Yesterday, Politico highlighted my post on the distributional impacts of expanding actuarial bands. I like that piece a lot. It gets into the weeds very quickly on a relevant policy discussion and illuminates some of the trade-offs and quirks of the structure.
Politico highlights a couple of writers a day. These links and names get blasted to their morning e-mail list which is heavily DC focused with political and policy implementation power as well as narrative setting power.
Who we’re reading:
· @sarahkliff
· @Health_Affairs
· @shefalil
· @bjdickmayhew
· @weeklystandard
· @pw_cunninghamhttps://t.co/hoj6kSFdh8— POLITICO Pulse (@POLITICOPulse) February 16, 2017
From yesterday’s list everyone except for the Weekly Standard is a good factual value. I learn something from those other writers when I read them.
So my question to Doug is does this engagement make sense? Is it better for people with very high leverage and influence to read me layout complex policy options with my set of priors or to read someone who is either not aware of the distributional consequences of this policy change or whose value structure and/or paycheck renders those considerations irrelevant?
If we’re going to have a system of fairly tightly clustered policy and political professionals we will have narrowly tailored publications that sets the minimum standard of being well enough informed with background knowledge of major events for that cluster. I think we will always have specific political/policy niche publications as every other tight cluster has their own publication (Cat Fanciers Daily, FantasyFootball has an entire industry of rapid update publications, Transportation planners have their own publications, marketing professionals have multiple publication channels that cater to their need. ) So in my opinion, engagement is better than passive rejection even as engagement comes from an almost top-10,000 political blog with lots of puppy pictures. Politico and Axios both have policy dissemination channels which are solid and highly influential. Liberal engagement in that channel adds value to the conversation and slightly shifts it in our direction.
I want to hear your opinion on this.