1. I was right about polling being worthless
2. At least Biden was spared humiliation
3. Americans chose oligarchy willingly.
4. Our feeble democracy wasn’t going to survive AGI (if we get it)
5. I think the inability of a large number of men and women to meet the always increasing IQ/EQ requirements needed for a middle-class life is the root cause. #massDisability
Now we enter the chaos times.
I last wrote about "mass disability" and the Left Behind in a 2021 post. The concept has sometimes seemed on the edge of going mainstream but it's never quite made it. Maybe we're getting closer; a recent Michael Tsai post (No App, No entry) reminded me of my Mastodon thread from a few weeks ago:
What is the crazy that drives Trumpism and the many global equivalents?
It is that the minimal IQ to function well in the modern world is now about 120 and that eliminates most people.This is both the most important fact of our time and the least palatable. It is the thing that cannot be said and it will be ruin of us if we don't say it ...I've been saying this for years. Today I was reminded of it while doing some travel booking.
During the bookings I encountered:1. A web site that didn't work with my older version of Safari (I knew what was wrong and switched to Chrome.
2. A Delta web site bug (I recognized it as a bug and knew what to do).
3. Place that was out of rental cards but I new Expedia would have some contracts that would let me find one.
4. Travel web sites that all needed new credentials...
... These are all routine parts of modern life including maintaining flaky computer systems (let me tell you ...) and phones ...It was not like this even 35 y ago. Travel agents handled travel complexity. There were no smartphones. Computers were very limited. There was no internet for most. By necessity everyday life was much simpler. Most people could cope with it.Now most cannot cope.This is the most important feature of our time. And nobody can talk about it.
I remember some good discussions on this thread but I can't find any of them now. Perhaps by design Mastodon has a limited memory. (My home instance has no search, so I had to download my archive and search it to find the date of the post. Then I could slowly navigate to it.)
I expanded on the theme a bit later:
Hotel laundry year 2000
1. Insert quarters to buy detergent, operate washer and dryer.
IQ requirement: 65 (my son could do this after a demonstration)
Hotel laundry year 2023
1. Scan QR code to download app whose profit comes from unspent funds.
2. Install app, create account with Apple ID
3. Figure out cryptic UX so can deposit funds (several odd unintuitive steps)
3. Deposit funds, paying just enough to cover this sesh. Pat the 25 cent low transaction penalty...
4. Spot the scam behind app and avoid it (eg find at minimum)
5. Diagnose why after paying money and confirming machine it’s still not working
6. Authorize specific transaction
7. Start laundry.
(My son could not do this)
8. When complete delete app.
IQ requirement: minimum 110, higher to spot the scam.
This is why America is burning.
People are scared and angry and feeling left behind -- and they can't come out and say they are unable to manage their tech. Because that's the ultimate shame.
See also:
This is the last in a short series of post that began on Nov 11, 2020, shortly after Biden won the presidency for the first time. Back then it looked like McConnell would hold the Senate.
In the decades since that post Trump became more insane than usual, a deranged mob of Trump cultists invaded the Capitol building, the Dems took the Senate, and Biden won the presidency for the third or fiftieth time depending how one counts. Truly, I need to finish this series while we still have electricity.
In the first post I wrote about how I think about the Trump voter (and America). I divided the Trump voter up into the religious fundamentalist (sometimes Trump cultist), the despicables (ex: Hawley, Cruz, the WSJ reader), and the Left Behind. The NYT profiled a Left Behind on 11/7/2020 (emphases mine):
... Nick [a] 26-year-old hair stylist ... spent the past few months campaigning for President Trump, taking special satisfaction in offending Biden supporters...
... He did not go to college and prides himself on his independent thinking; he puts himself in the category of street smart, not book smart...
... He had never bothered to register to vote until 2016, when he first heard Mr. Trump debate on television, and saw a political figure who reminded him of himself....
... When Fox News began reporting polls showing Mr. Biden in the lead, Ms. Rocco tried tuning into One America News, the right-wing cable network, which predicted a convincing victory for the president. The Roccos got news from a variety of sources — TikTok, QAnon, the pro-Trump comedian Terrence K. Williams, the YouTube mystic Clif High. “I’m a conspiracy theorist, I guess, if you want to call it that,” Ms. Rocco said...
... he reminded himself what kept him out there all these months: People had disrespected him. The Facebook group manager who had kicked him off. The neighbor who took his yard sign. Teachers who responded to his daughter’s enthusiasm about Mr. Trump with awkward silence.
