Polarization

A surprising little instance of what looks like personal butthurt on the part of young Matty Yglesias, in the Substack Notes, aimed toward the Australian economist and Blogger Hall of Fame member John Quiggin:

So the first thing to say is that Quiggin's note is marked with a mock HTML tag <sarc off> suggesting we're possibly not meant to take it literally, and it's definitely not an accurate summary of Yglesias's post ("Polarization Is a Choice"), which doesn't even mention the polarization between parties that would like to overthrow US democracy and those that would not. 

Rather, it's the story of less inflammatory issues in the careers of two originally "moderate" presidents who were (according to the author) practically the same political person during their respective presidential campaigns, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and then decided, apparently for personal reasons, to radicalize in oppposite directions, Trump to the "right" and Biden to the "left", when in office. Thus, in the case of Trump:

Thinking Bigger

 

Dumpling truck, via New York Street Food.

Cheered and even kind of pumped by a radio appearance from Matty Glesias (as I like to think of him—it's how it looks on his Twitter handle) promoting a book, One Billion Americans: The Case For Thinking Bigger, offering some pretty big thinking indeed: that if you really wanted to make America great again, you'd want to do it with a greater population, say tripling it to a billion by the year 2100, through a combination of policies: not just making immigration much easier rather than much harder as the Trump administration has done, but also making it much easier for existing Americans to raise kids, and generally working the infrastructure to support a bigger population, because

the United States is not “full.” Many of its iconic cities—including not just famous cases of collapse like Detroit but also Philadelphia and Chicago and dozens of smaller cities like Rochester and Erie—actually have fewer residents than they had decades ago. And virtually all of our thriving cities easily have room to grow and accommodate more people.

American Visigothic

A conservative mark = wrecked a lot of things and hurt a lot of people. @nytimes https://t.co/WwxZMzCenD

— Lance Mannion (@LanceMannion) December 26, 2017

After a chaotic start, the Roman Senate—sometimes working with Emperor Honorius holed up in Ravenna, sometimes against him—racked up a solid record of conservative accomplishment in 409, firmly letting their British colony know that it would have to defend itself from here on (Italia First!); improving troubled relations with Alaric the Visigoth by making him commander-in-chief of the Western Empire (magister utriusque militiae), paying him a substantial bribe, and naming an alternative local emperor, Priscus Attalus, more to Alaric's liking; not to mention passing an edict forbidding anybody to wear trousers within the city walls.

Actually the edict on the trousers dated back to 399, but you see what I mean.

Evariste-Vital Luminais (1821-96), Alaric's forces in the sack of Rome, 410.

I get briefly caught in the trollery

Christopher Hayes wanted to know what he should ask Diane Ravitch in an interview. Yglesias had a suggestion:

@mattyglesias @chrislhayes NO. Ending poverty is *a* key. Teacher pay is another http://t.co/MKNTgDyGfN (found in about 4 secs of googling).
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2013

Troll Bridge by Gido at DeviantArt.

Needless to say Yglesias did not respond. I personally doubt that teachers' salaries would provide enough money to make a significant dent in poverty anyway, in spite of the vast power of fanatical teachers' unions. But I'm not a famous economist.