Ideas are still big but books got small
The article discusses the economic divergence between the United States and Europe over the past two decades, highlighting the impact of social safety net expansions in the U.S. It emphasizes the importance of addressing housing constraints that limit economic growth in areas like California. The author also reflects on the evolution of influential ideas and books, comparing contemporary works to those of the past.
- ▪There has been significant economic divergence between the U.S. and Europe in the last 20 years.
- ▪The expansion of the social safety net in the U.S. under Barack Obama has shown that providing medical care to the poor can coexist with economic growth.
- ▪Housing constraints in high-growth areas like California are limiting broader economic benefits and should be addressed.
Slow Boring (Yglesias) files mainly under politics. We currently carry 34 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Slow Boring (Yglesias) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.slowboring.com/p/ideas-are-still-big-but-books-got |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 10:03:05 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T10:07:01.295Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T10:07:01.295Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hIQfQjk7aQHS |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Ideas are still big but books got smallPlus Cameron Boozer, the Colin Powell campaign that didn’t happen, and why I’m out on Vienna Matthew YglesiasMay 22, 2026ShareColin Powell at a presidential rally. (Photo by Joseph Sohm)I think American progressives are getting weirdly over-invested in denying that there’s been economic divergence between the United States and Europe over the past 20 years. I get that Americans like “Europe” — meaning universal health care and mass transit — as a social model, but it’s not like European countries created universal health-care systems and subways during the relevant period of analysis.Instead, the divergence happened during a time when the center-right has been mostly dominating European politics and when the United States had a significant expansion…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Slow Boring (Yglesias).
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