Donald Trump

Why are political speeches so vacuous?

PNRJ cognitive science, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 27 JDN 2460184

In last week’s post I talked about how posters for shows at the Fringe seem to be attention-grabbing but almost utterly devoid of useful information.

This brings to mind another sort of content that also fits that description: political speeches.

While there are some exceptions—including in fact some of the greatest political speeches ever made, such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” or Dwight Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron”—on the whole, most political speeches seem to be incredibly vacuous.

Each country probably has its own unique flavor of vacuousness, but in the US they talk about motherhood, and apple pie, and American exceptionalism. “I love my great country, we are an amazing country, I’m so proud to live here” is basically the extent of the information conveyed within what could well be a full hour-long oration.

This raises a question: Why? Why don’t political speeches typically contain useful information?

It’s not that there’s no useful information to be conveyed: There are all sorts of things that people would like to know about a political candidate, including how honest they are, how competent they are, and the whole range of policies they intend to support or oppose on a variety of issues.

But most of what you’d like to know about a candidate actually comes in one of two varieties: Cheap talk, or controversy.

Cheap talk is the part related to being honest and competent. Basically every voter wants candidates who are honest and competent, and we know all too well that not all candidates qualify. The problem is, how do they show that they are honest and competent? They could simply assert it, but that’s basically meaningless—anybody could assert it. In fact, Donald Trump is the candidate who leaps to mind as the most eager to frequently assert his own honesty and competence, and also the most successful candidate in at least my lifetime who seems to utterly and totally lack anything resembling these qualities.

So unless you are clever enough to find ways to demonstrate your honesty and competence, you’re really not accomplishing anything by asserting it. Most people simply won’t believe you, and they’re right not to. So it doesn’t make much sense to spend a lot of effort trying to make such assertions.

Alternatively, you could try to talk about policy, say what you would like to do regarding climate change, the budget, or the military, or the healthcare system, or any of dozens of other political questions. That would absolutely be useful information for voters, and it isn’t just cheap talk, because different candidates and voters do intend different things and voters would like to know which ones are which.

The problem, then, is that it’s controversial. Not everyone is going to agree with your particular take on any given political issue—even within your own party there is bound to be substantial disagreement.

If enough voters were sufficiently rational about this, and could coolly evaluate a candidate’s policies, accepting the pros and cons, then it would still make sense to deliver this information. I for one would rather vote for someone I know agrees with me 90% of the time than someone who won’t even tell me what they intend to do while in office.

But in fact most voters are not sufficiently rational about this. Voters react much more strongly to negative information than positive information: A candidate you agree with 9 times out of 10 can still make you utterly outraged by their stance on issue number 10. This is a specific form of the more general phenomenon of negativity bias: Psychologically, people just react a lot more strongly to bad things than to good things. Negativity bias has strong effects on how people vote, especially young people.

Rather than a cool-headed, rational assessment of pros and cons, most voters base their decision on deal-breakers: “I could never vote for a Republican” or “I could never vote for someone who wants to cut the military”. Only after they’ve excluded a large portion of candidates based on these heuristics do they even try to look closer at the detailed differences between candidates.

This means that, if you are a candidate, your best option is to avoid offering any deal-breakers. You want to say things that almost nobody will strongly disagree with—because any strong disagreement could be someone’s deal-breaker and thereby hurt your poll numbers.

And what’s the best way to not say anything that will offend or annoy anyone? Not say anything at all. Campaign managers basically need to Mirandize their candidates: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

But in fact you can’t literally remain silent—when running for office, you are expected to make a lot of speeches. So you do the next best thing: You say a lot of words, but convey very little meaning. You say things like “America is great” and “I love apple pie” and “Moms are heroes” that, while utterly vapid, are very unlikely to make anyone particularly angry at you or be any voter’s deal-breaker.

And then we get into a Nash equilibrium where everyone is talking like this, nobody is saying anything, and political speeches become entirely devoid of useful content.

What can we as voters do about this? Individually, perhaps nothing. Collectively, literally everything.

If we could somehow shift the equilibrium so that candidates who are brave enough to make substantive, controversial claims get rewarded for it—even when we don’t entirely agree with them—while those who continue to recite insipid nonsense are punished, then candidates will absolutely change how they speak.

But this would require a lot of people to change, more or less all at once. A sufficiently large critical mass of voters would need to be willing to support candidates specifically because they made detailed policy proposals, even if we didn’t particularly like those policy proposals.

Obviously, if their policy proposals were terrible, we’d have good reason to reject them; but for this to work, we need to be willing to support a lot of things that are just… kind of okay. Because it’s vanishingly unlikely that the first candidates who are brave enough to say what they intend will also be ones whose intentions we entirely agree with. We need to set some kind of threshold of minimum agreement, and reward anyone who exceeds it. We need to ask ourselves if our deal-breakers really need to be deal-breakers.

How to make political conversation possible

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 25 JDN 2460121

Every man has the right to an opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

~Bernard Baruch

We shouldn’t expect political conversation to be easy. Politics inherently involves confllict. There are various competing interests and different ethical views involved in any political decision. Budgets are inherently limited, and spending must be prioritized. Raising taxes supports public goods but hurts taxpayers. A policy that reduces inflation may increase unemployment. A policy that promotes growth may also increase inequality. Freedom must sometimes be weighed against security. Compromises must be made that won’t make everyone happy—often they aren’t anyone’s first choice.

But in order to have useful political conversations, we need to have common ground. It’s one thing to disagree about what should be done—it’s quite another to ‘disagree’ about the basic facts of the world. Reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes the best policy choice. But when you start insisting upon factual claims that are empirically false, you become inherently unreasonable.

What terrifies me about our current state of political discourse is that we do not seem to have this common ground. We can’t even agree about basic facts of the world. Unless we can fix this, political conversation will be impossible.

I am tempted to say “anymore”—it at least feels to me like politics used to be different. But maybe it’s always been this way, and the Internet simply made the unreasonable voices louder. Overall rates of belief in most conspiracy theories haven’t changed substantially over time. Many other times have declared themselves ‘the golden age of conspiracy theory’. Maybe this has always been a problem. Maybe the greatest reason humanity has never been able to achieve peace is that large swaths of humanity can’t even agree on the basic facts.

Donald Trump exemplified this fact-less approach to politics, and QAnon remains a disturbingly significant force in our politics today. It’s impossible to have a sensible conversation with people who are convinced that you’re supporting a secret cabal of Satanic child molesters—and all the more impossible because they were willing to become convinced of that on literally zero evidence. But Trump was not the first conspiracist candidate, and will not be the last.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now seems to be challenging Trump for the title of ‘most unreasonable Presidential candidate’, as he has now advocated for an astonishing variety of bizarre unfounded claims: that vaccines are deadly, that antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings, that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon. He even claims things that can be quickly refuted simply by looking up the figures: He says that Switzerland’s gun ownership rate is comparable to the US, when in fact it’s only about one-fourth as high. No other country even comes close to the extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership in the US; we are the only country in the world with more privately-owned guns than private citizens to own them—more guns than people. (We also have by far the most military weapons as well, but that’s a somewhat different issue.)

