I stopped reading him regularly last winter and stopped reading him altogether about 2 months ago because he had, in my mind, become completely a creature of his privileged background and Washington bubble. Now at least he admits that he is a neoliberal who believes that the expansion of the welfare state is complete.
Obviously I disagree with Matt but it is not generally my habit to stop reading people merely because I have a philosophical disagreement. I read other neoliberals, I read a lot of them actually. But Yglesias has taken to wearing his substantive ignorance of subjects as a badge. As he has explained ad-nauseam, he is a philosopher and is highly trained in logic. Thus substantive knowledge of the world isn't needed, he'll just spot the logical holes in the arguments and ideas of others.
Obviously, I prefer to read people who are both logical and substantively knowledgeable.
via Kevin Drum.
1 comment:
On one hand, health care reform, should it endure long enough to really come into being and assuming it works passably, certainly would mark major progress in assembling a social safety net.
On the other, I agree with you that there is more to be done. Most notably, we need a better system for providing economic security to the unemployed and to single mothers. The most productive our society gets, and the more it continues to have an acute need for a highly skilled workforce, the more intense the pressure to base societal rewards on something in addition to economic productivity is going to become.
We also need to move in the direction of categorical, rather than means tested approaches for many important parts of our safety net.
Of course, none of those high faluting policy wonk ideas matter much if Tea Party crazies gain any real power and we have to focus on concepts like preserving Social Security and Medicare, instead of closing the holes in the safety net.
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