Tag Archives: U.S. politics

November 2016 in Review

Sometimes you look back on a month and feel like nothing very important happened. But November 2016 was obviously not one of those months! I am not going to make any attempt to be apolitical here. I was once a registered independent and still do not consider myself a strong partisan. However, I like to think of myself as being on the side of facts, logic, problem solving, morality and basic goodness. Besides, this blog is about the future of our human civilization and human race. I can’t pretend our chances didn’t just take a turn for the worse.

3 most frightening stories

  • Is there really any doubt what the most frightening story of November 2016 was? The United Nations Environment Program says we are on a track for 3 degrees C over pre-industrial temperatures, not the “less than 2” almost all serious people (a category that excludes 46% of U.S. voters, apparently) agree is needed. This story was released before the U.S. elected an immoral science denier as its leader. One theory is that our culture has lost all ability to separate fact from fiction. Perhaps states could take on more of a leadership role if the federal government is going to be immoral? Washington State voters considered a carbon tax that could have been a model for other states, and voted it down, in part because environmental groups didn’t like that it was revenue neutral. Adding insult to injury, WWF released its 2016 Living Planet Report, which along with more fun climate change info includes fun facts like 58% of all wild animals have disappeared. There is a 70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “mega-drought” lasting 35 years or longer this century. But don’t worry, this is only “if emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked”. Oh, and climate change is going to begin to strain the food supply worldwide, which is already strained by population, demand growth, and water resources depletion even without it.
  • Technological unemployment may be starting to take hold, and might be an underlying reason behind some of the resentment directed at mainstream politicians. If you want a really clear and concise explanation of this issue, you could ask a smart person like, say, Barack Obama.
  • According to left wing sources like Forbes, an explosion of debt-financed spending on conventional and nuclear weapons is an expected consequence of the election. Please, Mr. Trump, prove them wrong!

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

lots more on Trump and infrastructure

There is a lot being written about Trump’s infrastructure plans – here are two roundup articles from City Observatory and The Week. Between them, they cite a total of 16 newspaper, magazine, academic, and political articles by my count. About 5 seem positive on balance and 11 negative. You could argue that I don’t pick the most un-biased sources, but let’s be honest, even if the left-leaning press adds some political spin, they still cover basic scientific and economic facts much better than outlets like Fox News.

Anyone who flies, drives, uses water, electricity, or gas, or visits public buildings knows the country’s infrastructure needs investment. Especially if you travel internationally, the state of our infrastructure is one of the first shocks that hits you when you return home. Economists seem to be in near consensus that better infrastructure would help our private sector be more efficient and competitive, and that infrastructure can be a good way to stimulate employment and income growth during a recession.

The negative articles raise a few issues. Some are ideological – some people just hate the idea of private money being invested, while others hate the idea of public money being invested. We need to get over these ideological biases and look for solutions that work, which are likely to be a blend. A little market discipline can help investors make good decisions about which risks are worth taking on, while public investment can help get projects with high social and environmental value over the financial hump.

The concerns that seem most valid to me have to do with special interests and lobbyists capturing these government funds just like they do in other industries like health care, energy, and security. Another thing that happens is that when funds are distributed through the states, politicians from rural areas are often able to steer investments away from the population centers where they would do the most economic and social good. This happens with highways, and also with water and sewer infrastructure loans through state revolving funds, which are only loans (not grants) to begin with. None of this results in efficient, high economic return investments any more than straight-up public investment would.

Perhaps my biggest concern, which the articles don’t touch on much, is that the country has no plan for what smart, efficient infrastructure would look like. If we had such a plan, we could target any new funds to the right kinds of projects. Market discipline is not a substitute for planning.

So call me an infrastructure advocate, but a skeptic that the U.S. government is going to do it the right way. My prescription would be a constitutional amendment clarifying that free speech only applies to humans and getting the lobbyists and campaign contributions under control, a comprehensive planning approach to all kinds of infrastructure, how they tie together and what they should look like over the next 50 years, and an implementation plan that targets funding through planning organizations in major metropolitan areas, leveraging federal and local public and private funds for the most economic, social, and environmental good.

