It sounds like you're saying that you find Marxism interesting as a philosophy, not necessarily that you think his philosophy is superior and should be enacted. If that is right, that makes sense. Or am I reading you wrong?
It sounds like you're referring to Marx's position that history will naturally progress to a point of global capitalism wherein all identity markers other than class will fade away, leaving just the proletariat on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other, and that at that point the revolution will occur and the dictatorship of the proletariat be established. Am I reading you right? If so, I think we're at my point of confusion, namely, how do you account for the fact that instead of the above occurring, the USSR and China had national largely non-industrial worker based communist revolutions that led to great famine and great oppression? I really can't wrap my head around a promotion of communism that doesn't account for what seem to be massive failures on its part. If your answer was, oh, China and the USSR didn't practice true Marxism I'd accept that as an answer but elsewhere you seem to indicate to me that you approved of Maoist tactics so am I right in assuming you do think China and the USSR are good models of communism?
It's rooted in economic ideas that were obsolete long before Marx, such as labor theory of value. Many new concepts such as marginal utility theory, economic calculation problem and comparative advantage principle are needed to understand modern economy and value of highly compensated middlemen.
Why should anyone look at centuries old philosophies that proved disastrous every time they were attempted? Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution without having personally experienced the hardship of pre-industrial living. He would have made great friends with the Unibomber. Now this post gives us new ideas to think about and try with possibly good results.
"Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution"
There are lots of bad takes on Marx, but this is easily the most hilarious.
Go read the Manifesto. It's brimming with paeans to early capitalism, touting its superiority to feudalism and praising it for abolishing "the idiocy of rural life" etc.
Later on, Marx did become concerned with the effects of capitalism on the natural environment, calling attention to what he termed the "metabolic rift". But he was faaaaaar from a luddite or a reactionary, and his theory of Communist revolution requires capitalist development, "without which want is merely made general".
Furthermore, it's hard to say how much "voting a bit more for Trump in 2020 vs 2016" is any indication of appeal in 2020 rather than an indication of *lack* of the *extreme* anti-appeal he had to these people in 2016, or the special appeal Obama had in 2012 and 2008.
There might be a few places where Trump did as well among minorities as Bush did in 2004 (I'm thinking mainly in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami), but those are rare.
"Listen, the most true truth is that even though the elites act like they care about you when they're on CNN, behind closed doors they laugh at you. They call you "rurals" in the exact tone you imagine. 'The rurals.' They steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and tell you they earned it by working harder. I've seen it and I can't stand it anymore."
That's the thing, right? What is the difference between a futures market and a sufficiently deep casino book that somehow manages to capture somewhat abstract predictions? It feels to me like the more it becomes unique, the shallower and less predictive it gets. There are plenty of real instruments that capture questions like "what will the inflation rate in the US be in 10 years" and "the electric car is the future of transportation" that seem way more robust than something that is just something like the Simon/Ehrlich bet writ large.
I mean, the GameStonks thing shows that a few billionaires like Elon Musk are able to manipulate markets *even more* than the hedge funds, by making people do it for the lulz.
So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?
If the actual numbers don't matter, why did you say $2.3 billion from 25 people? If the actual numbers don't matter why do you not want to say the full amount?
There's been research on this. The causality goes from politicians supporting certain policies to donations going to them. When politicians decide not to run for any more terms, they don't become less accomodating to the donor class. Garett Jones has been pointing out that they actually veer against populism when not "in cycle".
That's a very interesting paper! Thanks for sharing.
Although the paper does define economic elite as in the 90th percentile, so were talking about households that make $160,000+/year which is a bit different than billionaires controlling things. I'm also surprised they looked at income instead of wealth when defining their elite. Even more strange they define the average citizen's preferences as being the 50th percentile. So instead of looking at the aggregate preferences of everyone outside the elite class or everyone altogether, they are just looking at a specific middle band.
Additionally organized interest groups were split into two categories: business interest groups and mass public interest groups. I would think mass public interest groups would be a close representation of the mass public feelings, but I suppose a lot of people don't get involved in mass public interest groups. (Which fits in with what the Vox article says below.)
