If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In her magnificent 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the "mirror world" of right wing causes that are weird, conspiratorial versions of the actual things that leftists care about:
For example, Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements:
And while Qanon theories about children being disguised as reasonably priced armoires are facially absurd, the right's obsession with imaginary children is a long-established phenomenon:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-53416247
Think of the conservative movement's all-consuming obsession with the imaginary lives of children that aborted fetuses might have someday become, and its depraved indifference to the hunger and poverty of actual children in America:
Trump's most ardent followers reorganized their lives around the imagined plight of imaginary children, while making excuses for Trump's first-term "Kids in Cages" policy:
Obviously, this has only gotten worse in Trump's second term. The same people whose entire political identity is nominally about defending "unborn children" are totally indifferent to the actual born children that DOGE left to die by the thousands:
As for pedophile traffickers, the same Qanon conspiracy theorists who cooked their brains with fantasies about Trump smiting the elite pedophiles are now making excuses for Trump's central role in history's most prolific child rape scandal:
This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It's world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.
Once you know about Klein's mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself):
To conservative panics about health – that turn out to be a demand to dismantle America's weak public health system and America's weak regulation of the supplements industry:
But lately, I've been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right's mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right's twisted obsessions.
I've been thinking about this since I read a Corey Robin blog post about Mamdani's campaign rhetoric, in which Mamdani railed against "mediocrity" and promised "excellence":
Robin pointed out that while this framing might strike some leftists as oddly right-coded, it has a lineal descent from Marx, who advocated for industrialization and mass production because the alternative would be "universal mediocrity.”
Robin went on to discuss a largely lost thread of "socialist perfectionism" ("John Ruskin and William Morris to Bloomsbury Bolsheviks like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes") who advocated for the public provision of excellence.
He identifies Marx's own mirror world analysis, pointing out that Marx identified a fundamental difference between capitalist and socialist theories of the division of labor. While capitalists saw the division of labor as a way to increase quantity, socialists were excited by the prospect of increasing quality.
(There's a centaur/reverse centaur comparison lurking in there, too. If you're a centaur radiologist, who gets an AI tool that flags some diagnoses you may have missed, then you're improving the rate of tumor identification. If you're a reverse centaur radiologist who sees 90% of your colleagues fired and replaced with a chatbot whose work you are expected to sign off on at a rate that precludes even cursory inspection, you're increasing X-ray throughput at the expense of accuracy):
(In other words: the reverse centaur is the mirror world version of a centaur.)
After the mayoral election, Mamdani doubled down on his pursuit of high-quality public services. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani promised a government "where excellence is no longer the exception":
Robin was also developing his appreciation for Mamadani's vision of public excellence. In the New York Review of Books, Robin made the case that it was a mistake for Democrats to have ceded the language of efficiency and quality to Republicans:
Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: "We'll run the government like a business." Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.
Writing in Jacobin, Conor Lynch takes a trip into the good side of the mirror world, unpacking the idea of socialist excellence in Mamdani's governance promises:
During the Mamdani campaign, "efficiency" was just one plank of the platform. But once Mamdani took office, he learned that his predecessor, the lavishly corrupt Eric Adams, had lied about the city's finances, leaving a $12b hole in the budget:
Mamdani came to power in New York on an ambitious platform of public service delivery, and not just because this is the right thing to do, but because investment in a city's people and built environment pays off handsomely.
Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, and one of the main differences between a business and a government is that a business's shareholders can starve maintenance budgets, cash out, and leave the collapsing firm behind them, while governments must think about the long term consequences of short-term thinking (the fact that so many Democratic governments have failed to do this is a consequence of Democrats adopting Republicans' framing that a good government is "run like a business").
The best time to invest in New York City was 20 years ago. The second best time in now. For Mamdani to make those investments and correct the failures of his predecessors, he needs to find some money.
