Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

When You’re Rich They Think You Really Know

I typically listen to music when I’m trudging on the treadmill, and my preference is for tuneful songs with lyrics I can understand. (I’m old!).

I’ve previously posted about the insights and real wisdom often conveyed by musical lyrics, especially a favorite line from Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were a Rich Man.” Tevya sings that, if he were rich, the men of the town would all call on him for advice; he then sings “And it wouldn’t matter if I answered right or wrong. When you’re rich, they think you really know.”

As Trump assembles an administration of very rich men, we are about to see the fallacy that Tevya identified play out in real time.

Americans have a long history of confusing celebrity with competence and wealth with intellect. Those with eyes to see have always recognized that Trump himself is a deranged ignoramus with a bloated ego. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into “X,” he’d been able to maintain a reputation as highly intelligent partly because few people knew that–like Trump–his fortune began with an inheritance, and that he’d purchased Tesla–not invented it.

The United States is about to be governed (or ruled) by a whole cohort of equally clueless rich White guys, and the most pertinent  question is how much damage will they do? These are, after all, the “captains of industry” who think they know more than they do, who don’t know what they don’t know, and who are unlikely to listen to people who have actual expertise in economics and/or a wide variety of public policies. (As Tevya would say, “they think they really know.”)

Paul Krugman recently considered that conundrum in a newsletter titled “Never Underestimate the Ignorance of the Powerful.” He began by reproducing one of Trump’s “Truth Social” posts, in which the incoming President proposed substituting tariffs for income taxes. “Tariffs” Trump posted, “Will pay off our debt and MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m still extremely unsure what the incoming president will actually do about trade. The Smoot-Hawley level tariffs he promised during the campaign would be disastrous, but sometimes I think he may have at least a vague sense of the damage those tariffs would do, so what he’s really aiming for is an extortion scheme — one in which most companies would secure exemptions via political contributions and/or de facto bribes (e.g. buying Trump crypto.)

But then he’ll come out with something like the Truth Social post above, and I’ll be reminded that wealthy and powerful people like Trump or Andreesen or, of course, Elon Musk are often far more ignorant than policy wonks can easily imagine.

As Krugman reminds us, Trump very publicly disdains expertise, and Musk “appears to get what he thinks is intelligence from random posts on X.”

Krugman attributes this intellectual defect to “the arrogance of success.”

In the academic world there’s a familiar phenomenon sometimes called “great man’s disease,” in which a successful researcher in one field assumes that he (it’s usually a “he”) is so much smarter than experts in other fields that he doesn’t need to pay attention to their research. Physicists make confident, deeply ignorant pronouncements about economics; economists make confident, deeply ignorant pronouncements about sociology…

This kind of arrogance presumably comes even more easily to men of great wealth. After all, if these so-called experts are so smart, why aren’t they rich like me?

As Krugman also notes, wealth and power attract hangers-on who will tell the great man what he wants to hear. “There are wealthy men with enough humility to accept constructive criticism — I’ve met some of them. But such men don’t seem likely to play a role in the incoming administration.”

When Trump or Andreesen ask why we can’t go back to the McKinley era, when the government subsisted on tariffs and didn’t need an income tax, their problem isn’t failure to understand the revenue function; it’s failure to appreciate the simple fact that in the 1890s America barely had a government by modern standards.

Sure, tariffs could pay for a government without Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, at a time when even the military was tiny. But the constituency for returning to that kind of small government consists, as far as I can tell, of a couple of dozen libertarians in bow ties. And the kind of government we have now needs a lot more than tariffs to pay its way.

Bottom line: we’re about to discover the real downsides of a kakistocracy…

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What We Will Inaugurate

In a little over a week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the (dis)United States–an outcome that seemed unthinkable not that long ago. Among the reasons for that outcome was the refusal of millions of Americans to cast a ballot; if turnout had just held steady from 2020, Harris would have won. It’s hard to dismiss suspicion that racism and misogyny were more potent than a desire to keep a mentally-ill felon out of the Oval Office.

Some political supporters saw Trump as a path toward personal gain. As Josh Marshall wrote on Talking Points Memo, many Washington “players” saw Trump as a vehicle for their own ambitions. He wasn’t just old and increasingly worn out, but he also wasn’t particularly invested in what would happen once he was in the White House. His focus was on not going to jail and  exacting vengeance over his foes. As Marshall noted, that disinterest in actual governing leaves lots of openings for people who see an opportunity to direct–and benefit from– government policy. There’s little sign Trump cares. He’s already gotten what he wants.

