Beyond obvious short-term political goals, the reason for this is simple: in a machine as large and complicated as the government, it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change, and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.
Each administration makes changes (positive and negative) that won't be felt by voters for decades, if at all; and under each administration, voters endure the consequences (positive and negative) of previous administrations. But that doesn't get people to the polls, so why talk about it.
It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.
> and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.
This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."
Again.. using our own funds to do it. I find the whole thing inappropriate. If we decide to credit you, you will be re-elected, if we decide to blame you, we will invoke the courts.. and I doubt they will have a "really really hard time ascribing guilt" to the appropriate party.
It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s.
I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.
Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM
I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections.
Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
Also, chances are neither of the two parties fit what you want. Especially in the US it is basically choosing the lesser evil..
But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion.
"We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.
“I, candidate for office, align myself to and support the goals of the DNC, GOP, or XYZ” is pretty clearly political speech.
You could nibble away at the edges, maybe eliminate state support for primaries, change funding rules, but I think it’s ultimately not going away and probably not even getting diluted much if we keep the first past the post voting method.
Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc.
And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.
Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.
What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on.
It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.
I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples)
- Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs
- Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US
- Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes
- Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication
- Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes
- Embedded anthropologists studying populations & subcultures in Iraq & Afghanistan
- Poets and artists living in these communities
- Social scientists who study how rural Americans are used as a cheap workforce
- Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day
- Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it,
- Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy
The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world."
It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.
I'm an engineer, I know the perspective well. I'm part of the group of people keeping the lights on. And therefore there is nearly nothing out there that poses any sort of threat to my comfort, because society was built by and for people like me. That isn't an experience that matches up well with the typical experience and it would be very hard to spin as being exposed to 'reality'. I have access to disproportionate resources to solve my problems. And so do all the people you're listing.
> That [average] voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
Now you're being more specific, saying those people who work outside "the real world," are those who are:
> Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience.
Why do you think that a fry cook or janitor has more "broad life experience" than a professor or a doctor? Do you think that there is something more "real" and "authentic" about manual labor, that intellectual labor lacks? Is scarcity the only source of authenticity?
In my experience, most people a born into, and live their entire lives, in a single social stratum. Maybe it's abject poverty, maybe it's menial labor, maybe it's middle-class, or maybe it's educated and professional. The classes live in constant fear and envy of each other, but very few people get to experience more than of them first-hand. There's insulation, as you point out, between the strata, but that doesn't mean that the uneducated and the poor are experiencing more reality, just that they're experiencing it differently.
It isn't a question of manual vs. non-manual in my mind. areoform was picking out a list of people who typically aren't exposed to the actual constraints because they are in the top ~10-20% of the social hierarchy, and usually only specialise in one specific area as opposed to understanding the total situation. Someone who has immanent and structural problems putting food on the table or keeping employment will have a much better idea of where the urgent pain points in an economy are than, say, a dev at Stripe.
The people close to the happy tail end of the distribution for comfortable lifestyles aren't going to have a good understanding of the median or hard tail. Some do, most don't. People who live the risk of doing without food have a much better understanding of how bad the current food shortages are than I do, for example. Despite being quite interested in the crisis I have to really go out and look to figure out whether the situation is normal, a little bit worse or immanent threat of large numbers of people who had food last year running out.
Basically, in short, it is easier for someone average to figure out what the experience is for the average person. Which is one of the most important experiences for figuring out whether a policy is working or not. The median voter is quite well connected to the experience of the median voter, much better than people like me who have to use statistics and guess what their experience is.
Thankyou for drawing my attention to the fact that my language was excessively vague.
Could you provide any specific examples of that?
Repeal Obamacare.
I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.
That is certainly true, but they have a lot of trouble making these kinds of decisions correctly. Much of the time there is an objective fact of the matter regarding the causality between policy and outcome, but discerning it is very hard. In particular, for economic policy the time lag between cause and effect is commonly measured in months or years, and that can be very hard to unwind.
"Do you want to repeal suffrage?"
And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.
Voters are very stupid. And when a group gets smarter, gerrymandering comes in to 'lower the average'.
> And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.
“Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?)
People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.
No, suffrage is the right to vote. Not who. So 'repeal suffrage' simply means repealing the right to vote. It is not confusing, just absurd.
How anyone puts this down to anything other than a failing of school systems and the mass media in general is somewhat beyond me. It's easier to poke fun of people than dig into the problems in many spheres, I'm sure, but in this one.. I think you're just enabling a specific class of people to slickly pervert the will of the citizenry while still claiming a moral high ground for having done so.
