South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Over at Crooked Timber, Australian economist John Quiggin describes the limited opportunities for intellectual policy debate in the United States. (Incidentally, Quiggin’s recent book, Zombie Economics, is a fun and thought-provoking read.)

… this reflects the fact, in the current US scene, the groups with whom productive discussion is possible are quite limited. The right lives in a parallel universe and the Very Serious centre defines itself by the presumption that both right and left are, and always must be, equally wrong (Cass Sunstein bases his entire worldview on this presumption) . There is no point in debating specific issues with these groups except to the extent that it may be possible to convince individual rightists and centrists to stop being rightists and centrists. That leaves someone like me talking to neoliberals (in the US sense) on my right and to those to my left who are interested in positive discussions of policy and political strategy (a subset of a group that is not all that large in the first place).