Joe Biden

Good news for a change

pnrj current events, politics, public policy , , , ,

Mar 28 JDN 2459302

When President Biden made his promise to deliver 100 million vaccine doses to Americans within his first 100 days, many were skeptical. Perhaps we had grown accustomed to the anti-scientific attitudes and utter incompetence of Trump’s administration, and no longer believed that the US federal government could do anything right.

The skeptics were wrong. For the promise has not only been kept, it has been greatly exceeded. As of this writing, Biden has been President for 60 days and we have already administered 121 million vaccine doses. If we continue at the current rate, it is likely that we will have administered over 200 million vaccine doses and fully vaccinated over 100 million Americans by Biden’s promised 100-day timeline—twice as fast as what was originally promised. Biden has made another bold promise: Every adult in the United States vaccinated by the end of May. I admit I’m not confident it can be done—but I wasn’t confident we’d hit 100 million by now either.

In fact, the US now has one of the best rates of COVID vaccination in the world, with the proportion of our population vaccinated far above the world average and below only Israel, UAE, Chile, the UK, and Bahrain (plus some tiny countries like Monaco). In fact, we actually have the largest absolute number of vaccinated individuals in the world, surpassing even China and India.

It turns out that the now-infamous map saying that the US and UK were among the countries best-prepared for a pandemic wasn’t so wrong after all; it’s just that having such awful administration for four years made our otherwise excellent preparedness fail. Put someone good in charge, and yes, indeed, it turns out that the US can deal with pandemics quite well.

The overall rate of new COVID cases in the US began to plummet right around the time the vaccination program gained steam, and has plateaued around 50,000 per day for the past few weeks. This is still much too high, but it is is a vast improvement over the 200,000 cases per day we had in early January. Our death rate due to COVID now hovers around 1,500 people per day—that’s still a 9/11 every two days. But this is half what our death rate was at its worst. And since our baseline death rate is 7,500 deaths per day, 1,800 of them by heart disease, this now means that COVID is no longer the leading cause of death in the United States; heart disease has once again reclaimed its throne. Of course, people dying from heart disease is still a bad thing; but it’s at least a sign of returning to normalcy.

Worldwide, the pandemic is slowing down, but still by no means defeated, with over 400,000 new cases and 7,500 deaths every day. The US rate of 17 new cases per 100,000 people per day is about 3 times the world average, but comparable to Germany (17) and Norway (18), and nowhere near as bad as Chile (30), Brazil (35), France (37), or Sweden (45), let alone the very hardest-hit places like Serbia (71), Hungary (78), Jordan (83), Czechia (90), and Estonia (110). (That big gap between Norway and Sweden? It’s because Sweden resisted using lockdowns.) And there is cause for optimism even in these places, as vaccination rates already exceed total COVID cases.

I can see a few patterns in the rate of vaccination by state: very isolated states have managed to vaccinate their population fastest—Hawaii and Alaska have done very well, and even most of the territories have done quite well (though notably not Puerto Rico). The south has done poorly (for obvious reasons), but not as poorly as I might have feared; even Texas and Mississippi have given at least one dose to 21% of their population. New England has been prioritizing getting as many people with at least one dose as possible, rather than trying to fully vaccinate each person; I think this is the right strategy.

We must continue to stay home when we can and wear masks when we go out. This will definitely continue for at least a few more months, and the vaccine rollout may not even be finished in many countries by the end of the year. In the worst-case scenario, COVID may become an endemic virus that we can’t fully eradicate and we’ll have to keep getting vaccinated every year like we do for influenza (though the good news there is that it likely wouldn’t be much more dangerous than influenza at that point either—though another influenza is nothing to, er, sneeze at).

Yet there is hope at last. Things are finally getting better.

Trump will soon be gone. But this isn’t over.

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, inequality, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 8 JDN 2459162

After a frustratingly long wait for several states to finish counting their mail-in ballots (particularly Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona), Biden has officially won the Presidential election. While it was far too close in a few key states, this is largely an artifact of the Electoral College: Biden’s actual popular vote advantage was over 4 million votes. We now have our first Vice President who is a woman of color. I think it’s quite reasonable for us all to share a long sigh of relief at this result.

We have won this battle. But the war is far from over.

First, there is the fact that we are still in a historic pandemic and economic recession. I have no doubt that Biden’s policy response will be better than Trump’s; but he hasn’t taken office yet, and much of the damage has already been done. Things are not going to get much better for quite awhile yet.

