What I learned about managing catalytic converter theft: OEM vs aftermarket vs universal

The catalytic converter on my much loved 2010 Kia Sedona van was stolen. (I think there are two and the rear converter was removed. I'm not a car guy.) It's an every day thing around here.

This is what I learned about this problem.

1. Manufacturers only stock OEM converters for 10y post model date. So there's no OEM solution.
2. The normal option to an OEM converter is a "bolt-on" aftermarket product. This is typically installed by a service garage or muffler shop. In Nov 2022 there are none available for the Kia Sedona and many other vehicles. It's a national shortage.

There are three remaining options:

1. A "straight pipe": This is illegal but in our fallen times nobody seems to care. (Mad Max didn't even have a muffler.) Done by some muffler shops and by guys working out of their home. Oxygen sensor is a common issue, there are probably others. Not so good for the environment, but neither is replacing the vehicle.
2. A "universal catalytic converter". Insurance companies will send customers to a muffler shop that will install (weld I think) a "universal converter". These are not a perfect match to the vehicle so they may cause performance issues and trigger a check engine light. For this reason service shops avoid them in normal times. That "we don't go there" rule can cause some bad advice in post-apocalyptic times.
3. Sell or junk the vehicle and pay $50,000 for a new van. If sell then the buyer does one of the above.

Our garage mechanic didn't mention the "universal catalytic converter" option because "they don't do that". Sadly he hadn't updated his algorithm to deal with the national shortage. Now we have a new mechanic (He did apologize for his error, but hd didn't think to offer a retention incentive. I think he'll give better advice in the future.)

If you do replace a catalytic converter it may, of course, be stolen again. Consider a weld-on cage so thieves choose a neighboring vehicle instead. Or a straight pipe so they don't bother. It's handy to have a junk car when parking in unsecured lots in metro Minneapolis St Paul.

[Political aside: property crime will elect the GOP in America. Don't get fooled into thinking that only violent crime rates matter.]

What is Great Replacement Theory?

 [Copied over from a tweet stream.]

So now I'm trying to figure out what Great Replacement Theory is. It seems to be one part true and one part sort-of true.

The true part is that we expect a low-melanin blond-red hair (LMB) phenotype to become less common barring genome hacking. That's been well expected since at least the 1970s (perhaps 1870s?). These are recessive genes and migration and differential birthrates mean they will become uncommon.

The sort-of true part is that libs like me don't care about this. It's not just that my white skin is a PITA (thin, burnt, premalignant), it's also that we have a lot more to worry about. Like civilization for example.

The mostly untrue part is that libs/dems are conspiring to accelerate the decline of the LMB phenotype.

It's true we hope the GOP's white nationalism will discourage "non-white" (whatever whiteness is) voters, it's true we encourage immigration as a generally good thing for a low birth rate America that has benefitted from attracting worldwide talent, it's true that we enjoy and appreciate novelty and diversity, and it's true that we think it would quite good if all this led to the GOP to morph into a non-racist opposition party.

But it's not true that this is an explicit conspiracy.  It is, perhaps, an emergent result of our not caring that much about preserving a particular phenotype, our interest in preserving human and American civilization and our affection for novelty and diversity. I can, however, see why people who are passionately attached to LMB phenotypes would confuse this emergent result with a diabolical conspiracy.

Civilization, complexity and the limits of human cognition - another attempt at explaining the 21st century

The 70s were pretty weird, but I was too young to notice. (Not coincidentally, the Toffler/Farrell Future Shock book was written then.) By comparison the 80s and 90s more or less made sense. In 1992 Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" and that seemed about right for the times.

Things got weird again in the late 90s. I was in a .com startup and I remember valuations getting crazy about 1997, 3 years before the .com crash. We were still picking ourselves up from the crash when 9/11 hit. (A year later, on a purely personal note, my youngest brother vanished.) In the early 00s came Enron and other frauds almost forgotten now. Then in 2008 the real estate collapse and the Great Recession. We were barely recovering from the Great Recession when Trumpism hit. Followed by COVID (which was expected and not at all weird) and the Great Stupidity of the American Unvaccinated (which we did not expect and is perhaps weirdest of all).

