Responding To Incentives

American politics and culture in the 2020s have largely amounted to an extended reeducation on the inevitable consequences of perverse incentive structures.  So much of our current predicament is the culmination of lessons unlearned where both past precedent and a modicum of common sense should have alerted us that we were taking a destructive course.  At a macro level, this can be applied to the COVID-era consensus of flooding the zone with borrowed money and never considering that it would lead to inflation, as well as expecting that protectionist tariffs would not ultimately be paid by consumers rather than foreign governments.  

We can expect more fluidity in monetary and trade policies in a changing global economy, however, so some experimentation is not entirely unjustified when challenges arise.  In the previously cited cases, a massive vacuum of demand amidst a crippling pandemic needed an aggressive solution even if the stimulus, in retrospect, ended up overstimulating.  And as manufacturing capacity shifts away from American shores, it's reasonable to make some policy pivots to keep from being dependent on imports from economic rivals, even if broadly applied tariffs are the dumbest possible way to pursue that goal.

The enduring policy mistakes made in the first half of this decade have been centered around even more obvious cause-and-effect stimuli at the core of human nature that one or both sides has managed to get wrong.  We're already dealing with the easily predictable backlash on two of three biggest issues and are poised to with the third, even though the latter will be harder to remedy.

First is the issue of crime.  The movement was already afoot in the late 2010s to go easier on lawbreakers, whether through decriminalization or legalization of drugs, shortening sentences for criminals, doing away with cash bail, or taking away harm reduction options from police officers such as stop and frisk.  Most of these criminal justice reforms were argued with the pretext of racial fairness aspirations.  

We should always expect a push and pull on crime policy, and with good reason.  Leaning too heavily on the enforcement side leads to its own perverse incentives, such as police operating with a perception of impunity and overcrowded prisons hardening small-time offenders into worse versions of themselves.  Nonetheless, the rise in crime in the early-to-mid 2020s was a not-so-subtle reminder that the center of gravity should tilt toward the side of criminal enforcement in pursuit of social harmony given the risks of incentivizing widespread lawless behavior by those weighing the risks versus the rewards.

Worsening the situation, our would-be racial reckoning in 2020 exacerbated the narrative that enforcing crime was some combination of racist and ignorant of root causes.  As a consequence, there was a push to defund police departments, a loosening of shoplifting laws, growing acceptance of open drug use and the proliferation of homeless encampments populated mostly by addicts, and widespread elections of prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions who had no interest in prosecuting crimes.  Eliminating cash bail caught on in more and more places, allowing unprecedented numbers of offenders to reoffend in the same 24-hour period.  The result was a tangible surge in every kind of crime played out in a technological environment where all of this additional crime was captured on video for everyone to see.  And people didn't like what they saw.  Ultimately, they correctly decided that the biggest "root cause" of crime was letting criminals think they could get away with crime.

The backlash to the surge in crime has been comprehensive, crossing racial, ideological, and geographical boundaries.  Just as it was predictable that those predisposed to test legal boundaries would commit more crimes when they became incentivized to do so, it was equally predictable that the majority of the public would be motivated by survival instinct and be incentivized to once again enforce consequences for those who commit crimes.  As a result, the earnest cause of criminal justice reform was likely set back a generation.

Of course, the hole in this argument relates directly to the demographic whose crimes continue to be excused and enabled.....but I'll get to Trump and his civilian army later!

Second on the list of how public policymakers failed to calculate the response to incentives this decade was illegal immigration.  The Biden administration certainly tried to simulate the configuration of a healthy process when justifying the unprecedented mayhem at the U.S.-Mexican border for most of his term, redefining crossing the border illegally as "applying for asylum", but almost nobody was buying it.  Biden and other Democratic candidates for President campaigned on de facto open borders in 2019 and 2020 and voters believed that's exactly what they were getting in 2021, 2022, and 2023.  More importantly, millions of would-be migrants from around the world were mobilized to make the journey because they too were given the impression that de factor open borders were awaiting them.  

It still boggles the mind what the Democratic Party generally and the Biden administration specifically imagined would happen when signaling laxity of border enforcement to a world full of people awaiting a life in the United States, and who would quite obviously respond to the incentive to migrate here in unsustainable numbers.  What on Earth were they thinking?  It's really hard to understand and I can only come up with two possibilities.....  

