toddntucker.com
Director, Industrial Policy & Trade, @RooseveltInstitute.org, @RooseveltForward.org. Political scientist of economic transitions, administrative states, Bidenomics, Trumpnomics. Fellows @Harvard Kennedy School. Lectures @JHU. PhD.
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And the South's low taxes need to be put in light of the federal government's net transfer of resources to them.
www.axios.com/2025/02/12/s...
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There is no doubt that Southern states have something to show other states in terms of robust economic development offices - a demonstration not of deregulation but state power.
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I think the issue is less that there's not widespread acknowledgement of this trend, but that competition on the basis of labor suppression is seen as illegitimate/ socially corrosive - especially within national polities, but also between them.
Thus progressives' federalization push in the 1930s.
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People dunking on Trump for being an accidental socialist but I want to see more dunks that DOGE just fired the people that would be needed to run the Lange model
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Pour one out for the roughly three seconds last summer that Harris floated a price gouging proposal and got absolutely annihilated in the discourse to the point she never mentioned it again.
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My theory is that the argumentation style of positing a "theory of everything" draws them to each other. People that work on industrial policy or macro or Latin American policy or whatever would never pretend their interest should be for everyone all the time.
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Fwiw, here is my review of the book, which tries to unpack the question of power in abundance.
The tl;Dr is that I don't think Bay Area housing constraints are that relevant for national industrial policy, and that political factions need an organizable base.
rooseveltforward.org/2025/03/23/a...
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The new mediascape - with less investigative reporting, more take generation; fewer falsifiable/ clearly stated hypotheses, more hours long "debate me bro" podcast hangs - is making this mode of argumentation more common.
Think tanks and policy schools are struggling to adapt. How to train for it?
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This leads to a lot of slipperiness in the whole debate, between levels of abstraction, whether a problem is political or policy, perception or reality, whether the effort is a movement or just a book.
It's hard to tell how much this confusion is intentionally generated or genuinely unanticipated.
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In Abundance,
A) The consensus is hidden, even to its adherents.
B) The burden of proof is on people that question the revisionist take, who are asked to justify data they may have never thought about, like Austin v. New York housing build times. The counterarguments are (said to be) a surprise.
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3. In the olden days, contrarian and revisionist takes were very welcome. But the rules were:
A) Attack a clearly defined and widely accepted consensus.
B) Accept that the burden of proof was on you to rebut that consensus, anticipating counterarguments.
Abundance doesn't play by those rules.
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Stand strong
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The probabilities of each tipping point - the leftmost are more likely given current warming trajectory.
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And here's a breakdown of what temperature thresholds might trigger them, and what the warming impact could be.
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What's the orthodoxy you refer to?
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If China agrees to a fentanyl deal, it'll face tariffs similar to other countries. At that point, whatever reindustrialization justification for the tariffs to deal with Chinese overcapacity will slip away.
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Trump has a lot of leeway to define emergencies under existing precedents.
However, this line of argument could raise the question of whether the emergency is well specified. The deficit isn't the problem, it's the lack of preparedness ... Itself a policy choice, a problem with many solutions.
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I’ll also be on with @chrismurphyct.bsky.social and @ositanwanevu.com tomorrow with @rooseveltforward.org talking about the path forward and how we make that promise real. Tune in and listen. events.zoom.us/ev/AtLxoobQQ...
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If I'm a judge looking to pick and choose fights with the administration, this feels like an easy one to let Trump have. Congress not asserting its powers makes the delegation look lawful, and the tariffs implicitly approved.