Tag Archives: U.S. politics

Nate Silver weighs in

Nate Silver has launched his general election forecast page. He gives Hillary about an 80-20 chance of winning. He has a long discussion post about it here. I found this last paragraph interesting, where he relates a 20% chance of winning to a baseball game:

A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chancethat the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.

It’s an interesting way of thinking about risk. Let’s say your favorite team is in game 7 of the World Series, down by a run in the top of the eighth. The game is insanely late on the east coast as they always are, and you have to do something important early the next morning, like interview for a job or operate heavy machinery. Do you turn the TV off? No, of course not, you stay tuned.

June 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • Coral reefs are in pretty sad shape, perhaps the first natural ecosystem type to be devastated beyond repair by climate change.
  • Echoes of the Cold War are rearing their ugly heads in Western Europe.
  • Trump may very well have organized crime links. And Moody’s says that if he gets elected and manages to do the things he says, it could crash the economy.

3 most hopeful stories

  • China has a new(ish) sustainability plan called “ecological civilization” that weaves together urban and regional planning, environmental quality, sustainable agriculture, habitat and biodiversity concepts. This is good because a rapidly developing country the size of China has the ability to sink the rest of civilization if they let their ecological footprint explode, regardless of what the rest of us do. Maybe they can set a good example for the rest of the developing world to follow.
  • Genetic technology is appearing to provide some hope of real breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
  • There is still some hope for a technology-driven pick-up in productivity growth.

3 most interesting stories

inequality and mobility

The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has an interesting study of income mobility in the U.S. It appears to be true that the poorest families tend to stay poor (between 2003 and 2013, 64% of families in the poorest 20% stayed in the poorest 20%), while the richest tend to stay rich (72% of families in the richest 20% stayed in the richest 20%). Looking at the table if you are in one of the middle quintiles, (between the 20th and 80th percentiles, your chances of moving up or down to the adjacent quintile look to be about even. This measure of mobility increased somewhat in the 80s and 90s, but appears to be on the decline since then. Mobility is harder to measure across generations, but it does appear to be much higher than within a single generation, which you would expect. Mobility in the U.S. is lower than in other developed countries, both the northern European socialist ones where you might expect it, but also the Anglo-American peers like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, although the UK, France, Italy are in the same ballpark as the U.S. If you’re interested in this, stop reading my wordy description and go look at the data!

prime age males

Here’s an interesting report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers on the long-term decline in labor force participation by “prime age males”, defined as between the ages of 25 and 54 (this seems like a pretty broad definition, I’m glad to know I’m still in my prime!).

For more than sixty years, the share of American men between the ages of 25 and 54, or “primeage men,” in the labor force has been declining. This fall in the prime-age male labor force participation rate, from a peak of 98 percent in 1954 to 88 percent today, is particularly troubling since workers at this age are at their most productive; because of this, the long-run decline has outsized implications for individual well-being as well as for broader economic growth. A large body of evidence has linked joblessness to worse economic prospects in the future, lower overall well-being and happiness, and higher mortality, as well as negative consequences for families and communities…

• Participation has fallen particularly steeply for less-educated men at the same time as their wages have dropped relative to more-educated men, consistent with a decline in demand. o In recent decades, less-educated Americans have suffered a reduction in their wages relative to other groups. From 1975 until 2014, relative wages for those with a high school degree fell from over 80 percent of the amount earned by workers with at least a college degree to less than 60 percent. • CEA analysis using State-level wage data suggests that when the returns to work for those at the bottom of the wage distribution are particularly low, more prime-age men choose not to participate in the labor force: o The correlation is strongest at the bottom of the wage distribution: at the 10th percentile, a $1,000 increase in annual wages, or a roughly $0.50 increase in hourly wages for a full-time, full-year worker, is associated with a 0.13 percentage-point increase in the State participation rate for prime-age men. • This reduction in demand, as reflected in lower wages, could reflect the broader evolution of technology, automation, and globalization in the U.S. economy…

Conventional economic theory posits that more “flexible” labor markets—where it is easier to hire and fire workers—facilitate matches between employers and individuals who want to work. Yet despite having among the most flexible labor markets in the OECD—with low levels of labor market regulation and employment protections, a low minimum cost of labor, and low rates of collective bargaining coverage—the United States has one of the lowest primeage male labor force participation rates of OECD member countries. • U.S. labor markets are much less “supportive” than those in other OECD countries. The United States spends 0.1 percent of GDP on so-called “active labor market policies” such as jobsearch assistance and job training that help keep unemployed workers connected to the labor force, much less than the OECD average of 0.6 percent of GDP, and less than nearly every other OECD country. The contrast in participation rates reveals a flaw in the standard view about the tradeoffs between flexibility and supportive labor policies. • Another unique feature of the U.S. experience has been the rapid rise in incarceration, especially affecting low-skilled men. o By one estimate, between 6 and 7 percent of the prime-age male population in 2008 was incarcerated at some point in their lives. o These men are substantially more likely to experience joblessness after they are released from prison and in many States are legally barred from a significant number of jobs.