What should we be doing about this? I think at this point it’s clear that simply sitting back and hoping it goes away on its own is not working. There is a widespread fear that engaging with bizarre theories simply grants them attention, but I think we have no serious alternative. They aren’t going to disappear if we simply ignore them.

That still leaves the question of how to engage. Simply arguing with their claims directly and presenting mainstream scientific evidence appears to be remarkably ineffective. They will simply dismiss the credibility of the scientific evidence, often by exaggerating genuine flaws in scientific institutions. The journal system is broken? Big Pharma has far too much influence? Established ideas take too long to become unseated? All true. But that doesn’t mean that magic beans cure cancer.

A more effective—not easy, and certainly not infallible, but more effective—strategy seems to be to look deeper into why people say the things they do. I emphasize the word ‘say’ here, because it often seems to be the case that people don’t really believe in conspiracy theories the way they believe in ordinary facts. It’s more the mythology mindset.

Rather than address the claims directly, you need to address the person making the claims. Before getting into any substantive content, you must first build rapport and show empathy—a process some call pre-suasion. Then, rather than seeking out the evidence that support their claims—as there will be virtually none—try to find out what emotional need the conspiracy theory satisfies for them: How does it help them make sense of the terrifying chaos of the world? How does professing belief in something that initially seems absurd and horrific actually make the world seem more orderly and secure in their mind?


For instance, consider the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. At face value, this is horrifying: The US government is so evil it was prepared to launch an attack on our own soil, against our own citizens, in order to justify starting a war in another country? Against such a government, I think violent insurrection is the only viable response. But if you consider it from another perspective, it makes the world less terrifying: At least, there is someone in control. An attack like 9/11 means that the world is governed by chaos: Even we in the seemingly-impregnable fortress of American national security are in fact vulnerable to random attacks by small groups of dedicated fanatics. In the conspiracist vision of the world, the US government becomes a terrible villain; but at least the world is governed by powerful, orderly forces—not random chaos.

Or consider one of the most widespread (and, to be fair, one of the least implausible) conspiracy theories: That JFK was assassinated not by a single fanatic, but by an organized agency—the KGB, or the CIA, or the Vice President. In the real world, the President of the United States—the most powerful man on the entire planet—can occasionally be felled by a single individual who is dedicated enough and lucky enough. In the conspiracist world, such a powerful man can only be killed by someone similarly powerful. The world may be governed by an evil elite—but at least it is governed. The rules may be evil, but at least there are rules.

Understanding this can give you some sympathy for people who profess conspiracies: They are struggling to cope with the pain of living in a chaotic, unpredictable, disorderly world. They cannot deny that terrible events happen, but by attributing them to unseen, organized forces, they can at least believe that those terrible events are part of some kind of orderly plan.


At the same time, you must constantly guard against seeming arrogant or condescending. (This is where I usually fail; it’s so hard for me to take these ideas seriously.) You must present yourself as open-minded and interested in speaking in good faith. If they sense that you aren’t taking them seriously, people will simply shut down and refuse to talk any further.

It’s also important to recognize that most people with bizarre beliefs aren’t simply gullible. It isn’t that they believe whatever anyone tells them. On the contrary, they seem to suffer from misplaced skepticism: They doubt the credible sources and believe the unreliable ones. They are hyper-aware of the genuine problems with mainstream sources, and yet somehow totally oblivious to the far more glaring failures of the sources they themselves trust.

Moreover, you should never expect to change someone’s worldview in a single conversation. That simply isn’t how human beings work. The only times I have ever seen anyone completely change their opinion on something in a single sitting involved mathematical proofs—showing a proper proof really can flip someone’s opinion all by itself. Yet even scientists working in their own fields of expertise generally require multiple sources of evidence, combined over some period of time, before they will truly change their minds.

Your goal, then, should not be to convince someone that their bizarre belief is wrong. Rather, convince them that some of the sources they trust are just as unreliable as the ones they doubt. Or point out some gaps in the story they hadn’t considered. Or offer an alternative account of events that explains the outcome without requiring the existence of a secret evil cabal. Don’t try to tear down the entire wall all at once; chip away at it, one little piece at a time—and one day, it will crumble.

Hopefully if we do this enough, we can make useful political conversation possible.

Why does democracy work?

PNRJ book reviews, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 14 JDN 2460079

A review of Democracy for Realists

I don’t think it can be seriously doubted that democracy does, in fact, work. Not perfectly, by any means; but the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that more democratic societies are better than more authoritarian societies by just about any measure you could care to use.

When I first started reading Democracy for Realists and saw their scathing, at times frothing criticism of mainstream ideas of democracy, I thought they were going to try to disagree with that; but in the end they don’t. Achen and Bartels do agree that democracy works; they simply think that why and how it works is radically different from what most people think.

For it is a very long-winded book, and in dire need of better editing. Most of the middle section of the book is taken up by a deluge of empirical analysis, most of which amounts to over-interpreting the highly ambiguous results of underpowered linear regressions on extremely noisy data. The sheer quantity of them seems intended to overwhelm any realization that no particular one is especially compelling. But a hundred weak arguments don’t add up to a single strong one.

To their credit, the authors often include the actual scatter plots; but when you look at those scatter plots, you find yourself wondering how anyone could be so convinced these effects are real and important. Many of them seem more prone to new constellations.

Their econometric techniques are a bit dubious, as well; at one point they said they “removed outliers” but then the examples they gave as “outliers” were the observations most distant from their regression line rather than the rest of the data. Removing the things furthest from your regression line will always—always—make your regression seem stronger. But that’s not what outliers are. Other times, they add weird controls or exclude parts of the sample for dubious reasons, and I get the impression that these are the cherry-picked results of a much larger exploration. (Why in the world would you exclude Catholics from a study of abortion attitudes? And this study on shark attacks seems awfully specific….) And of course if you try 20 regressions at random, you can expect that at least 1 of them will probably show up with p < 0.05. I think they are mainly just following the norms of their discipline—but those norms are quite questionable.

They don’t ever get into much detail as to what sort of practical institutional changes they would recommend, so it’s hard to know whether I would agree with those. Some of their suggestions, such as more stringent rules on campaign spending, I largely agree with. Others, such as their opposition to popular referenda and recommendation for longer term limits, I have more mixed feelings about. But none seem totally ridiculous or even particularly radical, and they really don’t offer much detail about any of them. I thought they were going to tell me that appointment of judges is better than election (which many experts widely agree), or that the Electoral College is a good system (which far fewer experts would assent to, at least since George W. Bush and Donald Trump). In fact they didn’t do that; they remain eerily silent on substantive questions like this.

Honestly, what little they have to say about institutional policy feels a bit tacked on at the end, as if they suddenly realized that they ought to say something useful rather than just spend the whole time tearing down another theory.

In fact, I came to wonder if they really were tearing down anyone’s actual theory, or if this whole book was really just battering a strawman. Does anyone really think that voters are completely rational? At one point they speak of an image of the ‘sovereign omnicompetent voter’; is that something anyone really believes in?