Second, while Biden is a pretty good candidate, he does have major flaws.

Above all, Biden is still far too hawkish on immigration and foreign policy. He won’t chant “build the wall!”, but he’s unlikely to tear down all of our border fences or abolish ICE. He won’t rattle the saber with Iran or bomb civilians indiscriminately, but he’s unlikely to end the program of assassination drone strikes. Trump has severely, perhaps irrevocably, damaged the Pax Americana with his ludicrous trade wars, alienation of our allies, and fawning over our enemies; but whether or not Biden can restore America’s diplomatic credibility, I have no doubt that he’ll continue to uphold—and deploy—America’s military hegemony. Indeed, the failure of the former could only exacerbate the latter.

Biden’s domestic policy is considerably better, but even there he doesn’t go far enough. His healthcare plan is a substantial step forward, improving upon the progress already made by Obamacare; but it’s still not the single-payer healthcare system we really need. He has some good policy ideas for directly combating discrimination, but isn’t really addressing the deep structural sources of systemic racism. His anti-poverty programs would be a step in the right direction, but are clearly insufficient.

Third, Democrats did not make significant gains in Congress, and while they kept the majority in the House, they are unlikely to gain control of the Senate. Because the Senate is so powerful and Mitch McConnell is so craven, this could be disastrous for Biden’s ability to govern.

But there is an even more serious problem we must face as a country: Trump got 70 million votes. Even after all he did—his endless lies, his utter incompetence, his obvious corruption—and all that happened—the mishandled pandemic, the exacerbated recession—there were still 70 million people willing to vote for Trump. I said it from the beginning: I have never feared Trump nearly so much as I fear an America that could elect him.

Yes, of course he would have had a far worse shot if our voting system were better: Several viable parties, range voting, and no Electoral College would have all made things go very differently than they did in 2016. But the fact remains that tens of millions of Americans were willing to vote for this man not once, but twice.

What can explain the support of so many people for such an obviously terrible leader?

First, there is misinformation: Our mass media is biased and can give a very distorted view of the world. Someone whose view of world events was shaped entirely by right-wing media like Fox News (let alone OAN) might not realize how terrible Trump is, or might be convinced that Biden is somehow even worse. Yet today, in the 21st century, our access to information is virtually unlimited. Anyone who really wanted to know what Trump is like would be able to find out—so whatever ignorance or misinformation Trump voters had, they bear the greatest responsibility for it.

Then, there is discontent: Growth in total economic output has greatly outpaced growth in real standard of living for most Americans. While real per-capita GDP rose from $26,000 in 1974 to $56,000 today (a factor of 2.15, or 1.7% per year), real median personal income only rose from $25,000 to $36,000 (a factor of 1.44, or 0.8% per year). This reflects the fact that more and more of our country’s wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the rich. Combined with dramatically increased costs of education and healthcare, this means that most American families really don’t feel like their standard of living has meaningfully improved in a generation or more.

Yet if people are discontent with how our economy is run… why would they vote for Donald Trump, who epitomizes everything that is wrong with that system? The Democrats have not done enough to fight rising inequality and spiraling healthcare costs, but they have at least done something—raising taxes here, expanding Medicaid there. This is not enough, since it involves only tweaking the system at the edges rather than solving the deeper structural problems—but it has at least some benefit. The Republicans at their best have done nothing, and at their worst actively done everything in their power to exacerbate rising inequality. And Trump is no different in this regard than any other Republican; he promised more populist economic policy, but did not deliver it in any way. Do people somehow not see that?

I think we must face up to the fact that racism and sexism are clearly a major part of what motivates supporters of Trump. Trump’s core base consists of old, uneducated White men. Women are less likely to support him, and young people, educated people, and people of color are far less likely to support him. The race gap is staggering: A mere 8% of Black people support Trump, while 54% of White people do. While Asian and Hispanic voters are not quite so univocal, still it’s clear that if only non-White people had voted Biden would have won an utter landslide and might have taken every state—yes, likely even Florida, where Cuban-Americans did actually lean slightly toward Trump. The age and education gaps are also quite large: Among those under 30, only 30% support Trump, while among those over 65, 52% do. Among White people without a college degree, 64% support Trump, while among White people with a college degree, only 38% do. The gender gap is smaller, but still significant: 48% of men but only 42% of women support Trump. (Also the fact that the gender gap was smaller this year than in 2016 could reflect the fact that Clinton was running for President but Harris was only running for Vice President.)

