the economics of hope

i think one of the biggest failures of mainstream politics can be expressed as a very simple question.

how will my life get better?

not how will the government manage the next crisis.

not how will we prevent the other side from winning.

not why everything is complicated, even though it usually is.

how will my life get better?

i don’t mean this as a demand that politicians promise happiness on command.

and i certainly don’t think every problem has a quick solution.

but i find it sad how often political communication seems to begin with what we must preserve, what we must endure, or whom we must stop.

and how rarely it begins with a picture of what could actually improve.

1politics without a destination

imagine momo and lolo are having dinner after work.

momo has spent forty minutes trying to get across the city because public transport was unreliable.

lolo has just looked at the rent for an apartment roughly the size of her current one, only a little closer to work. she can’t believe how expensive it is.

they talk about politics.

momo mentions a speech she watched earlier. it was full of warnings about fiscal constraints, geopolitical uncertainty, and the importance of stability.

none of those concerns is wrong.

lolo mentions another politician who spent most of a speech explaining why the opposition was dangerous.

that warning might also be justified.

but when they try to remember what either politician promised to improve in their everyday lives, they struggle.

perhaps the problem isn’t that the speeches were factually wrong.

perhaps it’s that they never really answered the question the audience was asking.

what are you going to do about the things that make my life difficult?

2why expectations matter

economics has spent a lot of time studying expectations.

businesses invest because they expect future returns.

households make consumption and saving decisions partly based on their expectations about income, prices, and risk.

people invest in education because they believe it may create future opportunities.

the future matters to decisions we make today.

and our beliefs about the future can influence what that future eventually looks like.

a person who expects that learning a new skill will pay off is more likely to invest time in it.

a founder who believes a market can grow is more likely to build a company.

a family that feels financially insecure may delay major commitments.

these are examples of mechanisms, not guarantees.

expectations can be mistaken.

and a positive story doesn’t create jobs, homes, or functioning trains by itself.

but the distinction between current circumstances and expected future circumstances matters.

politics is partly about both.

people want their lives to improve.

and they want credible reasons to believe that improvement is possible.

3the mathematics of credible hope

we could represent a citizen’s expected benefit from a political promise with a very simple equation.

where:

• B is the benefit if the promise is successfully delivered;
• p is the citizen’s subjective probability that it will be delivered;
• C is the expected cost borne regardless of success.

it’s a way of separating two things that political communication often blends together.

how attractive is the future being promised?

and

how credible is the path toward it?

a politician might promise an enormous benefit, but if people believe the probability of delivery is close to zero, the expected value may be small.

another politician might offer a modest but believable improvement.

that could be more compelling.

assume the promised benefit is 10 hypothetical units and the cost is 3.

at a delivery probability of 20%, the expected net benefit is -1.

at 40%, it’s 1.

at 60%, it’s 3.

at 80%, it’s 5.

this is why i think political hope has two components.

ambition and credibility.

without ambition, politics becomes maintenance.

without credibility, it becomes fantasy.

the challenge is finding a way to combine them.

4why simple stories are powerful

there’s a reason some political messages are much easier to remember than others.

they describe a problem people recognize.

they identify a cause.

they offer a solution.

and they explain why the future could be different.

sometimes that structure is used responsibly.

sometimes it isn’t.

the difficulty is that the world rarely fits neatly into a single cause-and-effect story.

housing affordability, for example, can be influenced by supply constraints, construction costs, financing, household formation, income, regulation, and the distribution of housing across locations.

a complete explanation can take hours.

a slogan takes seconds.

but i don’t think the answer is to stop simplifying.

democratic communication requires simplification.

most people do not have the time or desire to read a policy paper before forming a view on every public issue.

the distinction i care about is between simplification that makes a complicated reality understandable and simplification that makes a complicated reality disappear.

the first is useful.

the second can be misleading.

and it isn’t always obvious where one becomes the other.

