The thing that's going to gut this economy is the fact that we're now spending 40% of our federal budget on programs for seniors, you know, uh Medicare and um and social security and all these basically old people vote and the Dian democracy is working too well and we keep transferring money from young people are more productive to old people who are less productive.
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Caballero, Hoshi, and Kashyap argue that evergreening was very bad for the Japanese economy, because it hoovered up scarce resources that better companies could have used to grow. With all of those crappy loans clogging up their books, Japanese banks couldn't lend to healthier companies. With big zombies like Daiei still able to employ large amounts of Japan's best managers, young scrappy upstarts were deprived of talent.
Noah Smith
They see degrowth as a grand project to unify and reinvigorate the political left — a Big Idea to fill the hole left by the collapse of communism in the 20th century. Each buzzword or stock phrase is a shout-out to a particular faction of the European left — 'decolonial' leftists angry about colonialism, climate activists, old-line socialists still angry about 'neoclassical economics', unionists who want job guarantees, social democrats who care about housing and education and welfare, and so on.
Noah Smith
Private insurers may be an unnecessary middleman, but the amount they extract from the system is not large compared to the amount that gets either appropriated or wasted by the people providing the care. So why do Americans — especially American progressives — focus so obsessively on health insurers instead of health providers? In a post two years ago, I hypothesized that it's because insurers are the part of the system we have direct contact with — the people who have to tell us "no" when we can't afford some treatment.
Noah Smith