The end of Chevron deference; export controls; jerky American profs; basic income; economics of AI; solar power uses; Global South tariffs; Gen Z wages; Stiglitz
My prediction: the end of Chevron deference will result in an absolute flood of case filings in federal courts. If businesses can gain approximately $150 in benefits gained/burdens and taxes avoided for every dollar spent lobbying Congress, think how much they can gain by filing anti-regulatory lawsuits. Unfortunately, I do not have a link for that $150 figure. I read it some years ago and do not remember where.
Here's the real problem: poor people don't have the money to pay for lobbyists or lawsuits.
I think there's already "an absolute flood" of filings and courts are overwhelmed everywhere. I also think you are underestimating the cost of filing lawsuits, and the extent to which firms can be optimistic about winning them. The John Roberts SCOTUS seems inclined to kick everything back to the supremely compromised humans who make up the majority of Congress and tell them "do better" (in this case, "write more clearly"). Therein lies the tautology.
And after the case is dismissed, during the interval when Congress is writing clear laws, the industry will be free from regulation. Sounds like an industry win to me.
You forgot that the business of America...is business!
But seriously, the Supremes just abrogated the Judicial Branch a ton of power at the expense of the Executive. But aren't the courts--from County, up through Federal Circuits--already backlogged? How is the Judiciary supposed to handle what's likely to be a massive increase in caseload?
Chevron deference was originally introduced because the judiciary was more liberal than the executive and conservatives wanted to stop judges from introducing /more/ implicit regulation, or at least getting it badly confused.
But a conservative Supreme Court now sits at the top of the judiciary, and I don't think more liberal regulations created by judges will survive. More confused ones, no doubt.
The $150 figure seems let's say improbable. If anything provided a return on investment of 15000%, people would start doing a lot more of it until the return equalized with other things they could do with their money.
I'm sure there are figures somewhere on money spent lobbying, and I'm sure there's probably some things going on under the table. Throw in PAC money in too.
My guess is the amount spent on lobbying/PAC has been going up steadily since 1990. Doubtless, returns are diminishing, but they the amount of money going into this quest certainly shows no sign of decreasing.
Me too.. and a characteristic of many of those ideas is that they often do not need "firm" -- i.e. reliable 24/7 battery-or-gas backed -- electricity. Just gobble it up when available.
I actually disagree that we need to "make the deep and thorough revisions to the Constitution that are really needed to deal with modern economic, social, and technological problems."
I believe that the boring, plain vanilla regulatory state, as it was working in ~2015 or so, was really working pretty well. Not perfectly obviously, but I actually believe that in general people are way too cynical about this. The essential functions of the regulatory state, in food safety, environmental protection, aviation safety, financial regulation and many others, are really working pretty well as is, without conservative judicial activism.
Now, obviously that's not to say that there's not room for improvement. I'm sure there is! But I honestly disagree that what we need is some sort of sweeping revision to the Constitution. And I also believe that attempting to do such a thing would actually be very dangerous.
If laws get written by fancy autocomplete (which mimics reasoning but does not reason), that will certainly create jobs... for lawyers who can find the loopholes, either to fix them before they get signed into law, or for the ones who exploit them once passed.
"The prize is the satisfaction of having spent extra minutes of your life reading economics blogs, which is of course the most valuable and enlightening thing you can do with your time."
I'm not sure the findings about tweeting academics are all that robust, given the methodology of the study.
But assuming that the basic insight holds, I wonder if the reason is that U.S. academics on social media are generally rewarded for being egotistical and toxic. In the U.S., at least, academics often use social media to raise their profiles: Deans and Admissions Officers like it when their professors are popular on social media. Egotistical and toxic tweeting reliably generates more retweets and followers than modest and kind tweeting, so you'd expect to see more of that among US. academics. My guess, at least.
Somehow I can't wrap my brain around this criticism of the Chevron doctrine ruling.
