Jacob Weisberg’s article blaming “the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis” makes fun reading for anyone who follows politics professionally, but it’s fundamentally misguided. The fact that the public, in response to opinion polls, delivers contradictory desires about the details of public policy just shows that most people have a second-order desire to not invest their time learning the answers to these questions. If you tried to decide how to build highway overpasses by polling people, you’d have (a) paralysis, (b) shitty highways, (c) snarky articles about how public ignorance rather than bad engineering was to blame. But the reality is that that would be a dumb way to build overpasses.

At the end of the day, I don’t think public opinion about policy is all that hard to figure out. People like conditions in the country to be good, and they get upset when conditions are not good. Effective politicians deliver good outcomes, and effective political institutions create incentives for those with power to do their best to deliver good outcomes. Right now, the outcomes being delivered by the Obama administration are not that good. But the nature of our political institutions is that these outcomes don’t represent the Obama administration’s best effort to deliver good outcomes. Instead, you get a weird mishmash of administration ideas, opposition obstructionism, “centrist” preening, liberal whining, etc., etc., etc.

I’m perennially baffled by the occasional phenomenon of American officials publicly complaining about China’s currency policy. After all, what kind of a world are we living in when a great nation can’t think of a way to devalue its own money? Larry Summers is a brilliant economist, but he can’t think up a better way of making this happen then asking the Chinese nicely (or not-so-nicely) then maybe he ought to step aside and let someone stupid take the helm. Maybe it’s just that I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I actually feel confident that if Barack Obama put someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about (me, say) in charge and give me a mandate to devalue the dollar I could get the job done.

To just name some crude measures, you could start musing allowed about how many we just won’t pay the Chinese the money we owe them. Or you could reflect on the fact that if the People Bank of China is determined to buy bonds and prevent the dollar from falling at all costs, then we may as well totally forget about the short-term deficit and just not collect any taxes at all for the rest of FY 2010. Probably something more subtle would work. But the point is that we’re still the only superpower on the block, and if we want the world to lose confidence in the soundness of our money we ought to be able to get the job done all on our own no matter what the Chinese say. They can take our pandas, but they can’t stop us from printing money.

The thing is that when the Obama administration isn’t specifically talking about Chinese exchange rate policy, it acts like it has the reverse problem—like we’re a small open economy that’s very worried about an imminent collapse in investor faith in the soundness of our monetary/budget situation. But there’s no evidence that this is a real problem. And insisting that China alter the exchange rate situation while we undergo simultaneously fiscal and monetary retrenchment amounts to demand massive retrenchment by the Chinese government. But why should they do that? And why should we want them to?

When talking about the household budget, I think it’s commonplace to draw a distinction between a claim like “you could save money by bringing Diet Coke from the store into the office rather than using the soda machine” and a claim like “you could save money by buying Popov instead of Grey Goose” or “you could save money by never drinking anything other than tap water.” These are on a spectrum, basically, between the idea of getting the same stuff in a cheaper way and spending less money by buying less stuff.

Unfortunately, we don’t do a good job of drawing these distinctions in the public sector. I was on the radio yesterday, for example, with a woman who said that the GOP’s Medicare privatization plan would save money by giving people vouchers to buy private insurance. That makes it sound like the Diet Coke case. But what Ryan’s plan actually does is first privatize/vouchers Medicare, and then “save money” by arbitrarily mandating that the cost of the vouchers have to grow slower than the cost of health care. In other words, with every passing year Ryancare vouchers get smaller and smaller relative to the cost of medicine. That’s just “saving” money by buying less. It’s like saying the police department could save money by not replacing officers who retire. It reduces expenditures, but not by exploiting any exciting efficiencies.

Penelope Green reports for the New York Times about the vast cultural influence of my twitter feed:

The earnestly modern habitats extolled in Dwell magazine, which celebrates its 10th birthday this year, veered into parody last week, pushed there by a mischievous blog called Unhappy Hipsters (unhappyhipsters.tumblr.com). With its deadpan captions (example below), it ricocheted in the blogosphere like a shuttlecock, as Twitterers like Matthew Yglesias, a political blogger, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic and Michele Posner, Dwell’s own managing editor, thwacked it onward and upward. Original Dwell cast members gleefully sent it back and forth. “We did brand the dispassionate hipster, didn’t we?” wrote Maren Levinson, a former photo editor, to Karrie Jacobs, the departed founding editor.

Dwell and The New Yorker are the only magazines I subscribe to, so I was happy to find the site. But yesterday someone pointed out to me that the CAP/Dwell nexus goes deeper than I’d realized, as my colleague Nina Hachigian has been featured in the magazine:

I would write an amusing caption, but that's someone else's blog concept

I think the internet has basically supplanted print as a way to convey information about news and politics, but architecture photography still works much better in a magazine.