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While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles.
by dbspin 7y ago
While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles.
So for example the net cost of normalising college debt, and the regulatory exceptions to bankruptcy etc around this form of debt, is not simply a generation entering the workforce in debt. It's massive concrete measurable inequality between those who can afford to work in internships (unpaid or underpaid) and those who's loans prevent that. It's exclusion from education for those who cannot take on enormous debt (or won't be granted loans). It's a shift to crude utilitarianism in education generally, because the insane cost of a degree means you'd be insane to do one that doesn't 'repay' its perceived value etc etc.
This is true again and again for the social issues created by the American economic-social pact (call it neoliberalism or what have you). From the knock on domestic violence, abuse and intergenerational trauma caused by the warrior culture of Americans gargantuan military, to its normalisation of militarised policing.
What all these issues have in common it a cultural unwillingness to tackle what are often substantively simple root causes. Issues which have been dealt with successfully in other cultures.
So in confusing how the electorate can be trivially manipulated by playing into their psychographic preferences and prejudices, with the relative complexity of social issues you're actually conceding to the delusion that politics is entertainment. That it's not candidates positions that matter, but the perception of those positions. That really most problems are simply impossible to solve (rather than politically unfeasible in the American context). That the political confusion and anger of the present moment is exclusively generated through persuasion rather than the justifiable (though often misdirected) result of concrete solvable issues.
We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way. The map in America, has become the territory.
- DanielBMarkham 7y agoI do not think politics is entertainment, and I support the creation of virtuous cycles. I think you've created a bit of a dichotomy where none was implied. All of our experiences online can be a form of entertainment, at least in part, politicians may be elected or not based on perception, and it's critically important to have and express values using good people. These ideas do not have to be in conflict with one another, and no cynicism on my part was intended.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way. Why do we need to do these things at the national level? The federal government is intentionally not set up to be able do these kinds of things. Doing these things at the federal level is an exercise in Constitution avoiding mental gymnastics and you wind up with hacks like withholding federal money or insane interpretations of the commerce clause in order to get things done or your policy winds up hanging by a threat that SCOTUS can cut at any minute (e.g. Obamacare). Using policy to mitigate social problems does seem to work well at the state level (for any given problem there seems to always be a state that's doing a good job tackling the problem) because the states don't have to implement back handed legislative solutions or compromise things as many ways and generally run at smaller scale. (For example, there are at least a couple states that have decent universal healthcare programs.)
- danans 7y ago> Using policy to mitigate social problems does seem to work well at the state level (for any given problem there seems to always be a state that's doing a good job tackling the problem) In the case of healthcare, the coverage standards, cost controls, revenue collection and payments must be handled at the federal level, otherwise you will end up with huge differences in benefits between state programs, which will result in similar issues seen with insurance companies today. For example, today, insurance companies are often loathe to pay for expensive-upfront but cheaper long-term procedures because the typical time for customer retention is correlated with how long their customers stay at their job. They don't want to pay for the procedure that their competitor is going to get the cost savings from down the road. There is nothing to stop an unregulated US-state run universal health system from doing the same thing. Also, because US states by definition have open borders, it would encourage health care arbitrage in densely populated border areas, which would overstress the systems of states with better health coverage, leading to inevitable legal conflict between those states. This is not to say that states can't play a role in the day-to-day local administration of healthcare benefits - just as they do with Medicare today - but the baselines have to be defined at a federal level.