I prefer rule by elected representatives, aka Congress.
Absent that rule by a single elected leader, aka President.
Absent that rule by judges appointed by an elected leader.
The commonality of all these options is that there is some plausible connection to the democratic process and the voters.
Below all of these is rule by a king or an oligarchy, since even despotism can be efficient.
However... last on my list of preferences would be rule by unelected bureaucrats.
Chevron allowed a single agency to serve as regulator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Not OK. Unfortunately, I doubt the ruling would make Congress more precise in its legislating. Your tongue-in-cheek suggestion of "AI solutions for writing and reading laws" isn't the problem. The current system works perfectly for Congresscritters: campaign in platitudes, legislate in generalities, disclaim all responsibility for the resulting mess. So while I'm pessimistic that it will reign in the imperial-executive tendancies of modern America, ending Chevron does move us from "rule by bureaucrat" to "rule by SCOTUS", which is an improvement in my book.
Except (as noted), Congress has no chance in hell of writing coherent and detailed laws that will resolve many of these issues (not enough expertise on the staffs on top of Congress not even being close to understanding 90% of the issues).
So, that means decisions will be made by judges (just as pre-Chevron) who again have no expertise and no staff to even come close to really understanding the issues (ex. the Amarillo judge and FDA).
So, your notion makes perfect sense in a "civics dream world", but in reality the expertise simply doesn't exist in the right places (and won't realistically).
So, I agree that the Imperial Presidency is a big problem - be happy to have all the agency expertise staff move to Congress - BUT that ain't going to happen.
Judges are unelected bureaucrats just like agency regulators, aren't controlled by an elected president, and have lifetime appointments. It's not very democratic.
It's a hierarchy: democratic processes at the top, increasingly less democratic ones at the bottom. I agree, it's far from ideal, but it's not hard to say that rule by judges appointed and confirmed by elected leaders is more democratic than rule by career bureaucrats who are accountable to no voter.
No. The vast majority of the bureaucracy effectively can not be replaced by the President. And not just because it's hard; the civil service act prevents this. Political appointees at the top are replaced, but the underlings know they can't be fired, and thus will slow walk or misplace or misunderstand orders and policies they disagree with. This is the essence of "the deep state" theory. While the term gets overused, it's not wholly wrong either.
On Chevron, your discussion, while likely accurate, overlooks that the part of the decision which says that Constitution takes precidence over administrative "efficiency" and experts. Congress will have to take care that they write laws and regulations that articulate their intentions. Congress has abnegaed their lawmaking responsibilities because they wanted to avoid the blame for bad laws and bad results. If it doesn't have the politically acceptable result, blame the bureaucrats. Bureaucrats ought to rejoice. In fact, it may result in more government employees. Congee will have to add policy experts to their staff.
A LOT of policy experts to add - do you really see that happening in Reality Land? I don't - I would guess that we will be right back in pre-Chevron land with judges deciding (which the conservatives didn't like). Lots of court cases, lots of jobs for lawyers, and almost no expertise actually involved in the judgements.
Chevron has been on life support for some time. You should have consulted with an attorney before you wrote your opinion. It has been chipped away for some time now.
That said, it is a good thing. This court, in particular, in many of its rulings, keeps saying, Congress do your job”. Much of the issues we face in America is due to Congress not doing its job. It is averse to taking a tough vote. Congress defers to Executive Power and EOs far too often to protect its members.
There isn’t a member who doesn’t acknowledge that our immigration system needs fixes, as do SS and Medicare. Real action on debt and deficit requires very hard decisions, which Congress doesn’t want to make. Many of the legal issues that end up in our courts are measured against Laws that were written decades, if not centuries ago, solely because Congress doesn't want to write new Legislation.
When deciding what a law says, it is what courts do. We have seen regulators attempt to add CO2 to the Clean Air Act. Ponds on farms are determined to be waterways. If you think we need more and more regulations, you are asking for more and more delays in areas that need management. Try building a new freeway extension or building a new refining plant.