We shouldn’t ignore the real suffering and discontent that rising inequality has wrought, nor should we dismiss the significance of right-wing propaganda. Yet when it comes right down to it, I don’t see how we can explain Trump’s popularity without recognizing that an awful lot of White men in America are extremely racist and sexist. The most terrifying thing about Trump is that millions of Americans do know what he’s like—and they’re okay with that.

Trump will soon be gone. But many others like him remain. We need to find a way to fix this, or the next racist, misogynist, corrupt, authoritarian psychopath may turn out to be a lot less foolish and incompetent.

Reasons to like Joe Biden

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Sep 6 JDN 2459099

Maybe it’s because I follow too many radical leftists on social media (this is at least a biased sample, no doubt), but I’ve seen an awful lot of posts basically making this argument: “Joe Biden is terrible, but we have to elect him, because Donald Trump is worse.”

And make no mistake: Whatever else you think about this election, the fact that Donald Trump is a fascist and Joe Biden is not is indeed a fully sufficient reason to vote for Biden. You shouldn’t need any more than that.

But in fact Joe Biden is not terrible. Yes, there are some things worth criticizing about his record and his platform—particularly with regard to civil liberties and war (both of those links are to my own posts making such criticisms of the Obama administration). I don’t want to sweep these significant flaws under the rug.

Yet, there are also a great many things that are good about Biden and his platform, and it’s worthwhile to talk about them. You shouldn’t feel like you are holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils; Biden is going to make a very good President.

First and foremost, there is his plan to invest in clean energy and combat climate change. For the first time in decades, we have a Presidential candidate who is explicitly pro-nuclear and has a detailed, realistic plan for achieving net-zero carbon emissions within a generation. We should have done this 30 years ago; but far better to start now than to wait even longer.

Then there is Biden’s plan for affordable housing. He wants to copy California’s Homeowner Bill of Rights at the federal level, fight redlining, expand Section 8, and nationalize the credit rating system. Above all, he wants to create a new First Down Payment Tax Credit that will provide first-time home buyers with $15,000 toward a down payment on a home. That is how you increase homeownership. The primary reason why people rent instead of owning is that they can’t afford the down payment.

Biden is also serious about LGBT rights, and wants to pass the Equality Act, which would finally make all discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity illegal at the federal level. He has plans to extend and aggressively enforce federal rules protecting people with disabilities. His plans for advancing racial equality seem to be thoroughly baked into all of his proposals, from small business funding to housing reform—likely part of why he’s so popular among Black voters.

His plan for education reform includes measures to equalize funding between rich and poor districts and between White and non-White districts.

Biden’s healthcare plan isn’t quite Medicare For All, but it’s actually remarkably close to that. He wants to provide a public healthcare option available to everyone, and also lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 instead of 65. This means that anyone who wants Medicare will be able to buy into it, and also sets a precedent of lowering the eligibility age—remember, all we really need to do to get Medicare For All is lower that age to 18. Moreover, it avoids forcing people off private insurance that they like, which is the main reason why Medicare For All still does not have majority support.

While many on the left have complained that Biden believes in “tough on crime”, his plan for criminal justice reform actually strikes a very good balance between maintaining low crime rates and reducing incarceration and police brutality. The focus is on crime prevention instead of punishment, and it includes the elimination of all federal use of privatized prisons.

Most people would give lip service to being against domestic violence, but Biden has a detailed plan for actually protecting survivors and punishing abusers—including ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment and ending the rape kit backlog. The latter is an utter no-brainer. If we need to, we can pull the money from just about any other form of law enforcement (okay, I guess not homicide); those rape kits need to be tested and those rapists need to be charged.

Biden also has a sensible plan for gun control, which is consistent with the Second Amendment and Supreme Court precedent but still could provide substantial protections by reinstating the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and adding other sensible restrictions on who can be licensed to own firearms. It won’t do much about handguns or crimes of passion, but it should at least reduce mass shootings.

Biden doesn’t want to implement free four-year college—then again, neither do I—but he does have a plan for free community college and vocational schooling.

He also has a very ambitious plan for campaign finance reform, including a Constitutional Amendment that would ban all private campaign donations. Honestly if anything the plan sounds too ambitious; I doubt we can really implement all of these things any time soon. But if even half of them get through, our democracy will be in much better shape.

