No, no, and no. This is because any good or service will be means-tested and our mechanisms for testing means are state-based which means redlining and discrimination. If the people who need it the most are African-Americans in the South, creating a good or service at the federal level will guarantee that Southern legislators will either opt out for "patriotic" reasons or gerrymander eligibility such that all the money goes to a white guy named Clem. The problem is that if you eliminate market forces the market will force everyone to take a knee. Education didn't go fully batshit until it became impossible to disburse student loan debt in bankruptcy while keeping the federal guarantee on student loan debt. As a consequence, any institution whose students default on debt get paid 100% by the government, who sells that debt to a collector for 10 cents on the dollar, who can garnish that student's debt at 200% of its face value and nothing shy of DYING will make it go away and somehow this is a subsidy problem? Medical expenses truly shot for the moon the minute the Republicans (with the backing of the AARP) forbid Medicare and Medicaid from negotiating prices with private companies. You think EpiPens would be $350 ea. if Medicaid could go "naaah we need these for the inner city and there's eleven cents of epinephren in a fifty cent housing get bent?" Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a deeply cynical, deeply libertarian book that argues every modern problem will eventually be solved by innovation simply because the incentives are too great not to. Nowhere does it say there will be smooth landings, nowhere does it say disruption won't leave a trail of dead, nowhere does it say things will be painless. Bastani basically sweeps the bodies under the rug, much the way Paul Watson's book on global warming basically says "so uhhh a lot of Africa, Asia and South America gonna die, moving on." If anything, Bastani argues that most innovation is happening outside the bounds of regulation and eventually, regulation catches up with innovation. There is zero fairness in Bastani's "vision." William Gibson's latest trilogy hinges on the concept of "the Jackpot", a period of tribulation in which no single event fucks the world over, but global warming, pandemics, scarcity and politics combine to deeply pare the human race down to isolated ivory-tower aristocrats lording over a vastly-depleted landscape. The actual depletion is left happily off-stage as per usual to play with time travel between alternate histories on either side of the event because, like most novelists, Gibson ignores the slow grinding period where nothing good happens and everybody dies. But make no mistake. "The Jackpot" is very much lurking in every page of Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism. Spoken by someone with no fucking clue how drug funding works. Aimmune was a two billion dollar company whose sole purpose was to feed peanuts in a controlled fashion to kids who are allergic to peanuts so they wouldn't be allergic to peanuts. In order to recoup the expense of peanuts, Aimmune had to sell their anointed peanuts for $50 ea. Nestle, smelling blood in the water, bought a two billion dollar company for two point six billion dollars so they could sell anointed peanuts for $50 ea. Now - your goal is to come up with a "prize" such that Nestle is more incentivized to come up with magic peanuts and give the technology to the government instead of selling magic peanuts for $50 ea for the next 17 years (not adjusted for inflation) without giving Medicare or Medicaid the ability to negotiate prices. The Progressive Housing Market, ladies and gentlemen - entirely owned by rich people yet somehow, eliminating zoning restrictions will somehow benefit poor people. Let's say my block goes from "residential" to "multi-family." First thing that's gonna happen is my neighbor is gonna try and scramble together a loan to buy everybody out 'cuz he already owns three of the 30 houses here. Next thing that's gonna happen is KBB or someone equally huge is gonna swoop in and buy everybody out for 20% more than the houses are worth. My neighbor is gonna do the best, of course, but the rest of us are gonna get a modest bump. KBB is gonna raze the entire neighborhood and in three years, maybe four, there will be a thousand units where there used to be 30... and every.single.one of them will rent for more than the houses that got nuked and all that money is gonna go back to where it came from: the fucking stock market. And Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama and Joe Biden will smile about all the "housing opportunity" they've opened up. We can pretend that there was some sort of low-income provision in all this but the developer will get two thirds of the way through, claim poverty, stop work and my neighborhood will be a hole in the ground for six months while city council meetings scream about "think of the children" and then those restrictions will be gone like a fart in the wind and poof my whole neighborhood is suddenly chockablock with pissed-off Amazonians who have nowhere to park because the permits were originally for low-income housing so there's no parking garage. And I would like our miscarriage rate to go down. But, much like Ezra Klein's Town Called Perfect, this has a lot more to do with conservatives more interested in eating horse paste than getting vaccinated because something something freedom.But progressives are often uninterested in the creation of the goods and services they want everyone to have. This creates a problem and misses an opportunity.
The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing.
A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a post-work, post-scarcity vision.
Bastani’s vision is bracing because it insists that those of us who believe in a radically fairer, gentler, more sustainable world have a stake in bringing forward the technologies that will make that world possible.
We should combine price controls with new policies to encourage drug development. That could include everything from more funding of basic research to huge prizes for discovering drugs that treat particular conditions to more public funding for drug trials.