So if you are going to let companies hire and fire at will, which overall is a good thing in my view, you need to have programs to education and train workers, not just as children but to retrain and upgrade their skills throughout their adult lives. Globalization and accelerating technological change make this need even more urgent.

Trumponomics

Moody Analytics has tried to take what Trump says and predict what would happen to the economy if he could actually do what he says.

Broadly, Mr. Trump’s economic proposals will result in a more isolated U.S. economy.
Cross-border trade and immigration will be significantly diminished, and with less trade and immigration, foreign direct investment will also be reduced. While globalization has created winners and losers in the U.S. economy in recent decades, it contributes substantially to the ongoing growth of the U.S. economy. Pulling back from globalization, as Mr. Trump is proposing, will thus diminish the nation’s growth prospects.

Mr. Trump’s economic proposals will also result in larger federal government deficits and a heavier debt load. His personal and corporate tax cuts are massive and his proposals to expand spending on veterans and the military are significant. Given his stated opposition to changing entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, this mix of much lower tax revenues and few cuts in spending can only be financed by substantially more government borrowing.

Driven largely by these factors, the economy will be significantly weaker if Mr. Trump’s economic proposals are adopted. Under the scenario in which all his stated policies become law in the manner proposed, the economy suffers a lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office (see Chart). By the end of his presidency, there are close to 3.5 million fewer jobs and the unemployment rate rises to as high as 7%, compared with below 5% today. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, the average American household’s after-inflation income will stagnate, and stock prices and real house values will decline.

Trump and organized crime

Here’s a long article on BillMoyers.com, with links to a lot of other articles, about Donald Trump’s alleged mob links.

While there are some financial subjects on which the media has dared to grill the billionaire — ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last month got Trump to deliver a blunt “no” when he asked about the Republican nominee-apparent’s repeated refusal to release his recent tax returns, something every other recent presidential candidate has done — there has been remarkably little interest shown in some of Trump’s less-than-savory connections.

One of the exceptions is Johnston, who, over the course of 27 years, has had ample occasion to pay attention to Trump’s finances and mob ties. He was not the first investigative reporter to do so. In 1992, Johnston favorably reviewed the longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s highly unauthorized biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, which, in Johnston’s words, “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.” As Barrett said not long after Trump declared for the presidency last year, Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Barrett updates his treatment of Trump in a new digital edition calledTrump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention…

Beyond ABC News’ Ross, TV has been even less eager to press inquires about Trump’s history of relations with organized crime. Nor have questions of Trump’s mob ties been much explored in other major news outlets. A notable exception: Johnston, who, in Politico last month, raised yet more questions. One was why Trump relied on ready-mix reinforced concrete construction (mob-controlled) to build his eponymous Fifth Avenue tower and subsequent New York buildings, although steel girders were the usual choice. Another was why, when seeking a license to build casinos in Atlantic City, Trump received special treatment from New Jersey gaming investigators, “Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators,” Johnston wrote, “Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on.” Wayne Barrett calls Trump Tower “a monument to the mob.” He writes of the “sweetheart deals” that delivered the concrete, and the special tax abatements that have continued to roll in for Trump. There, so far as the public is concerned, the matter has rested. Why do the major media, ordinarily eager to fight for their own angles on big stories, lag? Why do the dogs not bark and the chambers not echo?

where the money goes

I am somewhat familiar with how the U.S. federal government spends its money, but it is still instructive to see it broken down occasionally. Once social security, medicare, and interest are taken care of, the discretionary spending that is left is less than a third of the total. Of that, more than half is military. Veterans’ benefits make up another sizable chunk, nuclear weapons are partially funded under the energy budget, and it is not clear (to me at least) where intelligence and homeland security funding fall, so the real total for military and security is even larger than it appears.

May 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

What is the U.S. up to in Japan?

Well, Marines and sailors on Okinawa are raping and killing women, as usual. And President Obama is visiting Hiroshima and sort of mentioning but not really apologizing for dropping nuclear weapons on it.

I think it’s nice that Obama visited Hiroshima. I thought it would have been a nice place to announce a major nuclear stockpile reduction effort early in his second term. Here’s what he had to say about that:

among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

That’s a bit disappointing to me. We could drastically scale them back, creating good will around the world and giving us some moral high ground to work with other countries to scale them back. We could tackle the emerging and possibly far scarier biological weapons threat. We could scale back our footprints in Japan and Korea and leave those rich, modern, democratic nations to provide for their own defense while staying engaged with them through trade and diplomacy.

I am an Obama fan though. He is someone who chose to do as much good as he could within the constraints of the system. It is possible that if he had pushed the system harder he might have gotten more done, but it is also possible it would have been counterproductive. We will never know. I like his last minute attempts to begin the process of putting some thorny historical issues to bed with Cuba, Iran, Japan, and Vietnam. In Vietnam in particular I am struck by how little ill will the public seems to bear us, when they might have the most reason to of all those countries. These efforts build some good will internationally and provide a better starting point for future leaders to build on than the same old stale Cold War positions we’ve had for the last 50 years.