Each time the world went off kilter I have tried to figure out a root cause:

In Feb 2009 I tried to figure out the crash of 2008:

At last count my list of contributing factors to the crash of '09 included ...

1. Complexity collapse: we don't understand our emergent creation, we optimized for performance without adaptive reserve
2. Mass disability and income skew: The modern world has disenfranchised much of humanity
3. The Marketarian religion: The GOP in particular (now the Party of Limbaugh), but also many Democrats and libertarians, ascribed magical and benign powers to a system for finding local minima (aka The Market). The Market, like Nature, isn't bad -- but neither is it wise or kind.
4. The occult inflation of shrinking quality: What happens when buyers can't figure out what's worth buying. Aka, the toaster crisis - yes, really.
5. performance-based executive compensation and novel, unregulated, financial instruments: a lethal combination. See also - You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.
6. Disintermediating Wall Street: Wall Street became a fragile breakpoint 
7. The future of the publicly traded company: A part of our problem is that the publicly traded company needs to evolve
8. The role of the deadbeats: too much debt - but we know that
9. Firewalls and separation of powers: a culture of corruption, approved by the American electorate, facilitated dissolving regulatory firewalls
10. Marked!: Rapid change and the Bush culture made fraud easy and appealing

I put Marked! pretty low on the list, but maybe I should bump it up a bit. The Hall of Shame (Clusterstock) lists a lot more fraud than has made the papers [1]...

• Fairfield Greenwich Group: quietly complicit in the Madoff fraud?
• Angelo Mozilo: white collar mobster
• Sam Israel: a $400 million fraud. In the old days, he'd have been front page news. I never heard of him.
• Many more, each of which would have been in the news once - including: JS Forte, RS Piccoli, JG Ossie, D Palmer, A Nodel, Marc Dreier.
• Those swindlers who have made the news... Allen Stanford, and, of course, Mr. Madoff.

By 2010 I was focusing on RCIIIT: The rise of China and India and the effects of IT.

... The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible ...

In 2016 and again in 2018 I tried to explain Trumpism by contributing factors (I was too optimistic about Murdoch's health though):

• 65% the collapse of the white non-college “working class” — as best measured by fentanyl deaths and non-college household income over the past 40 years. Driven by globalization and IT both separately and synergistically including remonopolization (megacorp). This is going to get worse.
• 15% the way peculiarities of the American constitution empower rural states and rural regions that are most impacted by the collapse of the white working class due to demographics and out-migration of the educated. This is why the crisis is worse here than in Canada. This will continue.
• 15% the long fall of patriarchy. This will continue for a time, but eventually it hits the ground. Another 20 years for the US?
• 5% Rupert Murdoch. Seriously. In the US Fox and the WSJ, but also his media in Australia and the UK. When historians make their list of villains of the 21st century he’ll be on there. He’s broken and dying now, but he’s still scary enough that his name is rarely mentioned by anyone of consequence.
• 1% Facebook, social media, Putin and the like. This will get better.

That 1% for Facebook et all is pretty small — but the election of 2016 was on the knife’s edge. That 1% was historically important.

A few months ago I listed 3 causes for the post-COVID supply and labor shock economics of 2021:

1. Wealth became extremely concentrated. 

2. Returns on labor for 40% of Americans fell below modern standard for economic life.

3. Good investments became hard to find.

It's almost 2022 now, so we're into almost 25 years of the world not making sense any more. So now I'm digging even deeper for a root cause.

Today I'm going with Gordon's Law: the complexity of a complex adaptive system will increase until it reaches a limiting factor. Our civilization is a complex adaptive system and its complexity increased until it hit a limiting factor -- the complexity capacity of the average human. These days between 40 and 50% of American's can't handle civilization 2021 (sometimes I call this mass disability (see also). Witness among other things, The Great Stupidity of the FoxCovians.

