Showing posts with label crisisT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crisisT. Show all posts

Sunday, October 02, 2016

Why Trump? Blame the Vermont Teddy Bear company.

Why Trump rather than, say, Rubio?

To a first approximation, the globalization and technology driven collapse of the white non-college male, channeled by AM talk radio.

AM Talk radio which exists so advertisers can sell things to its audience. 

So who advertises for, say, Sean Hannity?

Which advertisers do business with Sean Hannity? | Reference.com

Advertisers who do business with Sean Hannity include the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, Mozy, Tax Defense Partners, Legal Zoom and the Vermont Teddy Bear Company.

There you go. It’s all the fault of the Vermont Teddy Bear Company.

(Seriously, who really funds Sean Hannity?)

Friday, September 30, 2016

How does the world look to Trump's core supporters?

Set aside the neo-Klan-Nazi minority. Set aside the truly despicable - Coulter, Hannity, Falwell and the like. Forget the hell-spawn who think only of their personal wealth.

Think about the white non-college male voter:

… Trump’s fortunes rest on his core supporters, white men who lack a four-year college degree … He leads Clinton among them by 76-17 percent, an enormous 59-point advantage. That’s widened from 40 points early this month; it’s a group Mitt Romney won by 31 points -- half Trump’s current margin -- in 2012.

Whatever happens with this election, that 60% gap is a staggering fact.

How does the world look like to these non-college white men of the 4th quintile?

I have limited exposure to this cohort. A few Facebook friends — but they don’t post much about Trump. A family member with a cognitive disability claims to like Trump. That’s about it.

I need a journalist-anthropologist to falsify my story. I can’t help imagining a story though. It goes like this …

  • I have no hope of a secure economic future with savings, stable employment, good healthcare benefits and a pension.
  • I have limited marriage opportunities. I really miss the patriarchy. I feel that in my bones.
  • I watch Fox. I can understand it. Fox approves of me. Nobody else cares what happens to me.
  • I don’t understand economics, but I’ve lived through the past ten years. I’ve heard a lot of broken promises. Maybe nobody understands economics. Maybe the people who understand economics are lying to me. I definitely don’t understand borrowing from a wealthier future.
  • I don’t like academics.
  • I don’t care about the damned polar bears. I like warm weather. I don’t like bugs. I like motors and pavement. I don’t care about CO emissions.
  • I watch reality cop shows, where every criminal is a black man. I directly encounter crime and it’s always black men. I am afraid of black men. [1]
  • I don’t have a lot to lose.

None of this is going to go away. If we want to keep civilization going we need to give this cohort hope.

See also:

- fn -

[1] As a pedestrian and cyclist I am far more likely to be injured or killed by a white woman on a phone than a black man. FWIW.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Trumpism: a transition function to the world of mass disability.

We know the shape of the socioeconomic future for the bottom 40% in the post globalization post AI  mass disability world.

But how do we get there? How does a culture transition from memes of independence and southern Christian-capitalist marketarianism to a world where government deeply biases the economy towards low-education employment?

There needs to be a transition function. A transform that is applied to a culture. With the anthropology perspective I’ve long sought Arlie Hochschild makes the case that Trump is, among other things, a transition function that erases Tea Party Marketarianism and embraces the heresy of government support (albeit for the “deserving”).

In a complex adaptive system we get the transition function we need rather than the one we want. No guarantee we survive it though.

See also:

Sunday, July 31, 2016

In defense of Donald Trump.

Trump is more racist and sexist than most 70+ yo white men. He is amoral and a con man. He may be a sociopath and probably has a narcissistic personality disorder. He is living proof that we need drug and dementia testing for presidential nominees. He is dim. Even by the standards of presidential contenders he is a nasty person.

Trump is the anti-Obama. Irrational, impulsive, thoughtless, intemperate … it’s a long list.

Trump makes paranoid H. Ross Perot look good. He exceeds the sum of the worst of GWB and Richard Nixon. I cannot think of a post WW II major party candidate this bad.