Mamdani's proposal for finding this money sounds pretty conservative: he's going to cut waste in government. He's ordered each city agency to appoint a "Chief Savings Officer" who will "review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery." These CSOs are supposed to find a 1.5% across-the-board savings this year and 2.5% next year:
Does this sound like DOGE to you? It kind of does to me, but – crucially – this is mirror-world DOGE. DOGE's project was to make cuts to government in order to make government "run like a business." Specifically, DOGE wanted to transform the government into the kind of business that makes cuts to juice the quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term health:
But Mamdani's mirror-world DOGE is looking to find efficiencies by cutting things like sweetheart deals with private contractors and consultants, who cost the city billions. It's these private sector delegates of the state that are the source of government waste and bloat.
The literature is clear on this: when governments eliminate their own capacity to serve the people and hire corporations to do it on their behalf, the corporations charge more and deliver less:
As Lynch writes, DOGE's purpose was to dismantle as much of the government as possible and shift its duties to Beltway Bandits who could milk Uncle Sucker for every dime. Mamdani's ambition, meanwhile, is to "restore faith in government [and] demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence."
As Mamdani said in his inauguration speech, "For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public."
Turning governments into businesses has been an unmitigated failure. After decades of outsourcing, the government hasn't managed to shrink its payroll, but government workers are today primarily employed in wheedling private contractors to fulfill their promises, even as public spending has quintupled:
After Snowden broke both his legs during special forces training and washed out, he went to work for the NSA. After a couple years, his boss told him that Congress capped the spy agencies' headcount but not their budgets, so he was going to have to quit his job at the NSA and go to work for one of the NSA's many contractors, because the NSA could hire as many contractors as it wanted.
So Snowden is sent to a recruiter who asks him how much he's making as a government spy. Snowden quotes a modest 5-figure sum. The recruiter is aghast and tells Snowden that he gets paid a percentage of whatever Snowden ends up making as a government contractor, and promptly triples Snowden's government salary. Why not? The spy agencies have unlimited budgets, and will pay whatever the private company that Snowden nominally works for bills them at. Everybody wins!
Ladies and gentlemen, the efficiency of government outsourcing. Run the government like a business!
As bad as this is when the government hires outside contractors to do things, it's even worse when they hire outside contractors to consult on things. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government spent a fortune on consultants, especially at the start of the pandemic:
The main beneficiary of these contracts was McKinsey, who were given a blank cheque and no oversight – they were even exempted from rules requiring them to disclose conflicts of interest.
Trudeau raised Canadian government spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion, creating a "shadow civil service" that cost vastly more than the actual civil service – the government spent $1.85b on internal IT expertise, and $2.3b on outside contractors.
These contractors produced some of the worst IT boondoggles in government history, including the bungled "ArriveCAN" contact tracing program. The two-person shop that won the contract outsourced it to KPMG and raked off a 15-30% commission.
Before Trudeau, Stephen Harper paid IBM to build Phoenix – a payroll system that completely failed and was, amazingly, far worse than ArriveCAN. IBM got $309m to build Phoenix, and then Canada spent another $506m to fix it and compensate the people whose lives it ruined.
Wherever you find these contractors, you find stupendous waste and fraud. I remember in the early 2000s, when Dan "City of Sound" Hill was working at the BBC and wanted to try an experiment to distribute MP3s of a radio programme.
The BBC – an organization with a long history of technical excellence – had given the exclusive contract for web delivery to Siemens, who wanted £10,000 to set up a web-server for the experiment. Dan rented a server from an online provider and put it all on his personal card, serving tens of thousands of MP3s for less than £10. It turns out that letting your technical personnel do your technology development costs 1/1000th of what it costs to have contractors do it.
Running your public institution "like a business" is incredibly inefficient. Back when Musk and Ramaswamy announced their plan to cut $2t from the US federal budget, David Dayen published a plan to realize nearly that much savings just by attacking waste arising from running the government "like a business":
The US government's own estimate of the losses due to contractor fraud comes out to $274b/year – roughly the size of the entire civil service payroll (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Musk sadistically destroyed, accounts for 0.012% of federal spending).
