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To rant more, folks should not underestimate how much this elite-consensus mentality has damaged the legitimacy of liberal democracy since 2008 -- and even before. (1/n) https://twitter.com/ChrisPolPsych/status/1343939237255778316
Elites of the center-right & center-left have made an *expressive* fetish of avoiding perceived moral hazard and/or perfecting of technocratic delivery of social welfare, to the point where policy is totally divorced from the reality of insecurity in a market economy. (2/n)
This is not to say that moral hazard is never a real thing or that folks should not care about the efficient delivery of services. (3/n)
But current elites' view of what constitutes serious moral hazard or efficient service delivery often reflects the expressive concerns of a stratum whose identities are entirely defined by idealized notions of market success or meritocratic competence. (4/n)
These expressive concerns -- subjectively real to those who hold them -- are bound up with the lived experience of highly educated people who are relatively shielded from the risks built into kinds of market economies that have been built in the neoliberal era. (5/n)
Concern about deficits -- always strategically turned on and off on the basis of partisanship anyway -- is similarly dysfunctional, despite the clear logic that running deficits is OK when demand is suppressed. (6/n)
As many folks smarter than me (including Krugman!) have noted, deficit concerns and support for austerity prosper far beyond any empirical justification, as a way for people to distinguish themselves as "serious" members of the governing elite. (7/n)
If we ever want to see any kind of legitimacy and stability come back to the liberal-democratic world, a lot of our leaders are going to need to step away from the managerial circle jerk they've gotten used to being part of. (8/8)