He may be worse that Cruz.

Yeah, America’s two leading contenders for the GOP nomination in 2016 were both awful. Two of the worst options in the past 100 years. That means something. It means despite our immense wealth and overall prosperity, despite our social and environmental progress, America is in trouble. Trump isn’t America’s festering abscess, he’s the fever. It’s not enough to treat the fever. We need to drain the abscess.

So where is the abscess? Why did the GOP drift further and further from reality? How did a political party that once supported science become anti-evolution and, most insanely, pro CO2 production?

I think Noah Smith has a part of the answer. The GOP had deep internal divisions and over the past 15 years the glue gave way.  The Party is broken, it has to reform.

Maybe that’s the whole story. I don’t think it is though. I think the abscess is the bottom 40% of white America. The great unwanted. The Left Behind. The new disabled. A cohort that has seen 40 years of shrinking opportunity. The economy has moved on; we don’t have vast office buildings full of thousands of people who move paper from cabinet A to cabinet B.

The odds are we’ll fix the Trump fever. Hell, even the Koch brothers favor Clinton. Obama is in the game and on top of his form. Women are starting to realize sexism is no more dead than racism.

But the abscess will still be there.

Sometimes fever is a friend. It tells you something bad is happening.

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Minnesota explained: Rubio, Sanders and the President Gordon agenda.

My home state of Minnesota, most annoyingly, uses caucuses. I attend the Dem variety in the bluest of neighborhoods. They are crowded, disorganized and well meaning. When I ride my bike to caucus cars slam to a stop as though I were a family of 5 on foot. Which is wrong and dangerous, but I appreciate the sentiment.

The Dem caucus is not representative of the Dem voter. You have to be very persistent to fight through traffic and crowds to hit the narrow window for voting. Only the most committed can get there. The caucus system is a bad, bad idea. I think the same is true of the GOP caucuses here.

So the caucus results last night were not too surprising.

The GOP, as usual, went for the extreme right candidates. This year there were three of ‘em - Trump, Rubio and Cruz. Since we have one of the strongest economies in the US, with unemployment under 5% for years, Trump didn’t have his usual vote-of-despair left-behind advantage. So the three extremes ended up with fairly similar numbers, but the anti-Trump movement focused on Rubio and he won.

My team went, as usual, for the more left candidate. Sanders won by 20%, so he might even have won a primary. I voted for HRC, but the MN DFL is effectively to the left of me — which is saying a lot.

I’m backing HRC but, in truth, we need to go down some variation of the Sanders road over the next two decades. We’re going to have to bias the post-AI globalized economy to generate jobs for the non-college — even at the cost of economic efficiency. We have to build more social supports for people who aren’t working, with some kind of rethinking of what we do for disabled workers. We may end up with a non-binary definition of disability, or even some kind of guaranteed income.

We will end up taxing wealth in one form or another and we’ll do a  lot more government redistribution. We should also, and this is not so much Sanders, execute on the old Gore “reinventing government” mission, refactoring regulatory systems. We need to break the accounting, tax and regulatory frameworks the mega-corporations (“neo-Chaebol is a term I like) have built; the foundations of a great stagnation ecosystem wherein new companies are built only for acquisition.

We need to build supports that enable entrepreneurial types to pick business designs off a shelf and implement them. We need to strip benefits from employment completely, and both fix and finish the mission the ACA started — while breaking the corporatization of that great compromise.

Phew. It’s a big mission, but it is doable. We have to do it, or we get President Trump. Or worse. Sooner or later. 

So I don’t feel that bad that Sanders won Minnesota. It’s a good sign for the future. I don’t want him to go up against the GOP though. By the time their attack machine is done with him he’ll be hiding in a stone shelter in the wilderness. HRC’s great strength is she’s lived that machine for decades. Nobody short of Obama can equal that. (And, of course, I would love him to keep his job. Alas, even if our constitution allowed that I think he’s ready for a change.)

