So It's Come to This: A Dylan Matthews Substack
The blog is back.
I started my first blog in February 2004. I had just turned fourteen and designed a catastrophically ugly Blogger-based page. My main motivation was to have an outlet to rant about politics that was not my middle-school friends, so as to continue having middle-school friends.
The blog was moderately successful at that goal. But through some strange series of events, it led to an internship which led to a job which led to a couple more jobs and before I knew it I was a 35-year-old who’d been writing for money for nearly half his life.
I recently took a job at Coefficient Giving, or the Grantmaking Institution Formerly Known as Open Philanthropy, which represents the end of that period of my life, or at least a significant break. I’m not writing professionally anymore. It’s scary but feels right.
That said … I do love to blog. And the kind of freedom that a non-professional blog (one that emphatically does not speak for my employer, just to get that in) represents was too tempting to resist.
So here we are. I want to be clear, because many of my friends have left traditional journalism jobs to become full-time, paid Substackers: that is not what I’m doing. This is a free newsletter and I intend for it to remain so for the foreseeable future. It’s a scratchpad, not a job.
An introduction to the blog
My 2025 was fairly eventful. I quit a job I’d had for nearly twelve years, took a job in a different industry, and my wife and I had a baby.
Another thing that happened, and probably the development most relevant to this blog, was the collapse of a book project I’d spent much of the previous two years working on. It fell apart for reasons that are mostly too boring and particular to get into here. But I’m stubborn and I still think it was a good idea for a book, and that the ideas in the book-to-be were good. A free Substack felt like a fair space to pursue them outside of my new day job.
The book was an attempt to explain why the US social safety net has grown so dramatically over the past half-century, while absolute poverty in this country has fallen so much. There is, at first glance, a mystery here: you would think that an era defined by Reaganism, the 1994 Republican revolution, deregulation in many areas of economic policy, tax revolts and across-the-board rate cuts, etc. would see the welfare state diminish rather than grow.
But the safety net did grow, and the book’s argument was that this had less to do with broad structural factors in the economy or shifts in American public opinion than with a small handful of policy entrepreneurs who came of age with the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. When the era of mass movement politics seemed to be ending, they adapted. They developed a more “inside game” strategy based on lobbying and Congressional advocacy. That work produced real, tangible policy wins.
My three main characters were Marian Wright Edelman (whose Children’s Defense Fund was integral to Medicaid expansion in the 1980s and 90s), Ron Pollack (who was key to the growth of food stamps and to the strategy that culminated in the Affordable Care Act), and Bob Greenstein (also a crucial figure in food stamps and whose Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is the main reason the Earned Income Tax Credit grew so much).
I knew that a group biography of three not-particularly-famous people would be a hard sell, but I didn’t anticipate another big reason it was a hard sell: people were startled by the premise. Almost everyone I talked to about this, from agents to editors to funders, was at minimum surprised to hear that the safety net has grown. At worst, they were actively skeptical that this could be true, and insisted living standards for the poorest Americans must be worse now than they were 50 years ago.
There is, of course, plenty of nuance in the trends I’m talking about. Some of the growth in the welfare state is due to health care becoming more expensive, rather than benefits becoming more generous. While absolute poverty (the share of people living under a certain dollar amount) has plummeted, relative poverty (the share living under, say, half the median income) hasn’t, in part due to trends in income inequality. I think the evidence shows that Americans at the 10th percentile of income are living vastly better lives in 2025 than they did in 1975, and the absolute poverty trends reflect this, but relative economic standing within a community matters too.
That said, the overall point that the safety net has grown, and that living standards at the bottom have improved, struck me as so obvious and clear in the data that I hadn’t braced myself for the depth of disbelief. I suspect a large part of the issue is that the people I was pitching are mostly liberals and leftists, and an unstated premise of a lot of left-of-center advocacy is that you must paint the world in a maximally negative way so as to inspire people to push for change.
I think this premise is mistaken. One thing I take from stories like Edelman, Pollack, and Greenstein’s is that you can do things, even in adverse conditions and even when you lack mass movements or the power of labor unions is waning. If you spend your whole life fighting to grow programs for the poor, and choose an effective set of strategies, the programs will, in fact, grow, and people will, in fact, benefit substantially. That strikes me as far more motivating than the fact that even after those efforts there is plenty of work left to do.
(As a side note, I think cultivating a broader understanding that the government can stand up redistributive institutions when necessary will be increasingly important if we ever do get major AI-caused economic disruptions. Whether it’s “only” a reallocation of similar scale to the China shock, or a brave new world where the returns to labor collapse altogether, maintaining living standards for the lower and middle-classes is going to require all kinds of new social insurance and welfare programs. If we start from the premise that America is unable to stand up new programs, or that it only ever did so successfully for a brief period defined by a cataclysmic depression and world war, then we’re doomed.)
We should believe true things about the world rather than false things, and “the safety net has grown and living standards for the poor are up” is true, and important. One thing I’d like to do with this newsletter is write a bit about the basic facts and trendlines on programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and the EITC. These are sometimes frustratingly hard to find through government sources, but they paint a clear picture, at least to my eyes.
Now there’s a chance that things will get weird
At my new job, there’s a culture of putting guessed-probabilities on everything. In that spirit, I’d say there’s a 60 percent chance this blog winds up being overwhelmingly about this welfare state history fixation of mine. There’s maybe a 10 percent chance I forget all about it and it lies fallow — I do sometimes abandon projects like this, though I think I do this less than I used to.
That leaves a 30 percent chance of something … else. I have little to no idea what. But I am under no pressure to maximize views or subscription revenue or any objective other than my personal enjoyment of this blog, so there’s a real chance we go off into strange directions that no one but me wants.
All of which is to say: I reserve the right to make this a Substack about Kelly Reichardt movies or old books I’m reading about the history of mechanical cotton picking or my repeated failed attempts to get into meditating or whatever other bullshit is capturing my attention. Fair warning.
In some ways that’s the most appealing thing about this experiment to me. For years, when I had an idea of something to write, I would proceed to get very in-my-head about whether it was really a Vox piece, or really a Future Perfect piece. There are absolutely no rules about what constitutes a Dylan Matthews Substack post. Is that a good thing? Let’s find out!