Why do I keep saying I'm not a genius like Ezra Klein? In 2003, when Ezra was a whopping 19 years old, he started a blog with Matt Singer, Ryan Davis, and Joe Raspars. The name of this blog was "Not Geniuses."
When I was 25, as Ezra is now, I certainly wanted to be taken seriously, and fortunately I wasn't. A 25 year-old simply hasn't been out to pasture long enough to write policy.
Ezra Klein, to me, is a poignant reminder that my generation has really not seen hardship at all. He reminds me that as my grandparents generation disappears, so too does a way of life where patience, saving, conservativism, and prudence ruled. Ezra Klein, blogging like he's important, reminds me that my generation has become accustomed to instant gratification. Blogging means you don't have to claw your way up any journalistic totem poles before you can write editorials every day. Blogging means you can eviscerate people who at your age were in the trenches of northern France with bullets whizzing over their heads.
The reason I mostly avoid politics on my blog, or at least minimize them, is because of "not geniuses" like Ezra Klein.
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Tuesday, August 11, 2009
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2 comments:
Fair game on Ezra. He's a boy genius like Yglesias and Douthat, and he deserves all the skepticism thereunto appertaining.
What I'll say in his defense is that, unlike a whole lot of older, well-established pundits at his own newspaper, Ezra has made it his business to know the details of public policy questions. George Will, David Broder, a lot of these guys don't seem to even read the stories in the Post's own news section.
So you'll see Ezra, for instance, try to calm down the liberals who were afraid of a bill that didn't have a public health insurance option in the exchanges. Since the exchanges would only be open to the self-employed, unemployed, or otherwise in need of individual insurance, they would not even be open to someone like you (and maybe me). Of this group of people, some would choose the public option--maybe 10 million in ten years, says the CBO.
To a lot of conservatives who are either too dishonest or too lazy to represent the plans accurately, this is "socialized medicine." To liberals, this was the make-or-break aspect of a huge bill that did a lot of things, including requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, subsidizing premiums for low and middle-income people, etc. Ezra pointed out that it was only one aspect of one part of a big bill. I was grateful for the perspective he offered.
so, moar science?
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