It looks like the first accusation is basically of p-hacking. Something we sadly see regularly today, especially in social sciences. Of the 1,779 bills in the dataset, the economic elite and the average American agreed on 1,594, leaving only 185 bills to examine the difference between them. There's some more crunch in the article itself and a rebuttle from the authors of the original paper.
By the way, I never said I thought democracy was that policy is set based on the wishes of the voters, and either you made a mistake by claiming that or are being deceptive here.
There are plenty of people willing to do it. All you have to do is lie incessantly to your constituents, say in Congress for a couple decades, and you'll have amassed a decent amount of wealth. If you aren't willing to do it, the elites can just find somebody else.
I’m not understanding what your point is. Is this oredicated on the premise that Democrats are better for the working class? Or are you arguing against the system in general. How is the article anti-white, please.
Part of the conflict theory article was about realizing he needed to learn how to talk to conflict theorists. It looks like this is an explicit appeal to conflict theorists, so therefore should look like conflict theory.
It's a pitch to a political faction which is itching for conflicts. Scott thinks they've long had a mistaken approach and he's trying to smuggle in some of his preferences under the veil of a conflict he has placed them on one side of.
The post seems pretty explicit that this is a dog whistle:
"You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and “classism”."
The difference is the regular whistle is something that is said plainly and is taken as it said. The dog whistle is when somebody tried to imbue meaning that is supposedly there but people fail to see it, except the explainer and imagined secret target audience of the dog whistle.
For example, if you criticize somebody for being elitist, and somebody comes and says it's actually "dog whistle" for saying he's a Jew - i.e. you are actually secretly signalling your imaginary anti-Semitic adherents that the real meaning of your message is attacking Jews, but nobody else - except for example comrade Finnydo above - could see it. Of course, usually it's complete baloney, people who are really anti-Semitic just plain say so, and they are rarely shy about it. Pretty much nobody is construing a complex narrative of class and populism to just secretly tell "jews bad" - neither most of the people who think so are actually capable of such subterfuge anyway. But this way you can smear a person without bothering with any proof - how would you prove you didn't secretly mean "Jews"? There's no evidence you could ever present to disprove such an accusation.
" Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.
The "upper class" that Donald Trump belongs to is a very different "upper class" from Boston Brahmins and the 'upper crust' who go to operas and throw gallant balls. See Scott's previous post for a better explanation: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
I think there’s another level of irony in there. New York of the 20th century had a thing where putting on working-class mannerisms is an upper-middle habit.
So in Trump we have someone with some rich roots and some less-rich roots putting on the New York working man face in order to get their support; then he is viewed by non-New York upper-middle as actually “worker” (and a bunch of others thought so too.) Was he from the poor part of Queens? No. He may not be “Boston Brahmin” but that’s primarily because his grandfather and mother were more recent immigrants, so there wasn’t enough geologic time to go full Brahmin.
To get taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s New York people did that, acting the way they thought people would if they were raised over a bar and worked on a loading dock. It was a form of signaling. I saw the leftovers of it, growing up in the tri-state area. It was also an act of the imagination.
Of course it strawmans the other side. It's a description of a form of demagoguery that Scott is arguing would be more effective than the current form. He may also believe that it is more nearly correct, but we can't expect a political party to limit itself to fair arguments for its position.
The transition wasn't completely binary but looking at presidential elections after 1960 and before 1990 purely based on which states the Democrat won:
Democrats did relatively worse in the South in 64, 68, 72 (only won one state and it wasn't in the South), 84 (same), and 88.
In 1980 it was about the same in the South as in other regions (although the West was especially Republican).
The only year the Democrat did significantly better in the South than in the country as a whole was 1976, when the candidate (Carter) was a southerner.
So overall I think it's safe to say that while the Democrats were still competitive in the South after the 60s, they definitely weren't "the party of the South" anymore.
Thinking further you could definitely argue that the transition took a lot longer in congressional and state elections. But even then I think the 60s is a good estimate for when Democrats stopped being "the party of the South" even if they kept a strong presence there.
Adding an edit function would be helpful. It also might make the problem worse. Perhaps an edit function that allows people to click through to see the edits?
On the other hand, it demonstrates that some people have some residual sense of shame and reconsider intemperate things they have said on the Internets. I tend to think twice before I hit "post", but that's just me.