It does seem like many people believe in making government more responsive to the people, whereas Achen and Bartels seem to have the rather distinct goal of making government make better decisions. They were able to find at least a few examples—though I know not how far and wide they had to search—where it seemed like more popular control resulted in worse outcomes, such as water fluoridation and funding for fire departments. So maybe the real substantive disagreement here is over whether more or less direct democracy is a good idea. And that is indeed a reasonable question. But one need not believe that voters are superhuman geniuses to think that referenda are better than legislation. Simply showing that voters are limited in their capacity and bound to group identity is not enough to answer that question.


In fact, I think that Achen and Bartels seriously overestimate the irrationality of voters, because they don’t seem to appreciate that group identity is often a good proxy for policy—in fact, they don’t even really seem to see social policy as policy at all. Consider this section (p. 238):

“In this pre-Hitlerian age it must have seemed to most Jews that there were no crucial issues dividing the major parties” (Fuchs 1956, 63). Yet by 1923, a very substantial majority of Jews had abandoned their Republican loyalties and begun voting for the Democrats. What had changed was not foreign policy, but rather the social status of Jews within one of America’s major political parties. In a very visible way, the Democrats had become fully accepting and incorporating of religious minorities, both Catholics and Jews. The result was a durable Jewish partisan realignment grounded in “ethnic solidarity”, in Gamm’s characterization.

Gee, I wonder why Jews would suddenly care a great deal which party was more respectful toward people like them? Okay, the Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but anti-Semitism is very old indeed, and it was visibly creeping upward during that era. And just in general, if one party is clearly more anti-Semitic than the other, why wouldn’t Jews prefer the one that is less hateful toward them? How utterly blinded by privilege do you need to be to not see that this is an important policy difference?

Perhaps because they are both upper-middle-class straight White cisgender men (I would also venture a guess nominally but not devoutly Protestant), Achens and Bartel seem to have no concept that social policy directly affects people of minority identity, that knowing that one party accepts people like you and the other doesn’t is a damn good reason to prefer one over the other. This is not a game where we are rooting for our home team. This directly affects our lives.

I know quite a few transgender people, and not a single one is a Republican. It’s not because all trans people hate low taxes. It’s because the Republican Party has declared war on trans people.

This may also lead to trans people being more left-wing generally, as once you’re in a group you tend to absorb some views from others in that group (and, I’ll admit, Marxists and anarcho-communists seem overrepresented among LGBT people). But I absolutely know some LGBT people who would like to vote conservative for economic policy reasons, but realize they can’t, because it means voting for bigots who hate them and want to actively discriminate against them. There is nothing irrational or even particularly surprising about this choice. It would take a very powerful overriding reason for anyone to want to vote for someone who publicly announces hatred toward them.

Indeed, for me the really baffling thing is that there are political parties that publicly announce hatred toward particular groups. It seems like a really weird strategy for winning elections. That is the thing that needs to be explained here; why isn’t inclusiveness—at least a smarmy lip-service toward inclusiveness, like ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ offices at universities—the default behavior of all successful politicians? Why don’t they all hug a Latina trans woman after kissing a baby and taking a selfie with the giant butter cow? Why is not being an obvious bigot considered a left-wing position?

Since it obviously is the case that many voters don’t want this hatred (at the very least, its targets!), in order for it not to damage electoral changes, it must be that some other voters do want this hatred. Perhaps they themselves define their own identity in opposition to other people’s identities. They certainly talk that way a lot: We hear White people fearing ‘replacement‘ by shifting racial demographics, when no sane forecaster thinks that European haplotypes are in any danger of disappearing any time soon. The central argument against gay marriage was always that it would somehow destroy straight marriage, by some mechanism never explained.

Indeed, perhaps it is this very blindness toward social policy that makes Achen and Bartels unable to see the benefits of more direct democracy. When you are laser-focused on economic policy, as they are, then it seems to you as though policy questions are mainly technical matters of fact, and thus what we need are qualified experts. (Though even then, it is not purely a matter of fact whether we should care more about inequality than growth, or more about unemployment than inflation.)

But once you include social policy, you see that politics often involves very real, direct struggles between conflicting interests and differing moral views, and that by the time you’ve decided which view is the correct one, you already have your answer for what must be done. There is no technical question of gay marriage; there is only a moral one. We don’t need expertise on such questions; we need representation. (Then again, it’s worth noting that courts have sometimes advanced rights more effectively than direct democratic votes; so having your interests represented isn’t as simple as getting an equal vote.)

Achen and Bartels even include a model in the appendix where politicians are modeled as either varying in competence or controlled by incentives; never once does it consider that they might differ in whose interests they represent. Yet I don’t vote for a particular politician just because I think they are more intelligent, or as part of some kind of deterrence mechanism to keep them from misbehaving (I certainly hope the courts do a better job of that!); I vote for them because I think they represent the goals and interests I care about. We aren’t asking who is smarter, we are asking who is on our side.

The central question that I think the book raises is one that the authors don’t seem to have much to offer on: If voters are so irrational, why does democracy work? I do think there is strong evidence that voters are irrational, though maybe not as irrational as Achen and Bartels seem to think. Honestly, I don’t see how anyone can watch Donald Trump get elected President of the United States and not think that voters are irrational. (The book was written before that; apparently there’s a new edition with a preface about Trump, but my copy doesn’t have that.) But it isn’t at all obvious to me what to do with that information, because even if so-called elites are in fact more competent than average citizens—which may or may not be true—the fact remains that their interests are never completely aligned. Thus far, representative democracy of one stripe or another seems to be the best mechanism we have for finding people who have sufficient competence while also keeping them on a short enough leash.

And perhaps that’s why democracy works as well as it does; it gives our leaders enough autonomy to let them generally advance their goals, but also places limits on how badly misaligned our leaders’ goals can be from our own.

Now is the time for CTCR

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Nov 6 JDN 2459890

We live in a terrifying time. As Ukraine gains ground in its war with Russia, thanks in part to the deployment of high-tech weapons from NATO, Vladimir Putin has begun to make thinly-veiled threats of deploying his nuclear arsenal in response. No one can be sure how serious he is about this. Most analysts believe that he was referring to the possible use of small-scale tactical nuclear weapons, not a full-scale apocalyptic assault. Many think he’s just bluffing and wouldn’t resort to any nukes at all. Putin has bluffed in the past, and could be doing so again. Honestly, “this is not a bluff” is exactly the sort of thing you say when you’re bluffing—people who aren’t bluffing have better ways of showing it. (It’s like whenever Trump would say “Trust me”, and you’d know immediately that this was an especially good time not to. Of course, any time is a good time not to trust Trump.)

(By the way, financial news is a really weird thing: I actually found this article discussing how a nuclear strike would be disastrous for the economy. Dude, if there’s a nuclear strike, we’ve got much bigger things to worry about than the economy. It reminds me of this XKCD.)

But if Russia did launch nuclear weapons, and NATO responded with its own, it could trigger a nuclear war that would kill millions in a matter of hours. So we need to be prepared, and think very carefully about the best way to respond.