Still not convinced this is anything other than an elitist trick.
I agree, it is a bitter pill. The alternative is to live in a society where leaders don't need the goodwill of the people in order to rule, and therefore have no interest in proclaiming their accomplishments. Fortunately, there are lots of dictatorships for you to choose from.
> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit,
Voters certainly decide, but I see little evidence that they decide accurately. It's not that they're stupid, it's just that (a) they don't understand how the government or the economy work and (b) have no collective memory. So, they decide, if there is inflation under the Biden administration, it must be Biden's fault, QED.
I don't think that voters are necessarily stupid. They just happen to act stupidly because they treat politics as entertainment rather than their civic duty. If people dedicated their time trying to learn about policy instead of browse memes and articles that affirm their beliefs, we'd be much better off.
Not the US, but I have read several reports of “vote counters” in Hungary and the amount of people that had to ask which of the options is (surprise) the right-wind, populist Orban is astonishing. And while illiteracy for example may well be worth in Hungary, the general idea is true of every country.
I re-watch this one at least every couple of months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08
The wisdom of crowds is fickle. Especially today where people have few social relationships and mass communications are so cheap.
"Stupid" is probably the wrong word here. "Gullible" is probably more apt, considering they keep falling for these.
May 2021 (with forecast!) https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1398685824934363138
Dec 2021 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1470870982588088325
August 2022 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1554497308024311809
Tweets in general are not good. Most are pointless, many are stupid, some are evil, and sadly only a few are worth existing. So I'm not suggesting that current White House tweets are good. They are just not remarkable in comparison to the tweets from the previous period.
But you definitely can find BS things similar to the one from the social security topic.
"President @realDonaldTrump has done more to lower medicine prices than any President in history!" (unsurprisingly it's hyperbolic and almost completely lacking any truth or evidence; the evidence points to an opposite result)
I'm not going to dig thru the pile to prove you wrong. But you're wrong.
Edit: Ok, I just have to add this gem. "This Administration is "tackling longstanding problems that no other Administration had the guts to do," @SeemaCMS says."
That period was just chock full of useless tweets or outright false tweets.
The one thing I'm aware of on this topic is the cost of insulin, which he did lower in 2020: https://nypost.com/2020/05/26/trump-cuts-cost-of-insulin-for...
When most people think of “lowering the price of insulin”, they would not think “increasing subsidies to a select group of the country, that happens to vote heavily, and heavily for the administration’s party”.
Also, the insulin price cap was for older, cheaper forms of insulin. The modern ones are still more expensive. Hence, anytime a politician touts doing something about insulin prices without specifying “all insulin”, I assume they are BSing.
It is always possible to spin anything negatively, but it might be worth considering why you're putting in this much effort.
Most importantly, it avoids politicians having to address the root problem, which is the lack of taxpayer funded R&D into medicine that would be in the public domain, hence not subject to the high prices of patented medicine. And of course, this helps the businesses that patent medicines.
It is also ridiculous to me how much more my country prioritizes the elderly over children, who are literally the future.
Doing things for some groups is not the same as pitting groups against each other.
> works against efforts to redistribute wealth for all
You can only steal and reallocate money, not wealth. This will destroy wealth for all.
> the lack of taxpayer funded R&D into medicine that would be in the public domain, hence not subject to the high prices of patented medicine.
Plenty of R&D is at least partially taxpayer funded, but you're underestimating the total amount of R&D (including the cost of completely failed ideas) that goes into drug discovery. Deciding taxpayers should fund the sum total of pharma R&D, and presumably also the production costs, as those would've been funded by the patent-protected profits, seems strange on the face of it.
> how much more my country prioritizes the elderly over children
The elderly aren't always prioritised. But with health, they, along with newborns and pregnant mums, are some of the naturally most at-risk people in your population.
> literally
Sigh.
Now that the precedent has been set this is likely to continue with one side using the mentioned but Trump arguments which are countered with at least he was not as bad as Biden. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum et delirium.
I would add "or negative", and I wouldn't qualify it with "it's like". As far as I can tell, this is the one-sentence description of how the public face of politics works, everywhere, always.
It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate basic realities without some arbitrary historical and legal context.
While we should be eternally vigilant and skeptical, the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation.
