It's possible I'm overselling Henry's post, but it's definitely worth reading.

I will definitely read.

An interesting question I ask myself is why so many social services that states fund are outsourced to nob-profits, like case management for individuals with disabilities. Some of that is just that it's less expensive because the staff are not unionized and are underpaid. They can also require contractors to do things they won't allow their employees to do, like use their personal cars to transport people.

At the same time, as someone interested in public service, I would personally be very nervous working for the Commonwealth of MA. They have a defined benefit pension that is fully funded by the employees, so the same nominal salary is worth less than, say the same job at a non-profit hospital. You don't get any Social Security contributions and there are complicated rules to prevent double dipping. If you cone out of school and start at 22, 25 or 28 and find yourself on the right track, you csn retire at 60 or 65 with a good pension. Some people, like cops working IT crimes, might find they can earn income in the private sector afterwards. But there is often little room for advancement and lots of miserable people who stick around for the pension. Certain agencies, like health commissions, operate independently and are managed differently.

Ok, in general I'm not able to understand this kind of theorizing. For example:

The popularist approach - reduced to its crudest form - says 'let's get re-elected by doing things that are popular with voters,' subordinating policy to public opinion. The theory of democracy here is that you make people happy by ministering more efficiently than your electoral opponents to a general body of public opinion. If you are a popularist, you pay a lot of attention to opinion surveys: what polls well and what doesn't? You are, almost by definition, a centrist...

The left power approach - reduced to its crudest form - says 'let's strengthen our coalition and undermine that of the other side.' Under this account, democracy is a struggle between competing groups, where the capacity of different factions to express and act on their interests doesn't just shape policy outcomes, but the contours of the political battlefield. If you are a left power person, you think a lot about using policy to direct resources to the groups and causes that you want to build up...

Of course these are caricatures of the two positions - but I think they are useful caricatures, which help explain why the debates are so angry (of course, personal relationships and animus play some role too). If you are a popularist, you are liable to think that the willingness of leftwingers to sacrifice electability to build power is unjustified - that it generates backlash rather than political success. Equally, if you are a leftist, you are liable to get angry at what you see as the perpetual enthusiasm of centrists to triangulate towards the median voter, forever sacrificing long term gains for short term results.

I, ah, just don't understand. Are we talking about how to win elections, or how to govern? I thought we were talking about how to govern. If you're talking about governing, isn't it (basically) just a bunch of problem-solving in very context-specific ways? And whether you're a centrist or liberal or conservative is just a matter of what you see as a problem, and what kinds of solutions you like.

Like, centrists are centrists because they genuinely like mealy-mouthed insufficient solutions, not because they're taking their cues from polls. (I mean, I know that plenty of people take their cues from polls, but that's how to keep power or carry out the will of the people. It's not how you form your ideology.)

3: I genuinely think there are people who think that being in the middle is always correct and that is how they form their ideology. So, if the country is pulled to the right, they are too.

My parents both had kind of odd political views. I remember my Dad saying about 12 years ago that in the 50's rich people seemed to have plenty of money and they took vacations to Europe, the economy was pretty good and they paid higher taxes. But for most of his life he identified as a Republican as did his libertarian-ish (pro-immigration) father.

He was a big fan of Moynihan's when he lived in NYS, refusing to vote for the Republican opponents despite being registered as a Fepublican. I remember him expressing concern about Clinton's budget, because the vote was so close and no/few Republicans voted for it. Being right in the middle or doing something in a bipartisan way is a virtue in this worldview.

Are we talking about how to win elections, or how to govern? I thought we were talking about how to govern.

To some extent that's part of the (IMO unnecessary) framing of the whole thing as a response to Saiselgy. But, in terms of the structure of the argument the bit you quote is intended to contrast with his taxonomy of approaches to state capacity. He's saying, "we spend a lot of time arguing over familiar left/centrist disputes. For example [bit you quoted] but it would be more productive and more interesting to argue instead about this. . ." (emphasis mine)

State capacity liberalism suggests instead that centrists and the left should engage over how to make the state better capable of solving problems. There are lots of different ways this could be done, and plenty of space for useful disagreement, without intellectual name calling!

...

