Elon’s report card
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Meanwhile, we can discard in retrospect all of the cynical tribalism when DOGE first started that it was a bad faith endeavor. I always believed it was a good faith endeavor that was not likely to be productive, and that’s about how it’s turned out.
I suppose there are still plenty of cynics who think Elon cares about nothing related to actual government efficiency and austerity, but I think current evidence is piled against them.
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Michael Munger put it best, referencing Tyler Cowen:
DOGE was terrific, if unintentional, test of @tylercowen's "state capacity libertarianism."
- Ask if government should be doing this.
- If answer=YES, then ensure work is fully staffed, professional and well-compensated.
Across the board cuts=dumb
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There used to be a conservative commentator (forgot which) who would make points about social programs failing by showing how their desired effects either didn’t show up in the data or worse, the opposite effect was shown in the data.
He would put a graph of poverty rates in his article, for example, and ask ‘can you tell when the war on poverty started?
Well….