“People who don’t like Trump, I honestly think they are very soft people,” he said. “That is why the world is becoming so sensitive today. Back in the day, you could throw a snowball at someone at school and everything was fine. Nowadays, a letter gets sent home: Your child is being mean.”
... His older brother, who he describes as the brainy one, took the other path, winning a scholarship to college. (He is the Biden voter.) But Mr. Rocco’s aspirations were staunchly blue-collar; he chose trade school and went to work at 17...
It's unlikely Nick would have done well at a four year college or succeeded as a knowledge worker. He could marry well, or find an inheritance, or show unusual entrepreneurial talent -- but more likely he's going to be the disrespected Left Behind. In today's America if you aren't a knowledge worker you're probably not going to make over $30/hr, and you're not going to make it into the middle class as an individual [2]. Even in countries with effectively free college this non-knowledge worker cohort is about half the population [2].
America can't survive as a democracy with half its citizens Left Behind. We'll have a January 6 every year -- only the mobs will be larger and have better weapons. Of all the threats we face, this is our greatest near term challenge. Even CO2 driven climate change is a lesser threat.
Biden needs to work out a solution for the Left Behind problem. The good news is that for this problem survival and politics align. The Left Behind are the core of Trump's base and the modern GOP, it's tricky for the GOP to block policies to bring the Left Behind into the middle class. And, after Jan 6, 2021, there's intense awareness of the danger posed by the Left Behind (though that will be quickly forgotten).
Most importantly the Left Behind are not only white, they are also Black [3], Hispanic, Asian and any slice you like (though more men than women). Helping the Left Behind crosses political boundaries, unlike reducing college debt.
What policies can be put in place so that most non-knowledge workers can earn over $30 an hour? I've written of a few over the years, here's a partial list:
- fn -
[1] One trade worker and one service worker couple can squeak in it as long as they don't have child care expenses and as long as they stay together.
[2] See also my pre-catastrophe 2015 post on why I was a "fan" (heavy irony) of Trump or a recent post/pre catastrophe retrospective. I've been on this topic for a long time though my thoughts have evolved quite a bit over 17 years.
[3] Deep and pervasive structural racism means there's great potential for increasing four year college participation in Black America. I don't think there's anywhere near that potential for White America.
[4] I think subsidized work has significant political, cultural, economic, psychological, and social advantages over direct cash subsidies -- but I'm not adverse to experimenting.
[5] "Blue collar" is a historic synonym for Left Behind.
I'm on the way to writing about what I think should be Biden's #2 priority (#1 is undoing Trump's executive orders). Three previous in this series include:
Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.... 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.... This [never-college] 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.
A few days ago I listed about 25 reasons that Donald Trump should not be President. Any one of them is sufficient by itself.
There are lots of lists like that. Every science and reality oriented publication in America had its own list. All opposed Trump. All recognized that beyond his venality and incompetence democracy was also at stake.
And yet ... he almost won reelection. The GOP held the Senate. Dems lost some House seats. The polls were wrong again (I blame the iPhone for the polls - ask me why).
So what do I think about America in general and the Trump voter in particular?
America is what it has always been. Some decades it does better, some worse, but in general it's a rough neighborhood. We were born from slavery and genocide, we fight lots of wars, we don't have universal healthcare, we tolerate mass shootings of children, we have large majorities that support torture of prisoners, we fund public education with local taxation and college through massive debt, we tolerate systemic anti-Black racism, we allow suppression of Black voting, we reelected GWB despite his torture program and the misdirected conquest of Iraq. We did well with higher education and science for a while, but the GOP attacks on science have done grave damage.
We aren't the worst of nations. China, Russia, North Korea, Germany in the early 21st century ... there are lots worse than us. We aren't the best of nations. Canada, the Nordics, South Korea, most of Europe, Japan are all better. Among post-industrial nations we are probably somewhere in the bottom third, but I could maybe argue for being average. Which makes sense -- we are made of humans and we're big and diverse enough to have a representative sample. Our Presidential system and electoral college and our history drive us down a notch or two.
That's America. What about the Trump voter?
I divide the Trump voters into slices. The biggest and most important are the "White* Left Behind". They are a diverse group, but in general they do not have the cognitive traits to be a "knowledge worker". They did not attend college and college would have been a poor use of their time and money. They don't read newspapers, they don't reason out their vote, they vote based on tribe and emotion. They are more or less anti-Black racist but they don't think they are being unfair. They are desperate to work but there are few good jobs for them. Living in an increasingly high tech and complex world they are every day reminded that they can't keep up. They live on the edge.