And I know I’m dreaming. Maybe Trump will get an infrastructure bank done, that would be something tangible and useful at least.

Obama on technological unemployment

In his New Yorker interview, Obama also had a few things to say about technological unemployment.

Trump had triumphed in rural America by appealing to a ferment of anti-urban, anti-coastal feeling. And yet Obama dismissed the notion that the Republicans had captured the issue of inequality. “The Republicans don’t care about that issue,” he said. “There’s no pretense that anything that they’re putting forward, any congressional proposals that are going to come forward, will reduce inequality. . . . What I do concern myself with, and the Democratic Party is going to have to concern itself with, is the fact that the confluence of globalization and technology is making the gap between rich and poor, the mismatch in power between capital and labor, greater all the time. And that’s true globally.

“The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”

One thing I am going to really miss about Obama is the way he has the ability to really understand and articulate the issues facing our country and world so well. I don’t expect that from Trump or the people he is appointing. I would be perfectly happy to be proved wrong.

exit polls

I hate the election outcome, and yet you won’t find me out in the streets protesting just because I’m a sore loser. You might find me out in the streets if and when the new administration starts taking immoral actions, such as denying people access to health care, reversing progress on climate change, or endangering the stability of the international financial system.

I don’t doubt for a second that there are a lot of errors and inefficiencies in the U.S. election system. That is because it is so decentralized and disorganized. I doubt it is hackable on a broad scale though, just because it is so decentralized and disorganized. The fact that the results were so consistently surprising in so many states to me is further evidence that the polls and exit polls were just biased.

The exit polls are just weird though, as Jonathan Simon points out. The election result is different from the pre-election polls by several percentage points in Trump’s favor. One explanation that is consistent with the facts is that the way “likely voter” was defined by the pollsters was wrong. In other words, enough “unlikely voters” turned out to deliver the election to Trump.

This logic is a little harder to assign to exit polls though. Exit polls are supposed to be a random sample of people who actually voted. The exit polls in this election were very consistent with the pre-election polls, and very inconsistent with the vote count. What could explain that? Either the sample of people who actually voted has to be biased, or people have to have lied on a large scale, and in a very consistent and biased way.

I don’t have the answer. I think we need to accept these election results and move on. But a thorough review of the process to make sure it is as transparent and verifiable as possible in the future would be a great idea.

70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “megadrought”

According to USA Today,

A group of researchers estimated in a new study published Wednesday that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, the odds of a monster drought ravaging the region for 35 years or longer this century would be between 70 percent and 99 percent, depending on a range of precipitation scenarios.

On the flipside, the scientists found that if steps are taken to aggressively reduce greenhouse gases, the risks of a decades-long drought could be cut nearly in half…

The researchers found that under a “business-as-usual” emissions scenario, the risk of a decades-long drought would be 90 percent in the southwestern U.S. if precipitation is unchanged. If there’s a modest increase in precipitation, the region would still face a 70 percent risk of a megadrought by the end of the 21 century. And if precipitation decreases under that warming scenario, the scientists estimated the risk at 99 percent.

Nice job, states like Utah and Arizona, voting to go back to “business as usual” just when, after 40 years of inertia when we already should have known better, we were taking some modest steps in the right direction. Perhaps your neighbors in Colorado, New Mexico (not to mention Old Mexico), and California have reasons to be less than happy with you.

technological unemployment

This New York Times Magazine article about an American returning home after living abroad is mostly fluff, but it did contain these few interesting paragraphs on technological unemployment.