(B) Republican presidents did well in the south because they did well everywhere from 68 to 92, winning an average of more than 40 states per election. But if you look at the vote totals, they did worse in the south until the mid to late 80s, and the south didn't vote solidly for a republican until Bush in 2000.
Yes Republican dominance in the South didn't set in until the 90s. But I don't think you can really say the Democrats were "the party of the South" during a period where their presidential candidates were more likely to win non-Southern states than Southern ones.
but they weren't. in 68, demo/dixiecrats combined win the south. 76, democrats win the south. In 1980 and 88, republicans win almost everywhere, but all the most republican states are western. in 88 there are one or two republican states that are highly republican, and then the real shift happens over the next decade. the only exception is 1972.
In 64, practically the only states the Democrats lost were in the South. In 68, saying "the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case. It's true that the landslides in 72, 80, and 84 make it harder to draw conclusions but at the least those don't show a clear Democratic overperformance in the South.
And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South." And that stronger statement doesn't really seem to hold up after the early 60s.
> the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case.
Yes it is when you're claiming republicans won the south. 30% dixiecrat, 30% democrat and 40% republican is NOT republican dominance.
> And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South."
the statement is republicans didn't dominate the south until the 90s. dixiecrats were democrats, not republicans. They didn't call themselves the dixiecans, after all.
I had to clean up Uncle Norman's apartment after he dropped dead at the age of 90. He had been incontinent for a while. I hired professionals. 2 bedroom apt, say 1,000 sq. ft. $10/sq.ft. I am not complaining. It was a debt of honor, a family thing.
That's quite surprising to me. In the US at least there is still a large "degree premium" which is used to explain why so many people are going to college. Is that not the case in Ireland? If so do you still only have a small minority of 18 year olds going the college route or have you also seen the same level of explosion in demand for higher education?
I'm always a bit leery when people point to random well-made items from their grandparents time that still work trying to argue that things used to be better made.
it's survivorship bias on steroids. in 100 years time some kid will be showing off their grandfathers blender from 2020 and people will make wow noises about craftsmanship... while completely ignoring the million crappier blenders sold the same year that simply didn't survive till 2120.
You can buy some really nice fancy toasters even now that will probably last extremely well but most people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a toaster.
I don't think this is true now - but it might be in the future. I agree that the main reason some of our crappy plastic toasters might be around in 50 years will be, as you say, that we produce bloody millions of the things and they decay with a sort of radioactivity-style half-life such that in 50 years probably some will have survived by sheer luck.
But, I don't think that's the main reason 50-year-old toasters are around now. I think the reason is that 50 years ago appliances like toasters were made according to a vastly different design philosophy which yielded far more long-lived products than we make today despite our better technology:
1. Instead of failure-prone but super-cheap-to-produce microelectronics on printed-circuit boards, devices had comparatively-expensive but comparatively-simple electromechanical mechanisms that were repairable by the average tinkerer using standard parts and tools.
2. Instead of moulded plastic cases, devices were made from metal (and Earthed rather than double-insulated), which was much more sturdy. If there were plastic/Bakelite parts they were entirely cosmetic and non-load-bearing.
3. Instead of being cheap enough to be essentially disposable, appliances were something of an investment and were made repairable by default - screwed together rather than glued or plastic-moulded, colour-coded wires (and usually with wiring diagrams made available by the manufacturers - imagine asking the manufacturer for a wiring diagram for your radio nowadays!), and enough free space inside the casing to actually work on the thing.
By way of evidence, consider cars in Cuba. It's not owing to survivorship bias that all those 1950s Cadillacs are still running there. It's made possible by the design philosophy of those cars - in particular the commonly-available and hand-workable materials, the dramatically under-stressed low-revving low-compression engines, the repairable nature of the design, and the support provided by the manufacturer (in the form of thorough documentation, workshop manuals, standardised parts, etc. all made-available to the consumer). Good luck keeping a Tesla car running for seventy years!
Also consider the television repair business, made possible by both the repairable nature of the sets, and the manufacturer support in the form of manuals, spare parts, etc.; as manufacturers learned they could get away with making irreparable products and simply not supplying documentation or spare parts, this entire industry has practically ceased to exist.