We see evidence supporting Marshall’s thesis in what currently looks like the “co-Presidency” of Elon Musk. An article in Common Dreams introduced readers to the Mump regime:

Welcome to America’s “Mump regime,” governance of, by and for the oligarchs in which an erratic unelected white supremacist gazillionaire whose new hobby is buying presidents is cosplaying as shadow president to cash in – and fuck kids with cancer – alongside a senile grifter selling everything in sight: Bibles, sneakers, perfume, hotels, cabinet seats, diplomatic posts and democracy itself. Beware: Just to be clear, “We now have a criminal enterprise, not a government.”

The article notes that Trump has assembled a group of billionaires–13 so far–to staff his oligarchy, but notes that Musk is both the richest and most influential.

A likely illegal alien and white supremacist who grew up in apartheid South Africa, made a fortune from a car that kills twice as many people as the industry average, and though foreign-born found a way to power by giving a useful idiot $277 million to become his puppet master. A good investment: Since the election, Musk has made $170 billion, most from Tesla and SpaceX investors eager to see him end all those pesky safety and labor rules that cut into profits.

Buying Trump was so profitable Never-Elected Pres. Musk is already malevolently branching out. He’s threatening people in Congress, including “jackass” moderates of both parties, with unseating them by throwing money at potential primary opponents if they dare to disagree with him. Governing by threat, tweet and financial heft comes so easily to the guy who quickly turned Twitter into a bigot-invested haven for hate akin to “a Munich beer hall hall in 1933” that he’s even telling Germans how to vote – for Nazis. “Only the AFD can save Germany,” he posted in defense of anti-immigrant fascists who want to purify Europe by casting out people it considers lesser, if not subhuman. Weirdly, he did it on the same day 100 years ago Hitler was released from a Bavarian prison, and the New York Times declared him a “tamed…sadder and wiser man” than when he’d tried to overthrow the government.”

It’s difficult to predict how successful the Mump Administration will be in implementing its announced policies. Despite having “served” as President for a term, Trump has clearly learned little or nothing about governance, and Musk (who believes he knows everything) is equally ignorant of the way things actually work. The GOP’s majority in the House is narrow and it’s filled with culture warriors and White Nationalists more intent upon appearing on Fox News than governing. They’re adamantly opposed to anything approaching negotiation or compromise. If the country emerges relatively unscathed by the looney-tune administration taking shape, we will owe that escape to their massive dysfunctions.

Unfortunately, however, even incompetent clowns can do a lot of damage.

I keep thinking of that Mark Twain quote: Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

On Inauguration Day, a number of Hoosiers who might be considered “Mark Twain patriots” will reaffirm our support for and love of our country and for what I have called “the American Idea”–the philosophy animating our constituent documents, and summarized by America’s first motto: e pluribus unum. 

Ours will be a simple message: in our America, government serves the common good, and everyone deserves a seat at the civic table. (You can find more information about that gathering here.)

Join us if you can.

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One Zip Code At A Time

In yesterday’s post, I shared my stunned reaction to the people described in Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.”

I have always known that there are people who–for one reason or another– are emotionally or mentally unable to cope with the world they actually inhabit. I’ve also recognized that conspiracy theories and flat-out lunacy have increased significantly over the past few years. (QAnon, Jewish space lasers, etc., etc.) But I’m willing to wager that those of us who go about our daily affairs without interacting with the millions of “bible believers” Alberta describes simply haven’t grasped the degree to which these angry and fearful folks have rejected contact with reality.

Their bizarre beliefs explain Trump’s narrow win.

So much for an explanation. We are left with the question: what do sane folks do when the inmates are running the asylum? Granted, we must resist the efforts of a federal administration to pander to MAGA dysfunctions, but–as the Brookings Institution has recently counseled–there are other steps we can and should take.

At the national level, bipartisan collaboration to identify the systemic sources of our economic and social distress will be a long time coming. In the meantime, voters still want someone to address the chronic challenges they see in front of them in the places where they live and work.