The current debate seems to be over whether to use economic sanctions, conventional military retaliation, or our own nuclear weapons. Well, we already have economic sanctions, and they aren’t making Russia back down. (Though they probably are hurting its war effort, so I’m all for keeping them in place.) And if we were to use our own nuclear weapons, that would only further undermine the global taboo against nuclear weapons and could quite possibly trigger that catastrophic nuclear war. Right now, NATO seems to be going for a bluff of our own: We’ll threaten an overwhelming nuclear response, but then we obviously won’t actually carry it out because that would be murder-suicide on a global scale.

That leaves conventional military retaliation. What sort of retaliation? Several years ago I came up with a very specific method of conventional retaliation I call credible targeted conventional response (CTCR, which you can pronounce “cut-core”). I believe that now would be an excellent time to carry it out.

The basic principle of CTCR is really quite simple: Don’t try to threaten entire nations. A nation is an abstract entity. Threaten people. Decisions are made by people. The response to Vladimir Putin launching nuclear weapons shouldn’t be to kill millions of innocent people in Russia that probably mean even less to Putin than they do to us. It should be to kill Vladimir Putin.

How exactly to carry this out is a matter for military strategists to decide. There are a variety of weapons at our disposal, ranging from the prosaic (covert agents) to the exotic (precision strikes from high-altitude stealth drones). Indeed, I think we should leave it purposefully vague, so that Putin can’t try to defend himself against some particular mode of attack. The whole gamut of conventional military responses should be considered on the table, from a single missile strike to a full-scale invasion.

But the basic goal is quite simple: Launching a nuclear weapon is one of the worst possible war crimes, and it must be met with an absolute commitment to bring the perpetrator to justice. We should be willing to accept some collateral damage, even a lot of collateral damage; carpet-bombing a city shouldn’t be considered out of the question. (If that sounds extreme, consider that we’ve done it before for much weaker reasons.) The only thing that we should absolutely refuse to do is deploy nuclear weapons ourselves.

The great advantage of this strategy—even aside from being obviously more humane than nuclear retaliation—is that it is more credible. It sounds more like something we’d actually be willing to do. And in fact we likely could even get help from insiders in Russia, because there are surely many people in the Russian government who aren’t so loyal to Putin that they’d want him to get away with mass murder. It might not just be an assassination; it might end up turning into a coup. (Also something we’ve done for far weaker reasons.)


This is how we preserve the taboo on nuclear weapons: We refuse to use them, but otherwise stop at nothing to kill anyone who does use them.

I therefore call upon the world to make this threat:

Launch a nuclear weapon, Vladimir Putin, and we will kill you. Not your armies, not your generals—you. It could be a Tomahawk missile at the Kremlin. It could be a car bomb in your limousine, or a Stinger missile at Aircraft One. It could be a sniper at one of your speeches. Or perhaps we’ll poison your drink with polonium, like you do to your enemies. You won’t know when or where. You will live the rest of your short and miserable life in terror. There will be nowhere for you to hide. We will stop at nothing. We will deploy every available resource around the world, and it will be our top priority. And you will die.

That’s how you threaten a psychopath. And it’s what we must do in order to keep the world safe from nuclear war.

The United Kingdom in transition

PNRJ current events, macroeconomics, personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 30 JDN 2459883

When I first decided to move to Edinburgh, I certainly did not expect it to be such a historic time. The pandemic was already in full swing, but I thought that would be all. But this year I was living in the UK when its leadership changed in two historic ways:

First, there was the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the coronation of King Charles III.

Second, there was the resignation of Boris Johnson, the appointment of Elizabeth Truss, and then, so rapidly I feel like I have whiplash, the resignation of Elizabeth Truss.

In other words, I have seen the end of the longest-reigning monarch and the rise and fall of the shortest-reigning prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom. The three hundred-year history of the United Kingdom.

The prior probability of such a 300-year-historic event happening during my own 3-year term in the UK is approximately 1%. Yet, here we are. A new king, one of a handful of genuine First World monarchs to be coronated in the 21st century. The others are the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Monaco, Andorra, and Luxembourg; none of these have even a third the population of the UK, and if we include every Commonwealth Realm (believe it or not, “realm” is in fact still the official term), Charles III is now king of a supranational union with a population of over 150 million people—half the size of the United States. (Yes, he’s your king too, Canada!) Note that Charles III is not king of the entire Commonwealth of Nations, which includes now-independent nations such as India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that successor to the British Empire contains 54 nations and has a population of over 2 billion.

I still can’t quite wrap my mind around this idea of having a king. It feels even more ancient and anachronistic than the 400-year-old university I work at. Of course I knew that we had a queen before, and that she was old and would presumably die at some point and probably be replaced; but that wasn’t really salient information to me until she actually did die and then there was a ten-mile-long queue to see her body and now next spring they will be swearing in this new guy as the monarch of the fourteen realms. It now feels like I’m living in one of those gritty satirical fractured fairy tales. Maybe it’s an urban fantasy setting; it feels a lot like Shrek, to be honest.

Yet other than feeling surreal, none of this has affected my life all that much. I haven’t even really felt the effects of inflation: Groceries and restaurant meals seem a bit more expensive than they were when we arrived, but it’s well within what our budget can absorb; we don’t have a car here, so we don’t care about petrol prices; and we haven’t even been paying more than usual in natural gas because of the subsidy programs. Actually it’s probably been good for our household finances that the pound is so weak and the dollar is so strong. I have been much more directly affected by the university union strikes: being temporary contract junior faculty (read: expendable), I am ineligible to strike and hence had to cross a picket line at one point.

Perhaps this is what history has always felt like for most people: The kings and queens come and go, but life doesn’t really change. But I honestly felt more directly affected by Trump living in the US than I did by Truss living in the UK.

This may be in part because Elizabeth Truss was a very unusual politician; she combined crazy far-right economic policy with generally fairly progressive liberal social policy. A right-wing libertarian, one might say. (As Krugman notes, such people are astonishingly rare in the electorate.) Her socially-liberal stance meant that she wasn’t trying to implement horrific hateful policies against racial minorities or LGBT people the way that Trump was, and for once her horrible economic policies were recognized immediately as such and quickly rescinded. Unlike Trump, Truss did not get the chance to appoint any supreme court justices who could go on to repeal abortion rights.

Then again, Truss couldn’t have appointed any judges if she’d wanted to. The UK Supreme Court is really complicated, and I honestly don’t understand how it works; but from what I do understand, the Prime Minister appoints the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chancellor forms a commission to appoint the President of the Supreme Court, and the President of the Supreme Court forms a commission to appoint new Supreme Court judges. But I think the monarch is considered the ultimate authority and can veto any appointment along the way. (Or something. Sometimes I get the impression that no one truly understands the UK system, and they just sort of go with doing things as they’ve always been done.) This convoluted arrangement seems to grant the court considerably more political independence than its American counterpart; also, unlike the US Supreme Court, the UK Supreme Court is not allowed to explicitly overturn primary legislation. (Fun fact: The Lord Chancellor is also the Keeper of the Great Seal of the Realm, because Great Britain hasn’t quite figured out that the 13th century ended yet.)

