Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

The Greeks Were Right

The early Greeks are said to have invented the idea of democracy, but that wasn’t their only contribution to the philosophy of governance. They also pioneered the importance of the “golden mean,” the mean between extremes. 

Right now, we are experiencing an assault on both of those critically important concepts.

The assault on democracy is well-understood; indeed, it preoccupies the political discourse. The importance of the “Golden Mean” is less understood. The Golden Mean was a core concept in Aristotelian ethics; Aristotle argued that virtue consists of finding the right balance in our behaviors and emotions.  (For example, courage is a virtue that lies between the extremes of recklessness and cowardice. Generosity is a virtue that lies between stinginess and prodigality.)  

American politics constantly wrestles with the proper balance between individualism and communitarianism. The country was founded on the principle that individuals are entitled to a generous zone of liberty–a zone that government should not invade until or unless that individual is harming the person or property of another, That principle gave rise to a very American, almost religious belief in individualism, and a corresponding suspicion of social programs and laws for the common good, which are inevitably opposed as unAmerican “socialism” or “communism.”

In the real world, of course, we are faced with finding a proper balance: what sorts of things really must be done communally, and when do government programs unnecessarily breach individual liberties? (I will ignore, for purposes of this discussion, the hypocrisy of MAGA folks who disdain “socialism” only when it benefits poor folks, and who have no problem with a corporatism that translates into socialism for the rich and a brutal capitalism for everyone else…)

What triggered the foregoing discussion was an article from the Guardian about–of all things–diet and exercise and long life. The article noted a decline in public health and life expectancies in rich countries, and posed the obvious question: what explains the gap between the public’s growing knowledge about living longer and its collective health going backwards?

The author of the essay is a public health scientist in Great Britain, whose job is looking into the factors that affect how long we will live. As she wrote, 

Most of these are out of individual control and have to do with the country and community we live in. The truth is, this “self-help” narrative doesn’t reflect the reality of how health works. In fact, the focus on personal responsibility and self-improvement has distracted us from the real issue –the impact that public policy, infrastructure and community make in affecting our health chances and longevity.

After citing the far better health and longevity outcomes in places like Japan, she writes that “What stands out about these places is that the people living there don’t just make individual choices that lead to better health – they live in places where healthy lives are normalised by government and culture.”

As I talk about in my new book, if I’m going to live to 100, I need more than fastidiously counting my calories and posting pictures of myself exercising on Instagram (which I am guilty of). I need to live in a world where health is a collective responsibility, not an individual one. This means supporting policies that make us all healthier – and politicians who prioritise the conditions for good health such as nutritious food especially for children, active cities, clean air policies, preventive healthcare and public provision of water, which should be at the core of what a government provides its citizens. There are lessons in how to improve life in all of these areas across the world: these are places where good health is built into daily life.

I confess that I have a strong libertarian streak, and a corresponding belief in the importance of the individual values of diligence, honesty, and hard work. But common sense requires recognition of the importance of the communities in which we live–the societies within which we are, in communitarian jargon–“embedded.” People cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they don’t have boots. They cannot simply choose to breathe clean air and drink uncontaminated water. Poor people without health insurance cannot simply decide not to need medical care.

Whether politicians want to acknowledge it or not, there are major elements of our lives that can only be addressed communally, and most of those can only be accomplished through government. Our job is to craft a social infrastructure that is adequate, that supports without intruding–to find that elusive “Golden Mean.”

I don’t think MAGA is interested…..

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The Brain Drain

Yesterday, I warned about the ferocity of the administration’s war on knowledge, and the incredible damage Trump and MAGA are doing to America’s long dominance in science and technology.

Lest you think I was over-reacting, allow me to share some recent headlines.

Foreign universities hope to lure scientists from the US after Trump research cuts | AP News
The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump – The New York Times
International students see fewer pathways to US careers under Trump
“‘A fear campaign.’ Students around the world are shocked, scared and saddened by US visa pause” — CNN
“America’s Coming Brain Drain: Trump’s War on Universities Could Kill U.S. Innovation” — Foreign Affairs
‘Major brain drain’: Researchers eye exit from Trump’s America; “In the halls of US universities and research labs, one question has become increasingly common as President Donald Trump tightens his grip on the field: whether to move abroad.” — AFP
“US brain drain: the scientists seeking jobs abroad amid Trump’s assault on research: Five US-based researchers tell Nature why they are exploring career opportunities overseas.” — Nature
The Economist warns: “America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain”.

(Links to each of these reports is available at the primary link.)

According to the Economist,

Springer Nature publishes Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. It also runs a much-used jobs board for academics. In the first three months of the year applications by researchers based in America for jobs in other countries were up by 32% compared with the same period in 2024.