His immigration policy, while far from truly open borders, would reverse Trump’s appalling child-separation policy, expand access to asylum, eliminate long-term detention in favor of a probation system, and streamline the path to citizenship.

Biden’s platform is the first one I’ve seen that gives detailed plans for foreign aid and international development projects; he is particularly focused on Latin America.

I’ve seen many on the left complain that Biden was partly responsible for the current bankruptcy system that makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loans; well, his current platform includes a series of reforms developed by Elizabeth Warren designed to reverse that.

I do think Biden is too hawkish on war and not serious enough about protecting civil liberties—and I said the same thing about Obama years ago. But Biden isn’t just better than Trump (almost anyone would be better than Trump); he’s actually a genuinely good candidate with a strong, progressive platform.

You should already have been voting for Biden anyway. But hopefully now you can actually do it with some enthusiasm.

This attack on the postal service must not stand

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Aug 23 JDN 2459085

Trump has done so many unprecedented and terrible things that we can become numbed by it all, unable to process each new offense because we are already overwhelmed by the others. Perhaps this is a kind of strategy on his part: Keep doing so many outrageous things that we lose our capacity to be outraged. Already it is fair to say that at least half of the 160,000 (and counting) Americans killed by COVID-19 would still be alive if a better President had been in office.

But the attack on the US Postal Service deserves particular attention, because the disruption of mail-in voting during a pandemic could radically alter the results of the election. Indeed, Trump has all but said that this was his goal in defunding the post office.

Trump has long hated the postal service (perhaps because it is a clear example of federal government doing things well and helping people), but his full-scale war upon it started with the appointment of Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General, whose main qualifications appear to be that he has given millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and hates everything the post office stands for. I am quite certain that if there were a Director of Henhouse Affairs, Trump would appoint the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The White House chief of staff claims that there have been no mail sorting machines decommissioned aside from those that were normally scheduled for replacement. Yet it’s easy to find a number of different sources claiming that there have been far more machines shut down than usual. Postal workers have also spoken out about other kinds of restructuring in the postal system that claim to be about “reducing costs” but seem to be systematically impairing the speed and reliability of service.

Trump claims that mail-in voting is insecure, which has a kernel of truth: Mail-in voting certainly doesn’t have the ironclad security against fraud that in-person voting has. (Unlike in-person voter fraud, mail-in voter fraud actually exists.) But not only is his concern obviously overblown, the USPS has even taken measures to upgrade their security using blockchain encryption. Bitcoin has always been a stupid idea (though a very lucrative one for anyone who bought in early), but blockchain does have some major advantages for voting security, because it is one of the few ways to make a remote system that is simultaneously secure and anonymous. Indeed, I think blockchain encryption (combined with more standard SSL encryption that most web pages already use) might well be a way to implement full-scale online voting—though surely not in time for this election.

The US Postal Service is the most popular federal agency in the United States, followed by the CDC, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Health and Human Services, all of which deservedly have strong bipartisan majority support among voters. It may surprise you to learn that the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Department of Justice also have strong majority support—though with substantial partisan differences. The most divisive federal agency is ICE, which is beloved by Republicans but hated by Democrats.

Some 91% of Americans approve of the USPS—and why shouldn’t they? It is objectively rated one of the best postal systems in the world—and if anything this isn’t even fair, because most of the other top-rated postal services, particularly Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Singapore, have far smaller areas to cover than the US does. If we restrict ourselves to countries of at least 10 million people and territory of at least 100,000 square kilometers, there are only four postal services rated higher than the US: Japan, Germany, France, and Poland. If we restrict to countries of at least 100 million people, only Japan remains.

Thus, attacking the postal service is clearly not a winning proposition if your goal is to advance the interests of your constituents or even gain more votes. But during a pandemic, mail-in voting is likely to be—and well should be—a very large proportion of all votes. Sabotaging the mail system is a highly effective way to make it much harder to vote in general. And that seems to very much be Trump’s intention.

It is a general pattern that when voting gets harder, Republicans become more likely to win. Liberal voters are more likely to be young adults, poor people, or people of color, all of whom generally have a harder time making it to the polls. This may be less true in this election in particular, because against Trump in particular people who are highly educated and live in cities have been far more likely to vote against Trump—and these are groups of people with particularly high voter turnout. Empirical estimates of how a switch to mail-in voting will affect the election results have been highly ambiguous.

