If you’d told me that America’s system of dealing with accuses criminals awaiting trial was massively inefficient, hugely unjust, and especially tilted against the poor I would have no problem believing you. My guess, however, would have been that knee-jerk “tough on crime” politics was to blame. Apparently the real issue is “the interests of a powerful bail bonding industry”. NPR makes the case solidly and it’s all the more remarkable when you consider that there are many, many, many more powerful industries out there.

Similarly, I have a friend who used to write software that had something to do with tax administration. She was telling me that it would be relatively simple to implement a system in which everyone’s tax forms come already filled out, so you could then change them if there was a problem, but otherwise have an easy time of it. But the change is always blocked by a combination of the Club for Growth, which wants taxes to be as annoying as possible, and Intuit, which wants to do your taxes for you.

I think the right way to interpret the news that most Americans think the stimulus money has been wasted rather than helping them is pretty obvious. Most people don’t know a lot of macroeconomic theory, most people don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, and most people recognize that the unemployment rate is ridiculously high. Ergo, they’ve decided the money was wasted.

Joe Klein has a good piece laying out the truth but I also think it’s a textbook example of how not to talk about gaps in the public’s knowledge of policy disputes. Calling the country “too dumb to thrive” or wondering if we’ve become “a nation of dodos” is way too harsh. It also opens the door for basic observations about public ignorance to be caricatured as elites sneering at the common man.

The fact of the matter, however, is that most people don’t know much about most things. I know a lot about US politics and policy debates and the NBA. I know less about the NFL, indie rock, various TV shows, etc. I know very little about contemporary literary fiction or soccer or plumbing or automobile repair or legitimate theater or chemistry or firearms or fashion or any number of other topics that lots of people seem extremely well-informed about. The simple fact of the matter is that there’s only so much time in the day and everyone can only know about so many things. I write about politics and policy debates for a living so I’d really better know a lot about it. Plenty of people who don’t deal with these issues professionally find them interesting, which is great. But plenty of other people don’t find them interesting and consequently they don’t know much about it. That’s not the same as them being “dodos.”

The problem isn’t that we need people to turn into utopian citizens, Stakhanovites of deliberative democracy eager to sink their teeth into every issue. The problem is that we need elected officials and political operatives who are willing to take responsibility for the idea that they will be judged first and foremost on the basis of outcomes. You don’t need an economic policy that people approve of, you need an economic policy that produces results people approve of—i.e., growth and jobs. You wouldn’t fix the toilet by polling people about what they think you should do, you would ask someone who knows how to fix toilets.

I tweeted earlier that if “focusing on jobs” created jobs, incumbents would never lose elections. And this seems to me to be the problem with a lot of the talk in the air about the Democratic Party trying to pivot to jobs. I’ve heard a lot of good ideas to pivot to a “jobs” message. But while I’m familiar with a lot of empirical evidence suggesting that the unemployment rate has a big impact on politics, I’m not familiar with any evidence suggesting that the volume of jobs-related messaging impacts anything.

So what might create jobs? Brad DeLong surveys some options:

If the Senate won’t let us run bigger deficits, and if the Federal Reserve is not expanding but rather cutting back on its degree of monetary easing, then there are only three paths open to try to increase employment:

1. Shifting government spending from things that create the most in the way of useful goods and services (and that also boost employment) to things that create the most employment (and maybe also create some useful goods and services): i.e., large government employment programs.

2. Shifting private production from things that create the most in the way of useful goods and services (and that also boost employment) to things that create the most employment (and maybe also create some useful goods and services): i.e., large (but incremental and temporary) new employment tax credits.

3. Using the U.S. Treasury as the world’s biggest hedge fund to take huge amounts of private-sector risk onto the government’s books, and thus create an appetite on the part of investors to finance additional risky investment even given their limited and depressed risk tolerance.

It’s unclear to me which of any of these are on the table…

I don’t fully understand what option 3 entails. And it’s important to note that whatever downsides you may think higher short-term deficits or more Fed easing would have, they would be smaller than the downsides entailed by options 1 and 2. By far the best option would be for congress to do something that addresses long-term deficits—something like passing a slightly modified version of the Senate’s health care bill—and then use that additional breathing space to implement bigger short-term deficits and more monetary easing. Any other jobs option looks much worse than that, and it’s not clear we’re even going to get any other jobs option at all.