Matt Yglesias with an interesting take that the Republicans are actually directionless. Unclear to me the extent to which I agree, given how early it is, but it is clear that factional strife is ongoing and could make it hard to do things. There was a podcast in Statecraft a while ago about the different governing methods of the two parties, with the Republicans being primarily top-down and the Democrats bottom-up. To the extent this is true, this implies that Trump himself doesn’t have a clear picture of what it is he wants to do, or more likely in my opinion, doesn’t want to think about Congress while EOs are available. Anyways, Matt’s article is probably in some ways a response to the idea that Democrats are lost, and according to this theory they are because their coalition fell apart and no one can do anything until the new equilibrium consensus is reached. For the most part, you can infer from their complaints that the woke contingent is being blamed and frozen out, probably rightly, since even as the executive branch is being gutted Trump’s approval rating is not falling since he has the shield of anti-DEI. And ironically, two of their traditional supporters who most naturally should be taking up the new left-wing core, the working class and tech, are now fighting it out in the Trump camp. I actually get the sense that the Democrats are waiting for one of the two to lose favor and rejoin their side, which hilariously means that it might be in the interest of the Republicans that their internal conflicts never resolve.
Jonathan Anomaly on the subversive podcast, arguing that we should have what he calls “Enlightened Tribalism”, which is essentially economic liberalism without universalism. It seems to me that the core question here is how to handle the paradox of intolerance. Supposedly the Vlach Rom believe they have absolutely no moral or legal obligations towards outsiders, which makes it difficult for mutually beneficial agreements to be made with the rest of society. Famously, the rationalist position is to more or less tolerate anyone. Among “liberal” progressives, the position is something like that you should not tolerate the intolerant, unless they happen to be officially marked disadvantaged (which can be thought of as a sort of threat assessment). Presumably, disagreement with both of these heuristics is why Jonathan felt the need to describe his current position. I personally don’t really understand it though, because to me the fundamental unit should be the individual and not the group, particularly in societies where most people are literate and so capable of doing their own moral reasoning. As Jonathan himself mentions, tribalism historically has been the cause of many violent conflicts, exactly because mutual intolerance means that coexistence is not possible.
Ben Reinhardt makes the case that universities do too many things to function effectively at any of them. Seems persuasive to me, but it occurs to me that if the process of unbundling begins with external focused competition that forces the university to pick a core mission, this will probably begin with the highest value functions like teaching and basic research first. If they don’t take the initiative, the universities will only have the leftovers, none of which will be usable as the center of any strategy. Semi-related, Michael Strong on Infinite Loops, although that is more focused on K-12.
MacLeans magazine on high housing prices in Canada (via Longreads). Related, Works in Progress on how parking is typically under-priced, which given the success of NY congestion pricing and the rise of ride-sharing, I’m cautiously optimistic about.
Metropolitan Review has interesting and well written reviews, but currently seems to be following a formula where they take holy cows and write negative or ambivalent reviews for them. This one is ARX-Han on Rejected (haven’t read).
Matt Levine on complications to the OpenAI buyout offer from Elon, discussed a few days ago by Nathan Young, also covered by 80K hours. Tangentially related, Zvi and Brian Chau with opposing valences to the Vance speech.
Living Fossils on ego depletion and the inability for some discredited theories to go away. Although I think in this case it’s because while ego depletion isn’t a distinct phenomena from fatigue (according to Michael Inzlicht, because it’s really fatigue), that nuance is lost on the general public, who now owns the concept and feels it to be true.
Sam Harsimony linkthread.