Indeed, perhaps this makes the Republican vote suppression campaign even more sinister: Perhaps they have moved beyond simply trying to tilt the scales in elections and are now willing to actively suppress democracy itself. It sounds radical, if not outright crazy, to assert such a thing—but many of the things that Trump and his Republican lackeys have done would have sounded crazy to me just a few years ago. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I honestly don’t know that Trump will concede defeat when he loses the election—he may refuse to accept the election results and try to stay in office via some sort of coup d’etat. Why do I think this could happen? Because he said so himself on national television. Vladimir Putin must be so embarrassed; his protege doesn’t even know how to be subtle about his authoritarianism.

FiveThirtyEight is currently giving Biden a 72% chance of victory, which is about 27% too low for my taste. That isn’t much better than the margin Hillary Clinton had four years ago. We can only hope that Trump attacking the most popular agency in our federal government will tilt those odds a little further.

Bernie Sanders may be our next President

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , ,

Feb 16 JDN 2458896

It’s too early to say who will win the election, of course. In fact, we’re not even entirely sure what the results of the Iowa caucuses were, because there were so many errors that they are talking about doing a recount.


But Bernie Sanders has taken a commanding lead in polls, and forecasts now have him as the clear front-runner. If we’d had range voting, Sanders probably would have won last time. But even with our voting system as terrible as it is, there’s a good chance he’ll actually win this time.

I would honestly prefer Elizabeth Warren; she shares Bernie’s idealism, but tempers it with a deep understanding of our political and economic system. Her policy plans are spectacularly good; she doesn’t just come up with a vague idea, she lays out a detailed roadmap of how it will be accomplished and how it will be paid for. Her plans cover a wide variety of issues, including a lot of things that most people aren’t even aware of yet nevertheless affect millions of people. Who else is talking about universal child care programs, the corruption in our trade negotiation system, antitrust action against tech monopolies, or reducing corporate influence in the military? Who else includes in their plan for corporate taxes detailed reforms to the accounting system? And who else has a plan for forgiving student debt that actually calculates the effective marginal tax rate induced by the phase-out? Elizabeth Warren is the economist’s candidate: Unlike almost everyone else in politics, she actually knows what she’s doing.

Bernie Sanders, by comparison, has an awful lot of laudable goals, but is often quite short on the details of how they will be achieved. His healthcare plan, in particular, “Medicare for All”, doesn’t seem to include any kind of cost estimate or revenue support. I’m all for single-payer healthcare, but it’s not going to get done for free. And at least in the past, he has made economic forecasts that are wildly implausible.

But we could certainly do a lot worse than Bernie. His most unrealistic ideas will be tempered by political reality, while his unflinching idealism may just shift our Overton Window in a much-needed leftward direction. He is a man of uncommon principle, and a politician of uncommon honesty—he does not have even one “Pants on Fire” rating on Politifact.

To say that he would obviously be better than Trump is a gross understatement: Almost anyone would obviously be better than Trump, and definitely any of the leading Democratic candidates would be.

In fact, Warren is the only candidate I unambiguously prefer to Sanders. Biden is too conservative, too willing to compromise with an uncompromising right wing. As historic as it would be to have an openly gay President, I’m not sure Buttigieg is the one I’d want. (On the other hand, the first gay President is almost certainly going to have to be extremely privileged and milquetoast to break through that glass ceiling—so maybe it’s Buttigieg or nothing.) Yang has some interesting ideas (like his basic income proposal), but no serious chance of winning. Bloomberg would be a good Libertarian Party candidate, but he’s no Democrat. The rest have fallen so far in the polls they aren’t worth talking about anymore.

Like I said, it’s really too early to say. Maybe Biden will make a comeback. Maybe Warren will win after all. But it does mean one thing: The left wing in America has been energized. If one good thing has come of Trump, perhaps it is that: We are no longer complacent, and we are now willing to stand up and demand what we really want. The success of Sanders so far proves that.

Reflections on Past and Future

pnrj current events, personal, science and academia , , , , , , ,

Jan 19 JDN 2458868

This post goes live on my birthday. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to celebrate much, as I’ll be in the process of moving. We moved just a few months ago, and now we’re moving again, because this apartment turned out to be full of mold that keeps triggering my migraines. Our request for a new apartment was granted, but the university housing system gives very little time to deal with such things: They told us on Tuesday that we needed to commit by Wednesday, and then they set our move-in date for that Saturday.