See also:

Monday, November 02, 2015

Trump explained: Non-college white Americans now have higher middle-aged death rates than black Americans

From today’s NYT Health section:

Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans. Gina Kolata Nov 2, 2015

… middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling…

… two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton… and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven … by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids…

… the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans…

… The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

The article falls apart a bit here. What we want to know is how the absolute death rate for non-college middle-aged white Americans in 2013 and in 1999.  We want to know how the Long Stagnation has changed vulnerable Americans, but Kolata’s article mixes all white Americans with the no-college cohort.

Fortunately the PNAS article PDF is freely available, but unfortunately it explains Kolata’s problem — the data we want seems to be buried in an unlabeled parenthesis in Table 1. From that I think I can reconstruct the key information: [1]. 

YearWhite no collegeBlack (all)White some collegeWhite BA+White All
1999 601 797 291 235 381
2013 736 582 288 178 415

For the no-college White American 1999 was a pretty good year; probably the best ever. That was the era of NASCAR America and the candidacy of GWB, champion of the “regular” white guy. Employment demand was high and wages were rising. Yes, as a white guy without any college you had a shorter lifespan than the minority of white (Americans) with a college degree, but at least black Americans were even worse off. It’s always comforting to have someone to look down on.

After 16 years of the Great Stagnation though, things are different. Suicide and substance abuse have pushed no-college white mortality to the level of 1999 black Americans, yet during the same period black American middle-aged mortality has fallen substantially. White no-college Americans are now at the bottom of the heap [1].

This is why we have the inchoate white rage that thunders through the GOP. This is why we have Donald Trump.

A large and culturally powerful part of America is in crisis. A cohort with lots of guns and a history of violence. Maybe we should pay attention. Trump is a signal.

- fn - 

[1] There was no breakdown of black death rates by education; a 2012 census report said 29% of whites and 18% of blacks had a BA or higher. Since 80%+ of black Americans have no BA it’s likely no-college whites now have higher middle-aged mortality than no-college blacks.

See also

Update 11/4/2015

There’s been considerable coverage of this story, but it’s been disappointing. Both DeLong and Krugman missed the college vs. no-college white middle-age cohort, and I think that’s the important story. There’s also been some discussion of anger as a defining trait of the GOP base, but no connection to the extreme distress of their core voter.

I’ve seen speculation that this is all about narcotic overuse. I find that very hard to believe, but I admit the use of narcotics for pain relief in America has exceeded my expectations. I remember in the 90s when “pain is the new vital sign” and family docs were berated for inadequate use of narcotics. I guess my peers responded well to that feedback.

It has occurred to me that there’s a potential bias we’re missing. Over the past 40 years colleges have gone from predominantly male to predominantly female. The big story here is increasing mortality in the no-college white cohort. But if there’s been a gender shift in that cohort, say from 55% female in 1999 to 45% female in 2013, that will make the no-college numbers even more dramatic. Since mortality has increased even when college grads are included this isn’t the entire story, but it will make the no-college effect more dramatic.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Capitalism, fraud and maximizing wantability

WaPo has a delightfully meta-subversive headline for an article about the failings of 21st century capitalism: This Kardashian headline shows why two Nobel winners say the economy is broken. Beneath the headline is a photograph of 3 reasonably attractive women and the hit enhancing text “Kourtney, Kim and Khloe — arrive at the Maxim Hot 100 party”.

Jeff Guo’s article proceeds to an interview with Akerloff and Shiller, reasonably well regarded academic economists, about their book Phishing for Phools. Unfortunately Guo does get around to the Kardashians, which blunts the beauty of the introduction. Still, it is a lovely bit of meta; boosting page hits for an article about how easily humans are manipulated in the interests of feeding their wants.

Shockingly, it seems capitalism does not optimize our better selves.

I’ll let that sink in a bit.

Sure, you think it’s obvious that capitalism is a system for finding local minima traps in a 3 dimensional field where demand is gravity and information technology enables complexity enables deception. If pressed to respond further you might say something like “tobacco”.