Trump's genius was exploiting the WLB while showing them that they have real political power. I don't blame the WLB for voting Trump. They are as much victim as they are aggressor.
The religious fundamentalist is another slice. A complicated slice. For some religion is a shallow facade they may assume or discard as needed. Others have a deep conviction that to me shades into delusion -- but I respect delusion. The universe is a vast and terrible place dominated by violence and entropy -- we all need some delusion. If you believe that every terminated ovum is a murder, and you know Trump will suppress abortion, then that outweighs all his other crimes. You might even decide to worship him.
I don't much blame the religious fundamentalist for voting Trump. They may be rationally choosing based on their fixed belief.
That leaves those who are not dominated by religious belief and who won enough of the cognitive lottery to be able to read newspapers, to remember what happened weeks or months or even years ago, and to make an informed decision. They may feel that democracy is hopeless, that authoritarian rule is inevitable, and they want to be on the side of the winner. They may care only about their wealth and privilege and feel Trump will best defend them. They may be fully racist -- generally anti-Black racist rather than pan-racist. (Anti-Black racism is far from a White-only thing.) They may enjoy living in an authoritarian society where they are commanded by superiors and able to command the inferior.
They are the elite Trump voter. I blame them. They have chosen a wrong path. They can redeem themselves in future, but for now I cannot be their friend.
* As of 2020 American "White" may include Latino/Hispanic. That boundary has long been fluid.
I believe this is true — though I’d be more confident if one of my favorite economists thought this was plausible (emphases mine):
If The Model Is Broken, Fix It | Gwynne Dyer
… The political model of Western-style democracy, which grew up alongside and then within a capitalist economic model, is now broken. Exhibit Number One is Donald Trump, but there’s lots of other evidence too.
One-third of French voters backed Marine Le Pen, a cleaned-up, user-friendly neo-fascist, in last year’s presidential election. In last September’s German election, one-eighth of the electorate voted for Alternative for Germany, a party whose more extreme wing is neo-Nazi – but it is now leads the opposition in the Bundestag, the German parliament.
Last month in Italy, the two biggest parties to emerge from the election were both led by populist rabble-rousers, one from the left and one from the right. Not to mention Brexit in Britain. And in every case the themes that dominated the populists’ rhetoric were racism, nationalism, hostility to immigrants – and jobs.
Trump rarely talked about anything else during the presidential election campaign: immigrants are stealing the jobs, free-trading American businessmen are exporting the jobs, the foreigners are eating America’s lunch….
Trump may not know a lot, but he knows One Big Thing. We are living in a new era of mass unemployment, and nobody has noticed. As Trump said the night after he won the New Hampshire primary in February 2016: “Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42.”
It’s not really 42 percent, but it’s not 4.1 percent (the current official US rate) either. According to Nicholas Eberstadt’s ‘Men Without Work’, the real unemployment rate among American men of prime working age (24-55) – including those who don’t get counted because they have given up looking for work – is 17 percent.
Why didn’t we notice? Because the unemployed weren’t protesting in the streets like they did in the Great Depression of the 1930s, although the rate is getting up to Depression era levels. After the Second World War, all the Western democracies built welfare states, mainly so a new generation of radical populist leaders would not come to power the next time there is mass unemployment.
It has worked, in the sense that there is not blood in the streets this time around, but the jobless millions are very angry even if the welfare state means that they are not starving. They do vote, and unless something is done to ease their anger, next time they may vote for somebody who makes Trump look good by comparison.
But if the problem is unemployment, then the answer is not obvious, because the main cause of unemployment in Western countries is not immigration or ‘offshoring’ jobs, as Trump pretends. It is computers.
One-third of American manufacturing jobs have vanished in the past 20 years, and the vast majority of them (85 percent) were destroyed by automation. The algorithms and the robot arms have already killed the Rust Belt, and there is a plausible prediction that almost half of existing American jobs may be automated out of existence in the next 20 years.
What would our politics look like then? Not very democratic, unless we do something to ease the anger of the unemployed. This doesn’t just mean giving them more money – a massive expansion of the welfare state – but also finding way of taking the shame out of unemployment, because it is the humiliation of being seen as a loser that breeds the anger…
I’ve called this ‘mass disability’, because to me it’s a mismatch between the skills the majority of humans have and the skills needed to earn a middle class or better income.