It's a variant of the "Future Shock" Toffler wrote about 52 years ago. I don't have a fix; I don't think the world will get less complex. Our technologies are moving too fast. Maybe we'll just get used to not understanding the world and civilization will stumble on regardless. After all, for most of human history the world was incomprehensible -- and we did manage. Sort of. Mostly without civilization though ...

Biden's essential task is to help the Left Behind

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:

1. A $15/hour minimum wage. Put pressure at the base.
2. Subsidize employment directly, or provide direct cash support (family allowance and the like), or do a mixture of both [4].
3. Learn from Germany and from Quebec's manufacturing sector.
4. Reduce corporate scale, favor smaller companies that employ more blue collar workers [5]
5. Get creative about small business generation - including a national small business generator.
6. Do public works and infrastructure that generate employment. I've been told the pharaohs built pyramids so laborers had work between flooding of the Nile. (The US military is one model for non-college public works employment.)
7. Review all our tax, accounting, finance and labor policies and revise to favor non-college employment.

This is what Biden needs to focus on.

- 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.

My 2015 post on why Trump was a sign of a healthy democracy

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: 

1. How I think about the Trump voter (and America)
2. What is middle class and why can't half of American voters get there?
3. Biden's lost agenda

This fourth post is about something I wrote in 2015. Back then I thought Trump was a bad joke. I thought that American politics was a compromise between corporations, powerful (wealthy) individuals, and the voting masses. Clearly corporations and the wealthy would prefer many GOP candidates over Trump, and the masses alone would not be enough.

Yay masses.

Now, amidst the smoldering wreckage, I'm going to quote from that old misguided post (emphases added): 

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.

"Good for democracy" except, of course, the white non-college masses spoke clearly back in 2016. An actual "President Trump" was unthinkable, but it happened. I do not underestimate him now.

So that part of the post did not hold up so well. But I stand by the part about making the never-college 40-50% of Americans a political focus. More on that when I write the fifth post in this series.

See also

• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes (Jan 2011)
• Rubio, Sanders and the President Gordon agenda (Mar 2016)

How I think about the Trump voter and America

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.

The Trump I remember

It's Nov 6, 2020 and I believe Trump's presidency is ending. I look forward to forgetting him, but one day I'll be asked what all the fuss was about.

For that day, to remind me, here is what I know of him know:

1. The crimes for which he was impeached -- extorting a foreign power to attack a political opponent.
2. The crimes for which he was not impeached -- the collusion with Russia against HRC.
3. The obstruction of justice.
4. The personal corruption.
5. The corruption of government and of industry, including running a protection racket against businesses.
6. The casual racism.
7. The people who worked for him.
8. The anti-science -- from CO2 to COVID to the environment and beyond.
9. Inserting Christian fundamentalism into American government.
10. The constant lying. (He was paradoxically transparent however. An accusation was invariably a confession.)
11. His mockery of persons with disabilities.
12. The threats and the cruelty. Not least the separation of migrant children and parents.
13. The stupidity. He really didn't seem to know very much about anything beyond corruption and real estate.
14. The propaganda.
15. The destruction of the ACA without a replacement.
16. The complete disinterest in art, culture, and the humanities.
17. The destruction of government agencies.
18. A complete lack of honor, compassion, or decency.
19. COVID mismanagement.
20. QAnon.
21. The authoritarianism.
22. The pardons. (Remember Al Kinani)
23. The post-election conduct.
24. The record-breaking federal executions.
25. The Gallagher war crime pardon
26. The illegal destruction of government records. 

As of Nov 2020 McSweeney's has a list, NYT Magazine did an interactive summary, The Atlantic had many articles summarized in their Biden endorsement:

...he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus"

Was there anything he did that was good?

1. Accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. It was the only viable choice, but I'm not sure HRC could have taken it (esp. with a GOP Congress).
2. He understood the Left Behind -- the majority of Americans who will never be knowledge workers. I don't think my team gets this. He didn't know what to do for them, but he knew what they wanted.

Update 1/18/21 - adding Unthinkable from The Atlantic.

State of the COVID-19 Pandemic - Fall 2020

I've written only a few COVID-19 posts, mostly about masks and activities. Looking back at them today they hold up pretty well. This feels like the right time for a summary.