It’s not obvious to Americans though. Our culture equates wealth with virtue, and the “invisible hand” of capitalism with the “invisible hand” of a Calvinistic God. It’s an authoritian-dominance attractor in culture-space, and we’re not the only people to get stuck in it.

So this is an article worth scanning, if only as a marker for the fading glamor of the 1990s capitalist (emphases mine) …

… Economics predicts that wherever there is a profit, someone will be there to make it. To that, Akerlof and Shiller propose a corollary: Wherever there is an opportunity to profit off people’s weaknesses, someone will exploit it…

… The basic idea of this book is that there is a “phishing” equilibrium, in which if there’s a profit to be made by taking advantage of your weakness, then that will be there.

… The standard view of markets (which is subject to problems of income distribution and externalities) is that markets will deliver the best possible outcome.

… that’s what the standard graduate student is taught. It’s what you’re told to believe, and what I think most economists do believe. As long as the markets are competitive, and there are no problems of income distribution and there are no externalities, it’s going to lead to the best possible world…

… that then has acquired a moral tone, which is that whatever happens in the market is okay. And that translates, in turn, into people arguing and thinking that it’s okay to be selfish. That if I earn this income, then I in some sense deserve it.

So this view that whatever markets do is good becomes this idea that whatever markets do is right…

… Kirman tracing the origins of this idea back to the Enlightenment. He says, “laissez faire made a lot of sense against the background of monarchy and controlling church.” So this idea of freeing the markets really came through at a time when businesses were being particularly oppressed….

… Irving Fisher was a Yale economist who in 1918 wrote a book saying the free market system is maximizing something but it’s not what Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, called utility. So he named it wantability.

I did a Google N-grams search [how often a word appears in books] for wantability. The term enjoyed some popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, then exponentially decayed. After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution the term was gone….

… the children’s candy bars were put at children’s eye level …You have professionals who are designing everything. They are designing it for wantability.

Reading this a part of me thinks I should get a Nobel just for my blog rants. Economists don’t think market solutions have local minima traps? It’s novel to think markets produce things that are bad for us? Stockholm, it’s not that hard to find my real identity. I would’t mind the money. You can give me another prize for canopy economics and eco-econ.

So this isn’t a book I’m likely to buy. It’s an interesting marker, however, of our changing attitudes towards market capitalism and for the intellectual history of our judgments from Adam Smith to Donald Trump. Twenty years of lousy economic growth (great for elite, awful for non-college) will do that. I’ll be looking for more signs of thoughtfulness …

See also

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.

I’m a liberal of Humean descent, and I’m a fan of Donald Trump.

No, not because Trump is humiliating the GOP, though he is. Of course I enjoy seeing the GOP suffer for its (many) sins, and it would be very good for the world if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential election, but Trump won’t cause any lasting political damage. Unless he runs as a third party candidate he’ll have no real impact on the elections.

I’m a fan because Trump appears to be channeling the most important cohort in the modern world — people who are not going to complete the advanced academic track we call college. Canada has the world’s highest “college” graduation rate at 55.8%, but that number is heavily biased by programs that can resemble the senior year of American High School (in Quebec, CEGEP, like mine). If we adjust for that bias, and recognizing that nobody does better than Canada, it’s plausible, even likely, that no more than half of the population of the industrialized world is going to complete the minimum requirements for the “knowledge work” and “creative work” that dominates the modern economy.

Perhaps not coincidentally about 40-50% population of Canadians have an IQ under 100. Most of this group will struggle to complete an academic program even given the strongest work ethic, personal discipline, and external support. This number is not going to change short of widespread genetic engineering...

Screen Shot 2015 08 07 at 8 16 45 PM

This cohort, about 40% of the human race, has experienced at least 40 years of declining income and shrinking employment opportunities. We no longer employ millions of clerks to file papers, or harvest crops, or dig ditches, or fill gas tanks or even assemble cars. That work has gone, some to other countries but most to automation. Those jobs aren’t coming back.