In short, the rise of the digital world means that in the real world, we have more work to do than ever to solve problems. The good news is that in the remaining places where people mix and encounter those they don’t already know—whether that’s their neighborhood Main Street or downtown—the seeds of solutions already exist. At this hyperlocal level, individuals and institutions avoid ideological arguments, build trust, and do the on-the-ground work—often starting with public spaces—across the civic, nonprofit, private, and public sectors.

The authors remind us that neighborhood quality of life has been shown to be a key determinant of both personal well-being and voter satisfaction, and argues that–contrary to the argument that hyperlocal efforts are somehow a form of secession– they are actually the opposite: a way to keep people and places engaged.

The article traced former actions of people the authors call “local champions—sometimes residents, other times businesses or local civic entities”—who have previously taken action focused on the local public realm, creating business improvement districts, parks conservancies, creative “placemaking” groups, community gardens, public markets, and community development corporations. As the article noted, these hyper-local efforts stimulated place-based vibrancy and culture, and rebuilt social and civic infrastructure.

In recent years, some of these entities have expanded to co-managing and programming a major new category of public space in partnership with transportation advocates: streets and sidewalks (and plazas created on them). At the same time, some of the most promising experiments in addressing specific issues such as homelessness, crime, education, health, and small business support have focused on a place-centered approach, integrating an array of public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic players at the place level.

The “moral of the story” is obvious: in the face of coming dysfunction at the national level, Americans can lean into and improve the place-based partnerships that build community, trust, health, and wealth at the hyperlocal, zip-code level.

Such efforts should start with research into past successes and failures.

How can we learn from—and improve upon—the last 50 years’ of place-based partnerships that played a key role in reversing urban decline? Who has succeeded in building and sustaining strong places? What are the legal, regulatory, governance, and management mechanisms that link those players with government at the hyperlocal level and incentivize their working together for the common good? Which bureaucratic barriers hold them back? What are the financial mechanisms that sustain place-centered institutions? Where are these place-centered partnerships not happening and why not?

I think this is sound advice. Focusing on local improvements encourages and facilitates participation by citizens who feel powerless to affect national policy. While we certainly should continue to do what we can to resist dangerous and damaging federal actions (emailing our representatives, attending protests, funding resistance organizations), an individual’s ability to effect change is far greater at the local level. And citizens who participate in local successes are much more likely to take an interest in all policy issues and to vote.

Even some of the rabid “believers” Alberta described might be induced to visit reality, however briefly, if reality visits their zip codes.

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Taking Credit

What do scolds like yours truly mean when we bemoan low levels of civic literacy ? Rather obviously, it’s an accusation of  lack of knowledge of America’s legal/philosophical framework–the Constitution and Bill of Rights, an understanding of what is meant by the “rule of law.” But it’s also, increasingly, a reference to citizens’ lack of historical knowledge and worrisome ignorance of the realities of the governing and economic environment they inhabit.

Civic ignorance isn’t all the fault of individuals who simply don’t care or don’t pay attention. For many years, high schools have neglected civics instruction and whitewashed America’s history. And the fragmented nature of our information environment positively encourages misunderstanding –or often, offers politically-motivated mythology–about the performance of Presidential administrations.

We’ve just emerged from an election in which Trump benefited handsomely from that latter ignorance, as voters blamed Biden for an inflation that was worldwide, even though, under his administration, the U.S. brought it under control far more quickly than other nations managed to do.

Trump’s narrow win points to a major problem posed by Americans’ low levels of civic literacy–the erroneous assignment of credit and blame.

Simon Rosenberg recently considered that problem.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inherited one of the worst first days an American Presidential Administration in our history. Trump left us a dadly bungled pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die unnecessarily, an economy in deep recession and a global economy teetering, a Capital City and our democracy that had just been attacked by Trump and his mobs. What Joe Biden and Kamala Harris walked into on January 20th was without doubt one of the worst first days an American Administration has ever faced.

Trump and Vance will inherit one of the best. The Biden-Harris job market has been the best since the 1960s. Wage growth, new business formation and the # of job openings per unemployed persons have been at historically elevated levels. Inflation has been beaten, gas prices are low, interest rates are coming down and our recovery from COVID has been the best of any advanced nation in the world. The dollar is strong. GDP growth has hovered around 3% for all four years of Biden’s Presidency and the stock market keeps booming. The uninsured rate is the lowest on record. Through historic levels of domestic production of renewables, oil and gas America is more energy independent today than we’ve been in decades. Crime, overdose rates, the flows to the border and the deficit have come way down. Biden’s big three investment bills are creating jobs and opportunities for American workers today and will keep doing so for decades if Trump doesn’t gut them. We’ve begun stripping away the requirement of a four year college degree for government employment and other jobs too. We’ve lowered the price of prescription drugs, capped insulin at $35 and this year all seniors will enjoy a $2,000 Rx price cap. The Iranian-Russian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis in the Middle East has been deeply degraded. The Western alliance has been rejuvenated…..