Obviously the American response has been pretty lousy. Given America's fissiparous culture and lousy record on things like managing gun violence and providing universal good-enough healthcare we were never going to do a terrific job, but Trump took us down a few more levels. The GOP's anti-science and anti-government stance has contributed as well, not least by underfunding the CDC for decades. It does suck that the disease is infectious before symptoms develop.

We will probably get a decent vaccine. Even if Trump, Xi, and Putin screw-up their national evaluations there will be a few nations that do it right. We probably won't get a great early treatment antiviral in the next year or two but our hospital management will keep incrementally improving and we ought to get a decent monoclonal. We are, despite America's almost incomprehensible incompetence, starting to see better masks in use. Masks that protect the wearer as much as they reduce spread. (We could have lightweight PAPRs for use by vulnerable teachers, but that's like asking for a warp drive.) We should get inexpensive antigen tests for use in school and home, and we'll probably figure out how to use them.

Our understanding of the American pandemic is not great. Data is getting harder to find for many states. That won't change unless Trump loses -- and even then it will take months to rebuilt. A few states may have good data collection so we will have to rely on them to sample pandemic progress. Universities and non-profits are trying to close the gap. Getting local prevalence data in Google Maps will help. There's still a chance states will adopt Google/Apple contact tracing (paging Minnesota, damnit).

On the bright side our knowledge of the innate immune system and of viral infection sequelae (myocarditis [1]!) is growing ten times faster than normal. Even in the QAnon world we can still do some science.

On the public front the situation is mixed at best. It will be a miracle if we don't see a big rise in numbers as winter settles in and we move indoors. Pandemic social and economic distress is amplified by the longterm issues of never-college income, information technology disruption, demographic shifts, and the legacies of American slavery. Remote work has been pretty successful though -- getting people out of air conditioned offices is a big deal.

Less unhappily, unknown sequelae aside, the vast majority of people under 40 with good innate immune systems seem to tolerate SARS-CoV-2 pretty well (though some will die horribly after months of struggle and the myocarditis thing is a bit worrisome). It also seems that a modest amount of ventilation dramatically reduces infectivity -- and, despite lack of public guidance and Trump's CDC sabotage, I think ventilation is improving. There don't seem to be big outbreaks in gyms or ice arenas for example -- though there's also no useful data. COVID-19 will become endemic, but over decades, as we develop true herd immunity, it will become more like the other coronavirae that we live with.

Between our various failures, residual strengths, and the peculiarities of COVID-19 much of America is more-or-less implementing some version of slow motion infection of the under 30 and more-or-less leaving the 40+ to protect themselves. The elite 40+ segment of Americans are learning to buy and wear user-protective masks, the non-elite are kind of screwed. But that's America in the year 2020.

- fn -

[1] Lots of people are wondering how common myocarditis is with viral infections. We've always known of viral myocarditis, but it's not like we did cardiac MRIs on everyone with a cold. The decrease in MIs during COVID precautions is certainly interesting. This review isn't perfect, but it's a good start.

Gender and politics in America

My Twitter feed often ascribes GOP dominance at the state and federal level, and the patriarchal policies that follow, to male choices.

That is clearly incorrect. We know that 52% of white women chose Trump. In a white-women only election he’d have still won.

Today I wondered what overall gender differences are in voter turnout. The Center for American Women and Politics had some numbers:

They write (emphases mine) …

In every presidential election since 1980, the proportion of eligible female adults who voted has exceeded the proportion of eligible male adults who voted (see Figure 1) … The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964.

Women have a larger voice in our elections than men. In 2018 America race and education are bigger divides than gender. White men are deplorable, but white women are not a lot better.

And so it came to this

In the year 2018 it is no longer insane to suspect that the Soviet Union Russia executed a successful multi-year campaign against the United States of America which included the subversion of the GOP and the election of an incompetent President who effectively obeys Russia’s supreme leader.

I’m not saying this is likely. I’m not saying this was entirely planned rather than, say, somewhat opportunistic and emergent.