The first is that the Biden team was genuinely more frightened of incurring the wrath of the microscopic caucus of open borders dead-enders within their party than enraging the overwhelming majority of voters who loathe disorderly borders and mass illegal immigration.  The second option is that the Biden team saw hordes of illegal border crossings as helpful toward mitigating the post-COVID labor shortage, deducing that a dysfunctional economy strained by too few workers would be a bigger detriment to his re-election than 10 million illegal border crossings over the course of his term.  If it's the latter, I'll at least credit to the Biden team for having some method to the presumed madness, but I suspect that's giving them too much credit.  Ultimately, I suspect they were operating out of fear of upsetting AOC and Julian Castro, and like most Democrats of the last 15 years, were likely under the delusion that Hispanic voters wanted as much illegal immigration as they could get based on ethnic kinship.  This mindset has cost the Democratic Party absolutely everything.

But idiotic border policy cost more than just the Democratic Party.  The country is going to need more immigrants as we approach a demographic cliff with a rapidly depleting workforce aging to its sunset, but thanks to a Biden-era border policy that incentivized lawlessness for four years, we're not gonna get it.  Just as criminal justice reform was likely set back a generation because of the mindless zeal of its hard-line activists, immigration reform has likely been set back a generation as well, and it will cost us dearly.

And in the overcorrective national backlash to the left's failed understanding of human nature related to behavioral incentives, we've managed to create a new monster vastly more menacing than the original sins.  That monster, of course, is an autocratic President operating without regard to any laws he doesn't like and facing little to no consequence from those whose constitutional duty is to rein him in.

Once again, it all boils down to bad actors responding to an enabling incentive structure.  If you're Donald Trump, it makes complete sense to continue operating with impunity in a system that has allowed him to operate as a criminal his entire adult life, and particularly since entering politics.  Not only was he allowed to dodge an expansion-pack resume of felony indictments on matters as serious as inciting insurrection and refusing to surrender confidential files, the Supreme Court went so far as to give him an open-ended get-out-jail-free card for the crimes he commits in his second term.  Meanwhile, the legislative branch, controlled by Trump's party, continues to shrug off the crimes inevitably being committed in Trump's second term, ranging from suspension of habeas corpus for deported immigrants to accepting a $400 million luxury jet as a bribe from a foreign government in league with terrorists.  Add in a freshly emboldened crime syndicate working on his behalf after he was permitted to pardon thousands of felonious insurrectionist loyalists and you have the makings of a slow-moving coup that isn't moving so slowly anymore.

And this is just the tip of the spear.  With his "memecoin" cryptocurrency hustle, Trump has set himself up for an unlimited pipeline of under-the-table bribes from the world's worst despots.  If Vladimir Putin slips Trump a billion-dollar memecoin "gift" in exchange for favorable policy treatment, not only will nobody be in a position to stop him, nobody outside of the Trump family is even gonna know about it.  By letting a single man who happens to be a clinical sociopath operate outside of the law, 77 million American voters and every would-be institution intended as a guardrail have incentivized the most lucrative criminal enterprise in the history of our species.

While there was a clear and entirely predictable public backlash to those who incentivized street crime and illegal immigration in the first half of the 2020s, it's not as obvious that the country will be as easily able to course correct on the government we chose on November 5, 2024.  A sociopath has been granted effectively unlimited power.  He's already proven he's not inclined to give up that power without breaking as many things as possible on his way out, and that was at a time where he was still theoretically within the reach of the law.  He no longer is.  And if he doesn't like the verdict that voters render in 2026 or 2028, why on Earth would he feel obliged to abide by it?  He's been given every opportunity and every incentive possible to bulldoze his challengers with a literal and figurative tank, so why should we expect that he won't?

But even if we assume, despite every indication otherwise, that Trump won't seize the long list of incentives he's been given to maintain his grip on power beyond January 20, 2029, I maintain my prediction from November that the future is autocracy, and that autocracy will transcend party affiliation moving forward.  We're not gonna flip a switch in November 2028 and go back to the regular order we lived by in the nation's first 248 years of existence.  Now that the delicious toothpaste of authoritarianism has been released from the tube, it's not gonna go back in.  The incentive structure that Americans allowed to be put into place to enable Donald Trump will outlast the 78-year-old man who inspired it, and no matter the prevailing ideology of the time, I fully expect the America of 2055 to more closely resemble the autocratic America of 2025 than the institution-driven republic we lived in back in those long-ago days of 2023.

The history books will look back upon the 2020s as the decade that an arrogant America decided that the incentive structures that enabled counterproductive or destructive behavior in the past no longer applied.  At this point, the best we can hope for is that the empire avoids complete collapse as a consequence of that hubris.