Rosenberg morosely itemizes what we know is coming: Trump will take credit for Biden’s accomplishments. If he doesn’t manage to tank the stock market, its health will be due to him.

The economy will be strong due to him. Crime will be down due to him. Seniors will have their prescriptions capped at $2,000 due to him. Bridges will be built due to him. Record domestic gas and oil production will happen due to him. Gas prices will be low due to him. Iran and Russia will be weakened in the Middle East due to him…….

Rosenberg writes that Americans need to engage in a “long and deep conversation” about why the story of the Biden-Harris administration failed to resonate with the public–why so many Americans simply failed to understand its really remarkable performance–and dramatically mis-remembered the chaos and ineptitude of the prior Trump administration. As Rosenberg writes,

There has been one big story in American politics since 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell – Democrats have made things better for the American people, Republicans have made them worse. We’ve repeatedly brought growth, lower deficits, rising wages, American progress. Republicans have brought 3 recessions in a row, higher deficits, American decline and now unfathomable MAGA ugliness and extremism.

Americans’ confusion of celebrity with actual accomplishment is responsible for some of the phenomena I lump under “civic illiteracy.” If Joe Biden had the glamour and oratorical skills of a Barack Obama, perhaps the successes of his administration would have been more widely understood.

Trump will take credit for Biden’s accomplishments. Those of us who know better need to be loud and persistent truth tellers.

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The Work Of Governing

An unfortunate side-effect of Americans’ fascination with celebrity is their accompanying confusion of fame with competence. That inability to understand the difference–especially when it comes to political campaigns– is largely a result of widespread ignorance of the day-to-day grunt-work of governing.

John Sweezy, the long-ago (now deceased) Republican chairman of my county party used to say that every citizen should be required to serve two years in government, and prohibited from staying for more than four years. While I disagreed with his four-year edict, I completely understood the benefit of a two-year stint that would introduce citizens to the distinctly unglamorous realities involved.

I served as Corporation Counsel in Indianapolis for a bit over two years, many–many–years ago, and it was an education. I was disabused of the then-widespread notion that civil servants were largely folks who couldn’t find private sector jobs–my co-workers were some of the brightest and most hard-working people I’ve ever known. Most of all, I came to understand the realities of government service, along with the difficulties of weighing competing public interests.

In one of her recent Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson illuminated those lessons by recalling the efforts that averted a threatened Y2K calamity.

When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed.

As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could be disrupted by the glitch. They knew that the public must have confidence that world systems would survive, and the United States and the United Kingdom, where at the time computers were more widespread than they were elsewhere, emphasized transparency about how governments, companies, and programmers were handling the problem. They backed the World Bank and the United Nations in their work to help developing countries fix their own Y2K issues.

Those of us who were adults in the run-up to the turn of the century still remember the dire warnings. Planes would fall out of the sky, computers would fail to work, the funds in your bank account would be inaccessible…on and on. Preachers of some religions predicted the end times.

None of that happened, not because the threat was unfounded, but because public servants worked for many months to correct the problem. As Richardson wrote,

In fact, the fix turned out to be simple—programmers developed updated systems that recognized a four-digit date—but implementing it meant that hardware and software had to be adjusted to become Y2K compliant, and they had to be ready by midnight on December 31, 1999. Technology teams worked for years, racing to meet the deadline at a cost that researchers estimate to have been $300–$600 billion. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.

Richardson followed her description of the problem and its solution with what I will label “the moral of the story.”

Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”

I don’t know how to make the majority of American voters understand that when they cast a ballot, they need to vote for someone with the skills or background to understand the job–someone who is competent to fix the sorts of problems governments encounter. When they vote for an entertainer, or culture warrior, or “outsider” who proudly claims to know nothing about politics or government, they get what they vote for–and governing suffers.

After all, most of us wouldn’t choose a doctor who’d never been to medical school…

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