I’m just saying it’s no longer insane to suspect that we lost a war we didn’t realize we were fighting.

Year one of post-imperial America

The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. That was the end of Russia’s Empire, the end of the USSR. I was 30 years old. I may still have a newspaper from that day.

When did America’s empire end? It’s not so clear. Was it 9/11/2001 when the towers fell? Was it 3/20/2003 when the US split from its NATO allies and invaded Iraq?

Historians will decide, but I think most will settle on the election of Donald Trump on November 8, 2016, 27 years after the fall of the USSR. The symmetry is irresistible.

Both left and right agree, America is no longer a hegemonic power. The GOP’s collapse and Trump’s incoherence have made America a mighty but brainlessly blundering behemoth. The world has shifted from a unipolar to a multipolar system ten years earlier than expected. Everything frozen is in motion, from Korea to the West Bank. The sun has set on the American Empire, Putin’s revenge has been poetically perfect [1].

Was America’s Empire a good thing? I think the rebuilding of Europe and Japan was a good thing. I think containment of the Soviet Union was good. The long peace, without direct conflict between world powers, was good. Avoiding the end of human civilization was probably good too. Most of this came between 1945 and 1989 though. The record over the last 27 years has been more mixed. Perhaps the world will do better without America.

Where do we go now? I have given up on the prediction business. What I hope happens is that the GOP is swept from power on November 3, 2020. By then much of America’s federal government will be severely damaged or devastated, but we now know that our system was rotten and ready for a fall in 2016. After 2020, without the burden of empire, the United States can begin rebuilding. Like a city leveled by flood or earthquake, we can return better than we were.

- fn -

[1] Do read that Atlantic article. I’d forgotten Anna Chapman from 2008! Among other things we learn that Russia is justly proud of its astounding coup, but not entirely sure it was a good idea:

… The original aim was to embarrass and damage Hillary Clinton, to sow dissension, and to show that American democracy is just as corrupt as Russia’s, if not worse. “No one believed in Trump, not even a little bit,” Soldatov says. “It was a series of tactical operations. At each moment, the people who were doing this were filled with excitement over how well it was going, and that success pushed them to go even further.”…

… The head of the FSB’s elite cyber unit and his deputy were forced out; two other top officers from the unit ended up in Moscow’s most notorious jail.  “They’re now under incredible pressure both from the inside and the outside,” Soldatov said. “Sometimes,” says Michael Hayden, a director of the National Security Agency under George W. Bush, “you have successful covert operations that you wish hadn’t succeeded.” …

… What Russia showed in the 2016 election—and what it has continued to show in the election’s aftermath—is not so much its own strength, but American vulnerability: that it doesn’t take much to turn the American system on itself. “Covert-influence operations don’t create divisions on the ground; they amplify them,” says Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief. John Sipher, the former CIA operative, agrees. “If there’s anyone to blame, it’s us,” he says. “If we accept the stoking, it’s our fault.”

Understanding century 21 - IT, Globalization and urban-urban migration

In the 90s the world kind of made sense. Since then, not so much. I don’t know if teens truly are experiencing an anxiety epidemic, but any American growing up in the new millennium has reason to be anxious.

I think the root causes of our disruption are globalization (China and India) and information technology (AI, robots, advertising supported web, etc) leading to peak human/mass disability and the collapse of the GOP.

I’m now considering a third factor — namely urban-urban migration (though it may be a consequence of globalization and IT rather than a root cause). The population required to sustain a viable local economy keeps increasing; this is absolutely not what we expected when the net was young. Once a city of 10,000 was viable, then a city of 50,000, then a few hundred thousand. We seem too heading towards a million as baseline.

This is politically potent here because the structure of American government gives disproportionate power to low population density regions. The pain of these communities is politically consequential. This is usually described as a “rural” crisis, but these aren’t “rural” in the traditional sense. They are regions around large towns and small cities that are no longer economically viable.

I was a family medicine resident and a young physician in communities like these. Recent stories feel familiar — they remind me of my desolate drives along the Erie Canal and the IT driven end of the mill town. It’s a worldwide thing.

