Klein is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He also co-founded Vox. Definitely Democratically-oriented.
A lot of this is coming from his opinion piece in the New York Times entitled "Four Ways of Looking at the Radicalism of Joe Biden". That may be gated. It's worth your time to find a way around that. Here's an idea: try our library.
So it's a Democrat writing about how the Biden administration has moved to the left of Democrats.
The standard explanation for all this is the advent of the coronavirus. The country is in crisis, and Biden is rising to meet the moment. But I don’t buy it. That may explain the American Rescue Plan. But the American Jobs Plan, and the forthcoming American Family Plan, go far beyond the virus. Put together, they are a sweeping indictment of the prepandemic status quo as a disaster for both people and the planet — a status quo that in many cases Biden helped build and certainly never seemed eager to upend.
Klein has 4 explanations for this.
1)
Republicans have completely stopped engaging with the Democrats. You can't compromise with someone that won't talk to you. So the mainstream Democrats are compromising with the Democrats further to the left instead.
2)
Most people don't seem to understand this point:
Washington is run by 20- and 30-somethings who run the numbers, draft the bills, brief the principals.
It's always been that way. And this younger generation has "... Sharply different view on the role of government ... and the risks worth taking seriously".
Now, and this is my personal opinion, I can see how someone in that generation would look at the last 20 years and see government failures all around, but I don't see how from this one concludes that it will be different this time.
3)
I'm actually OK with this. I think highly of economists, but I don't think other people have to:
Biden has less trust in economists, and so does everyone else [in his administration].
Obama’s constant frustration was that politicians didn’t understand economics. Biden’s constant frustration is that economists don’t understand politics.
It does bug me that the people in charge have less trust of economists about the economics itself.
This especially bugs me because it does not happen in other fields. The idea that we'd have less trust in soccer coaches about soccer itself is not something most people would accept.
4)
Biden is a political chameleon. This is simple. The electorate moved left, and so did Biden.
Do not fool yourself that this was about electoral shenanigans (I'm not even denying the relevance of those).
Instead keep in mind that Trump was a lifelong Democrat. If the Republicans can fall in behind Trump, it means they were moving to left at least several years ago.
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Klein also tweets, and there are some cool clarifications and comments there. Plus he gets replies from people from the stratosphere like Paul Krugman:
Mostly this seems right, but "not listening to Larry Summers" is not the same as "not listening to economists." The really big difference with Biden is the reduced influence of Wall Street ...
I agree with this on one level: I didn't think the people that both Bush and Obama brought in from Wall Street were very good.
But on another level I disagree. The Biden executive is heavily staffed with people who've rotated through a particular Wall Street firm: Black Rock.
Bush and Obama pulled Wall Streeters mostly from Goldman Sachs. To me, switching to Black Rock is a lateral shift.
On a different note, Mason made clear that the direction of the Biden team shows a lot less interest in incentives than in the past. That's all about the microeconomics and the efficiency of doing things in certain ways. Here's Matt Yglesias:
The danger is that the more successful you are at saying “fuck it, we just need full employment” the more micro/efficiency considerations actually end up mattering a lot.
That reflects an essential truth: when something works seamlessly it starts to seen unimportant, and we begin to take it casually. For example, most people drive more carefully after an accident, and that helps them avoid another one, but that discipline fades, and when it does the probability of an accident goes back up again. This is Cochrane's point: the people on the Biden team have forgotten that moves like this in the 60s ended badly all through the 70s.
I would say both Krugman and Yglesias are to the left of Klein, but neither one is in the league of Jared Bernstein or Heather Boushey.
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And what does Tyler Cowen think about Klein's hypotheses?
I would frame the described truths in a quite negative manner. I would say that in essence they are making decisions based on their own sociology and class and conformism, and also on the basis of what they think (poorly informed) voters want, rather than focusing on scientific reasoning and trying to see that through. And whatever problems economics might have, including as a predictive tool, one does not do better with those who are trying to take its place.
That's raw.
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