Medicare "upcoding" – a form of fraud committed by companies like United Healthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage provider in the country – costs the public $83b/year:
Congress has banned Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining for pharma prices, which is why the US government pays 178% more than other governments, for the same drugs, which are often developed at public expense:
The Pentagon is a cesspit of waste. It's not just firing spies and rehiring them as contractors at a 300% markup – that's just for starters. The Pentagon receives $840b/year and has failed its last three audits:
The conservative version of "efficiency" cashes out to "efficient at extracting value from public institutions, workers and customers." Mamdani's (good) mirror world "efficiency" means providing great public service through investing in public excellence.
New York City is overdue for this kind of overhaul. Everywhere you look in the city, you find high price consultants making out like bandits and starving the city of the funds it needs to deliver. The Second Avenue subway spent more on consultants than it spent on digging tunnels:
Mamdani has pledged to audit the Department of Education's 25 largest contracts (the DOE spends $10b/year on outside contractors). He's rolling out "fiscal training and certification" for any government employee involved in procurement.
Mamdani isn't pretending he can bridge the gap that Adams left in the city's finances through efficiency alone: to make up the difference, he is going to tax NYC's millionaires, and ask the state to "rebalance" its relationship with NYC's taxpayers (NYC contributes 54.4% of the state budget, but only gets 40.5% in return).
As Lynch writes, NYC was the birthplace of austerity-driven outsourcing, following from the city's bankruptcy in 1975. 50 years later, Mamdani is bringing that age to a close.
Mamdani knows what the stakes are, too. He called efficiency "the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics":
Mamdani is reviving the tradition of "sewer socialism," a governing philosophy based on "bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways":
Sewer socialism, public excellence, real efficiency: these are the (good) mirror world versions of the right's obsession with "government efficiency." On the conservative side of the mirror, "efficiency" is an excuse for hamstringing government employees and turning their budgets over to lazy, crooked contractors. On the left's side of the mirror, "efficiency" is building capacity in democratically accountable institutions that care about helping every person, and who deliver tomorrow's excellence by making long-term investments today.
Image:
DAVID ILIFF (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_Midtown_Skyline_at_night_-_Jan_2006_edit1.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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As Trump rails against free trade, demands public ownership stakes in corporations that receive government funds, and (selectively) enforces antitrust law, some (stupid) people are wondering, "Is Trump a communist?"
In The American Prospect, David Dayen writes about the strange case of Trump's policies, which fly in the face of right wing economic orthodoxy and have the superficial trappings of a leftist economic program:
The problem isn't that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump's version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque.
Take Trump's demand for a 10% stake in Intel (a course of action endorsed by no less than Bernie Sanders). Intel is a company in trouble, whose financialization has left it dependent on other companies (notably TMSC) to make its most advanced chips. The company has hollowed itself out, jettisoning both manufacturing capacity and cash reserves, pissing away the funds thus freed up on stock buybacks and dividends.
Handing Trump a 10% "golden share" does nothing to improve Intel's serious structural problems. And if you take Trump at his word and accept that securing US access to advanced chips is a national security priority, Trump's Intel plan does nothing to advance that access. But it gets worse: Trump also says denying China access to these chips is a national security priority, but he greenlit Nvidia's plan to sell its top-of-the-range silicon to China in exchange for a gaudy statuette and a 15% export tax.
It's possible to pursue chip manufacturing as a matter of national industrial policy, and it's even possible to achieve this goal by taking ownership stakes in key firms – because it's often easier to demand corporate change via a board seat than it is to win the court battles needed to successfully invoke the Defense Production Act. The problem is that Trumpland is uninterested in making any of that happen. They just want a smash and grab and some red meat for the base: "Look, we made Intel squeal!"
Then there's the Trump tariffs. Writing in Vox EU, Lausanne prof of international business Richard Baldwin writes about the long and checkered history of using tariffs to incubate and nurture domestic production:
The theory of tariffs goes like this: if we make imports more expensive by imposing a tax on them (tariffs are taxes that are paid by consumers, after all), then domestic manufacturers will build factories and start manufacturing the foreign goods we've just raised prices on. This is called "import substitution," and it really has worked, but only in a few cases.
What do those cases have in common? They were part of a comprehensive program of "export discipline, state-directed credit, and careful government–business coordination":
https://academic.oup.com/book/10201
In other words, tariffs only work to reshore production where there is a lot of careful planning, diligent data-collection, and review. Governments have to provide credit to key firms to get them capitalized, provide incentives, and smack nonperformers around. Basically, this is the stuff that Biden did for renewables with the energy sector, and – to a lesser extent – for silicon with the CHIPS Act.