I don’t have any other explanation for why the entire western world is simultaneously in crisis other than what I wrote about in 2010 - Globalization (China) and Information Technology.
See also:
My #1 son is a special needs adult. He’s excited to start at $10/hour job running food around a sports stadium. It’s work he can do — he’s got a great sense of direction and he is reasonably fit.
The job engagement process is run by an archaic corporate web site that looks like it was built for IE 3. The site claims to support Safari but warns against Chrome. It is not useable on a smartphone.
The HR process requires managing user credentials, navigating a complex 1990s style user interface, and working around errors made by the HR staff — who probably also struggle with the software. He would not have the proverbial snowball’s chance without my ability to assume his digital identity.
Sure, #1 is below the 5th percentile on standard cognition tests — but this would have been a challenge to the 15th percentile back in the 90s. In the modern era, where most non-college young people are primarily familiar with smartphones, this is a challenge to the 30th percentile.
Which means the people might want to do this job are being shut out by the HR software created to support the job. Which probably has something to do with this.
The world is broken.
#massdisability
Once upon a time tens of thousands of New Yorkers moved paper from one file cabinet to another. Once upon a time there were jobs for strong bodies. Once upon a time you could be blue collar and middle class.
Once upon a time anyone could be a warrior …
Special Operations Troops Top Casualty List as U.S. Relies More on Elite Forces
… “We’ve moved out of the major combat operations business,” said Linda Robinson, a counterterrorism expert at the RAND Corporation. In recent years, she said, the military has effectively outsourced rank-and-file infantry duties to local forces in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, leaving only a cadre of highly skilled Americans to train troops and take out high-value targets…
Now the physical and cognitive elite dominate warfare. Automation and globalization — in this case drones and outsourcing to local infantry.
Trump didn’t come from nowhere.
It’s a human thing. Something insane happens and we try to figure out “why now?”. We did a lot of that in the fall of 2001. Today I looked back at some of what I wrote then. It’s somewhat unhinged — most of us were a bit nuts then. Most of what I wrote is best forgotten, but I still have a soft spot for this Nov 2001 diagram …
I think some of it works for Nov 2016 too, particularly the belief/fact breakdown, the relative poverty, the cultural dislocation, the response to modernity and changing roles of women, and the role of communication technology. Demographic pressure and environmental degradation aren’t factors in Crisis-T though.
More than those common factors I’ve blamed Crisis-T on automation and globalization reducing the demand for non-elite labor (aka “mass disability”). That doesn’t account for the Russian infowar and fake news factors though (“Meme belief=facts” and “communications tech” in my old diagram). Why were they so apparently influential?
Maybe we should blame the iPhone …
Why Trolls Won in 2016 Bryan Mengus, Gizmodo
… Edgar Welch, armed with multiple weapons, entered a DC pizzeria and fired, seeking to “investigate” the pizza gate conspiracy—the debunked theory that John Podesta and Hillary Clinton are the architects of a child sex-trafficking ring covertly headquartered in the nonexistent basement of the restaurant Comet Ping Pong. Egged on by conspiracy videos hosted on YouTube, and disinformation posted broadly across internet communities and social networks, Welch made the 350-mile drive filled with righteous purpose. A brief interview with the New York Times revealed that the shooter had only recently had internet installed in his home….
…. the earliest public incarnation of the internet—USENET—was populated mostly by academia. It also had little to no moderation. Each September, new college students would get easy access to the network, leading to an uptick in low-value posts which would taper off as the newbies got a sense for the culture of USENET’s various newsgroups. 1993 is immortalized as the Eternal September when AOL began to offer USENET to a flood of brand-new internet users, and overwhelmed by those who could finally afford access, that original USENET culture never bounced back.
Similarly, when Facebook was first founded in 2004, it was only available to Harvard students … The trend has remained fairly consistent: the wealthy, urban, and highly-educated are the first to benefit from and use new technologies while the poor, rural, and less educated lag behind. That margin has shrunk drastically since 2004, as cheaper computers and broadband access became attainable for most Americans.
… the vast majority of internet users today do not come from the elite set. According to Pew Research, 63 percent of adults in the US used the internet in 2004. By 2015 that number had skyrocketed to 84 percent. Among the study’s conclusions were that, “the most pronounced growth has come among those in lower-income households and those with lower levels of educational attainment” …
… What we’re experiencing now is a huge influx of relatively new internet users—USENET’s Eternal September on an enormous scale—wrapped in political unrest.