It’s sad and ironic that it was precisely by not being bigoted and racist that Truss ensured she would not have sufficient public support for her absurd economic policies. There’s a large segment of the population of both the US and UK—aptly, if ill-advisedly, referred to by Clinton as “deplorables”—who will accept any terrible policy as long as it hurts the right people. But Truss failed to appeal to that crucial demographic, and so could find no one to support her. Hence, her approval rating fell to a dismal 10%, and she was outlasted by a head of lettuce.

At the time of writing, the new prime minister has not yet been announced, but the smart money is on Rishi Sunak. (I mean that quite literally; he’s leading in prediction markets.) He’s also socially liberal but fiscally conservative, but unlike Truss he seems to have at least some vague understanding of how economics works. Sunak is also popular in a way Truss never was (though that popularity has been declining recently). So I think we can expect to get new policies which are in the same general direction as what Truss wanted—lower taxes on the rich, more privatization, less spent on social services—but at least Sunak is likely to do so in a way that makes the math(s?) actually add up.

All of this is unfortunate, but largely par for the course for the last few decades. It compares quite favorably to the situation in the US, where somehow a large chunk of Americans either don’t believe that an insurrection attempt occurred, are fine with it, or blame the other side, and as the guardrails of democracy continue breaking, somehow gasoline prices appear to be one of the most important issues in the midterm election.

You know what? Living through history sucks. I don’t want to live in “interesting times” anymore.

Working from home is the new normal—sort of

PNRJ current events, futurism, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 28 JDN 2459820

Among people with jobs that can be done remotely, a large majority did in fact switch to doing their jobs remotely: By the end of 2020, over 70% of Americans with jobs that could be done remotely were working from home—and most of them said they didn’t want to go back.

This is actually what a lot of employers expected to happen—just not quite like this. In 2014, a third of employers predicted that the majority of their workforce would be working remotely by 2020; given the timeframe there, it required a major shock to make that happen so fast, and yet a major shock was what we had.

Working from home has carried its own challenges, but overall productivity seems to be higher working remotely (that meeting really could have been an email!). This may actually explain why output per work hour actually rose rapidly in 2020 and fell in 2022.

The COVID pandemic now isn’t so much over as becoming permanent; COVID is now being treated as an endemic infection like influenza that we don’t expect to be able to eradicate in the foreseeable future.

And likewise, remote work seems to be here to stay—sort of.

First of all, we don’t seem to be giving up office work entirely. As of the first quarter 2022, almost as many firms have partially remote work as have fully remote work, and this seems to be trending upward. A lot of firms seem to be transitioning into a “hybrid” model where employees show up to work two or three days a week. This seems to be preferred by large majorities of both workers and firms.

There is a significant downside of this: It means that the hope that remote working might finally ease the upward pressure on housing prices in major cities is largely a false one. If we were transitioning to a fully remote system, then people could live wherever they want (or can afford) and there would be no reason to move to overpriced city centers. But if you have to show up to work even one day a week, that means you need to live close enough to the office to manage that commute.

Likewise, if workers never came to the office, you could sell the office building and convert it into more housing. But if they show up even once in awhile, you need a physical place for them to go. Some firms may shrink their office space (indeed, many have—and unlike this New York Times journalist, I have a really hard time feeling bad for landlords of office buildings); but they aren’t giving it up entirely. It’s possible that firms could start trading off—you get the building on Mondays, we get it on Tuesdays—but so far this seems to be rare, and it does raise a lot of legitimate logistical and security concerns. So our global problem of office buildings that are empty, wasted space most of the time is going to get worse, not better. Manhattan will still empty out every night; it just won’t fill up as much during the day. This is honestly a major drain on our entire civilization—building and maintaining all those structures that are only used at most 1/3 of 5/7 of the time, and soon, less—and we really should stop ignoring it. No wonder our real estate is so expensive, when half of it is only used 20% of the time!

Moreover, not everyone gets to work remotely. Your job must be something that can be done remotely—something that involves dealing with information, not physical objects. That includes a wide and ever-growing range of jobs, from artists and authors to engineers and software developers—but it doesn’t include everyone. It basically means what we call “white-collar” work.

Indeed, it is largely limited to the upper-middle class. The rich never really worked anyway, though sometimes they pretend to, convincing themselves that managing a stock portfolio (that would actually grow faster if they let it sit) constitutes “work”. And the working class? By and large, they didn’t get the chance to work remotely. While 73% of workers with salaries above $200,000 worked remotely in 2020, only 12% of workers with salaries under $25,000 did, and there is a smooth trend where, across the board, the more money you make, the more likely you have been able to work remotely.

This will only intensify the divide between white-collar and blue-collar workers. They already think we don’t do “real work”; now we don’t even go to work. And while blue-collar workers are constantly complaining about contempt from white-collar elites, I think the shoe is really on the other foot. I have met very few white-collar workers who express contempt for blue-collar workers—and I have met very few blue-collar workers who don’t express anger and resentment toward white-collar workers. I keep hearing blue-collar people say that we think that they are worthless and incompetent, when they are literally the only ones ever saying that. I can’t stop saying things that I never said.

The rich and powerful may look down on them, but they look down on everyone. (Maybe they look down on blue-collar workers more? I’m not even sure about that.) I think politicians sometimes express contempt for blue-collar workers, but I don’t think this reflects what most white-collar workers feel.

And the highly-educated may express some vague sense of pity or disappointment in people who didn’t get college degrees, and sometimes even anger (especially when they do things like vote for Donald Trump), but the really vitriolic hatred is clearly in the opposite direction (indeed, I have no better explanation for how otherwise-sane people could vote for Donald Trump). And I certainly wouldn’t say that everyone needs a college degree (though I became tempted to, when so many people without college degrees voted for Donald Trump).

This really isn’t us treating them with contempt: This is them having a really severe inferiority complex. And as information technology (that white-collar work created) gives us—but not them—the privilege of staying home, that is only going to get worse.

It’s not their fault: Our culture of meritocracy puts a little bit of inferiority complex in all of us. It tells us that success and failure are our own doing, and so billionaires deserve to have everything and the poor deserve to have nothing. And blue-collar workers have absolutely internalized these attitudes: Most of them believe that poor people choose to stay on welfare forever rather than get jobs (when welfare has time limits and work requirements, so this is simply not an option—and you would know this from the Wikipedia page on TANF).

I think that what they experience as “contempt by white-collar elites” is really the pain of living in an illusory meritocracy. They were told—and they came to believe—that working hard would bring success, and they have worked very hard, and watched other people be much more successful. They assume that the rich and powerful are white-collar workers, when really they are non-workers; they are people the world was handed to on a silver platter. (What, you think George W. Bush earned his admission to Yale?)

And thus, we can shout until we are blue in the face that plumbers, bricklayers and welders are the backbone of civilization—and they are, and I absolutely mean that; our civilization would, in an almost literal sense, collapse without them—but it won’t make any difference. They’ll still feel the pain of living in a society that gave them very little and tells them that people get what they deserve.

I don’t know what to say to such people, though. When your political attitudes are based on beliefs that are objectively false, that you could know are objectively false if you simply bothered to look them up… what exactly am I supposed to say to you? How can we have a useful political conversation when half the country doesn’t even believe in fact-checking?