A decade ago, progressives talked often of making housing affordable, but they didn’t talk much about increasing housing supply. Now they do. That’s progress.
don’t think these various policies have cohered into a policy faction, a way progressives think of themselves, at least not yet. But I’d like to see that happen.
One of the problems with techo-libertarians is that they are loathe to recognize that the point of "regulation", per se, is to make companies absorb some of the external costs of doing business, none of which are captured by regulation-skirting companies like Uber and their ilk. One can quibble with any particular regulation as overbearing or inappropriate for its particular stated ends, but when we say we're against regulation what we're really saying is "Fuck the Cuyahoga river; move elsewhere if you want drinkable water." There's no Utopian future in which tech companies solve everything. We already sort of know what it looks like when tech companies solve everything, and it looks a lot like Jan 6. I think Klein is wrong that liberals have not paid attention to supply side problems. Obama tried to prop up our solar sector to compete with the Chinese and all we got was a 24 hr news cycle about Solyndra. Similarly, the government is already the biggest funder of basic drug research, insofar as most new drugs result from discoveries made at university/non-profit labs. CAR-T, for example, comes from your neck of the woods (Hutch--even though the first product was made at Penn, that's where the idea was hatched, if I'm not mistaken). There are ways to attack the drug price problem without radically changing the way drugs are manufactured and delivered. Most have to do with regulatory and legal handling post-approval. E.g., We could extend the patent life of new medicines in exchange for price controls. One thing that has happened in the last few decades is that the discovery-to-market time horizon has gotten *really long. This is a function of a number of factors, but in the end a company may only have 6 or 7 years to recoup their investment (plus all the failed investments they need to cover with each successful drug). I think the one area where we may be ripe for a technoutopian change is with respect to work. The pandemic has shown us all how stupid commuting every day is for so many jobs. If enough people can redistribute themselves out of crowded, expensive centers, then you'd think housing pressure would ease naturally. I think the last thing I want to see in America is Hong Kong-style 200 sq-ft apartment living. We have the space; let's use it.
The older I get, the more firmly I believe that economics and policy "research" are nothing more than the black art of burying externalities. The whole point of most soft sciences related to policy of any kind is to argue that some things aren't worth arguing about. This is generally done to the benefit of whoever pays the best. And the older I get, the more firmly I am convinced that actual progress is done in darkness where it doesn't cost anything. The Treasury department repatriating swiss bank accounts, for example. Never so much as made the news. It's one of the things Piketty said was an unalloyed good and not a single reporter bothered to follow up on it whatsoever. The fact that cryptocurrency fucking eliminates counterfeiting, black market and gray market goods. Know what's been biting my ass all year? Depending on who you ask it's either the "9.5% affordability threshold", the "9.83% rule" or the "family glitch." Here's how it works: - You, a citizen of the greatest economy the world has ever seen, get sick sometimes. This can cost you tens of thousands of dollars. In order to defray this utterly avoidable and utterly lamentable tragedy, you are required under penalty of law to buy health insurance. - They, the Government, as part of the most cynically "sweeping" healthcare reforms in generations, have determined that you should never be required to pay more than (currently) 9.83% of your adjusted gross income for health insurance that does effectively fuckall until you get hit by a bus or are diagnosed with cancer. - So they, the healthcare exchanges, will knock off a giant chunk of exchange plans such that the price you pay for health insurance can be as low as... nothing. Especially if you work part-time. - So I, your plucky employer who would really really really like to give you health insurance, should be able to pay for what's left of your cheap insurance but - They, the government, says "there can be only one" subsidy so if I want to offer you insurance, You get zero help from the government - Unless I, your employer, make my health insurance plan so shitty you have to pay more than 9.83% of your AGI for it - At which point you are allowed to buy it from the government again. Round numbers? I'm looking at a $60k/yr disincentive to provide my employees health insurance. They're all effectively on "single payer" despite the fact that I've got three employees making six figures(!) because the way we calculate AGI is every bit as gerrymandered as anything else. Yet the right is still about Death Panels. As a private employer, I am an utter fucking dumbass if I try and offer you insurance. What will truly disturb you is that the vagaries of this reality are so well-hidden that a conversation with a friend-of-a-friend, who is the chief litigator for the Department of Labor in this state, did not reveal any of it. "Can my employees pay for health premiums out of their Section 125 cafeteria plan" was met with a resounding "...maybe? Maybe not? Try it and see?" from the literal guy who would take me to court if I couldn't. (the answer is "yes you can if it's dental and vision, no you can't if it's medical" - there saved you six months). So if you want to make actual progress in the current climate, you're busy wondering if the Sicilian Defense is cost-effective when you're down a rook and Ezra Klein is all "if you jump all the way to the other side of the board you get a king". It's called Medicare For All and it's so fucking obvious that the chinstrokers and talking heads are convinced it'll never work.There are ways to attack the drug price problem without radically changing the way drugs are manufactured and delivered.