In March Nature itself conducted a poll of more than 1,200 researchers at American institutions, of whom 75% said they were thinking of leaving (though disgruntled academics were probably more likely to respond to the poll than satisfied ones).

And just as American researchers eye the exit, foreigners are becoming more reluctant to move in. Springer Nature’s data suggests applications by non-American candidates for American research jobs have fallen by around 25% compared with the same period last year.

As any sentient observer might have predicted, MAGA’s war on knowledge is a win for China, which is offering big salaries to entice disaffected knowledge-workers to relocate there.

According to an essay in the Washington Post, the administration’s inability to understand the consequences of its actions is based in large part on its lack of historical knowledge.  In “Houston, J.D. Vance has a problem,” Mark Lasswell reports that Vance “barely grasps the history of the U.S. space program.”

Last week, Newsmax interviewer Greg Kelly took a break from slathering Vance with praise to delicately broach the possibility of a “brain drain” from American universities if researchers decamp for more hospitable institutions overseas. The White House, as you might have heard, is working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government that for the past century helped make the United States the most powerful and innovative country in the world.

“I’ve heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear, that we’re going to have a brain drain,” the voluble vice president told Kelly. “If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that.”

As Lasswell sardonically notes, “Vance seems to think a defunded brainiac who happens to be an American citizen is going to tell a recruiter from Aix-Marseille University, “You can keep Provence. I’d rather work on nanotechnology in my garage. U-S-A!”

The actual history of America’s space program–and scientific dominance–is rather different from Vance’s version. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union recruited German and Austrian scientists, engineers and technicians. (Without, as the essay notes, being too picky about their Nazi connections. I enthusiastically recommend Tom Lehrer’s “take” on Von Braun...) In the mid-1950s, they created the U.S. space program. “Von Braun and his many, many colleagues were instrumental to U.S. space supremacy — and, according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, most of them became naturalized citizens in 1954 or 1955.” 

We may not have been picky about their politics, but we did understand–once upon a time–that a nation’s health and wealth depend upon its respect–and support– for empirical knowledge. 

MAGA=Morons Are Gutting America….. 

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The War On Knowledge

When citizens are subjected to a “flooding of the zone”–daily assaults on a wide variety of systems, beliefs and values that have long been an accepted part of our governing environment–we can be forgiven for a lack of focus. It’s hard enough just to keep track of what is happening, let alone to decide which attacks are most worrisome. But Adam Serwer makes a good case for putting the war on knowledge at the top of the list.

In The New Dark Age, Serwer writes

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Serwer enumerates the Trump assaults: threats to withhold funding from colleges and universities that don’t submit to MAGA demands. Sustained attacks on the engines of American scientific inquiry– the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health–and on repositories of America’s history, including the Smithsonian.  Arts organizations and libraries are losing funding. Large numbers of government scientists have lost  their jobs and remaining researchers prevented from broaching forbidden subjects. “Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.”

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

Serwer describes the attacks on universities. He uses the example of West Point, and the administration’s purge of forbidden texts to reveal what MAGA’s “ideal university” might look like.

West Point initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is broad-based; it isn’t limited to academia. The administration has also singled out and fired government employees involved in research of multiple kinds.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.

Serwer enumerates the nature of the cuts and their foreseeable consequences, especially for public health. As he notes, modern agriculture and medicine, and advances in information technology like the internet and GPS were built on the foundation of federally funded research.

For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble—for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines—the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless.

MAGA’s racist fight against “wokeness” requires destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, and distorting any American history that undercuts the administration’s goal: destroying the “ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism.”

You really need to click through and read the entire essay–and weep.

Welcome to a new Dark Ages.

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About That “Abundance” Agenda

My middle son lived in Manhattan for ten years before relocating to Amsterdam, and during his tenure in the Big Apple he sprinkled numerous conversations with complaints (okay, rants) about the excessive costs of the city’s infrastructure. He couldn’t understand why other countries could extend their subway systems and railways at a fraction of America’s cost, and could complete projects far more rapidly.  He loved New York, but the glaring and costly inefficiency offended him.

I had no wisdom to impart. I didn’t know–and was unable to speculate– why a subway extension in the U.S. cost so much more–and took so much longer– than similar projects in other countries.

Until very recently, I was equally unaware of the policy war centered on something called  the abundance agenda, which turned out–despite what I still consider a weird label–to be an argument over that same question: why can’t America build things anymore?

As an article from The Atlantic explained:

The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.

The article documented national examples that dovetailed with my son’s complaints. For example, the amount of time that elapsed between Biden’s signing of his infrastructure bill and actual construction meant that voters hadn’t seen the effects of that legislation by the next election.

A massive law had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.

Only 58 of the “nationwide” electric-vehicle-charging stations were in service; completion dates for most road projects was mid-2027. Rural broadband access to had connected zero customers.