Trump's not doing any of that. He's just winging it. There's zero follow-through. It's all about appearances, soundbites, and the libidinal satisfaction of watching corporate titans bend the knee to your cult leader.
This is also how Trump approaches antitrust. When it comes to corporate power, both Trump and Biden's antitrust enforcers are able to strike terror into the hearts of corporate behemoths. The difference is that the Biden administration prioritized monopolists based on how harmful they were to the American people and the American economy, whereas Trump's trustbusters target companies based on whether Trump is mad at them:
In her 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein introduces the idea of a right-wing "mirror world" that offers a conspiratorial, unhinged version of actual problems that leftists wrestle with:
For example, the antivax movement claims that pharma companies operate on the basis of unchecked greed, without regard to the harm their defective products cause to everyday people. When they talk about this, they sound an awful like leftists who are angry that the Sacklers killed a million Americans with their opiods and then walked away with billions of dollars:
Then there are the conspiracy theories about voting machines. Progressives have been sounding the alarm about the security defects in voting machine since the Bush v Gore years, but that doesn't mean that Venezuelan hackers stole the 2020 election for Biden:
When anti-15-minute-city weirdos warn that automated license-plate cameras are a gift to tyrants both petty and gross, they are repeating a warning that leftists have sounded since the Patriot Act:
The mirror-world is a world where real problems (the rampant sexual abuse of children by powerful people and authortiy figures) are met with fake solutions (shooting up pizza parlors and transferring Ghislaine Maxwell to a country-club prison):
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd049y2qymo
Most of the people stuck in the mirror world are poor and powerless, because desperation makes you an easy mark for grifters peddling conspiracy theories. But Trump's policies on corporate power are what happens in the mirror world inhabited by the rich and powerful.
Trump is risking the economic future of every person in America (except a few cronies), but that's not the only risk here. There's also the risk that reasonable people will come to view industrial policy, government stakes in publicly supported companies, and antitrust as reckless showboating, a tactic exclusively belonging to right wing nutjobs and would-be dictators.
Sociologists have a name for this: they call it "schismogenesis," when a group defines itself in opposition to its rivals. Schismogenesis is progressives insisting that voting machines and pharma companies are trustworthy and that James Comey is a resistance hero:
After we get rid of Trump, America will be in tatters. We're going to need big, muscular state action to revive the nation and rebuild its economy. We can't afford to let Trump poison the well for the very idea of state intervention in corporate activity.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
From the latest episode of Patrick McKenzie's podcast Complex Systems:
One point about vaccine hesitancy that I think is broadly underappreciated:
Consider the Pell Grant program in the United States. Pell Grants are essentially free money for college. Despite that, we never hear about “Pell Grant hesitancy,” yet every college knows it has to do a sales job to explain this to prospective students.
For example, they’ll say: "There are various ways to fund college. A loan you have to pay back. A grant, like a Pell Grant, is free money you don’t pay back. Here’s an application you need to fill out, and then the money will arrive." Even though it’s free money, colleges still invest in explaining and promoting it because people don’t automatically understand the program.
Now think about the COVID vaccine rollout. A lot of people, particularly in the professional-managerial class, assumed the vaccine was the most anticipated product release in human history. After a year of lockdowns and trauma, it seemed obvious that no one would need convincing to take it. But that assumption was wrong.
Much of what was perceived as vaccine hesitancy wasn’t driven by anti-science or deep-seated opposition. It was more like, No one has sat me down and explained why this benefits me. Many people assumed, If the vaccine were truly important, someone—my doctor, a public health official—would have told me by now.
This wasn’t well-calibrated to the reality of the U.S. healthcare system, which, for better or worse, didn’t believe it needed to sell the vaccine to individuals.
Now, of course, there was a partisan and politicized element to vaccine hesitancy. And it wasn’t a straightforward left-versus-right issue—it had a bit of a horseshoe effect, pulling in groups from across the spectrum. But a significant portion of the hesitancy stemmed from a lack of direct, clear communication, not outright opposition.