Honestly I wish someone had explained to them that even the most ideal meritocratic capitalism wouldn’t reward hard work. Work is a cost, not a benefit, and the whole point of technological advancement is to allow us to accomplish more with less work. The ideal capitalism would reward talent—you would succeed by accomplishing things, regardless of how much effort you put into them. People would be rich mainly because they are brilliant, not because they are hard-working. The closest thing we have to ideal capitalism right now is probably professional sports. And no amount of effort could ever possibly make me into Steph Curry.

If that isn’t the world we want to live in, so be it; let’s do something else. I did nothing to earn either my high IQ or my chronic migraines, so it really does feel unfair that the former increases my income while the latter decreases it. But the labor theory of value has always been wrong; taking more sweat or more hours to do the same thing is worse, not better. The dignity of labor consists in its accomplishment, not its effort. Sisyphus is not happy, because his work is pointless.

Honestly at this point I think our best bet is just to replace all blue-collar work with automation, thus rendering it all moot. And then maybe we can all work remotely, just pushing code patches to the robots that do everything. (And no doubt this will prove my “contempt”: I want to replace you! No, I want to replace the grueling work that you have been forced to do to make a living. I want you—the human being—to be able to do something more fun with your life, even if that’s just watching television and hanging out with friends.)

How to pack the court

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Jul 10 JDN 2459790

By now you have no doubt heard the news that Roe v. Wade was overturned. The New York Times has an annotated version of the full opinion.

My own views on abortion are like those of about 2/3 of Americans: More nuanced than can be neatly expressed by ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life’, much more comfortable with first-trimester abortion (which is what 90% of abortions are, by the way) than later, and opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade in its entirety. I also find great appeal in Clinton’s motto on the issue: “safe, legal, and rare”.Several years ago I moderated an online discussion group that reached what we called the Twelve Week Compromise: Abortion would be legal for any reason up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, after which it would only be legal for extenuating circumstances including rape, incest, fetal nonviability, and severe health risk to the mother. This would render the vast majority of abortions legal without simply saying that it should be permitted without question. Roe v. Wade was actually slightly more permissive than this, but it was itself a very sound compromise.

But even if you didn’t like Roe v. Wade, you should be outraged at the manner in which it was overturned. If the Supreme Court can simply change its mind on rights that have been established for nearly 50 years, then none of our rights are safe. And in chilling comments, Clarence Thomas has declared that this is his precise intention: “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” That is to say, Thomas wants to remove our rights to use contraception and have same-sex relationships. (If Lawrence were overturned, sodomy could be criminalized in several states!)

The good news here is that even the other conservative justices seem much less inclined to overturn these other precedents. Kavanaugh’s concurrent opinion explicitly states he has no intention of overturning “Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015)”. It seems quite notable that Thomas did not mention Loving v. Virginia, seeing as it was made around the same time as Roe v. Wade, based on very similar principles—and it affects him personally. And even if these precedents are unlikely to be overturned immediately, this ruling shows that the security of all of our rights can depend on the particular inclinations of individual justices.

The Supreme Court is honestly a terrible institution. Courts should not be more powerful than legislatures, lifetime appointments reek of monarchism, and the claim of being ‘apolitical’ that was dubious from the start is now obviously ludicrous. But precisely because it is so powerful, reforming it will be extremely difficult.

The first step is to pack the court. The question is no longer whether we should pack the court, but how, and why we didn’t do it sooner.

What does it mean to pack the court? Increase the number of justices, appointing new ones who are better than the current ones. (Since almost any randomly-selected American would be better than Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, or Brent Kavanaugh, this wouldn’t be hard.) This is 100% Constitutional, as the Constitution does not in any way restrict the number of justices. It can simply be done by an act of Congress.

But of course we can’t stop there. President Biden could appoint four more justices, and then whoever comes after him could appoint another three, and before we know it the Supreme Court has twenty-seven justices and each new President is expected to add a few more.

No, we need to fix the number of justices so that it can’t be increased any further. Ideally this would be done by Constitutional Amendment, though the odds of getting such a thing passed seem rather slim. But there is in fact a sensible way to add new justices now and then justify not adding any more later, and that is to tie justices to federal circuits.

There are currently 13 US federal circuit courts. If we added 4 more Supreme Court justices, there would be 13 Supreme Court justices. Each could even be assigned to be the nominal head of that federal circuit, and responsible for being the first to read appeals coming from that circuit.

Which justice goes where? Well, what if we let the circuits themselves choose? The selection could be made by a popular vote among the people who live there. Make the federal circuit a federal popular vote. The justice responsible for the federal circuit can also be the Chief Justice.

That would also require a Constitutional Amendment, but it would, at a stroke, fundamentally reform what the Supreme Court is and how its justices are chosen. For now, we could simply add three new justices, making the current number 13. Then they could decide amongst themselves who will get what circuit until we implement the full system to let circuits choose their justices.

I’m well aware that electing judges is problematic—but at this point I don’t think we have a choice. (I would also prefer to re-arrange the circuits: it’s weird that DC gets its own circuit instead of being part of circuit 4, and circuit 9 has way more people than circuit 1.) We can’t simply trust each new President to appoint a new justice whenever one happens to retire or die and then leave that justice in place for decades to come. Not in a world where someone like Donald Trump can be elected President.

A lot of centrist people are uncomfortable with such a move, seeing it as ‘playing dirty’. But it’s not. It’s playing hardball—taking seriously the threat that the current Republican Party poses to the future of American government and society, and taking substantive steps to fight that threat. (After its authoritarian shift that started in the mid 2000s but really took off under Trump, the Republican Party now has more in common with far-right extremist parties like Fidesz in Hungary than with mainstream center-right parties like the Tories.) But there is absolutely nothing un-Constitutional about this plan. It’s doing everything possible within the law.

We should have done this before they started overturning landmark precedents. But it’s not too late to do it before they overturn any more.

Centrism is dying in America.

PNRJ core principles, current events, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , ,

Apr 24 JDN 2459694

Four years ago—back when (shudder) Trump was President—I wrote a post about the true meaning of centrism, the kind of centrism worth defending.

I think it’s worth repeating now: Centrism isn’t saying “both sides are the same” when they aren’t. It’s recognizing that the norms of democracy themselves are worth defending—and more worth defending than almost any specific policy goal.

I wanted to say any specific policy goal, but I do think you can construct extreme counterexamples, like “establish a 100% tax on all income” (causing an immediate, total economic collapse), or “start a war with France” (our staunchest ally for the past 250 years who also has nuclear weapons). But barring anything that extreme, just about any policy is less important than defending democracy itself.

Or at least I think so. It seems that most Americans disagree. On both the left and the right—but especially on the right—a large majority of American voters are still willing to vote for a candidate who flouts basic democratic norms as long as they promise the right policies.

I guess on the right this fact should have been obvious: Trump. But things aren’t much better on the left, and should some actual radical authoritarian communist run for office (as opposed to, you know, literally every left-wing politician who is accused of being a radical authoritarian communist), this suggests that a lot of leftist voters might actually vote for them, which is nearly as terrifying.

My hope today is that I might tip the balance a little bit the other direction, remind people why democracy is worth defending, even at the cost of our preferred healthcare systems and marginal tax rates.

