Megan McArdle

Opinion | Trump should heed, not hide, the jobs numbers Firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner won’t improve the U.S. economy.

Firing the head of the BLS is not only destructive; it's stupid. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

I agree! However in my experience talking to youngsters, Witness is not one of them.

The median age in the United States is 38 years. Most people weren't even born when it came out.

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

That is the prediction of the column!

Surprising number of people interpreting this as an endorsement of Trump policies rather than a prediction, even though I lay out many reasons that Trump's actions on tariffs and brutal immigration raids are bad.

Ranked Choice, Election Reform, and the New York City Vote What lessons does the New York City primary hold for this and other electoral reforms?

Coming next week! I'm hosting a @cato.org online panel discussion with @davedaley.bsky.social, @mcmegan.bsky.social and John Ketcham (Manhattan Institute) on lessons of the NYC mayoral primary for ranked choice voting and other election reforms. It's Wed. Aug. 6 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Register here: /1

More to the point, you are really, really not supposed to have human waste in an area where food or drink is being served, for good reasons. Is there a reason they couldn't take the travel potty and the kid into the bathroom?

They also favor "right" position like restricting immigration and trans rights. They favor all sorts of spending until you attach a price tag, at which point they balk. Both sides tend to pick and choose issues to claim that the rest of America secretly agrees with them. This is self-delusion.

And no one in mainstream institutions ever cared much if the Nation or the American Spectator was mad at them.

Which, again, is fine if you're doing a hobby of personal self-enrichment, but if so, I'd suggest that knitting is way more fun and productive than never-never political theorizing.

Progressive influence on Twitter was important because it was a dominant piece of a larger conversation, which fooled a lot of decisionmakers into thinking that their ideas were more common than they actually are. Now they're the equivalent of a little political magazine.

But their reach is also downgraded simply by virtue of being in a bubble that their group has, to some extent, deliberately created with trolling and norms about group and chain blocking.

Which of course really limits the reach. Progressives complain that their reach was downranked on Twitter (ironically, if they are correct, they are complaining about exactly what they demanded be done to conservatives). Fair enough.

And moreover, the polarization stuff, combined with a reasonably lax moderation policy, explains why the left trolls are even more toxic and offputting than they were on Twitter--telling people to kill themselves, mobbing people who talk about AI, etc.

I think thinking about groupthink and group polarization would suggest that bubbling, however cosy it is for participants, isn't great for the left if the left's goal is to do politics, rather than to feel good about themselves for having the right kind of opinions for Someone like them.

(And of course most arguments sound more persuasive when there are no opponents around to make good counterarguments).

(And while it's possible that people are just being persuaded by great arguments, this is a general phenomenon, not limited to people you think have great ideas, so odds are, even if you think you were just thinking for yourself, you were not.)

They're also prone to polarization--people tend to shift their opinions towards the group consensus, moving the private opinions of everyone in a more extreme direction. I think that that phenomenon, over repeated Twitter iterations, explains a lot of political mistakes over the last decade.

You also have to think about how group dynamics influence the direction of your political movement. People are social animals who like to fit in. That desire makes homogenous groups prone to groupthink, where people go along with bad ideas to preserve in-group harmony.

If you're doing politics, you have to think about stuff you rarely have to think about when you're doing knitting. Like "How does my conversation look to people who don't agree with me? Is it creating moments that will be misunderstood (or, alas, understood) when they escape to the real world?

I got a number of responses to my column along the lines of "I don't want a debate, I just want relaxing/interesting conversations with like-minded people", and I guess I'd say that's fine if you're doing knitting, but not fine if you're doing politics.

(I'd argue that a huge problem with politics right now is that people do treat it as a hobby, where the object is to be personally interesting/kind/logically consistent/high status/morally pure, rather than a way to get things done in a fractious and diverse polity.

Interesting piece that I think misses a few big pieces of the puzzle. For one thing, it treats politics as a hobby, as an end in itself, like knitting. But politics is supposed to be a means to an end, which means that you have to think about its real world effects on people outside the group.

If your law is good when there are good people in office, but dangerous when there are bad people in office, your law is bad.

I did used bemused correctly, and am bemused that multiple people claimed i didn't.

I think it's not just that it's seen as a conservative thing, it's that military and defense issues are seen as a *lower-class* interest - and by academic historians that most dreaded of all things, a popular interest.

Let's face it, as Trump outrages go, his actions on the TikTok ban wouldn't seem to rate very high. But what he's claiming to do here -- suspend the operation of a federal law, even as to its enforcement by states and private parties -- is actually among his most radical and king-like moves.

Possibly, but as the last election demonstrated, it's not.

None of this contradicts what I said--did you read that?

There are a lot more lefties still on Twitter than conservatives on Bluesky. I see their posts daily!