Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…And so, things do change. But in terms of describing where we are right now, I think that polarization is driving political outcomes in a quite profound way. You’re not dealing with something where people are being distracted by polarization while the system works well in the background. Abortion aside, at the state level, is policy polarization going up? I know people vote more according to the national party’s reputation. But in terms of actual policy, doesn’t it just not matter that much? Again, abortion aside. I know there’s Medicaid extension. Most of those will probably happen. But for most of the budget, it seems it doesn’t matter. My understanding is that policy polarization at the state level actually has gone up quite a bit, and certainly partisan polarization, I know, in state legislatures has gone up a lot. One of the tricky things about this conversation — and people will kind of hear it going on — when you say the word “polarization,” you could be referring to a bunch of different things. Are we talking about how legislators vote in Congress? Are we talking about how people feel about the other side? Are we talking about issue outcomes? So, the question, a little bit, is what dimension of polarization we’d be looking at there. Different ones probably have different answers.…

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