lost as to the author’s intended takeaway. something like “[democratic] systems that are blind to second-/third-order policy effects underperform”? so what do you do about that?
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.