Common problems
- The Rise of the Meritocracy has been a mess (Michael Young)
- We’re Coming Apart (Charles Murray)
- “Deaths of despair” (Anne Case & Angus Deaton)
- “Millennial burnout” and “Workism” (Anne Helen Petersen & Derek Thompson)
- Not enough babies (Lyman Stone)
- Increasing Inequality (Piketty, Saez & Zucman)
Competing Explanations
- It’s all the Neoliberals’ fault! (Monbiot, and really too many to name)
- The Great Stagnation (Cowen, Thiel, Gordon)
Common Among Explanations
- The music stopped sometime around the 1970s
Competing Solutions
- Make America Grow Again
- YIMBY
- Moonshots
- Make Stagnation Safe Again
- More tax and transfer
- Expand the safety net
Question
- Are the common solutions mutually exclusive?
Work-around for potential mutual exclusivity
- Positive sum investments in public goods
- Public health
- Infrastructure
- Education
- Basic scientific research
- Long-ball experimental investments
In Fairness
- \\ Critics of inequality have a point when it comes to needing an elite that has skin in the game with respect to public institutions.
- // Defenders of the growth(+) paradigm (see Cowen, Stubborn Attachments) have a point when it comes to needing a pie large enough to continually improve human well-being — not to mention meet our “embedded growth obligations” (Eric Weinstein).