This is, above all, that democracy is self-correcting. If a bad policy gets put in place while democratic norms are still strong, then that policy can be removed and replaced with something better later on. Authoritarianism lacks this self-correction mechanism; get someone terrible in power and they stay in power, doing basically whatever they want, unless they are violently overthrown.

For the right wing, that’s basically it. You need to stop making excuses for authoritarianism. Basically none of your policies are so important that they would justify even moderate violations of democratic norms—much less than Trump already committed, let alone what he might do if re-elected and unleashed. I don’t care how economically efficient lower taxes or privatized healthcare might be (and I know that there are in fact many economists who would agree with you on that, though I don’t), it isn’t worth undermining democracy. And while I do understand why you consider abortion to be such a vital issue, you really need to ask yourself whether banning abortion is worth living under a fascist government, because that’s the direction you’re headed. Let me note that banning abortion doesn’t even seem to reduce it very much, so there’s that. While the claim that abortion bans do nothing is false, even a total overturn of Roe v. Wade would most likely reduce US abortions by about 15%—much less than the 25% decrease between 2008 and 2014, which was also part of a long-term trend of decreasing abortion rates which are now roughly half what they were in 1980. We don’t need to ban abortion in order to reduce it—and indeed many of the things that work are things like free healthcare and easy access to contraception that right-wing governments typically resist. So even if you consider abortion to be a human rights violation, which I know many of you do, is that relatively small reduction in abortion rates worth risking the slide into fascism?

But for the left wing, things are actually a bit more complicated. Some right-wing policies—particularly social policies—are inherently anti-democratic and violations of human rights. I gave abortion the benefit of the doubt above; I can at least see why someone would think it’s a human rights violation (though I do not). Here I’m thinking particularly of immigration policies that lock up children at the border and laws that actively discriminate against LGBT people. I can understand why people would be unwilling to “hold their nose” and vote for someone who wants to enact that kind of policy—though if it’s really the only way to avoid authoritarianism, I think we might still have to do it. Democracy is too high a price to pay; give it up now and there is nothing to stop that new authoritarian leftist government from turning into a terrible nightmare (that may not even remain leftist, by the way!). If we vote in someone who is pro-democratic but otherwise willing to commit these sorts of human rights violations, hopefully we can change things by civic engagement or vote them out of office later on (and over the long run, we do, in fact, have a track record of doing that). But if we vote in someone who will tear apart democracy even when they seem to have the high ground on human rights, then once democracy is undermined, the new authoritarian government can oppress us in all sorts of ways (even ways they specifically promised not to!), and we will have very little recourse.

Above all, even if they promise to give us everything we want, once you put an authoritarian in power, they can do whatever they want. They have no reason to keep their promises (whereas, contrary to popular belief, democratic politicians actually typically do), for we have no recourse if they don’t. Our only option to remove them from power is violent revolution—which usually fails, and even if it succeeds, would have an enormous cost in human lives.

Why is this a minority view? Why don’t more Americans agree with this?

I can think of a few possible reasons.

One is that they may not believe that these violations of democratic norms are really all that severe or worrisome. Overriding a judge with an executive order isn’t such a big deal, is it? Gerrymandering has been going on for decades, why should we worry about it now?

If that is indeed your view, let me remind you that in January 2021, armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building. That is not something we can just take lying down. This is a direct attack upon the foundations of democracy, and while it failed (miserably, and to be honest, hilariously), it wasn’t punished nearly severely enough—most of the people involved were not arrested on any charges, and several are now running for office. This lack of punishment means that it could very well happen again, and this time be better organized and more successful.

A second possibility is that people do not know that democracy is being undermined; they are somehow unaware that this is happening. If that’s the case, all I can tell you is that you really need to go to the Associated Press or New York Times website and read some news. You would have to be catastrophically ignorant of our political situation, and you frankly don’t deserve to be voting if that is the case.

But I suspect that for most people, a third reason applies: They see that democracy is being undermined, but they blame the other side. We aren’t the ones doing it—it’s them.

Such a view is tempting, at least from the left side of the aisle. No Democratic Party politician can hold a candle to Trump as far as authoritarianism (or narcissism). But we should still be cognizant of ways that our actions may also undermine democratic norms: Maybe we shouldn’t be considering packing the Supreme Court, unless we can figure out a way to ensure that it will genuinely lead to a more democratic and fair court long into the future. (For the latter sort of reform, suppose each federal district elected its own justice? Or we set up a mandatory retirement cycle such that every President would always appoint at least one justice?)

But for those of you on the right… How can you possibly think this? Where do you get your information from? How can you look at Donald Trump and think, “This man will defend our democracy from those left-wing radicals”? Right now you may be thinking, “oh, look, he suggested the New York Times; see his liberal bias”; that is a newspaper of record in the United States. While their editors are a bit left of center, they are held to the highest standards of factual accuracy. But okay, if you prefer the Wall Street Journal (also a newspaper of record, but whose editors are a bit more right of center), be my guest; their factual claims won’t disagree, because truth is truth. I also suggested the Associated Press, widely regarded worldwide as one of the most credible news sources. (I considered adding Al Jazeera, which has a similar reputation, but figured you wouldn’t go for that.)

If you think that the attack on the Capitol was even remotely acceptable, you must think that their claims of a stolen election were valid, or at least plausible. But every credible major news source, the US Justice Department, and dozens of law courts agree that they were not. Any large election is going to have a few cases of fraud, but there were literally only hundreds of fradulent votes—in an election in which over 150 million votes were cast, Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes, and no state was won by less than 10,000 votes. This means that 99.999% of votes were valid, and even if every single fradulent vote had been for Biden and in Georgia (obviously not the case), it wouldn’t have been enough to tip even that state.

I’m not going to say that left-wing politicians never try to undermine democratic norms—there’s certainly plenty of gerrymandering, and I just said, court-packing is at least problematic. Nor would I say that the right wing is always worse about this. But it should be pretty obvious to anyone with access to basic factual information—read: everyone with Internet access—that right now, the problem is much worse on the right. You on the right need to face up to that fact, and start voting out Republicans who refuse to uphold democracy, even if it means you have to wait a bit longer for lower taxes or more (let me remind you, not very effective) abortion bans.

In the long run, I would of course like to see changes in the whole political system, so that we are no longer dominated by two parties and have a wider variety of realistic options. (The best way to do that would of couse be range voting.) But for now, let’s start by ensuring that democracy continues to exist in America.

Reversals in progress against poverty

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, development economics, inequality , , , , ,

Jan 16 JDN 2459606

I don’t need to tell you that the COVID pandemic has been very bad for the world. Yet perhaps the worst outcome of the pandemic is one that most people don’t recognize: It has reversed years of progress against global poverty.

Estimates of the number of people who will be thrown into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic are consistently around 100 million, though some forecasts have predicted this will rise to 150 million, or, in the most pessimistic scenarios, even as high as 500 million.

Pre-COVID projections showed the global poverty rate falling steadily from 8.4% in 2019 to 6.3% by 2030. But COVID resulted in the first upward surge in global poverty in decades, and updated models now suggest that the global poverty rate in 2030 will be as high as 7.0%. That difference is 0.7% of a forecasted population of 8.5 billion—so that’s a difference of 59 million people.