Still, a birthday seems like a good time to reflect on how my life is going, and where I want it to go next. As for how old I am? This is the probably the penultimate power of two I’ll reach.

The biggest change in my life over the previous year was my engagement. Our wedding will be this October. (We have the venue locked in; invitations are currently in the works.) This was by no means unanticipated; really, folks had been wondering when we’d finally get around to it. Yet it still feels strange, a leap headlong into adulthood for someone of a generation that has been saddled with a perpetual adolescence. The articles on “Millennials” talking about us like we’re teenagers still continue, despite the fact that there are now Millenials with college-aged children. Thanks to immigration and mortality, we now outnumber Boomers. Based on how each group voted in 2016, this bodes well for the 2020 election. (Then again, a lot of young people stay home on Election Day.)

I don’t doubt that graduate school has contributed to this feeling of adolescence: If we count each additional year of schooling as a grade, I would now be in the 22nd grade. Yet from others my age, even those who didn’t go to grad school, I’ve heard similar experiences about getting married, buying homes, or—especially—having children of their own: Society doesn’t treat us like adults, so we feel strange acting like adults. 30 is the new 23.

Perhaps as life expectancy continues to increase and educational attainment climbs ever higher, future generations will continue to experience this feeling ever longer, until we’re like elves in a Tolkienesque fantasy setting, living to 1000 but not considered a proper adult until we hit 100. I wonder if people will still get labeled by generation when there are 40 generations living simultaneously, or if we’ll find some other category system to stereotype by.

Another major event in my life this year was the loss of our cat Vincent. He was quite old by feline standards, and had been sick for a long time; so his demise was not entirely unexpected. Still, it’s never easy to lose a loved one, even if they are covered in fur and small enough to fit under an airplane seat.

Most of the rest of my life has remained largely unchanged: Still in grad school, still living in the same city, still anxious about my uncertain career prospects. Trump is still President, and still somehow managing to outdo his own high standards of unreasonableness. I do feel some sense of progress now, some glimpses of the light at the end of the tunnel. I can vaguely envision finishing my dissertation some time this year, and I’m hoping that in a couple years I’ll have settled into a job that actually pays well enough to start paying down my student loans, and we’ll have a good President (or at least Biden).

I’ve reached the point where people ask me what I am going to do next with my life. I want to give an answer, but the problem is, this is almost entirely out of my control. I’ll go wherever I end up getting job offers. Based on the experience of past cohorts, most people seem to apply to about 200 positions, interview for about 20, and get offers from about 2. So asking me where I’ll work in five years is like asking me what number I’m going to roll on a 100-sided die. I could probably tell you what order I would prioritize offers in, more or less; but even that would depend a great deal on the details. There are difficult tradeoffs to be made: Take a private sector offer with higher pay, or stay in academia for more autonomy and security? Accept a postdoc or adjunct position at a prestigious university, or go for an assistant professorship at a lower-ranked college?

I guess I can say that I do still plan to stay in academia, though I’m less certain of that than I once was; I will definitely cast a wider net. I suppose the job market isn’t like that for most people? I imagine most people at least know what city they’ll be living in. (I’m not even positive what country—opportunities for behavioral economics actually seem to be generally better in Europe and Australia than they are in the US.)

But perhaps most people simply aren’t as cognizant of how random and contingent their own career paths truly were. The average number of job changes per career is 12. You may want to think that you chose where you ended up, but for the most part you landed where the wind blew you. This can seem tragic in a way, but it is also a call for compassion: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Really, all I can do now is hang on and try to enjoy the ride.

If we had range voting, who would win this election?

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July 16, JDN 2457586

The nomination of Donald Trump is truly a terrible outcome, and may be unprecedented in American history. One theory of its causation, taken by many policy elites (reviewed here by the Brookings Institution), is that this is a sign of “too much democracy”, a sentiment such elites often turn to, as The Economist did in the wake of the Great Recession. Even Salon has published such a theory. Yet as Michael Lind of the New York Times recognized, the problem is clearly not too much democracy but too little. “Too much democracy” is not an outright incoherent notion—it is something that I think in principle could exist—but I have never encountered it. Every time someone claims a system is too democratic, I have found that deeper digging shows that what they really mean is that it doesn’t privilege their interests enough.