Policy wonks began to ask the same questions my son had asked. What was going on? American government used to construct engineering miracles like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge ahead of schedule and under budget– Medicare had become available less than a year after it passed, but the Affordable Care Act’s exchange took nearly four years. And an embarrassing question: Why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?

The policy wonks concluded that, over the years, a web of laws and regulations has turned any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. But removing excess regulations is highly controversial, because the limitations on building and government were largely imposed by interest groups that believed them necessary– interest groups that have dominated the Democratic Party for the last half century, and who saw their task as preventing an alliance of government, Big Business and Big Labor from subordinating the needs of citizens. They wanted to prevent the government from doing harm– but too often, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is an example. Passed in 1969, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.

Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.

The article has many more examples, but the issue is so contentious because it isn’t “either/or”–it requires policymakers to find the mean between extremes. How much regulation is needed to safeguard the environment, or protect against government overreach–and how much is too much?

If and when we elect lawmakers who actually care about governing, it’s an issue they need to address.

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Economics And The Rule Of Law

One of the multiple failures of the not-very-bright people who are currently running/ruining our government is their inability to connect the dots, to understand that when they set out to undermine X, the consequences of that assault aren’t just limited to X. We live in a complex and interrelated world, and failure to understand those complexities can lead to unanticipated damage.

The Trump administration consistently displays enormous ignorance of the way the world actually works. That ignorance–that disdain for pesky things like expertise and evidence–is particularly evident in Trump’s approach to economic policy. It isn’t just his insane belief in tariffs (a belief shared by no economist, conservative or liberal). It isn’t just his echoing of longstanding Republican insistence that tax cuts for “job creators” will grow the economy–despite ample evidence to the contrary. (Of course, even if those tax cuts don’t lead to economic growth, they do lead to the growth of generous political contributions…)

It isn’t even the GOP’s failure to understand the dire economic and civic consequences of further impoverishing citizens who are already struggling in order to fatten the wallets of the already wealthy, a failure once again demonstrated by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

The most dangerous failure to connect the dots is the less-noted but even more consequential failure to understand the economic importance of the rule of law, or to recognize how Trump’s assaults on the law will dramatically and inevitably undermine the nation’s economy.

I’ve previously explained why widespread obedience to the rule of law is an essential underpinning of liberty and civic equality–why it is at the very basis of what I call “the American Idea.” But it is equally important to understand why the nation’s economic health is absolutely dependent upon a government that respects the rule of law.

Trump’s autocratic attacks on–and utter disregard for– the rule of law are a direct threat to the willingness of foreign investors to buy and hold American  stocks and bonds. When those investors see Trump and his administration unilaterally defaulting on contracts, arbitrarily withholding funds that have been properly and legally appropriated, ignoring court decisions and attacking judges, deporting people without even the pretense of due process–while at the same time providing special treatment for donors, favored companies, and White immigrants– those investors re-think the safety of their investments.

Why should we care?

Among other things, foreign investors inject capital for increased production and economic expansion. They create new employment opportunities and facilitate technology transfer. Foreign investors often bring in advanced technologies and expertise, fostering innovation and boosting productivity in local industries. When foreign businesses generate profits, they contribute to U.S. tax revenues, providing American government with resources to fund public services.

That investment is at risk. As one economist put it,

The erosion of the rule of law under Trump can have enormous economic significance for a foreign government, investor, or company with stakes in our economy. They now know that the U.S. government may ignore its contracts with them or decide not to enforce their agreements with others when it serves the political or personal interests of the president. That’s the way the world works in the kleptocratic dictatorships in Russia and Venezuela, and virtually no one invests in their stocks and bonds.

By following their lead, Trump and his apprentices risk devastating capital flight that could leave many of our leading financial institutions insolvent. In addition to his deeply destructive tariffs, Trump’s sweeping campaign against the rule of law in the United States has raised the economic stakes from a rocky business cycle to a potential financial and economic meltdown with terrible consequences.

America’s respect for the rule of law is the reason foreign investors have felt safe parking their money here, and all Americans have benefitted from our role as a safe place in the global economy.

Anyone who has taken Economics 101 understands that the rule of law is fundamental to business and investment. It creates the predictable, stable, and fair environment that economic activity depends upon. Without predictability and stability,
businesses and investors are unable to make long-term plans and commitments. Unless laws governing commerce are clear and consistently enforced– and not subject to arbitrary changes– companies can’t assess risks and returns.

You would think the Republicans who fancy themselves protectors of private property and capital would understand that it is the rule of law that protects that private property from seizure or infringement, and that investors–foreign or domestic– are highly unlikely to put money into an economy where assets can be seized or destroyed without due process.

When the GOP was a party, and not a cult, it understood that.

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