I was in the group of people who were eagerly anticipating the rollout of the vaccines in 2021. Looking through my message history in several group chats, I can find that at the start of April 2021, I repeatedly broadcast a message to my local friends to the effect of:
The vaccine is available to everyone age 16 or higher on [date]
VACCINES ARE FREE FOR EVERYONE and YOU DO NOT NEED HEALTH INSURANCE to get injected FOR FREE.
Additionally, there are two earlier tiers of groups that are eligible to get their vaccine on [date -14 days] and [date -7 days]; here is a link to see if you're part of one of the eligible groups
I received numerous replies to the effect of, "thank you for sharing this information with me; I just booked an appointment to get vaccinated, which is something that I would not have done in the counterfactual world where I did not see your message." (I do not think the person who lives in that counterfactual world -- and did not schedule the vaccination appointment -- fits the typical profile of what people think of "vaccine hesitant.")
There is probably a world in which these people got this same information from a public health official or a doctor. (Perhaps that world has higher state capacity and more efficacious institutions.) Instead, these people live in a world where they got that message in the group chat that used to be used to organize board game meetups.
The point that "the general rollout in mid April 2021 is for everyone 16 and up" seemed to be a piece of information that people got from me that they didn't get from other messaging channels.
Another critical point that several people appreciated having explicitly spelling out for them was "everyone can get jabbed for free; yes, this includes the uninsured, or people who don't know if they're insured because they're 25 and maybe that means they're on their parents' insurance but they kinda neglected to figure out that whole thing but also embarrassed to ask about it."
This was a vital bit of signal that seemed to get dropped from some of the messaging that made it to their ears, and it rhymes a bit with a parenthetical remark Patrick made outside the podcast audio:
You can understand why people are skeptical [of Pell Grants], too! “As if the federal government would give me tens of thousands of dollars, for free, with basically no checking. That certainly hasn’t matched any other experience in my life!”
Patrick also has a parenthetical note about why the US healthcare system needs to play a marketing role in "selling" the vaccine to individuals, despite their belief that that this was not necessary:
Pharmacies were the primary site that the vaccine was physically delivered at, and pharmacies are not specialized in demand generation for drugs. The pharma industry expects physicians to do that; that is why the physicians get visits by attractive people explaining the benefits of the new things on offer.
Two practical implications:
Society benefits from having functional institutions that can do things at scale, like informing the public of information that they need to know as a matter of public safety
In the absence of institutions, one of the fallbacks for important information making its way to the people who need it is "group chat message from the person who organizes the board game meetup I attended a year ago." This might practically describe you, dear reader. You may not wish to be burdened with this responsibility, but this is one mechanism by which you can be part of the change which you wish to see in the world.
I participated in this (admittedly small-scale) messaging effort in part thanks to the example set by other participants in local group chats which I am a part of, which have historically been the way that I have learned information, like "There is currently a boil order for [neighborhood]; here is a webpage with a map to see if you are affected. (Also, in case 'boil order' is a new phrase to you: there are worries about water contamination due to [reasons] and as such the health department is recommending that you boil any water that comes out of your tap before drinking it, even if it 'looks normal.')"
I feel that parenthetical point bears repeating. One point of frustration I personally heard from multiple people in 2020 was the number of occasions when public officials issued an order like "shelter in place" without further elaboration for the benefit of people who weren't already familiar with that precise piece of jargon.
You might think that people, upon encountering that sort of jargon, would perform a Google search to discover what exactly it is they are being instructed to do. But as someone who has ever worked in marketing and looked at sales funnel dashboard can tell you, there is zero chance that the conversion rate for this is 100%. Whenever you add the step of "do a google search to figure out what the public order is actually notifying you about," you are adding another layer to the funnel. And with each layer you add, you are losing some people.
It's sort of amazing how much higher defence spending is these days than it was historically. We think of the Civil War as a total war but we were spending just as much through most of the Cold War. And during the War of 1812 we were only spending half as much as we do today. Government's ability to extract wealth from the economy overall has gone way, way up.
