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Arqiduka's avatar

An issue with your graph (cool and interesting as it is) is that your axes may not be uncorrelated which may, alas, explain the gap: it may not be feasible to combine those elements in such a way. Not convinced of this, but still more likely than the discovery of a huge gap that no one thought of plugging.

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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

You bring up an important point. An Upper Left agenda will be the subject of the next few Rules.

Trump had part of the picture. Subsidized outsourcing (see Rule 1) devastated the blue collar middle class. And extending our welfare state to hordes of immigrants constitutes Subsidized Strike-Breaking.

I'm old enough to remember when small farming was a viable career, and when native born citizens worked in the fields.

Bring wages up for such non-academic work and you need less welfare, less government assistance for healthcare as well.

But Trump's programme was only part of what is necessary to make America more like Mayberry or Lake Woebegone. There is some economics we need to cover. We need some intellectual populism.

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Eugine Nier's avatar

Logically, the upper left would be the left-anarchists. And while there are people who think of themselves as left-anarchist, the underlying philosophy is so incoherent that they inevitably function as useful idiots for the Authoritarian left.

The problem is that people are not naturally equal in their abilities or inclinations, thus in the absence of government action, people's outcomes will differ greatly, and conversely equal outcomes require a strong government to enforce them.

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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

If you go to the extreme, yes.

Also also yes, not all points on the map are attainable.

Note also: I like to center my political maps to the current status quo situation. You are in the upper left quadrant for the United States if your program would shrink government and narrow the wealth gap in the United States compared to the situation in 2023. It helps to keep one focused on the current job at hand vs. going utopian.

There are, of course, problems with such dynamic maps. How do you compare political figures over time? The dynamic map is good for comparing intent. Less good for comparing political programs side by side.

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