Humans have been migrating from rural areas to cities for centuries. It’s often been socially disruptive. It still is, particularly because of the way American government works. The dying regions have power, and as they lose their cognitive elite they are ever more desperate and easier to deceive.

See also

• Gordon’s Notes: Crisis-T: What’s special about rural? 2016. Similar ideas from a year ago.

All those "Democrats and white middle class" articles explained in four lines.

I’m going to translate the subtexts and signals of What’s Wrong With the Democrats? - The Atlantic into plain language:

1. Democrats should have disowned Black Livers Matter.
2. Democrats shouldn’t run a woman for the presidency.
3. Democrats should have lied more.
4. Democrats should have paid more attention to the economic collapse of the non-college (peak human, mass disability)

I agree with the fourth. I was worried about that before Trump took over. I don’t agree with #3, I think lying works a lot better on the GOP base than the Dem base.

Number one and two remind me of the Al Gore’s choice to embrace gun management measures. It was a progressive and brave act, but Americans showed they didn’t want it. Dems have not pushed it since.

I don’t think we’ll see a woman running for the presidency of the United States in the next ten years. Maybe 20 years. I was shocked that almost half of white college educated women voted for Trump. HRC was less excellent than Obama, but she was pretty good. Since white men are  hopeless the lack of support from white women was a killer.

I also think Dems will shy away from BLM like movements - at least for another decade. We won’t say that loudly, but watch what happens. American racism is stronger than many thought.

The are sad predictions. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t have a lot of faith in post-Trump America. 

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can journalists top writing these articles?

All our family healthcare visits are now billed as CPT E&M Code "Level Four"

Very few people will understand what that subject line means.

The short version is that the way we account for physician services was born broken in 1994 and it is now in a state of advanced collapse.

It can’t go on and it can’t stop.

Don Berwick, the best CMS administrator we’ve ever had (forced out by GOP) said this five years ago:

.. Dr. Donald Berwick, the immediate past administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which administers the Medicare program, said a small portion of the billing increase is likely caused by outright fraud, but in the majority of cases hospitals are legally boosting profits by targeting the vulnerabilities of Medicare’s payment system. “They are learning how to play the game,” Berwick said about the hospitals....

... Berwick, the former CMS head, said patients haven’t changed. What’s changed is the aggressiveness of how hospitals bill. “They are smart,” Berwick said. “If you create a payment system in which there is a premium for increasing the number of things you do or the recording of what you do, well, that’s what you’ll get.”...

See also

• Gordon's Notes: Health care reform. Be humble. Be afraid of the accounting rules. 1/2009. RBRVS. We had such good intentions.
• Gordon’s Notes: Electronic health records and payment increases: It’s not fraud. 10/2012. 

Crisis-T: what to do about the delusions and the lies.

I’ve been using “crisis-T” as a tag for our times. I used to think it was a bit melodramatic; that maybe T would somehow veer to the fantasies of Thiel and the like.

Welcome to week two of Crisis-T. A week in which I’ve started monitoring neo-soviet propaganda for clues to what Bannon, Flynn and Putin are thinking (the troika).

Emily and I are still working out how to respond to this. I hope the March for Science happens — I’d join that one way or another. We already subscribe to the NYT, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Talking Points — it’s essential to support journalism with hard coin. The 2018 congressional campaign has begun and we will be active (I’ll likely vote in the GOP primaries, more on that later). We’ve done our first of many ACLU and Planned Parenthood donations. Basically we more or less track what Scalzi is doing.

I write and tweet of course, but that’s more therapeutic than useful. It does mean though that I run into some of the issues that real journalists face. Like how to approach the maelstrom of lies and delusions that Bannon and Trump produce. On the one hand presidential speech is a form of action, it can’t be disregarded. On the other hand I’m beginning to worry Bannon is not a conventional idiot. He may have a real talent for strategic propaganda and effective distraction.