In fact, I would say the 'problem' is maybe the opposite - I am somewhat more skeptical that this is a 'Musk led personal intervention' to draw arbitrary cynicism towards a political entity he does not like - playing 'moral equivalence' games with people who say "The economy is doing good!" (without nuanced context) and "I won the election!" (without the obvious 'context' that the statement is literally false, or blatantly misleading).
That said, it's just skepticism, I really can't say one way or the other obviously.
There's clearly a grey threshold in what we can tolerate from government and political statements, and it's very hard to fathom where that line is - but this one is not near that line.
If any administration wants to claim "Lowest unemployment ever!" in a Tweet, well then that's fine. They can say that as long as it's true, a history lesson is not needed in this case.
In any case, if they are going to do this, they need a set of publicly stated criteria for it, and they need to apply the criteria objectively and consistently.
This is a different kind of statement when it's not hedged in any way as compared to the tweet as quoted in the article.
> “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership” (emphasis mine)
Of course it's easy to assume that they said "the biggest increase" to make it sound as good as possible and it's easy to assume that they said "in 10 years" because they didn't want to just lie. But then, why did they need to include "through President Biden's leadership"? Isn't that technically false if it happened "through 50-year-old legislation"?
That being said, why do you think that statement isn't intentionally misleading? Or if you do think it's intentionally misleading, why do you think the context shouldn't be added? I don't buy that it's arbitrary; it's clearly relevant to the statement that was made.
Certainly I'd agree that this policy is absolutely ripe for abuse (through arbitrary application) but so far I haven't seen a reason for people to think that it will be or has been abused, barring the assumptions they choose to make.
So if Biden wants to take credit for that. Let him.
Taking credit for the 'lowest employment' especially using the term 'ever' would require an hour of debatable qualifications to make it entirely clear.
Would the President make this statement in his 1st month in office, make this a bit of a nonrepresentational statement? Well, probably. But it's still true.
This understanding that somehow this specific WH statement is hedged or loaded in some kind of special manner just isn't correct. In fact, you could likely delve a bit deeper into it as well to find even more relevant nuance.
"Why do you think that statement isn't intentionally misleading?"
It's true, and it doesn't require any more context than any other statement, so it's fine.
I think it would be naive of us to expect that the statement by the WH or any political body is going to run us down on the details and caveats of their statements unless they are hugely relevant.
Some of the language used here that this causes 'cruelty and harm' etc. is ridiculous.
This language within the scope of normal communications enough that we would not even be having this discussion were Twitter to not have initially marked the Tweet.
The so called 'cruelty and harm' would have gone entirely unnoticed.
And finally, this is not a threshold of content moderation for arbitrary 3rd parties to make arbitrary corrections. I'd love a feature that allowed me to add my favourite 'truthy-meter' to Twitter statements, but I'd loathe to trust Twitter specifically for things that are so mundane. They have a responsibility to call out hard misinformation, such as vaccine or election lies - but not arbitrary quips.
> I think it would be naive of us to expect that the statement by the WH or any political body is going to run us down on the details and caveats of their statements unless they are hugely relevant.
> Some of the language used here that this causes 'cruelty and harm' etc. is ridiculous.
> This language within the scope of normal communications enough that we would not even be having this discussion were Twitter to not have initially marked the Tweet.
> The so called 'cruelty and harm' would have gone entirely unnoticed.
I won't disagree but that's because of what "naive" means. It reads that I should expect this kind of behavior, to which I would say I shouldn't tolerate it. I should be able to expect that these political bodies don't produce this kind of statement.
I do think the "cruelty and harm" would have gone unnoticed because it's so common to see this kind of thing. There are people that won't look into this and will have their vote swayed because of it, despite that it doesn't matter. I don't care that it's true when it's so misleading and I don't think it should be tolerated. I do not think it's hyperbole to use this language, disagreements notwithstanding.
I don't remember what it is but I remember hearing a word for this kind of statement. Specifically in public relations, it's a statement that's true on its face and clearly intended to sound good in a particular way, but also missing key context that takes away from the good.
Anyway, often in such cases I will read the context in some public comment section, rather than having it pinned by the staff of the site I'm reading. I can understand that people do not like that this was decided by Twitter staff (and I do honestly expect that's what happened given the account's profile), and I would also prefer that this sort of thing is decided by the community or even not at all.
But I have to end in defense of "cruelty and harm". You can disagree but it would be naive to think it is simply mistaken thinking.