One day, I drove down Highway 101 to Silicon Valley to meet Reid Hoffman, a partner at the venture-capital firm Greylock and the chairman of LinkedIn, the professional-social-networking company, which was then in the process of being sold to Microsoft for $26.2 billion. Hoffman founded LinkedIn the same year I left for Beijing; now he was a billionaire. He is politically active, having supported and advised Obama and raised money for and donated money to Hillary Clinton. I mentioned how the election had become a referendum of sorts on globalization and trade, yet there had been little discussion about the next big earthquake — artificial intelligence, or the approaching world of self-driving cars, smartphones that can diagnose a melanoma and much more. Globalization may have ravaged blue-collar America, but artificial intelligence could cut through the white-collar professions in much the same way.

Hoffman said the reactions to artificial intelligence range from utopian to dystopian. The utopians predict huge productivity gains and rapid advances in medicine, genetic sequencing, fighting climate change and other areas. The dystopians predict a “Robocalypse” in which machines supplant people and, possibly, threaten humanity itself. “My point of view,” he said, “is that it is a massive transformation and does really impact the future of humanity, but that we can steer it more toward utopia rather than dystopia with intelligence and diligence.”

Either way, another major economic shift is coming, perhaps sooner than people realize. Hoffman said that many of the jobs in today’s economy will change fundamentally during the next 20 years. On the same day I met with Hoffman, Uber announced a pilot program to test self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. It also bought a company developing self-driving trucks. “We have to make sure that we don’t have a massive imbalance of society by which you have a small number of people that own the robots and everyone else is scrambling,” he said.

If the current political upheaval in the U.S. and elsewhere is caused by the onset of technological unemployment, we could truly be in trouble, because not only is it going to get worse, it is being completely misdiagnosed. When an illness is misdiagnosed, it can be treated in ineffective or even completely counterproductive ways. If underemployment caused by technological progress is the root of our current problems, the solutions have to lie in providing people with the skills they need to work with the new technology, helping people to build an ownership stake in the technology, lowering barriers to startups and innovators, and providing a safety net for those still left behind through no fault of their own. Instead, we are talking about subsidizing outdated technologies and industries, blaming mythical internal and external enemies for our problems, and removing the limited safety net we have fought so hard to build up until now.

Washington State carbon tax voted down

I wrote recently about a carbon tax referendum in Washington State. Sadly (in my view), it was voted down.

The carbon tax initiative (I-732) garnered only 42 percent of the vote in Washington State. The tax was supposed to be revenue neutral by lowering the state sales tax by 1 cent and provide tax rebates of up to $1,500 per year to 460,000 low-income households. The initial $25 per ton would have boosted the price of gallon of gas by about 25 cents, and added 2.5 cents to each kilowatt-hour of coal-fired electricity, and 1.25 cents to electricity generated by natural gas. Interestingly, the proposal which aimed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide that are contributing to man-made global warming was opposed by many leading environmentalist groups. Why? Largely because of the tax’s revenue neutrality. The climate activists wanted to use the revenues to “invest” in various projects such as subsidizing solar and wind power schemes, mass transit and job training for folks put out of work by climate policies.

It’s unfortunate. Let’s review: Taxes on externalities (which occur when the activity of Group A results in a profit while unfairly imposing a cost on Group B) are a good thing for at least three reasons. First, they give Group A to engage in less of the offending activity because they now have to pay the cost rather than imposing the cost on someone else. Second, if Group A decides the activity is still worthwhile, revenue is raised for the government which it can spend on some worthy cause, like helping Group B. Third, the revenue raised by taxing bad things can be used to reduce taxes on good things, like work and savings and investment and making a profit without hurting other people. All this is good for people and the economy as a whole. The only party hurt is Group A, which had no right to profit at everyone else’s expense in the first place. The reason we don’t do this more is that Group A is able to use some of its profits to buy off politicians and mount propaganda campaigns to convince the public to vote against their own interests.

Washington State’s carbon tax vote

Washington State voters are considering a carbon tax. The proceeds would be used to offset other taxes, making it revenue neutral. This could be a national model, if we weren’t all so allergic to the word tax.