I wonder if we should treat the lie-stream like the weather.  Box it on the proverbial page 2 as Bannon-T lies and delusions of the day. Each lie-delusion is then listed with a contrasting statement of testable reality. Then the main pages can focus on even more important problems, like swapping the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence for Bannon on the principals committee of the National Security Council.

More as we figure this out …

Update Jan 30, 2017: Jeff Atwood has one of the best action lists I’ve seen.

Investment things I learned in Crisis-T

All the money Trump will take from the poor and give to the rich has to go somewhere. So share prices should rise.

On the other hand, a 10% import tariff will lead to a global trade war. I’m particularly looking forward to the carbon tariffs an angry China applies to the US. So share prices should fall.

Corporate behemoths will increase monopoly and monopsony powers and fully leverage regulatory capture in an era where corruption exceeds living memory. So share prices should rise.

Trump will, WTF, resume underground nuclear testing or something like that. So share prices should fall…

Hey, I don’t know what the market is going to do. If I knew I’d hire people to manage the billions we don’t have. I do know the our equity investments have grown over the Obama years, I see some warning signs, and our portfolio is now equity-heavy. So it makes sense to rebalance. Crisis-T just means I made myself do it.

I chose to rebalance primarily in our retirement accounts, so the sales had no tax implications. I sold shares and parked the cash. In a few months, when we learn if the GOP Senate has a spine, we may sell more in our taxable accounts and shift the retirement back into equities. It’s probably not an orthodox way of proceeding, but it’s relatively easy to adjust.

Since I rarely mess with our investments (largely S&P, extended market, and whole market index funds — plus college 529 plans I don’t touch) I learned a few things. In no particular order …

1. If you sell shares in Vanguard’s ultra-cheap low overhead index funds you can’t buy back into the same fund until 30 days post-sale. So if you make it one big sale if the timing is good. Vanguard makes it easy to create a cash fund to hold sales within a particular account family.
2. Fidelity’s 401K accounts are completely different business from their HSA accounts which are unrelated to their … Oh. Heck. I don’t like Fidelity.
3. It takes a long time for these mutual fund orders to sell. They seem to sell at near market close the day after the order is placed — and the online accounts aren’t updated for a while. So you can’t do any of this under market pressure. I placed a sell order at 7pm on Thur, they were in process Friday, the web site was updated Sat pm.
4. If you’re not using a SEP IRA you might as well roll it into a regular IRA. You can always create a new SEP IRA in future.
5. Rollovers are complicated and slow. Even the Vanguard ‘concierge’ people seemed unsure about all the rules. You can borrow against 401K funds, but the investment options may be poor. You may be able to rollover a former employers 401K into a new employers 401K — but it’s all special cases. There may be a way to create an IRA account that a 401K can roll into and still be able to rollover into a 401K — but that’s just weird. Once you mix a 401K with IRA funds you can’t reverse it, it’s all IRA then. There’s a reason people spend money for tax lawyers.
6. Vanguard has a much better web site than Fidelity and Vanguard message responses are excellent.
7. Vanguard is in the midst of switching all their funds into a brokerage framework. I worry that it will increase costs but I’m naturally suspicious. I’d like to read something about why the change.

Save America. Vote GOP.

In the real world HRC is President and the GOP is beginning a painful reform process that will lead to a far better conservative party and a healthy American democracy.

In our consensus hallucination a walking tire fire is President, the GOP is further from reform than ever, and smart Dems are reading Josh Marshall’s advice. Oh, and the wake-up button isn’t working.

While we’re waiting for wakefulness we might as well come up with a plan or two. Plan one is to address the root cause of non-college misery. That will be useful if we survive (hint: avoid war with China) to get a sane government again.

Plan two is about getting a sane government. Towards that end we need to save the GOP from its addiction to the unreal. Unreality is a dangerous drug, after decades of abuse the GOP is in desperate need of rehab …

From Tabloids to Facebook: the Reality Wars (revised from my original)

I’ve been thinking about Russia’s successful hacking of the 2016 US election. It shouldn’t be seen in isolation.

It should be understood as part of the ancient human struggle with delusion and illusion — the reality wars.

