(no subject)

[timelets]

Politics in a democracy is a combination of zero-sum and cooperative games (per Yglesias via rsokolov);
-- elections is a zero-sum game (win-lose);
-- policy is a cooperative game (win-win).

Currently, zero-sum games dominate American politics despite the times of economic prosperity. Why?

- in the absence of wars, politicians learned to frame basic socioeconomic issues as zero-sum games, e.g.
-- immigrants vs citizens ("НАШИ бедные. их именно мигранты опускают уже ниже некуда.");
-- trade disputes;
-- green energy vs fossil fuels ("wind turbines cause cancer.");
-- single-payer "socialist" vs employer-sponsored "capitalist" healthcare;
-- "elites vs the people";
-- urban vs rural.

Reality TV and social media stimulate zero-sum game framing:
-- always winners and losers;
-- trolling and ego maintenance;
-- direct appeal to emotions, e.g. measure engagement and likes;
-- no need to get anything done.

Major critical issues ignored by zero-sum framing:
-- the death of industrial employment;
-- budget deficits;
-- infrastructure deficiencies;
-- urban density and housing costs;
-- asset inequality;
-- aging (Medicare/Social Security);
-- military overspending.

Comments

[tijd]

A comprehensive immigration reform is also needed and should be a win-win.

Eisenhower said: "if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power."
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10746

If the goal is not to solve problems but simply to stay in power, one way to achieve it is to exacerbate problems, making the voters even more anxious https://timelets.dreamwidth.org/953782.html?thread=344246#cmt344246

[timelets]

Immigration is an emotional issue but its real costs to the society are relatively low. Even if we grant the idiot's desire for the wall it would be at around $10-15B. Solving the healthcare would cost 100 times more. The same goes for infrastructure, etc.

For Individual-1, staying in power means staying out of jail.

[peristaltor]

No, solving healthcare would not cost a dime. Remember the enormous sums currently going to private coverage; these would go to a single payer monopsony (sp?). Costs would then come down, not go up.

Don't worry, you're not the only person to miss this.

[timelets]

We have a single-payer system in Medicare and it's going bankrupt because of the demographics.

[peristaltor]

No, we have a deliberately inadequately funded Medicare system. Money is available, or would be, if Medicare weren't a political target.

[timelets]

Does "inadequately funded X" imply that to fund it adequately one needs to fund it more?

[peristaltor]

Of course, which completely misses the point. The reason it was inadequately funded to begin with was to drive/let it slip it to bankruptcy, so that politicians who hate anything smacking of New Deal social nets could just kill it dead.

If one diverts even a bit of the private health coverage dollars, one could both save Medicare without additional federal funding and cut quite a bit of the waste inherent in the private business model (waste here being the waste at the top of the corporate chain; similar roles played in public administration cost about 1/10th to 1/100th private, depending upon which private corp is examined).

[timelets]

Ok. If this is a political issue how are you going to solve it then?

[peristaltor]

Ooo, I'm in charge?! *Squee!*

First and foremost, and in reference to your OP on zero-sum decision making, notice that all problems involving wealth——its creation, its transfer, its consumption——are not economic problems, but rather problems of political economy. The biggest propaganda success of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the sanitizing of political economy into separate (and separated) disciplines called economics and politics.

Once you've done that, notice all the outlets and efforts at maintaining this separation and its continuance, including ones you cited in the OP (reality TV pops right out).

A great example for me was the creation of the so-called "Nobel" Prize for Economics in 1968, which Alfred Nobel never endowed and which his descendants decry as propaganda… which it totally is.

Instead of being decided by other economists, the prize is ultimately issued by bankers to "economic" (again, notice the removal of the political) thinkers whose ideas help bankers maintain their aloof position above politics, thus giving them the ability to undermine political decision making.

Think here about Varoufakis getting shut down by EU bankers. He was right, they were wrong; it was indeed "fiscal waterboarding." (I wrote about years ago.) Later, Picketty pointed out that Greece and many other forgave German reparation debt in 1960, adding further irony to the ECB's current position, largely dictated, as it is, by Deutchebank officials.

I could totally go on, but I would point you to heterodox thinkers on political economy like Mark Blyth and Steve Keen for better insight.

Edited to repair hypertext.

[timelets]

In the beginning you said "solving healthcare would not cost a dime." Then, you acknowledged that it was a political issue. You further noted that it's a political economy issue. Ok, granted. Do you have a practical proposal of how to solve this political issue, so that it would not cost a dime?

[peristaltor]

When I said it wouldn't cost much at all, I meant much more. The money is there; all it needs is to be moved to where it can help solve the problem (rather, as it is, creating it).

Treat it like a problem of political economy instead of a hard-and-fast bookkeeping shortfall. Shift money currently propping up health care insurance company profits and direct it instead to propping up more centralized, more cost-controlling entities that can help at least start to bring down excess profits reaped by health providers (which often play private insurers against each other).

That, of course, would solve the problem. Your question as to the political situation that created it? Given the decades head start the movers on this corporate takeover have had, solving that takeover would take some time as well.

Sadly, things are getting so extreme the solution would either take as much time (as I prefer), or no time at all, once someone realizes the people are frustrated enough to take, shall we say, Second Amendment solutions in hand (which I do not relish).

The French Revolution should serve as a warning, and we're getting very close to pre-Revolution levels of inequity today.

[timelets]

Would you bet $1,000 that the US will start a transition to a single-payer system within the next 5 years?

[peristaltor]

I don't bet large sums on anything, especially things this turbulent. It could happen, but then I said the same damned thing back in the '90s, and that was killed dead as well.

Interesting times.

[peristaltor]

Coincidentally, I found this article, one sent to me just today, relevant. It even mentions Yglesias in passing.

Substitute "engineers" for economists and their allies the bankers, and very few changes need be made.

[tijd]

The immigration problem has two parts:

1. Providing a humane treatment to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers.
2. Simplifying immigration for high-skilled workers, including students getting advanced degrees at American universities.

Both issues could receive a wide support if it was not for racist fear-mongering.

[timelets]

Agree.