Remember Krugman in 1998 declaring the internet's impact would be no greater than that of the fax machine? I think that's when he lost the bulk of his credibility. It would have still been an acceptable sentiment in say 1996. By 1998 you had to be clueless to think that.
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Most of his legislative record has been rolled back and won't be restored even if Biden wins. The world has changed too much. Can't step in the same river twice etc. But ACA remains as... something of a landmark compromise. I'm still on it.
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Clinton too will be remembered as a dead-end president on an abandoned historical branch. His second term was mostly bogged down with the Lewinsky scandal, and his own legacy is fumbling the post-Cold War and creating Putin via the permissioning effects of intervening in Bosnia.
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The best thing that can be said for Clinton is that he didn't mess up the growth of the internet that was happening on his watch, and did a mediocre job wherever he did have some agency. He was mostly harmless, and a pleasant presence on the world stage.
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Interestingly, both 1993-97 and 2010-14 were periods of high indeterminate optimism for people on the right side of history. That part of the energy of those periods was NOT a dead-end. But because it was illegible nobody could take credit for it or narrativize it.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1310658178326040577 …
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The definition of “right side of history” didn’t change, though some people who were on that side either went pessimistic or determinate. In both cases becoming, as far as I’m concerned part of the problem.
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I’m pretty proud of how I threaded the futures needle in my software eating the world essays of 2015. I managed to hedge it just right and call out the upcoming fork in history correctly, though I didn’t make branch predictions. So the essays managed to not get cache-invalidated.
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I didn’t predict either the right or wrong future. I just pointed to both as possibilities and warned against one.https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/the-future-in-the-rear-view-mirror/ …
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The biggest thing I missed was which elites would lead a reactionary revolt. I was focused on fox elites (aka Bernie/inequality crowd), but the ones who led were the lion elites. But I didn't learn about the Pareto fox vs. lion circulation of elites theory till later.
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Kind make sense, since the 2013-14 milieu which I was thinking about was all techlash, inequality, occupy wall street etc., with Piketty being headline news. I expected a leftist-fox-reaction and got a rightist-lion-reaction.
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You give Obama too much credit; the white reaction was active on day one. The petering out of his “hope” agenda is a function of how badly he and other progressive Democrats underestimated the potency of unvarnished racism as a political motivator. Trump brought the message home.
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perhaps
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