In the US the reality wars were once bipartisan; each party struggled to separate fact from fantasy. Over the past few decades the GOP stopped fighting, they embraced the unreal. From Reagan to Gingrich to the Tea Party to Trump. By the 21st century we began seeing books like “The Republican War on Science”.

Unreality spread like a virus. AM talk radio was infested. Then came Drudge and Fox. Later Breitbart and finally the Facebook fake news stream. From the Clinton “murders” to birtherism to child pizza porn slaves.

This wasn’t bipartisan. The anti-reality meme, a core historic component of fascism, became concentrated in the GOP. Russia jumped on board, but Russia is more of a plague carrier than an intelligent agent. They lost their reality-war in the 90s. All their news is unreal now. Putin, like Trump, takes the fakes.

Trump’s victory is a triumph of the unreal. Of Will, I suppose. Now it threatens us all.

The rebellion against reason, against the perception of the real, is old. It’s a core component of fascism, but it’s much older than fascism. The Enlightenment was a setback for the unreal, but it wasn’t a final defeat. Now, in our troubled 3rd millennium, anti-reason is strong. It has taken over Russia. It has taken over the GOP, and Trump’s GOP has taken over America.

Somehow we have to rescue the GOP from it’s addiction to the unreal. That would be hard if it had been defeated. Now it seems impossible.

But there is a way. We need to vote GOP.

Vote GOP … in the primaries that is. In my home of Minnesota the Dem contenders are all pretty reasonable. I can send some money and volunteer to support the party, but my primary/caucus vote isn’t needed. On the other hand, the Minnesota GOP has lots of reality denialists running for office. I can use my primary vote to favor relatively sane GOP contenders.

If even half of Dems vote GOP in primaries we can ally with sane conservatives to pull the GOP back from the brink. Yes, there are a few sane conservatives. They are a dying breed, but there is room to ally with them here.

Then, in the election, we vote Dem. If America is lucky the Dems win. If America is unwise the GOP wins — but it’s a saner GOP. A setback, but not a catastrophe.

Work for a sane GOP. As a good Dem, vote GOP. 

After Trump: reflections on mass disability in a sleepless night

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.

After Trump: information wants to be free, but knowledge is expensive

Fourteen  months ago I wrote that Trump was a sign of a healthy democracy.

That one might rank up with my Peak Oil prediction. I’m really not very good at the precision business. It’s hard to know what the future will be like, it’s harder to know when the future will be.

Trump now looks more like a cardiac arrest. Not a bit of chest pain that inspires healthier living; a full out arrest with defibrillators, chest compression and, at best, a long slow recovery. Whatever Systems we had to prevent something like Trump, they didn’t work. We have a political never event; the worst of America contending for the presidency.

When the plane crashes, when the healthy patient dies, we do a root cause analysis. Usually half a dozen things went wrong all at once; multiple safeguards failed. Some of these we know about. We had the Great Recession. We had home and wealth loss concentrated in the non-college population. We had globalization. We had, have, will have the AI world eliminating jobs — especially for the non-college. We have a demographic transition form white protestant to a mix of peoples. We have rapid evolution of social mores and constant technology churn. We have the secularization of America, the end of a historic religious consensus. We have the collapse of the GOP’s historic coalition of the wealthy and the white working class.

Those are big things. But I think we needed something else to create Trump. We needed to eliminate reality.

In our era it started with right wing AM talk radio and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — not least Fox News. Today it manifests as a torrent of consensual hallucination racing across Facebook. Most of America, especially the non-college, live in world of dreams with only a loose connection to reality. I didn’t see that coming.

How can we correct this? The economics are not good. It takes money to do run the New York Times, almost nothing to create a false news story. The New York Times costs $200 a year — only the elite can read it now. Breitbart is free — supported by AARP ads.

Making knowledge available only to the elite is not a great survival strategy.

See also:

• The Year Knowledge Died. Conservative source, via Clark Goble. 11/2016
• How Social Media Got Weaponized—War in the Digital Age - The Atlantic 10/2016
• Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality 11/2016

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.