I have been interviewed by The Weekly Anthropocene. It’s sort of a grab bag of all the topics we talk about on this blog—some effective altruism, some general life advice. I really enjoyed getting to talk to Sam Matey, who’s a very smart guy. Check it out!
The short version is that eggs getting more expensive pushed some people over the edge to Trump, because "the elites care more about chickens than you" hits home.
I may have been too out of touch on political ads last cycle, but I do not remember a single mention of cage-free egg advocates being blamed for rising egg prices. Even the author acknowledges that they were probably not the primary factor in price changes.
I think there may be a lot of "elites care more about [insert progressive project here] than you" going around, and every writer spent the month after the election substituting in the parts of modern left-wing thought that they dislike the most into that sentence as the thing that must be jettisoned to ensure future victory. Some are more right than others about how repellant to the general public their targeted issues are and assessing the cost/benefit of putting those projects on temporary or permanent hold. However, I find the case for the cage-free egg election to be weak. Compare the saliency of eggs to how much people argued over immigration, a much more talked about issue where conservatives think liberals are deliberately squandering public resources to appease a special interest group.
The election did largely turn on increasing prices relative to more-slowly-increasing incomes, but "egg prices" were just a flagship issue that started to code for the more general problem. I don't think a reduction in animal welfare activity would have been noticed by anyone, or changed prices.
On the cage-free eggs part, I wonder what you think about this argument: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1861568.html
The short version is that eggs getting more expensive pushed some people over the edge to Trump, because "the elites care more about chickens than you" hits home.
I may have been too out of touch on political ads last cycle, but I do not remember a single mention of cage-free egg advocates being blamed for rising egg prices. Even the author acknowledges that they were probably not the primary factor in price changes.
I think there may be a lot of "elites care more about [insert progressive project here] than you" going around, and every writer spent the month after the election substituting in the parts of modern left-wing thought that they dislike the most into that sentence as the thing that must be jettisoned to ensure future victory. Some are more right than others about how repellant to the general public their targeted issues are and assessing the cost/benefit of putting those projects on temporary or permanent hold. However, I find the case for the cage-free egg election to be weak. Compare the saliency of eggs to how much people argued over immigration, a much more talked about issue where conservatives think liberals are deliberately squandering public resources to appease a special interest group.
The election did largely turn on increasing prices relative to more-slowly-increasing incomes, but "egg prices" were just a flagship issue that started to code for the more general problem. I don't think a reduction in animal welfare activity would have been noticed by anyone, or changed prices.
That makes sense. I guess the only way to interpret the eggs thing is inflation in general, or falling living standards overall.