Political Generosity
Last night showed me something about my model of the world
It’s funny how much can change in four years, while so many other things remain the same.
Four years ago, we were looking at a potential Trump re-election. Covid was happening. I felt like the world could be ending. Politics was my life, my obsession. I couldn’t let the evil candidate win again.
That led to a fight with my dad, which I wrote about. It went viral. I nailed the headline: “Today I gave my dad a choice: Trump or his grandson”. It tapped into a lot of deeply buried emotions on both sides, but I realized that the more viral it went, the more nuance was lost.
That was one of the scariest moments of my life, because I started receiving all sorts of hate directed toward me. I’m not someone who is used to that. I’m a very friendly and mostly non-confrontational guy, to a fault if I’m honest.
It would have been easy to just brush it off like “fuck those guys, they are the enemy, who cares what they think”. And to some extent, I did. But I also looked at myself long and hard, and asked myself why I got the feedback that I did.
Fast forward to today. The day after election day. (Oddly enough, the day after the last presidential election is when I quit my corporate job, because I realized I was never going to be able to hit my goals. Apparently, these types of events trigger inflections in my life. )
My wife is worried. My youngest son is crying. And I’m at peace, to the point where my wife made an offhand comment about whether I was sure I didn’t actually vote for Trump this time.
I can assure you that I did not. I can’t stand the guy. I think he’s entirely in it for the power and the profit. And I don’t have faith that he has the country’s best interests at heart.
But I also no longer believe that people who vote for him are evil. I admit that I drank that koolaid last time, and wasn’t a fan of the flavor. So I’m not using this as an emotional trigger this time. Instead, I’m asking more questions. If that’s the candidate that won, what does that tell us about the actual state of the world? What can we learn from it?
Let’s look at how it stacks up from the other side:
Government doesn’t work
They elected someone from outside the system, a non-politician.
Business works
They elected a “businessman” to fix the problems with the inefficiencies of government
Regulation is bad
Strip away the requirements to meet all sorts of additional requirements that block progress from happening
The free market works
Rich people are creating value in the world and should not be demonized
Partnered with Elon
Identity Politics is Bad, Meritocracy is Good
We shouldn’t be elevating people because they check some box, we should be elevating people who earn it.
Borders should be secure
Can’t let everyone in - there has to be some filtering
I could respond with the Democrats’ talking points on each of these, but when I put it this way, I don’t actually disagree with any of these points! But there is a lot of nuance that would create variation in how each of these result in policy.
This is a chance for the left to understand what they are missing, because this election showed us that they missed the mark by a lot. Politics is a completely new game right now.
Do I think that Trump is going to dismantle a lot of existing institutions? I believe it’s likely.
Do I think that Trump is going to replace them with better institutions? I do not.
Do I think that matters? No.
Institutions are stores of trust. We filter information through them as a way to having someone we can trust do the work of validation. The existing institutions have lost trust, so they are crumbling. I think Trump is accelerating the timeline, but I also believe this is an opportunity for changing things as they break down.
I’ve already started building my own institution: Build In Public University. I’m going to continue that work, because I don’t believe we need the government to provide anything. It would be great for the government to provide what we need, but the reality is that it won’t. The entire economic model is broken, so they aren’t going to fix it, because it works for the people who have won. Then we put people who have won in charge, and expect them to tell us what to do so we can win, even though in most cases, us winning would result in them not winning. So should we believe them?
My hope is to provide a blueprint for institutions, so you can create an institution around anything you want!
So, in the spirit of generosity, I’m going to put it out there: I don’t care who you voted for. If you are interested in fixing the problems experienced by real people, I’m on your side. I’ll be here sharing new economic models we can use to fund all sorts of new programs.
It’s time to make sure the economy works for everyone, and that’s the problem I’m working on solving.
Once we create institutions that are transparent and verifiable, we’ll end up being in much better shape.
So here’s a call to action for my fellow democrats: use this as a lesson. Don’t rely on your party to solve your problems, start creating solutions now. It’s way cheaper, and frankly, way easier than going through the political machinations that you currently need to.
Right now, the impression of the democrats is that everything is too orchestrated. Everything feels like a calculated move. Nothing feels authentic, it’s all a performance. It’s all about taking the right steps, using the right words, checking the right boxes.
Trump is unpolished. He just says whatever the fuck he thinks and doesn’t worry about it. He’s shameless, and that’s a superpower in an attention-driven world. He knows how to work an audience, and he’s captured an audience that he’s built trust with over the last 8 years. He didn’t give up his identity to the party, he pulled the party to his identity.
In a world where everything has to be polished and clean, Trump felt more real. And people are experiencing a world that feels less and less real to them as more and more of it moves online.
It’s easy to dismiss Trump and what you think he stands for. But if democrats want to win, they need to understand why they lost.
It starts with seeing people as people, not groups. The intention is noble, but the results are poorly designed systems. Let’s design systems that are inclusive by establishing clear guidelines and making sure anyone has the opportunity to meet those guidelines.
You don’t fix broken systems by optimizing for specific outcomes. That’s putting bandaids all over the place. You fix broken systems by identifying root causes and fixing those.
As I studied more and more of the economy, I realized something important. People are the most undervalued resource this country has. That’s the root problem. Almost everyone feels undervalued by the world around them. That’s the result of seeing your local reality on a global scale. The internet shows us the extremes of the best and the worst. We’ve optimized for polarity, because we’ve created adversarial systems that function due to information asymmetries.
The easiest way to fix information asymmetries is to spend money, because that money either leads to higher value (better outcomes) or it doesn’t. That’s a benefit for the economy because it enables people around them to see the decisions they made and make better ones. And the more money someone has access to, the more they can buy the time of experts to help them make informed decisions.
When people don’t have money to spend on information (education), they don’t value education. Make it easier to make money. Make it easier to spend it for help. Help people buy more space in their lives so they don’t need to validate every single bit of information that they come across. Create high-trust environments for sharing information. Create a world where both sides are arguing about the same context. The details, not the people. What solutions actually work? Let’s create tests.
What’s the desired outcome and why? For who? Let’s talk to them. Does this match what they say? Do they achieve that outcome?
The model of the world that you’ve developed should match reality. If it doesn’t, your model is wrong, not the world. That’s the problem with identity politics, it optimizes for groups over individuals, so it encourages tribalism. You need to belong to the winning tribe. With a true meritocracy, you want to elevate individuals as high as possible! And you can do so infinitely.
Again, this is why transparency is vital. You have to show the model you’ve developed. You’ve got to have a clear definition of “merit”. Then you’ve got to make sure that anyone interested in competing on those criteria is able to do so.
If there’s a disagreement on the definition of merit, it’s an opportunity to fork and let the market decide.
The problem that the right tends to miss is that there’s a lot of “merit” that isn’t. We’ve over indexed on merit in specific ways, and that’s led us to a lot of blind spots in the economy. Those blind spots are what I’m referring to when I say that people are undervalued. If you are in the top group of people that are being valued fairly, then you tend to believe the system is fair. But I can mathematically prove that it isn’t, and will be doing so in the research I publish through Build In Public University, while also using that research to predict reality - the outcomes I enable with said research.
It’s time to drop the tribes. It’s time to unify the country, and work together to craft the narrative of the US. Because as long as the narrative is of distrust and obstruction, nothing gets fixed. A lot is going to get broken, and that’s going to cause chaos.
Entropy is opportunity.
So let’s use this opportunity to usher in a future that works for everyone.