Regulators that are appointed are biased and partisan. Whole departments can become biased and partisan. It is hard not to see the EPA or the IRS as partisan, depending on who is running them.
Do you REALLY believe that Congress will start doing this job? There are so many areas that Congress isn't doing its job on basic matters - much less the level of detail and expertise that will be needed.
I even agree that Congress should - but expecting that is fantasy land.
It sounds like Joseph Stiglitz is unfamiliar with Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. It behooves many of us to read that volume.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it described that way before. The “burden” is actually a pleasure for the regulators when lobbyists and donors and activists are behind it, and the appointees come into their roles with a specific agenda of “interpretation” already bought and paid for. Sometimes the regulators come from the same activist groups paying for the changes, and they certainly coordinate with them. Burden?
Like saying it is a burden to the restaurant when a client orders the double porterhouse.
Great example is the EPA shutting down coal and gas plants with its carbon capture ruling even as electricity demand explodes.
💩💩💩💩💩 >>> The prize is the satisfaction of having spent extra minutes of your life reading economics blogs, which is of course the most valuable and enlightening thing you can do with your time.🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
My prediction: the end of Chevron deference will result in an absolute flood of case filings in federal courts. If businesses can gain approximately $150 in benefits gained/burdens and taxes avoided for every dollar spent lobbying Congress, think how much they can gain by filing anti-regulatory lawsuits. Unfortunately, I do not have a link for that $150 figure. I read it some years ago and do not remember where.
Here's the real problem: poor people don't have the money to pay for lobbyists or lawsuits.
The trial bar hires poor people as litigants and only takes 40 percent
I think there's already "an absolute flood" of filings and courts are overwhelmed everywhere. I also think you are underestimating the cost of filing lawsuits, and the extent to which firms can be optimistic about winning them. The John Roberts SCOTUS seems inclined to kick everything back to the supremely compromised humans who make up the majority of Congress and tell them "do better" (in this case, "write more clearly"). Therein lies the tautology.
And after the case is dismissed, during the interval when Congress is writing clear laws, the industry will be free from regulation. Sounds like an industry win to me.
You forgot that the business of America...is business!
But seriously, the Supremes just abrogated the Judicial Branch a ton of power at the expense of the Executive. But aren't the courts--from County, up through Federal Circuits--already backlogged? How is the Judiciary supposed to handle what's likely to be a massive increase in caseload?
Nubby, I think you're looking for arrogated. But otherwise, agreed!
Got me, Kathleen! They arrogated their increased branch power by abrogating precedent!
AbRolutely.
Well, it takes a lot of assumptions to support our senses of humor!
Chevron deference was originally introduced because the judiciary was more liberal than the executive and conservatives wanted to stop judges from introducing /more/ implicit regulation, or at least getting it badly confused.
I think this is likely to happen again.
But a conservative Supreme Court now sits at the top of the judiciary, and I don't think more liberal regulations created by judges will survive. More confused ones, no doubt.
The $150 figure seems let's say improbable. If anything provided a return on investment of 15000%, people would start doing a lot more of it until the return equalized with other things they could do with their money.
I'm sure there are figures somewhere on money spent lobbying, and I'm sure there's probably some things going on under the table. Throw in PAC money in too.
My guess is the amount spent on lobbying/PAC has been going up steadily since 1990. Doubtless, returns are diminishing, but they the amount of money going into this quest certainly shows no sign of decreasing.
Loved the section on solar. Don't stop an Owens Lake, fill Mono!
And submerge all those beautiful rock/salt formations? Better to irrigate the Blythe area (which is pretty ugly) and agricultural oasis.
Me too.. and a characteristic of many of those ideas is that they often do not need "firm" -- i.e. reliable 24/7 battery-or-gas backed -- electricity. Just gobble it up when available.
I wouldn't want to destroy Mono Lake by turning it into freshwater!