5the distinction between popular politics and populism

the word populism is used so casually that it sometimes stops being useful.

in political science, different definitions emphasize different features, including claims to represent a morally unified people against a corrupt elite.

but in everyday conversation, people often use the word for almost any political message that is emotional, simple, or widely appealing.

i think that’s a mistake.

there is nothing inherently objectionable about a politician speaking in language people understand.

or focusing on the cost of groceries.

or promising to make public services work better.

or being emotionally compelling.

it’s quite the opposite, i would find it concerning if those things became grounds for suspicion.

the important questions are different.

is the explanation truthful?

does it acknowledge meaningful constraints?

does the proposed solution have a plausible mechanism?

does it respect democratic pluralism?

can the promise be evaluated after the election?

a message can be simple without being dishonest.

and a message can be technically sophisticated while still concealing weak reasoning.

6what i find interesting about mamdani’s affordability message

one reason i find zohran mamdani’s political messaging in new york interesting is its focus on concrete affordability concerns.

rent.

buses.

childcare.

groceries.

these are things people experience, not abstract policy categories.

i don’t think that automatically makes every proposed intervention effective.

whether a rent policy helps tenants over time, whether a transit proposal can be financed, or whether a grocery intervention works as intended are separate empirical and administrative questions.

those deserve scrutiny.

but as a communication example, the underlying question is immediately understandable:

how can living in this city become more affordable?

and then the policy discussion begins from that objective.

there’s a lesson here that doesn’t belong exclusively to the political left.

a market-oriented politician could start with the same question and propose different instruments.

build more housing.

remove unnecessary barriers to business creation.

improve competition.

make public administration faster.

a social-democratic politician might emphasize public investment, redistribution, or stronger protections.

they could disagree profoundly about how to deliver the improvement.

but at least they’d be debating ways of making people’s lives better.

rather than treating political identity as the main event.

7hope is not a substitute for policy

there’s an obvious objection to everything i’ve written so far.

politics isn’t marketing.

governments have to make real decisions, allocate resources, and implement policies.

a compelling narrative can’t replace competence.

i agree.

and i think the objection is essential.

a government that repeatedly promises dramatic improvement and fails to deliver can damage trust.

not just in the government.

but in the possibility of improvement through politics at all.

which means credibility isn’t an optional detail.

it’s part of the political product, if i can use a slightly unfortunate economic metaphor.

this is also why the politics of hope shouldn’t mean promising that every trade-off will disappear.

some changes take time.

some improvements cost money.

some benefits are unevenly distributed.

some experiments fail.

a credible political vision should be able to explain those facts without abandoning the ambition to improve things.

8why defensive politics has limits

there are legitimate reasons to vote against something.

a policy may threaten rights.

a political movement may propose damaging changes.

an institution may need protection.

democracy absolutely requires the ability to say no.

but i struggle with the idea that the entire political imagination should consist of preventing the worst alternative.

if the most compelling message a political movement can offer is that the other side would be even worse, it leaves an important question unanswered.

what would you do with power?

what would improve?

how would you know?

a politics built entirely around fear can perhaps explain why people should resist a particular outcome.

it has a harder time explaining what they’re building together.

and people need both.

9what an ambitious but credible story sounds like

imagine momo and lolo listen to a third speech.

this politician doesn’t promise to solve every problem.

instead, she says:

momo and lolo might disagree about the details.

they might think the plan is too market-oriented, too interventionist, too expensive, or not ambitious enough.

but at least they can evaluate it.

the destination is visible.

the mechanism is open to challenge.

the trade-offs are acknowledged.

that seems like a much healthier starting point for politics.

10the future we’ve forgotten to imagine

i think the question how will my life get better? is sometimes dismissed as simplistic.

but i think it’s one of the most demanding questions we can ask of a government.

because a serious answer requires almost everything politics is supposed to do.

understand people’s actual problems.

choose priorities.

make trade-offs.

build institutions that can deliver.

measure results.

admit mistakes.

and offer a believable account of why the future might be better than the present.

it is not enough to be right about the dangers of the alternative.

and it is not enough to have technically sophisticated policies that nobody can connect to their lives.

politics needs substance.

but it also needs a destination.

and that brings me to the question i’ve been avoiding throughout this series.

when we say we want politics to make people’s lives better, what exactly do we mean by better?