The future for about half of all Americans, and all humans, looks grim. When Trump talks to his white audience about immigrants taking jobs and betrayal by the elite he is starting a conversation we need to have. 

It doesn’t matter that Trump is a buffoon, or that restricting immigration won’t make any difference. It matters that the conversation is starting. After all, how far do you think anyone would get telling 40% of America that there is no place for them in current order because they’re not “smart” enough?

Yeah, not very far at all.

This is how democracy deals with hard conversations. It begins with yelling and ranting and blowhards. Eventually the conversation mutates. Painful thoughts become less painful. Facts are slowly accepted. Solutions begin to emerge.

Donald Trump is good for democracy, good for America, and good for the world.

See also

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

I said Romney could never win the GOP primary ...

Five years Romney was running for President. Back then I wrote:

Gordon's Notes: Romney: not possible

In order to win the GOP primaries Mitt Romney has to convince Christian conservatives that he's reversed many of his longstanding opinions. He also, incidentally, has to publicly renounce his religion and be born again as a Baptist ....

I wrote my post around Kenneth Woodward's 2007 NYT OpEd.  Woodward walked through the theological gulf between Christian fundamentalisms and Mormonism -- and he didn't even touch on the more exotic portions of traditional Mormon belief. I didn't believe a former Mormon bishop could win the GOP primary. Perhaps he could win the presidential election -- but not the GOP primary.

It took five years, but it seems I was not exactly right.

I'd like to know how he did it, and how evangelicals crossed that divide. In the meantime, I think some credit goes to GOP voters. Maybe quite a bit of credit -- depending on what they were thinking.

So how exceptional is Romney's religion? Is Mormonism technically Christian? I tried two sources, both were a bit evasive ...

Encyclopedia of Religion and Social Science

... In its Christian primitivism and antinomianism, it was akin to many other "restorationist" movements, such as the Campbellites, which emerged at about the same time in the "burned over district" ...

... in the 1840s, Joseph Smith and his successor prophets began to promulgate a series of new revelations and doctrines that moved Mormonism in a sharply heterodox direction relative to the Protestant heritage from which it had emerged. Since then, mainstream Protestantism, especially the more evangelical and fundamentalist varieties, has generally been unwilling to consider Mormons as part of the Christian family, despite the continuing Mormon claims to being the one, true, authentic church of Jesus Christ, restored to usher in a new dispensation of the fullness of the Gospel.... 

and

Mormon (religion) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Mormon beliefs are in some ways similar to those of orthodox Christian churches but also diverge markedly...

.. Mormons regard Christian churches as apostate for lacking revelation and an authoritative priesthood, although they are thought to be positive institutions in other respects. Smith, they believe, came to restore the institutions of the early Christian church. Although calling people to repent, Smith’s creed reflected contemporary American optimism in its emphasis on humanity’s inherent goodness and limitless potential for progress.

Perhaps it's a bit of a sensitive question. I'd go with technically Christian-related but not Protestant; probably closer to Christianity than Unitarianism or Judaism. Obviously there's a bit of irony if the Obama-is-a-muslim slice of the GOP ends up electing an arguably non-Christian President. (Maybe that's why Romney encourages Trump; it keeps the Birther whackos busy. Left alone they might go in another direction.)

If Romney does win he'll be expanding the religious range of the American presidency ...

Religious affiliations of Presidents of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unitarian

  • John Adams
  • John Quincy Adams
  • Millard Fillmore
  • William Howard Taft

No denominational affiliation

  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Andrew Johnson
  • Ulysses Grant
  • Rutherford Hayes
  • Barack Obama (previously United Church of Christ)

However, since the list includes four Unitarians (we go there - they evidently take agnostics) the historical record already stretches a good bit beyond "mainstream" Christianity. So President Romney would be unusual, but, theologically speaking, not entirely unprecedented.