Everything has a second-order effect. Most people stop at the first one. Policy, economics, and incentive structures → scndordereffects.substack.co…
Joined February 2026
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Jun 2
New SOE piece out. The Reversibility Question, on European immigration.
6,000 words on what the data shows, why the policy persisted against voter preferences for two decades, and what can and can't be undone.
Link below.
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What do you want me to dig into this week? Got a piece on partisanship coming, but I read everything in the replies. Throw topics at me.
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The pattern under almost everything I write about is the same one. A system built to do X slowly starts protecting itself instead, and the gap between its stated job and its real behavior becomes the whole story. Immigration, healthcare, schools, the Fed. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
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Most of the people telling you the game is rigged have never actually tried to win it. Some things really are rigged. A lot of the rest just require doing the boring thing for longer than feels reasonable.
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Zoning is the most powerful housing policy in the country and almost nobody votes on it. It gets decided at meetings on Tuesday nights by the handful of people who bother to show up. Usually the ones who already own and want nothing to change.
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Jun 13
Weekend one. What's a small thing you do that has a wildly outsized payoff? Stealing the good ones.
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Jun 13
The most underrated skill in any field is being willing to say "I don't know" before someone forces it out of you. Almost nobody does it, because the incentive is to sound certain. The people who do it are usually the ones worth listening to.
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Grant Ellison retweeted
Jun 12
You see a trillion dollars.
Gavin sees 3/4 of a mile of high speed rail.
Jun 12
Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and gas while Elon Musk becomes a TRILLIONAIRE.
When the federal government is for sale, the rich get richer and everyone else gets shafted.
The system is rigged.
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Jun 12
Friday question. What's a book that actually changed how you see the world, not just one you liked? Building a list.
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Jun 12
You're allowed to think the COVID vaccines worked and also think mandating them for a 22 year old with prior infection was bad policy. Those two aren't in tension. The fact that saying both still sounds edgy tells you the conversation never actually reopened.
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Jun 12
Mortgage rates have been stuck in the mid-6s for a while and the market froze instead of crashing. Nobody who locked in at 3% wants to sell and re-borrow at current rates. So the inventory just never shows up and prices don't really fall.
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Jun 12
Give me your most defensible unpopular opinion. Bar is, you could actually argue it with data, not just vibes. I'll push back on a few in good faith.
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Jun 12
Here’s the uncomfortable finding from the partisanship research. Most people can’t name many specific policies their own side supports. They’re very clear on what the other side is. The identity turns out to be almost entirely about who you’re against.
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Jun 11
A lot of institutions quietly stopped optimizing for the thing they exist to do and started optimizing for not getting blamed. Once you see that switch, the behavior stops looking like incompetence. Every slow, defensive call is rational if the real goal is making sure no individual ever owns the downside.
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Jun 11
For the homeschool parents here. What's the one subject you were most scared to teach that turned out fine, and the one that's genuinely hard? Comparing notes.
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Jun 11
Rate cuts don't help the person who can't afford the house. Lower rates just mean the same monthly payment buys a bigger number, so the price floats up to meet it. Affordability is a price problem wearing a rate costume.
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Jun 11
Fill in the blank. "Everyone knows __________ but nobody in charge will say it." Best replies get a follow.
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Jun 11
RT @JessicaBRiedl: Showing that "uncapping the payroll tax does not fully fund Social Security" is easy and requires no complicated models…
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Jun 11
The thing people miss about European immigration politics is that the major parties converged. When both sides hold roughly the same position, voting harder doesn't move anything. You can oppose something at the ballot box for over a decade and watch it not change, because there's nobody to vote for who'd change it.
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Jun 10
What's something you changed your mind about in the last year? Doesn't have to be political. Just want to see who's actually updating out there.
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Jun 10
The top 1% paid 38.4% of all federal income tax in the latest IRS data. The bottom half paid 3.3%. You're allowed to think that's still not enough. But any sentence that opens with "the rich don't pay taxes" is describing a country that doesn't exist.
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