This is a terrible reversal of fortune, and a global tragedy. Ten or perhaps even hundreds of millions of people will suffer the pain of poverty because of this global pandemic and the numerous missteps by many of the world’s governments—not least the United States—in response to it.

Yet it’s important to keep in mind that this is a short-term reversal in a long-term trend toward reduced poverty. Yes, the most optimistic predictions are turning out to be wrong—but the general pattern of dramatic reductions in global poverty over the late 20th and early 21st century are still holding up.

That post-COVID estimate of a global poverty rate of 7.0% needs to be compared against the fact that as recently as 1980 the global poverty rate at the same income level (adjust for inflation and purchasing power of course) income level was a whopping 44%.

This pattern makes me feel deeply ambivalent about the effects of globalization on inequality. While it now seems clear that globalization has exacerbated inequality within First World countries—and triggered a terrible backlash of right-wing populism as a result—it also seems clear that globalization was a major reason for the dramatic reductions in global poverty in the past few decades.

I think the best answer I’ve been able to come up with is that globalization is overall a good thing, and we must continue it—but we also need to be much more mindful of its costs, and we must make policy that mitigates those costs. Expanded trade has winners and losers, and we should be taxing the winners to compensate the losers. To make good economic policy, it simply isn’t enough to increase aggregate GDP; you actually have to make life better for everyone (or at least as many people as you can).

Unfortunately, knowing what policies to make is only half the battle. We must actually implement those policies, which means winning elections, which means restoring the public’s faith in the authority of economic experts.

Some of the people voting for Donald Trump were just what Hillary Clinton correctly (if tone-deafly) referred to as “deplorables“: racists, misogynists, xenophobes. But I think that many others weren’t voting for Trump but against Clinton; they weren’t embracing far-right populism but rather rejecting center-left technocratic globalization. They were tired of being told what to do by experts who didn’t seem to care about them or their interests.

And the thing is, they were right about that. Not about voting for Trump—that’s unforgivable—but about the fact that expert elites had been ignoring their interests and needed a wake-up call. There were a hundred better ways of making that wake-up call that didn’t involve putting a narcissistic, incompetent maniac in charge of the world’s largest economy, military and nuclear arsenal, and millions of people should be ashamed of themselves for not taking those better options. Yet the fact remains: The wake-up call was necessary, and we should be responding to it.

We expert elites (I think I can officially carry that card, now that I have a PhD and a faculty position at a leading research university) need to do a much better job of two things: First, articulating the case for our policy recommendations in a way that ordinary people can understand, so that they feel justified and not simply rammed down people’s throats; and second, recognizing the costs and downsides of these policies and taking action to mitigate them whenever possible.

For instance: Yes, we need to destroy all the coal jobs. They are killing workers and the planet. Coal companies need to be transitioned to new industries or else shut down. This is not optional. It must be done. But we also need to explain to those coal miners why it’s necessary to move on from coal to solar and nuclear, and we need to be implementing various policies to help those workers move on to better, safer jobs that pay as well and don’t involve filling their lungs with soot and the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We need to articulate, emphasize—and loudly repeat—that this isn’t about hurting coal miners to help everyone else, but about helping everyone, coal miners included, and that if anyone gets hurt it will only be a handful of psychopathic billionaires who already have more money than any human being could possibly need or deserve.

Another example: We cannot stop trading with India and China. Hundreds of millions of innocent people would suddenly be thrown out of work and into poverty if we did. We need the products they make for us, and they need the money we pay for those products. But we must also acknowledge that trading with poor countries does put downward pressure on wages back home, and take action to help First World workers who are now forced to compete with global labor markets. Maybe this takes the form of better unemployment benefits, or job-matching programs, or government-sponsored job training. But we cannot simply shrug and let people lose their jobs and their homes because the factories they worked in were moved to China.

A prouder year for America, and for me

PNRJ current events, personal, politics, public policy , , , ,

Jul 4 JDN 2459380

Living under Trump from 2017 to 2020, it was difficult to be patriotic. How can we be proud of a country that would put a man like that in charge? And then there was the COVID pandemic, which initially the US handled terribly—largely because of the aforementioned Trump.

But then Biden took office, and almost immediately things started to improve. This is a testament to how important policy can be—and how different the Democrats and Republicans have become.

The US now has one of the best rates of COVID vaccination in the world (though lately progress seems to be stalling and other countries are catching up). Daily cases in the US are now the lowest they have been since March 2020. Even real GDP is almost back up to its pre-pandemic level (even per-capita), and the surge of inflation we got as things began to re-open already seems to be subsiding.

I can actually celebrate the 4th of July with some enthusiasm this year, whereas the last four years involved continually reminding myself that I was celebrating the liberating values of America’s founding, not the current terrible state of its government. Of course our government policy still retains many significant flaws—but it isn’t the utter embarrassment it was just a year ago.

This may be my last 4th of July to celebrate for the next few years, as I will soon be moving to Scotland (more on that in a moment).

2020 was a very bad year, but even halfway through it’s clear that 2021 is going to be a lot better.

This was true for just about everyone. I was no exception.

The direct effects of the pandemic on me were relatively minor.

Transitioning to remote work was even easier than I expected it to be; in fact I was even able to run experiments online using the same research subject pool as we’d previously used for the lab. I not only didn’t suffer any financial hardship from the lockdowns, I ended up better off because of the relief payments (and the freezing of student loan payments as well as the ludicrous stock boom, which I managed to buy in near the trough of). Ordering groceries online for delivery is so convenient I’m tempted to continue it after the pandemic is over (though it does cost more).

I was careful and/or fortunate enough not to get sick (now that I am fully vaccinated, my future risk is negligible), as were most of my friends and family. I am not close to anyone who died from the virus, though I do have some second-order links to some who died (grandparents of a couple of my friends, the thesis advisor of one of my co-authors).

It was other things, that really made 2020 a miserable year for me. Some of them were indirect effects of the pandemic, and some may not even have been related.

For me, 2020 was a year full of disappointments. It was the year I nearly finished my dissertation and went on the job market, applying for over one hundred jobs—and got zero offers. It was the year I was scheduled to present at an international conference—which was then canceled. It was the year my papers were rejected by multiple journals. It was the year I was scheduled to be married—and then we were forced to postpone the wedding.

But now, in 2021, several of these situations are already improving. We will be married on October 9, and most (though assuredly not all) of the preparations for the wedding are now done. My dissertation is now done except for some formalities. After over a year of searching and applying to over two hundred postings in all, I finally found a job, a postdoc position at the University of Edinburgh. (A postdoc isn’t ideal, but on the other hand, Edinburgh is more prestigious than I thought I’d be able to get.) I still haven’t managed to publish any papers, but I no longer feel as desperate a need to do so now that I’m not scrambling to find a job. Now of course we have to plan for a move overseas, though fortunately the university will reimburse our costs for the visa and most of the moving expenses.

Of course, 2021 isn’t over—neither is the COVID pandemic. But already it looks like it’s going to be a lot better than 2020.