The proposal is strikingly simple and refreshingly bipartisan. According to Yes on I-732.org, I-732 would:

  • Directly address climate change by adding a tax of $25/ton on carbon emissions;
  • Reduce the statewide sales tax by 1%;
  • Add a tax credit of $1500/year for low-income households; and
  • Lower the Business and Occupation (B&O) tax on manufacturers to .001%.

This type of fossil fuel tax would be first of its kind in the United States, though it has been implemented elsewhere. According to the World Bank, 15 countries currently tax carbon. Sweden’s policy is the most aggressive, at rate of $168/ton. Closer to home, a carbon tax has been in place in British Columbia, Canada, since 2008, which has resulted in a 5-15% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. BC’s tax is much lower than Sweden’s, at a rate of $30/ton.

my election prediction

I have a little election prediction spreadsheet. It takes the poll averages for swing states as reported by RealClearPolitics, generates a random number for each with a 4% standard deviation, and runs 1,000 trials in about 10 seconds. Go to Nate Silver or other online sites for a much more professional and sophisticated approach. I do this just for fun and to help me understand how the system works. So without further ado, here is how I think Tuesday night might unfold. The poll closing times are the earliest closing times in a given state according to ballotpedia, so you would expect some numbers to start tricking in at that point. I’m writing Sunday around noon, just in case there is some big development between now and Tuesday.

Based on RealClearPolitics, if both candidates win the states they lead in right now, Hillary would win with 298 electoral votes to 240 for Trump. Nate Silver predicts 290-247, and puts the odds at 65-35. Betfair puts it at 323-215 and the odds at 80-20. My spreadsheet comes up with an electoral college average of 295-243 and odds of 85-15.

Here is one way the evening could unfold to get in the ballpark:

First, I assume Clinton and Trump have both won all the states considered relatively safe by RealClearPolitics. This means Hillary starts off with 218 and Trump with 165. Seems unfair, doesn’t it? But these are the demographics, and why the breathless media coverage of swing states is a bit misleading. If Trump is leading half the swing states on a given day, that doesn’t mean the race is anywhere near tied.

7:00 p.m. EST

  • Results start to trickle in from Florida, Georgia, Virginia and New Hampshire.
  • The night starts off with a bang for Clinton with wins in Florida and Virginia.
  • Trump gets Georgia and New Hampshire.
  • Clinton leads 247-185.

7:30 p.m. EST

  • North Carolina and Ohio
  • I’ll throw both to Trump.
  • 247-218. Getting slightly interesting.

8:00 p.m. EST

  • Pennsylvania and Michigan
  • I don’t think Trump has a realistic shot at either. They go to Clinton.
  • 283-218. It’s over!

9:00 p.m. EST

  • They split Arizona (Trum) and Colorado (Clinton).
  • 292-229

10:00 p.m. EST

  • Iowa and Nevada
  • I’ll throw both to Trump. I’ll also throw him New Mexico to look like slightly less of a loser.
  • 292-246

This is what I expect to happen. Of course, the votes get counted slowly, and we can pretend there is some suspense as they are counting votes in states that are not expected to be close. Still, I think we might all be in bed at 10 p.m. on the east coast knowing who the next President. And this is what I want to happen. Although I would enjoy some suspense on some level, rationally I know it is better not to live in interesting times.

For Trump to win, a lot of unlikely things have to fall into place, but here is a plausible scenario: Trump starts the night with a huge bang, winning Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Clinton gets Virginia. Trump would be up 252-218. By the way, I gave Clinton New Mexico to start off this time. Clinton wins Pennsylvania and Michigan, going up 254-252. They split Arizona and Colorado (263-263!). Trump gets Iowa and goes up 269-263. It comes down to Nevada. Right now it looks like Nevada is reasonably solid for Clinton, so it comes down to a 269-269 tie. The House of Representatives casts the deciding vote, picking Trump for President. The National Guard is deployed in some states to ensure order.

So Florida is a big deal, obviously. We knew that.