TBC I agree with you that becoming president was more complicated than win the dam, win the day. But that more complicated story is still much less complicated than I expected it to be.
Elizabeth
Karma: 22,183
I’m not sure if you’re disagreeing with my point (that Johnson’s rise had fewer moving parts than I expected) or just sharing an additional interesting fact.
what % of credit would you assign to Brown and Root, Sam Rayburn, and Richard Russell?
After reading volume 1 of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, I’m struck by how simple parts of (Caro’s description of) Johnson’s rise were.
Johnson got elected to the House and stayed there primarily because of one guy at one law firm which had the network to set state fundraising records, and did so for Johnson primarily because of a single gigantic favor he did for them[1].
Johnson got a great deal of leverage over other Congressmen because he was the one to realize Texas oilmen would give prodigiously if only they knew how to buy the results they wanted, and he convinced them he was the only reliable source of advice on how to do so (which he could get away with partially because the man they truly trusted, Sam Rayburn, lent his credibility to Johnson instead of leveraging it himself).
If this story was a movie, or a book shorter than 3000 pages (and counting) I would be sure it had been simplified for run time. I’m not ruling that out. But other parts of the book are more complicated than this, so I have to consider that politics can be simpler than I thought.
- ^
I’m sure he did other favors for them and their clients over the years, but as presented the relationship was set when he rescued New Deal funding for a dam.
- ^
I got a little ambitious and normed the data by value of dollar, relative to 2006Q1. 2025 looks even less exceptional than it did in nominal terms
Things I learned from reddit fashion
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn’t consider Trump’s exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
- ^
Although FWIW, I didn’t vote in the last presidential election because it wasn’t obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
- ^
Capital flight is a great indicator, thank you for the suggestion.
I’m dubious on Smith article though. He claims to be talking about foreign capital investment, then uses a bunch of proxies that aren’t net investment. If you graph actual foreign investment, you see a decline, but it looks like a continuation of a trend from the Biden years, or arguably even Obama. The only time investment went net negative was in 2014, which stems from Vodafone selling Verizon back to itself.
If anyone is feeling ambitious I’d love to see this graph normed for inflation or GDP.
There’s nothing physically impossible about having a president that’s substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We’d expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that’s not evidence. And we’d expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that’s not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
Over in this comment, DAL suggests that one reason for polarization is a lack of local news leading people to vote based on party’s national reputations rather than knowledge of local candidates. If he was right, we’d expect other signs of the nationalization of races, such as an increase in out-of-state fundraising.
I checked, and that’s exactly what I found. The percentage of out-of-state funding doubled from 1998 to 2022, with an especially sharp increase starting in 2018.
And this undersells the change, because it includes only hard money (that donated directly to candidates). PACs are a larger and larger percent of campaign spending, and I expect have a larger percentage of out of state money.
This doesn’t prove lack of local news is the culprit, but it does point to the locus of ~control moving away from individual candidates and towards parties.
What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion / corruption?”
Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party).
This suggests to me that local money should compose a smaller percentage of campaign funds over time. This is me pre-registering that I’m going to check this and publish results. If it’s false I will downgrade this hypothesis in my mind but not consider it disproven.
EDIT: prediction verified
I’m reading Caro’s Path to Power now, and he says seniority system was well established in the house by Johnson’s arrival in the depression.
I greatly appreciate the context you provided in the linked comment, and in general the attempt to explain why an underrepresented side views their choices as reasonable or necessary. I want to do what I can to support you continuing to bring up counterpoints and things people are missing.
This particular post reads to me as president-neutral, in that you could post it on a conservative-leaning forum under a democratic president and it would look equally in tune with local culture. Maybe I’m wrong about that, it’s easy to read things that match one’s own worldview as neutral, in which case I’m asking for specifics on what makes this not neutral.
One guess, based on your other comment, is that Habryka takes the legitimacy of the court for granted, in which case I’d like to dig into more detail on that.
(relevant thread from a lawyer early last year on the powers and tools that courts have to force a president or other federal officials to follow their court orders, such as freezing assets).
“Force” seems strong compared to what the thread says. He starts with “no chance of the White House successfully refusing to comply” but for every mechanism except freezing assets, he caveats with “this might work”
refinement: people have always moved, but they used to reorient towards a local social circle. Now they can stay in contact with their old friends forever but they’re never going to discuss local politics with them, only national.
why did local news ever work?
A lot of recent political changes are blamed on the loss of local news (motivating example), which is in turn blamed on the internet undercutting ad revenue (especially classifieds revenue). But if people never cared about local news enough to ~pay for it, why did papers ever offer it? Why not just sell the classifieds and the national news people were willing to pay for, and save the expense of the local stuff no one wanted?
Some ideas:
Newspapers and tv channels were confused and didn’t realize they could get away without producing local news.
This seems unlikely to me, because if all they cared about was national news why subscribe to the local newspaper at all? People who only wanted national news would subscribe to a national paper.
some sort of preference cascade, such that the price people were willing to pay for local news dropped as others’ willingness dropped.
People lost interest in local news for non-preference-cascade reasons
Mobility meant people felt less invested in their local area
I think the trend at the time was for fewer interstate moves.
More competition for people’s time. In the 90s there were four channels and at 6 and 11 they were all showing local news. What were you gonna do, not watch TV?
People don’t seek out local TV news but can be hooked via ads during prime time programming (“the hot new trend ruining the lives of students at your kids’ high school, specifically”). As people stopped watching prime time tv with ads, channels lost the opportunity to hook people for their local coverage.
Local but not national news was replaced by something else, like Facebook, Citizen, or Nextdoor.
I don’t think the timing or distribution work out for this.
Bold of you to assume that 7 will be enough to finish the story.
Prestige/reputation is supposed to work like the pagerank algorithm: every person has a little bit of prestige to distribute, it flows to a few major sinks, and those sinks can themselves distribute it to the people they respect.
Real prestige isn’t like this, of course. You can improve people’s perception of your prestige, and thus your actual prestige, with the right clothes or website design. But you can also hack the pagerank algorithm. For example, let’s say we have 3 low status entities: a website, a blogger, and a small meeting of subject matter experts. We can improve their status by calling them an online magazine, a science writer, and a colloquium, but that’s not yet prestige hacking. The real magic comes when the colloquium introduces the writer and the magazine as if they are important, because then their presence makes the colloquium more impressive. Then the magazine can write up the colloquium as if it was important, because that makes their exclusive access more impressive. Via tricks like this, one can manufacture pagerank weight out of thin air.
The ethics of this are complicated. I will say as a practical matter that failures of prestige hacking are punished harshly and if you are learning about the concept just now you should assume you are bad at it. The goal of this post is teaching self-defense through recognition.
Credit allocation: I learned the term from people at Leverage, but when I asked around I found the idea originated elsewhere and no one was sure who deserved credit for the name.
Measles causes immune amnesia, which sets your immune system back 2-5 years. You’d need to follow people for years to know what the true cost was.