Hence, we ought start thinking about how to combine different approaches to state capacity liberalism, coming to a better understanding of their particular strengths and weaknesses, and how to implement them in practice. As a very initial step, below is an initial list of some approaches, based on my own partial and limited understanding of the debates. Again: I'm not claiming that this is a comprehensive map, or making any grand statement of my own. I'm trying to pin down a loose set of arguments that are in the air, but that are never quite explicitly articulated in the way I do here. And even a flawed effort to set this all down might get other people talking about their own understanding of what is at stake, if only to correct my blunders.

So here goes: in no particular order, brief descriptions of six varieties of state capacity liberalism: big fix liberalism, adaptive state liberalism, supply-side progressivism, democratic steering, repurposed neoliberalism and cyborg bureaucracy.

An interesting question I ask myself is why so many social services that states fund are outsourced to nob-profits, like case management for individuals with disabilities

I don't have a precise answer. I do think it's interesting that it's clearly a topic of conversation at the moment.

In terms of my own political experience I'd say that there's a two pronged simplistic argument against having government do too much directly. When times are tough it feels wasteful to spend lots of money on government employees (and there's resentment because they seem insulated from the economic downturn). When times are good there's a feeling that the private sector is working hard to improve efficiency and government is stagnant. I'm not saying those arguments are correct, just that they are familiar.

In terms of political history, the story I hear is that post-Vietnam and post-Watergate liberals turned away from the New Deal, in some ways, toward emphasizing the importance of citizens being able to provide a check on government. And then Reagan (and Clinton) explicitly campaigned on trying to reduce the size of government.

The most interesting argument that I've seen recently was in Recoding America which observed that, at the Federal level at least, lots of high ranking civil servants didn't want to be in charge of managing programs. Policy implementation was seen as lower status and less rewarding than working on legislation or high-level data collection and forecasts. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet that's a significant factor.

So it's a map, and it's arguments that are in the air, and it's a set of blocks from different toy boxes that we are or are not shoving into containers? I'm sorry, Henry Farrell, you're banned.

7: I think those are metaphors not analogies; so not directly banned but, yes, somewhat clunky.

6: I mean, it's not what I like doing either. But if you had MPP degrees that were like MBAs and prepared you to be a generalist manager in government, then maybe these could become good career paths.

3: I think the common thread is "How do we overcome the major collective action problems that have messed up both policy and politics in complex interlocking ways and empowered reactionaries?"

So it implicates both how to win elections and how to govern - because each contributes to the other, and failing at one contributes to failing at another. And all of these ways to look at it have different narratives about that interaction, the core of what's going on, all simplifications, sometimes clashing in their prescriptions, but all usable in their own way.

9: I think that's a great question. The problem isn't just trying to figure out a model of government which is capable of doing things, but also overcoming a tendency for people to try to offload the parts of their job they don't want to deal with.

That is an argument in favor of "Big Fix Liberalism" as an approach to pick a couple of major goals and focus attention and resources on them (that may just defer the problem rather than solving it -- maybe 20 years later, after the big fix is no longer shiny it will get outsourced).

"How do we overcome the major collective action problems that have messed up both policy and politics in complex interlocking ways and empowered reactionaries?"

Ah okay, this makes sense.

10 and 12: i wonder sometimes whether it wouldn't be better if we didn't see the job of government to purchase services at the cheapest price but also saw the jobs generated in providing those services as good jobs. The old city machines were plenty corrupt, and I'm not endorsing them, but i think that ruthless efficiency and cost-cutting takes away a core constituency that will be supportive of taxes and social services.

Ok, once I got to this part:

So here goes: in no particular order, brief descriptions of six varieties of state capacity liberalism: big fix liberalism, adaptive state liberalism, supply-side progressivism, democratic steering, repurposed neoliberalism and cyborg bureaucracy.

it was really interesting to read. Up till then I was mostly struggling.

I did say that the post had lengthy stage-setting, but perhaps I should have emphasized that more. I'm glad you found that final section interesting.

I wouldn't have stuck with it without the warning. I didn't have much continuous time during the day, though.

I didn't have much continuous time during the day, though.

Heebie likes her life like her Christopher Nolan movies.