“White Low-Income Non-College” (WLINC) and “non-elite” are politically correct [1] ways of speaking about the 40% of white Americans who have IQ scores below 100. It’s a population that was protected from net exposure until Apple introduced the first mass market computing device in June of 2007 — and Google and Facebook made mass market computing inexpensive and irresistible.
And so it has come to pass that in 2016 a population vulnerable to manipulation and yearning for the comfort of the mass movement has been dispossessed by technological change and empowered by the Facebook ad-funded manipulation engine.
So we can blame the iPhone too.
- fn -
[1] I think, for once, the term actually applies.
The NYT has a readable summary of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s US income research. Much of it is familiar, but I was struck by this paragraph:
[since 1979] … Younger adults between 20 and 45 years old have seen their after-tax incomes flatline.
But over the same period, seniors in the bottom half have seen their after-tax incomes grow by over 70 percent. The bulk of that gain represents increased health care spending through Medicare.
Growth rates of a few percent a year do add up; health care is eating everything. Maybe it’s time to reread my old health care post.
Their findings are very important, but one of their recommendations falls flat (emphases mine) …
… improving education and job training, equalizing distribution of human and financial capital, and increasing labor bargaining power, combined with a return to steeply progressive taxation
No, education and job training aren’t the answer. Roughly 40-50% of the US population has an IQ of less than 100. People with an IQ of under 100 have many skills, but they are not going to succeed in an academic program. Canada has the world’s highest “college” (includes 2 year vocational programs) graduation rate, and even they top out at around 56% of the population. I’m not sure why economists struggle with this basic arithmetic, my guess is they spend too much time with the cognitive elite.
What is the answer? We need to flip our thinking. We can’t change people to fit the work available in the natural post-industrial economy. We need to change the work to fit the humans. We need to incentivize work that is meaningful and rewarding across the cognitive spectrum. Germany did some of that by biasing their economy towards manufacturing. We can do some of that too (sorry Germany, that’s going to hurt you!), but we’re going to have to think more broadly. We’ll need to provide direct or indirect subsidies for work that’s productive even if it can’t compete with automation. We’ll have to apply work support lessons from the US military (long history of productive work across cognitive spectrum) and from traditional disability work support programs.
For reference - DeLong’s Peak Human and my Mass Disability are synonyms. Both refer to a surplus of productive capacity relative to labor supply, particularly the supply of non-elite cognitive labor.
I like the term ‘mass disability’ because we have a long history of supported labor for people we have traditionally called ‘cognitively disabled’.
Ok, that’s not the whole story.
I also like the term because I have a personal agenda to support persons with traditional cognitive disabilities. Using the term ‘disability’ forces us to think about how individual features become abilities or disabilities depending on the environment — something Darwin understood. Addressing the needs of the majority of human beings can also help the most disadvantaged.
How, a friend asked, did I come up with the 40% number for “mass disability” that I quoted in After Trump: reflections on mass disability in a sleepless night?
I came up with that number thinking about the relationship of college education, IQ curves, and middle class status. The thesis goes like this…
So I could say that the real number is 50%, but college students mess up the income numbers. The 40% estimate for functionally disabled Americans adjusts for that.
As our non-sentient AI tech and automation gets smarter the “ability” threshold is going to rise. Somewhere the system has to break down. I think it broke on Nov 8, 2016. In a sense democracy worked — our cities aren’t literally on fire. Yet.
I’m having trouble sleeping. There are a few boring reasons for that, but the election is not helping. So it’s time to write while sleep-impaired. I’ll try to keep this short, but I’m also going to break it into sections.
Context
My son has a substantial cognitive disability and little prospect of self-sustaining employment. His temperament is different from mine. I am novelty-seeking and instinctively skeptical of authority, he loves routine and structure. I am Vulcan, he is Klingon.
I am elite. He is not. Obama is my ideal President, he declared for Trump (though, interestingly, he chose to abstain in the end). I used to be uneasy around police, he loves K9 cops.
My son’s growth and development has shaped my life and thought for 20 years. He has informed my thinking about mass disability, something I’ve been writing about for 8 years. Because of him I have sympathy even for the Deplorables, angry and lost in a world that doesn’t want them any more.
The Big Picture
I don’t think any period in human history has seen as much cultural change as America 1950-2016. Civil Rights. Feminism. Gay Rights. Atheist Rights. Gender Rights. I have a flexible mind, and I feel a bit awed by all I have had to unlearn and learn. It’s not just America that’s changed of course. I believe that, in addition to ecological collapse and economics, the 9/11 world is a reaction to the education and empowerment of women.