So in this case none of it really applies; notions 'cruelty and harm' are a bit absurd.
There is a habit among 'thinking people' to escalate the most innocuous thing to an undeserved proportion.
When there are no lingering controversies, the most minor supposed slight - becomes the controversy.
This issue is out of proportion for this level of meaningful dissection.
More objectively ... the Tweet does not involve policy, it's not political, it's not controversial, it's not 'before the courts', it does not involve foreign policy, it's not 'insensitive or offensive', it doesn't delve into economic matters, it's not related to health or elections, it won't move markets or affect business - and most appropriately - it's essentially factual.
It's a banal, truthful statement about some secondary, bureaucratic outcome.
If we were to apply this level of conscientious scrutiny to every Tweet or statement, I don't think anyone would ever agree on what 'reality' is.
So there is no 'there' there. There's nothing to escalate.
We have a free press to add more context, that's their job.
Tweets can cause 'harm' obviously, when influential people lie about material things especially related to health, violence, ultra bigotry/racism, political insurrection etc. but otherwise, Twitter is a random tech company, it's beyond their purview to selectively contextualize arbitrary bits of information.
Yes, it is. A leader's first responsibility is to tell the truth -- and citing misleading statistics is worse than an outright lie.
It is cruel to lie to people in a way that causes them harm.
Could also be? You definitely are not understanding the article.
> The White House deleted a Twitter post on Wednesday touting an increase in Social Security benefits for seniors after the social media platform added a “context” note pointing out that the increase was tied to a 1972 law requiring automatic increases based on cost of living changes.
Emphasis is mine; added for "context". :)
The WH statements are not misleading, and they definitely do not cause 'harm'.
You're using the language of post-modern/post-reality hyperbole politics which frankly, might be our greatest scourge at the moment.
When Donald Trump Tweeted that "The US had the lowest unemployment rate for African Americans" during his tenure, one could argue that's a bit of a stretch in terms of him taking credit.
The press had a lot to say about it.
But it's fully within his purview to say that even if it really does require contextualization.
There's no need to 'fix' a Tweet or statement like that.
When people say things like 'XYZ cures cancer!' - or 'XYZ politician is secretly abusing children in the basement of a restaurant' - then there's a moderation issue.
It is morally wrong when leaders (Democrat or Republican) intentionally lie in such a way as to manipulate people into beliefs and behaviors that cause more problems for those people.
> But it's fully within his purview to say that even if it really does require contextualization.
Not morally, no it's not. I believe he'll answer for it come judgment day, along with the others who have done it. You've heard the phrase "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- the point is: wrongly framed statistics, intentionally presented, are the worst form of lying.
You may not subscribe to care/harm moral philosophy, but surely you value truth -- it's the bedrock of freedom. To lie is to take away people's freedom.
The Soviet Union, Communist China, and the DPRK were built on lies. Those who tolerate lies do everyone a disservice.
I disagree. First of all the increase wasn't Biden's administration merit and that's one blatant lie.
Then if the social security benefits have increased only to keep up with inflation, to celebrate this as positive is clearly misinformation. Those receiving the benefits are as poor as they were before, while society as a whole becomes poorer. Nothing to celebrate here.
BTW loose fiscal policy did not cause inflation.
The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
The majority of Covid debt originated prior to January 20th 2021, and with a GOP majority in the Senate. Of the $1400 stimulus sent to individuals, the previous President, the previous Senate Majority Leader, and the 2 Senate candidates each campaigned on the equivalent of the $1400. The previous administration is also on record as rejecting audit measures for the Payment Protection Program. The previous administration nominated the fed chairman that increased the federal reserve balance sheet and tools well beyond 2008-2009, while also not adjusting the pace despite the federal stimulus above (and other stimulus until Fall 2021)
This still fails to explain why the US is seeing lower inflation than most of the rest of the world, almost none of which has the borrowing capacity of the US federal government.
The rest of the world is not uniformly seeing inflation. I heard this morning that Canada is at 3.5%. Korea is at 6%, and this is driven by import prices, since the USD is at high demand.
Domestically to the US, it's more complicated. Boomers are retiring causing a labor crunch, but businesses are attaining record profits which just about match the magnitude of price increases.
That pretty universal, no?
It's like when Canada's job growth is 70% due to government hiring and the gov't comes out and says "See how well the economy is doing?".
Or companies "spin" some negative stat into a positive one.
That's why the more transparency and readily-available information there is, the better : )
They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.