Part of the problem, I think, is that even democracy as we know it in the real world is really not all that democratic, especially not in the United States, where it is totally dominated by a plurality vote system that forces us to choose between two parties. Most of the real decision-making happens in Senate committees, and when votes are important they are really most important in primaries. To be clear, I’m not saying that votes don’t count in the US or you shouldn’t vote; they do count, and you should vote. But anyone saying this system is “too democratic” clearly has no idea just how much more democratic it could be.

Indeed, there is one simple change that would both greatly expand democracy, weaken the two-party system, and undermine Trump in one fell swoop, and it is called range voting. I’ve sung the praises of range voting many times before, but some anvils need to be dropped; I guess it’s just this thing I have when a system is mathematically proven superior.

Today I’d like to run a little thought experiment: What would happen if we had used range voting this election? I’m going to use actual poll data, rather than making up hypotheticals like The New York Times did when they tried to make this same argument using Condorcet voting. (Condorcet voting is basically range voting lite, for people who don’t believe in cardinal utility.)

Of course, no actual range voting has been conducted, so I have to extrapolate. So here’s my simple, but I think reasonably reliable, methodology: I’m going to use aggregated favorability ratings from Real Clear Politics (except for Donald Trump, whom Real Clear Politics didn’t include for some reason; for him I’m using Washington Post poll numbers, which are comparable for Clinton). Sadly I couldn’t find good figures on favorability ratings for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, though I’d very much like to; so sadly I had to exclude them. Had I included them, it’s quite possible one of them could have won, which would make my point even more strongly.

I score the ratings as follows: Every “unfavorable” rating counts as a 0. Every “favorable” rating counts as a 1. Other ratings will be ignored, and I’ll add 10% “unfavorable” ratings to every candidate as a “soft quorum” (here’s an explanation of why we want to do this). Technically this is really approval voting, which is a special case of range voting where you can only vote 0 or 1.

All right, here goes.

Candidate Favorable Unfavorable Overall score
Bernie Sanders 48.4% 37.9% 50.5%
Joe Biden 47.4% 36.6% 50.4%
Elizabeth Warren 36.0% 32.0% 46.2%
Ben Carson 37.8% 42.0% 42.1%
Marco Rubio 36.3% 40.3% 41.9%
Hillary Clinton 39.6% 55.3% 37.7%
Scott Walker 23.5% 29.3% 37.4%
Chris Christie 29.8% 44.5% 35.3%
Mike Huckabee 27.0% 40.7% 34.7%
Rand Paul 25.7% 41.0% 33.5%
Jeb Bush 30.8% 52.4% 33.0%
Mike O’Malley 17.5% 27.0% 32.1%
Bobby Jindal 18.7% 30.3% 31.7%
Rick Santorum 24.0% 42.0% 31.6%
Rick Perry 21.0% 39.3% 29.9%
Jim Webb 10.3% 15.0% 29.2%
Donald Trump 29.0% 70.0% 26.6%

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren aren’t actually running, but it would be great if they did (and of course people like them, what’s not to like?). Ben Carson does surprisingly well, which I confess is baffling; he’s a nice enough guy, I guess, but he’s also crazypants. Hopefully if he’d campaigned longer, his approval ratings would have fallen as people heard him talk, much like Sarah Palin and for the same reasons—but note that even if this didn’t happen, he still wouldn’t have won. Marco Rubio was always the least-scary Republican option, so it’s nice to see him come up next. And then of course we have Hillary Clinton, who will actually be our next President. (6th place ain’t so bad?)

But look, there, who is that up at the top? Why, it’s Bernie Sanders.

Let me be clear about this: Using our current poll numbers—I’m not assuming that people become more aware of him, or more favorable to him, I’m just using the actual figures we have from polls of the general American population right now—if we had approval voting, and probably if we had more expressive range voting, Bernie Sanders would win the election.

Moreover, where is Donald Trump? The very bottom. He is literally the most hated candidate, and couldn’t even beat Jim Webb or Rick Perry under approval voting.

Trump didn’t win the hearts and minds of the American people, he knew how to work the system. He knew how to rally the far-right base of the Republican Party in order to secure the nomination, and he knew that the Republican leadership would fall in line and continue their 25-year-long assault on Hillary Clinton’s character once he had.

This disaster was created by our plurality voting system. If we’d had a more democratic voting system, Bernie Sanders would be narrowly beating Joe Biden. But instead Hillary Clinton is narrowly beating Donald Trump.

Trump is not the product of too much democracy, but too little.