And then there’s the demographic transformation of America. There’s a fertility transition that continues to drop family size; without immigration America’s population would be shrinking. There’s the rapid aging of the post-war boomers. There’s the transition of the euro-american to minority status.
Now add China. No period of human history has seen anything comparable to the rise of China — if only because it is nation of a billion people. The economic transformation is severe; there is a limit to how quickly economies can adapt.
And, of course, no period of human history has seen an intelligent machine. We live in the AI era. Not the sentient AI era, or at least not so far as I know. But we now have distributed, almost ubiquitous, machine intelligence. Pre-AI technologies have already eliminated much of the work that supported the non-college middle class. The service work that remains pays far less and demands strong emotional control. A control that many men, and some women, don’t have.
The AI era is the era of mass disability. An era when the work that is valued and compensated requires cognitive and emotional skills that perhaps 40% of the US population does not have. No, more college will not help.
Extreme cultural transformation. Demographics. China. The AI era and mass disability. I haven’t even mentioned that pre-AI technologies wiped out traditional media and enabled the growth of Facebook-fueled mass deception alt-media.
We should not be surprised that the wheels have come off the train.
The GOP in 2016
We will lose the consumer protections and financial regulation slowly built over the past 8 years. We will lose Obamacare. The Gender Rights movement will stall.
I’ve seen some talk of the Senate minority slowing this, but we are also going to lose the filibuster. We are unlikely to win the House or Senate in 2018 — so this will happen.
This will be sad and it will hurt a lot of people, not least Trump supporters.
It may not be as bad as some fear though. ObamaCare was failing. It was a tough political compromise that ran into GOP hellfire; the GOP blocked the post-launch fixes any big legislation needs. It was from the start intensely corporate and bureaucratic, with a misguided focus on analytics and top-down controls. GOP Representatives and Senators are not going to risk the wrath of their constituents, especially the non-college whites who are at risk of losing coverage. There will be a replacement. It will cover fewer people but perhaps it can be built up.
CO2 control seems to be hopeless now, but I’m not so sure about that. Sure, Trump is an idiot, but not everyone in the GOP truly believes that global warming is a good idea. There’s a chance the GOP will make changes that Obama could never get past the GOP.
This was all going to happen with any large GOP victory. Indeed, with his political core of white non-college voters Trump is going to be more cautious that Cruz or Ryan.
Trump: the mass disability conversation
I once wrote a blog post titled "Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.”. It was really prescient:
… 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.
Hah-hah. Laughs on me.
This part holds up better:
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 …
… 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 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…
I guess we’re having the conversation now. Too bad we didn’t have it four years ago. Obama, my ideal president, missed that one. He wasn’t alone, as recently as 2015 I complained “Both DeLong and Krugman missed the college vs. no-college white middle-age cohort, and I think that’s the important story” (K had a false start in 2012.)
Late in the campaign Obama picked up the theme with work on labor market monopsony and “predistribution”. Some of the Bernie Sanders themes that Clinton adopted, like free community college, were a first step. Overall though my team missed this one. It was a huge miss. They should have been reading Gordon’s Notes …
Trump: white nationalism and patriarchy
Half of college educated white women voters voted for Trump. I can’t quite get my head around that one. That cohort would have given Clinton the election.
Half.
What do we understand that? We need to resurrect anthropology and fuse it with journalism. How? I’ve no idea, but we need a way to explain ourselves to ourselves. A NYT piece made a good start with an interview of some of these women. Rage about the Black Lives Matter movement and critiques of police (prime job for the blue collar) were a factor; as well as susceptibility to Facebook-fueled right wing agitprop. I suspect these women are also relatively comfortable with traditional male-female roles. They want a “strong leader”; maybe they favor “enlightened patriarchy”. (The article had one significant error, it claimed white college-educated women voted for HRC. They did not. If they had we wouldn’t be talking about this.)
The whites are acting like a tribe. It’s different from acting like we own the country. This is shades of old racism mixed with aggrievement, loss, and bitterness. Unfortunately, unlike other tribes, the white tribe votes.
Reagan pioneered the use of white racism to win power. Trump has kicked it up several notches. He has summoned our demons at just the right wrong time. Now we live with the consequences. Trump isn’t going to beat these demons back, he is much more racist than Reagan was (more than most of us imagined).