My understanding is that before diversion, Mono’s level was much higher and significantly less brackish.
I actually disagree that we need to "make the deep and thorough revisions to the Constitution that are really needed to deal with modern economic, social, and technological problems."
I believe that the boring, plain vanilla regulatory state, as it was working in ~2015 or so, was really working pretty well. Not perfectly obviously, but I actually believe that in general people are way too cynical about this. The essential functions of the regulatory state, in food safety, environmental protection, aviation safety, financial regulation and many others, are really working pretty well as is, without conservative judicial activism.
Now, obviously that's not to say that there's not room for improvement. I'm sure there is! But I honestly disagree that what we need is some sort of sweeping revision to the Constitution. And I also believe that attempting to do such a thing would actually be very dangerous.
If laws get written by fancy autocomplete (which mimics reasoning but does not reason), that will certainly create jobs... for lawyers who can find the loopholes, either to fix them before they get signed into law, or for the ones who exploit them once passed.
"nine is at least five" is not merely "technically" correct. It is correct. :)
Technically.
"The prize is the satisfaction of having spent extra minutes of your life reading economics blogs, which is of course the most valuable and enlightening thing you can do with your time."
Good one!
I'm not sure the findings about tweeting academics are all that robust, given the methodology of the study.
But assuming that the basic insight holds, I wonder if the reason is that U.S. academics on social media are generally rewarded for being egotistical and toxic. In the U.S., at least, academics often use social media to raise their profiles: Deans and Admissions Officers like it when their professors are popular on social media. Egotistical and toxic tweeting reliably generates more retweets and followers than modest and kind tweeting, so you'd expect to see more of that among US. academics. My guess, at least.
Somehow I can't wrap my brain around this criticism of the Chevron doctrine ruling.
I prefer rule by elected representatives, aka Congress.
Absent that rule by a single elected leader, aka President.
Absent that rule by judges appointed by an elected leader.
The commonality of all these options is that there is some plausible connection to the democratic process and the voters.
Below all of these is rule by a king or an oligarchy, since even despotism can be efficient.
However... last on my list of preferences would be rule by unelected bureaucrats.
Chevron allowed a single agency to serve as regulator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Not OK. Unfortunately, I doubt the ruling would make Congress more precise in its legislating. Your tongue-in-cheek suggestion of "AI solutions for writing and reading laws" isn't the problem. The current system works perfectly for Congresscritters: campaign in platitudes, legislate in generalities, disclaim all responsibility for the resulting mess. So while I'm pessimistic that it will reign in the imperial-executive tendancies of modern America, ending Chevron does move us from "rule by bureaucrat" to "rule by SCOTUS", which is an improvement in my book.
Shockingly, the folks at American Postliberal don't like the ruling any better than you, Noah: https://www.americanpostliberal.com/p/deference-to-chevron When was the last time you agreed with integralists?
Except (as noted), Congress has no chance in hell of writing coherent and detailed laws that will resolve many of these issues (not enough expertise on the staffs on top of Congress not even being close to understanding 90% of the issues).
So, that means decisions will be made by judges (just as pre-Chevron) who again have no expertise and no staff to even come close to really understanding the issues (ex. the Amarillo judge and FDA).
So, your notion makes perfect sense in a "civics dream world", but in reality the expertise simply doesn't exist in the right places (and won't realistically).
So, I agree that the Imperial Presidency is a big problem - be happy to have all the agency expertise staff move to Congress - BUT that ain't going to happen.
Judges are unelected bureaucrats just like agency regulators, aren't controlled by an elected president, and have lifetime appointments. It's not very democratic.
It's a hierarchy: democratic processes at the top, increasingly less democratic ones at the bottom. I agree, it's far from ideal, but it's not hard to say that rule by judges appointed and confirmed by elected leaders is more democratic than rule by career bureaucrats who are accountable to no voter.
