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Nice post but perhaps a bit US-centric: "Most polities are split into two big hostile tribes." That's significantly less true in Sweden. There's the difference between two-party and proportional systems. There's also the difference that the US is much less a folk—from history, from hugeness, from language. Demonization of 'the other side' is not as stark in Sweden, partly because there is less cogency to the notion of two opposing sides and partly because there is less demonization.

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"Or give up on trans rights in exchange for $50B of federal school funding."

This deal helps one member of the Dem coalition but hurts another. Before even discussing it with the other party, they would need to agree internally. The trans people are getting nothing in return for this deal.

You aren't just negotiating with the other party, you are negotiating within your party.

"Similarly, imagine Republicans offering to support higher immigration as long as immigrants were excluded from the welfare state."

Yeah, this has worked so well in the past huh.

"Or promising to abandon school choice if public K-12 establishes a 40% Republican teacher quota."

A 40% Republican teacher quota sounds like a wildly unworkable and idiotic idea. So you would be giving up a real solution for something that might even make things worse.

"But it utterly fails to explain why China would refuse to name a price and cross its fingers in the hope that Taiwan will play the fool."

If China accepts that deal they have forfeited their claim. It destroys their credibility including with their own people. If they try to enforce that claim in the future it will be seen as illegitimate.

China already has a bunch of foreign exchange it doesn't know what to do with. Will more foreign exchange allow the CCP to declare that China has surpassed the West.

"Why did you refuse to compromise on the death penalty to get your way on abortion? "

Abortion a the death penalty aren't about "life". The death penalty is a proxy for how seriously we take crime and abortion is a proxy for whether you believe in traditional sexual and familial values (chastity, fertility, marriage). That's why few on the pro-life side care about IVF, because people doing IVF are trying to start families which is what the debate is really about, not fetuses.

There is a lack of imagination here. What principals were Manchin and Sinema pushing when then they signed the latest bill? Sure looked like horse trading to me.

In general, I think you just haven't thought through how unworkable these proposals are.

I think the closest thing to truth here is the following two principals:

1) Foreign policy is a bunch of random posturing nonsense most of the time

2) There is a strong status quo bias that is hard to overcome

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Eh. People wouldn't horse-trade publicly, and they can't negotiate away any sacred cows. But quiet deals among politicians, where they support each other's non-sacred-cow legislation is the norm.

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Interesting point on trading territory. My impression from reading about European history since the Roman era is most wars were about acquiring resources and that was mostly so those in power had more wealth to play with (either by taxing it or taking personal ownership of stuff you conquered). Middle ages wars all seemed to start because King X wanted territory Y and ended when they traded provinces to end the conflict. For now.

World War II was the last major conflict I can think of which was all about annexing territory. In the years since, we seem to have almost completely given up that behavior (Ukraine is shocking because land grabs are so out of the norm any more). I think your implicit observation that this is because of democracy may be right. It's much easier for an autocrat to give up land. It's much harder for a Parliament to do so even when it makes complete sense.

It's weird. On the one hand, we decry many borders because they were just set by a bunch of white guys in a smoky room drawing lines on a map. And yet, we seem to have terrible difficulty recognizing those cigar-chomping white guys did a bad job and the borders really ought to move. There seem to be any number of long simmering disputed borders which, from an outsiders perspective, seem trivially easy to fix, and yet the people involved don't.

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I think one important aspect that is missing fro this article is the idea of conflicting commitment strategies.

David Friedman has an example of a neighbor who throws his trash into your backyard every day and offers to stop in exchange for a trifling sum. Even if you find his offer credible (and your cheapest option), you will not accept it. Which is why your neighbor won't try this in the first place.

Border disputes are a clear case of such commitment strategies conflicting with each other. If Japan pays Russia for land it already claims, what stops other nations from claiming Japanese islands and getting free money?

I believe deep ideological issues are similar to this. The Democrats don't want to pay the Republicans to step back from an unreasonable position, and vice versa.

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I'm amazed at the even far more mundane areas for compromise that are ignored. Drop the min wage in exchange for an EITC expansion? Permanently limit cap gains taxes in exchange for no cap on payroll taxes?

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Many government employees believe that earning profits is immoral. Instead, they believe that the government should allocate scarce resources even though that encourages stalemates. For example, from the Wall Street Journal today discussing Colorado River water.

In a letter Monday to federal regulators, John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, accused other users of coming up with unreasonable proposals—including for “drought profiteering.” In an interview, he singled out farming districts in Arizona and California that have offered to use less water on their crops in return for cash payments.

Farm officials say they have conserved, too, and called the money-for-water plan necessary to quickly achieve savings and help offset the economic impact.

In Yuma County, Ariz., four irrigation districts have put together a plan to pay farmers $1,500 for each acre foot of water they don’t use over 935,000 acres there over the next four years, said Wade Noble, general counsel for the districts.

The arrangement would represent a roughly one-fifth reduction in the farmers’ water use, which they would attempt to make up by improving crop yields. They could get compensation from $4 billion in drought relief Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) negotiated to include in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed Tuesday.

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One concern about these sorts of bargains is they may incentivize extremism or expressing false preferences. Democrats might advocate for open borders as leverage to get abortion but they might not truly want open borders. Financially rewarding the capture of islands might incentivize military conquest. I don’t know if this would actually happen, but it’s worth noting.

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Excellent post, and I think that you’re probably right about the priority being getting emotions high as opposed to getting stuff down.

It’s pretty obvious from the way many issues are framed, even. Take abortion. Framing it as pro-choice vs pro-life is--strictly speaking--inaccurate in itself, as there are very few states on either aisle who completely ban or allow abortion. It really depends on context.

A lot of people just don’t like mentioning this though. It makes the conversation harder to have.

Nevertheless, it’s not fair to blame politicians alone. The reason that this “flare up emotions, avoid action” thing works is because people let it work, too. No keyboard warrior hardcore democrats wants to talk about why choice is fair in abortion but not in vaccines. And no similar Republican wants to talk about how Texas still rules abortion illegal even in cases of rape.

We should look at ourselves, too.

If anyone interested in some nuance, at least on Roe, I’d deeply appreciate your thoughts on the article below. Trying to reach more people with it.

https://nanithemoney.substack.com/p/raise-your-hand-if-youre-neither

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"You could insist that all of these are rotten deals for the other side. If that were the key problem, however, you’d expect the other side to jump at the opportunity."

I JUST don't get it. Teach me how to read (again)!

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"You could insist that all of these are rotten deals for the other side. If that were the key problem, however, you’d expect the other side to jump at the opportunity."

I JUST don't get it. Teach me how to read (again)!

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In the post from which "politics is cruelty" comes, it is said that cruel is an emotion. It is not. You can be cruel but you can't feel cruel, for one thing. A person being cruel is a person disposed to behave in certain ways, for openers. Anger is an emotion: you can be angry, make someone else angry, feel angry, and so on. If a person does something cruel, they are not feeling cruel or making other people feel cruel. You don't feel cruelty; you are cruel or not, which is a way of talking about what you do and why you do it and how it is to be evaluated. Being cruel, again, is not feeling cruel. It is not even having any specific sensation. It is only a category mistake to think it is.

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I would draw a line between this piece and your thought-provoking essay justifying Szasz in light of price theory -- in both essays, you seek to the fit the untidy world of human passions to the Procrustean bed of economics. It is a wonderful shtick.

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What Robin Hanson said.

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Also, there are technologies today enabling people to create new democratic and territorial systems

https://thenetworkstate.com/dashboard

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