On the other hand the GOP is going to get nervous about this. The party is not going to be comfortable with overt white racism. There will be some GOP help with stuffing the Nazis and Klansmen back in the bottle. We will need that help.
The Resistance
In my home town of St Paul Minnesota a mob has been blocking a freeway. That’s dumb team. Stop doing that. We need more leadership. There’s a guy I know who’s going to be out of a job in seven weeks…
Ok, so Obama is probably going to want to take a break. We are going to need someone though. This isn’t just one crazy election. Remember the “Big Picture”. There are huge forces at work, especially the lack of demand for non-elite labor (what I call “mass disability”). If you think we’re in trouble now, imagine what’s going to happen to China in the next few years. (Russia is toast.)
We need to oppose Trump. He’s a twisted wreck. I suspect, however, that he’s going to find a lot of long knives in DC. The GOP leadership are not nice people, and they prefer Pence to Trump (not that Pence is good news).
We need to oppose Trump, but we also need to remember why we have Trump. We need to focus on the big picture - there are solutions. We live in whitewater times; we need to hold onto each other while we try to steer the raft. Because there’s a waterfall ahead …
See also:
I’ve been writing about this for a bit over 8 years …
KRISTOF: Watching the Jobs Go By - his weakest column in years 2/2004. Very early thoughts in this direction.
Why your daughters should be roofers — not architects 3/2004. Precursor ideas.
On redistribution 6/2004. From an article in The Atlantic: “It is doubtful that in any society with universal suffrage the majority is going to sit on the sidelines and watch, generation after generation, while a handful of investors and corporate managers reap almost all the benefits of technological and economic progress."
The limits of disaster predictions: complex adaptive systems 2/2007. We have survived doom before.
Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0 3/2008.
"I believe that about 20% of adult Americans aged 25 to 65 are effectively disabled in our current globalized post-industrial economy. I believe this number will rise as our population ages. I believe this is the fundamental problem, along with network effects, driving modern wealth concentration.
Over time the economy will change to develop niches for unused capacity (servant economy?), but the transition need not be comfortable. In the meantime technological shocks, such as ubiquitous robotics, may induce new disruptions to a non-equilibrium economic structure — risking extensive economic breakdown."
Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III 4/2010
Civilization is stronger than we think: Structural deficits and complex adaptive systems 5/2010. Hope.
Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world 5/2010. College is not the answer.
Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes. 1/2011 “In a virtualized economy workers with average analytic and social IQ less than 125 are increasingly disabled. Since this average falls with age the rate of disability is rising as the we boomers accumulate entropy …Start applying the lessons learned from providing employment to cognitively impaired adults to the entire US population.” Looking back this is when my thinking about mass disability began to crystallize.
Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011. I thought we’d have the conversation then, but it didn’t go forward. Unfortunately.
Life in the post-AI world. What’s next? 9/2011
The Post-AI era is also the era of mass disability One of my favorites. 12/2012
Addressing structural underemployment (aka mass disability) 5/2013 Some ideas on solutions. Good ideas by the way.
Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really. 8/2015
Trump explained: Non-college white Americans now have higher middle-aged death rates than black Americans 11/2015 “Both DeLong and Krugman missed the college vs. no-college white middle-age cohort, and I think that’s the important story”
Trumpism: a transition function to the world of mass disability 8/2016
How does the world look to Trump’s core supporters? 9/2016.
After Trump: information wants to be free, but knowledge is expensive 11/2016. This feels fixable, but it’s a fundamental problem.
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 …
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.
This is what I think socioeconomic support will look like in 2040 based on cognitive [2] quintiles.
The bottom quintile (0-20%, non-voters) will have supported work environments and direct income subsidies; an improved version of what most [1] wealthy nations do for the 0-5% of adults currently considered cognitively “disabled” [1].
The second quintile (20-40%, Trump base if white) will have subsidized employment (direct or indirect).
The fifth quintile (80-100%) will live much as they do now.
I don’t know what happens to the 3rd and 4th quintile.
- fn -
[1] The US is currently “mainstreaming” the cognitively disabled into relatively unsupported work, a well intentioned and evidence-free project by (my) Team Liberal that is going to end in tears.
[2] In US male euros (avoid racism/sexism effects) maps to academic achievement which tests learning, social skills, temperament and the like.
If you want to take a mildly demented barely ambulatory nonagenarian out of his nursing home bed for a six hour flight to San Francisco you may be insane or murderous. Or perhaps your 93 yo WW II vet is in better shape than mine.