Aren’t they accountable every four years when a new president gets to choose administrators who will interpret the law their own way?
No. The vast majority of the bureaucracy effectively can not be replaced by the President. And not just because it's hard; the civil service act prevents this. Political appointees at the top are replaced, but the underlings know they can't be fired, and thus will slow walk or misplace or misunderstand orders and policies they disagree with. This is the essence of "the deep state" theory. While the term gets overused, it's not wholly wrong either.
Stiglitz is always very careful not to be taintable as a neoliberal. :)
Who else furiously scrolled down to get to footnote 1?
No need to scroll, there's a hover pop-up.
Thanks for pulling these interesting nuggets together!
On Chevron, your discussion, while likely accurate, overlooks that the part of the decision which says that Constitution takes precidence over administrative "efficiency" and experts. Congress will have to take care that they write laws and regulations that articulate their intentions. Congress has abnegaed their lawmaking responsibilities because they wanted to avoid the blame for bad laws and bad results. If it doesn't have the politically acceptable result, blame the bureaucrats. Bureaucrats ought to rejoice. In fact, it may result in more government employees. Congee will have to add policy experts to their staff.
I didn't overlook that!
A LOT of policy experts to add - do you really see that happening in Reality Land? I don't - I would guess that we will be right back in pre-Chevron land with judges deciding (which the conservatives didn't like). Lots of court cases, lots of jobs for lawyers, and almost no expertise actually involved in the judgements.
Democracy is a good thing.
Too much Democracy like too much of anything is a bad thing.
I once wrote on ACX that too much [thing we were discussing] was bad for you, and some wit replied: No duh, that’s why it’s called “too much.”
Can’t argue with the logic!
Chevron has been on life support for some time. You should have consulted with an attorney before you wrote your opinion. It has been chipped away for some time now.
That said, it is a good thing. This court, in particular, in many of its rulings, keeps saying, Congress do your job”. Much of the issues we face in America is due to Congress not doing its job. It is averse to taking a tough vote. Congress defers to Executive Power and EOs far too often to protect its members.
There isn’t a member who doesn’t acknowledge that our immigration system needs fixes, as do SS and Medicare. Real action on debt and deficit requires very hard decisions, which Congress doesn’t want to make. Many of the legal issues that end up in our courts are measured against Laws that were written decades, if not centuries ago, solely because Congress doesn't want to write new Legislation.
When deciding what a law says, it is what courts do. We have seen regulators attempt to add CO2 to the Clean Air Act. Ponds on farms are determined to be waterways. If you think we need more and more regulations, you are asking for more and more delays in areas that need management. Try building a new freeway extension or building a new refining plant.
Regulators that are appointed are biased and partisan. Whole departments can become biased and partisan. It is hard not to see the EPA or the IRS as partisan, depending on who is running them.
Do you REALLY believe that Congress will start doing this job? There are so many areas that Congress isn't doing its job on basic matters - much less the level of detail and expertise that will be needed.
I even agree that Congress should - but expecting that is fantasy land.
It sounds like Joseph Stiglitz is unfamiliar with Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. It behooves many of us to read that volume.
“Burden of interpreting regulations”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it described that way before. The “burden” is actually a pleasure for the regulators when lobbyists and donors and activists are behind it, and the appointees come into their roles with a specific agenda of “interpretation” already bought and paid for. Sometimes the regulators come from the same activist groups paying for the changes, and they certainly coordinate with them. Burden?
Like saying it is a burden to the restaurant when a client orders the double porterhouse.
Great example is the EPA shutting down coal and gas plants with its carbon capture ruling even as electricity demand explodes.
I'm going to steal that double porterhouse quip. Getting hungry just thinking about it
💩💩💩💩💩 >>> The prize is the satisfaction of having spent extra minutes of your life reading economics blogs, which is of course the most valuable and enlightening thing you can do with your time.🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
At lease he has a sense of humor. Most economists are just like accountants, but without the personality ..