I think there is some added detail needed here about short vs long-term outcomes. In the long run, progress does seem to be winning out. Trade liberalization may be temporarily on the retreat, but the long-term trend remains. Regarding zoning, someprogress has been made. Modern rent-control schemes tend to be less draconian than past ones (allowing for higher rents on new development, for example).
Mostly this probably conflicts with the claim
Voters, broadly speaking, aren’t capable of understanding the impacts of policies, past or present, and so cannot judge or punish politicians accordingly, except for glaring mistakes.
Which mistakes are considered glaring changes over time. As we gradually raise the sanity waterline, obviously bad policies are easier to reject. There is also a bit of learning-by-doing. During the 2008 recession, many people bought into the claim that the Federal Reserve simply couldn’t do much about low inflation. During the 2020 recession, the Federal Reserve acted much more aggressively to stimulate demand. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine India retreating back into the License Raj or China returning to a Command-and-Control economy.
Do you mean progress in the good sense or the progressive political sense? I am arguing this is so in the political sense, but not neccessarily the good sense. So of course trade liberalisation would continue, because it is politically progressive, but not actual progress for many people in Western countries.
If rent control schemes are still taken seriously anywhere, is that not still a massive defeat? This theory would predict that a massive amount of energy could be poured into moving housing policy in the right direction, but only make a small amount of progress because politicians aren’t incentivised to solve housing policy, which I think corresponds with reality. What I’m getting at with housing policy is that progressive politicians may literally have no or negative incentives to fix it, and therefore the energy to do it has to be entirely public, which is a bad political design.
The Fed is not a democratic institution. China is not a democracy either. India I know little about. I don’t see how these examples are relevant to my point that in a democracy, left wing parties aren’t electorally incentivised to solve people’s problems, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t, or make them worse.
I think there is some added detail needed here about short vs long-term outcomes. In the long run, progress does seem to be winning out. Trade liberalization may be temporarily on the retreat, but the long-term trend remains. Regarding zoning, some progress has been made. Modern rent-control schemes tend to be less draconian than past ones (allowing for higher rents on new development, for example).
Mostly this probably conflicts with the claim
Which mistakes are considered glaring changes over time. As we gradually raise the sanity waterline, obviously bad policies are easier to reject. There is also a bit of learning-by-doing. During the 2008 recession, many people bought into the claim that the Federal Reserve simply couldn’t do much about low inflation. During the 2020 recession, the Federal Reserve acted much more aggressively to stimulate demand. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine India retreating back into the License Raj or China returning to a Command-and-Control economy.
Do you mean progress in the good sense or the progressive political sense? I am arguing this is so in the political sense, but not neccessarily the good sense. So of course trade liberalisation would continue, because it is politically progressive, but not actual progress for many people in Western countries.
If rent control schemes are still taken seriously anywhere, is that not still a massive defeat? This theory would predict that a massive amount of energy could be poured into moving housing policy in the right direction, but only make a small amount of progress because politicians aren’t incentivised to solve housing policy, which I think corresponds with reality. What I’m getting at with housing policy is that progressive politicians may literally have no or negative incentives to fix it, and therefore the energy to do it has to be entirely public, which is a bad political design.
The Fed is not a democratic institution. China is not a democracy either. India I know little about. I don’t see how these examples are relevant to my point that in a democracy, left wing parties aren’t electorally incentivised to solve people’s problems, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t, or make them worse.