Or maybe you’re prepared.
I did this. Actually, my brother and I did this together, except for the plane flights where I went solo with Dad. We did it because my 93yo father had one request left in his life — to see his younger sister in San Francisco. And, thanks to an accident of Quebec’s healthcare and his disabled vet status, he had money to pay for the trip.
Of course when I agreed to fulfill his wish he was 3 months younger than when we actually went — and significantly stronger. Old old age is like that.
Stil, we went. And because my brother joined us in San Francisco it went pretty well. Luck helped — we had perfect flights and transportation.
I don’t know anyone else who has done this, but I’m sure hundreds have. Somebody gets those old vets out for Normandy ceremonies. On the other hand, I suspect those guys are in better shape than Dad (some of ‘em probably run foot races and jump hurdles).
If you want to do something like this, and before I dump all my trip memories (we aren’t doing this again), here’s what I learned:
There’s more but that’s enough for now — and probably the most I can remember since most of the traumatic memories are already fading. The good memories, because this trip actually, amazingly, worked, are getting stronger.
It could have gone quite badly though. This isn’t for the faint of heart.
Donald Trump as the voice of the non-college 50%. TNC on the mass (black) incarceration society - and reparations. Hundreds of colleges produce no earnings boost (but lots of debt).
There is a common thread. America needs 40 million non-college jobs that pay $30 an hour.
That is our 21st century “Manhattan project” class challenge.
Get creative.
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...
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
Over the past few decades developed world growth in wealth and income has been captured by a small segment of the population.
Globalization and information technology have reduced demand and opportunity for the majority of Americans. We don’t have jobs filing papers, we don’t have jobs filling gas tanks, we don’t deliver mail, we don’t hand out cash at the bank. We can barely service cars any more. Computers/smartphones can’t be serviced. I call this mass disability.
America was built on slavery; the civil war was only 150 years ago. We’ll be working on our slavery issues for at least another hundred years. Black America has been, and will be, our most vulnerable and stressed population. Euro-americans are in denial about the work remaining. (We’ve made progress, but it’s one hell of a long crawl back from that abyss.)
So, riots.
American unemployment, as economist’s measure it, is back to our post-2000 “norm”. On the other hand economic growth is low; our last quarter would make a fine start to another recession. Krugman et al debate the cause of “secular stagnation” in general, and strangely low labor force participation and Beveridge Curve shift in particular.
The usual suspects are globalization and “IT” (increasingly “AI”, politely referred to as “robots”). I also suspect the dominance of the dysfunctionally powerful modern corporation plays an important role along with the related the rise of economic parasites.
Income inequality is inducing economic distortions that likely also contribute, though I think that effect is partly offset by corporate power. Slowdowns in scientific discovery and technological innovation aren’t helping.
That’s a long list - as one would expect in an eco-econ world where we have to treat economies as ecologies. It takes a lot to change a self-correcting system.
I think we can add more though - including the intersection of demographics and medicine.
Once upon a time, as “recently” (cough) as when I started medical school in 1982, parents died in their 60s and 70s. They weren’t as vigorous as today’s 70 yo’s but they weren’t particularly frail either. They ate poorly, smoked and exercised little — but that’s not enough to make someone frail. It just means that elders died relatively quickly of cancer, heart disease, and organ failure. Dementia was starting to become more common, but it wasn’t universal.
Today’s Boomer parents are different. They stopped smoking 20 or 30 years ago. They’ve had more education and they’ve benefitted from bypass surgery and far better medications for lipid and blood pressure control. Their diets are lousy and they never exercised much — but they’re not nearly as obese as we will be.
So they tend to last — into their 80s. Which is pretty much the end of the road for the human machine. So Boomer parents get to be frail - and demented. That’s an entirely different care burden than any previous generation has known - and it’s hitting the boomer peak of today’s demographic curve. As always, the burden falls largely on women.
The frailty burden is genuinely new. It’s not big enough to explain all of our economic transformation, but I think it plays a significant role.
Fortunately, there’s an obvious fix - and an investment opportunity.
I expect to see massive solar powered robotic dementia care facilities opening across the empty spaces of America — probably as extensions of Google’s data centers. With robotic caretakers, waste water recycling, soy lent green synthetic protein, and high bandwidth connections to companion AIs and VR-integrated remote children this should be quite pleasant.
I’m looking forward to my pod. (Oh, sh*t, I’m in it right no…..)
See also
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