Consider also the number of people nowadays who know how to change the oil in their car (or even for that matter change a spare wheel!), or to wire a new plug onto a domestic appliance, or to service their bicycle themselves, or to use a soldering iron, or (...)
I think the general principle might be that as things become cheaper to produce, they become more disposable, and as products become more disposable the less appetite consumers have for repairing them - or even adequately performing basic maintenance - and these two trends form a mutually-supporting cycle.
If you tried to sell a business model like Apple's or Tesla's (videlicet "You can't repair this yourself, you have to bring it to us - and only to us - and we will decide whether it shall be repaired or whether you must scrap it and buy a new one") to the generation that bought their transistor radios in kit form, wired plugs onto their own appliances, changed their own oil, etc. etc. there would have been absolute outcry!
Finally, for today's "nice toasters that cost hundreds of dollars": in my experience, such things don't cost hundreds of dollars because they are more repairable or even necessarily better build-quality. They're just flashier-looking and have more "features" (I use the term in a sense that "bagels fit in the slot" counts as a feature but "the element is user-replaceable" doesn't). I think probably the reasons for this are that A) to the demographic they're marketed-to, a £300 toaster is every bit as disposable as a £30 toaster is to you or me, and B) after this many iterations of the "manufacturers' slightly less repairable <-> consumers' slightly less appetite to repair" cycle, the people who buy £300 toasters have no greater desire or ability to maintain or repair their appliances, or to differentiate between high-build-quality and low-build-quality appliances, than a £30 toaster consumer.
Hey Internaut. What do you think is the supply demand situation for blue collar jobs in Ireland? How can we improve the prestige? What about the quality? How big of a mistake was removing the trade track from education?
Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. It's great to get your insight, and disappointing that I can't find that insight anywhere else.
I keep hearing the degree premium is as strong as ever here in the US... but that's because wages for people without degrees keep going down rather than going up for people with a Bachelor's.
A bunch of my friends work in cleaning in ireland and it's normally not the most lucrative job unless you own your own company and have some good connections.
The degree premium is going to be confounded all to hell, especially in ireland.
Since college admission works directly off exam points it tends towards ruthlessly and brutally fair and since most of the cost of tertiary education is covered by the state with extra grants for low income students ireland is unusually good at taking bright kids from poor backgrounds and tossing them into university which means that college gets even more strongly correlated with base IQ than in the states.
So when someone with a college degree makes more money it's hard to say if it's simply that bright people are both more likely to score well on exams and do well in the workforce because that confounds it all to hell.
throw in irelands strong tradition of exporting it's young people whenever there's an economic downturn where people with good credentials have an easier time getting jobs in the UK, America, Australia... etc
Please excuse my ignorance, but what are 3D Jobs? All I'm getting from Google are results about 3D graphics and the like, and since that has no obvious connection to window washing, I'm assuming it's a case of can't find the esoteric due to similarly named mainstream.
I totally get this. Last year we bought and renovated a home in an area where we have few contacts. After a series of disappointments getting estimates from the guys on the first page of search results, we started soliciting contractors by word of mouth. Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it; referrals give them as much business as they can handle.
Not only were they not plugged in online, they barely use available payment tools. Some didn’t even take credit cards. But they were licensed and insured and totally professional in their work.
The contractors on the first page of results all seemed to be following some sort of SEO playbook and might even have been using the same suite of materials and tools, marketed to guys who want to up their game. They made extensive use of glossy pamphlets and scheduling tools that seemed designed to calm my assumed fears as a suburban housewife that the guy ringing my doorbell at 10am would indeed be Frank from Electro Inc. They also charged up the wazoo compared to the guys sticking to phone calls and paper checks. We simply couldn’t afford most of the guys using the Advanced Professionalism Web Optimization Package. I assume those fancy 21st century business tools consume a lot of overhead.
It occurred to me that the economy is like an iceberg; a vast amount of important stuff is underwater and we probably have no idea how much based on the parts we can see analyzing web data. Now when I hear theories about how close we are to automating everything, I wonder if the people theorizing have ever had to find someone to rewire their house.
>Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it;
This isn't just a working-class phenomenon. My mother made wedding cakes for decades. Most of the sugarcraft guild have no websites of their own, they don't need them because they're craftspeople who don't lack for work.
Going round wedding faires with my SO apparently I'm not allowed look at the cakes any more because I couldn't keep the expressions off my face. Almost everything I've ever seen at a wedding faire nobody in my mothers circles would have ever allowed leave their workshop. Most of it would have scored badly in the childrens sections of sugarcraft competitions.
The people who constantly have to plug for business at faires are the people who are so poor at their job that they can't get anyone to recommend them to friends and so end up short of work.
I keep hearing upper-middle class people with houses saying "are there ANY plumbers who are sane, can arrive at the agreed hour, and clean up after? willing to pay for it."
So I imagine that the ones who DO meet the requirements are in high demand and earn WAY more than a librarian or teacher.
Surprisingly, it's the same in science and engineering.
The internet will tell you a lot, but the important parts are either hidden in experts' heads or siloed in corporate R&D. There is even some in physical books that nobody bothered to OCR. Once you go past undergrad level the availability of information drops off a cliff.
Are there any online sources you do recommend for getting exposure to a variety of interesting blue-collar information? I can follow a bunch of academics on Twitter and have a reliable source of neat studies, or read the blogs of programming nerds and learn about useful computer things, but I don't know of a good way to regularly encounter a breadth of content for real-life skillsets and jobs (or trust myself to evaluate which such things are genuinely good).
This. The practical knowledge that sustains modern life is rapidly disappearing. Fucking water and heat are going to become some sort of sci-fi cult mystery.
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
So where do the boat paraders, brand new $70k truck ralliers, and Trump supporters who flew to the Capitol riot, staying in fancy hotels - fit in with this white working class? Maybe these "petty exurban bourgeoise" are a small sliver of Trump's base. But they're certainly the most visible and vocal.
The core assumption of this piece, that social class can beat out economic class as a principle for organizing political coalitions neglects the role of near zero real interest rates in easing tensions within coalitions. Republicans don't have to face trade-offs between low taxes, high military spending, and social security benefits for their massive elderly base. Dems don't have to face a trade-off between high taxes on their upper middle-class base and expansive welfare for poor minorities. The coalition between all the rungs of a social class ladder is possible in a zero-interest rate vetocracy where tradeoffs are nil, and the state can't do anything ambitions for the bottom rung, but I don't see it enduring if those conditions change.
Well, the party that wants to right now is geographically disadvantaged, and you need to control a trifecta in order to do anything. Dems can only do whatever their 3-4 most conservative members will sign off on jamming through in reconciliation.
The trade offs are all still there though. Deficit spending on cheap credit gives you more money to allocate but it doesn't determine who gets it. We could raise taxes and have even more military spending or higher social security payments than we do now. We could cut those things and have even lower taxes than we do now.
And everything all kind of balances anyway. Sure, if you have low interest rates you can spend on credit, but then asset prices inflate. Housing costs more. The cost of living increases relative to wages.
The way out of high interest rates is to print the debt. That causes nominal prices and wages to increase (inflation), but the consequent higher interest rates cause asset prices, i.e. housing prices, to decline relative to wages. So now the working man pays more in taxes to fund social security without deficit spending, but spends less on rent. Cancels out. The retiree's social security check comes and they spend more on food and transportation but less on rent. Cancels out again.
The inflation also makes the coalition easier to hold, because nothing looks like a cut. You get a constructive spending reduction by just not increasing spending as fast as inflation. You get a constructive increase in revenues at the same tax rate because nominal wages increase relative to nominal assets and income/sales taxes are a percentage of wages/dividends and capital gains taxes are a percentage of the *nominal* asset price increase, so that inflation and high interest rates increases real government revenues without a nominal rate increase.
It's not obvious that this actually makes a coalition politically more difficult than low interest rates.
At that point, I feel like you've basically reduced class structure to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe and just renamed them in a way that's more palatable to Red Tribe.
Thats what it kind of always was, didn't you know?
The US doesn't only think of "Class" in terms of money. Some *behaviors* are trash, while others are better.
Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
If you blessed them with millions of dollars, they wouldn't be percieved differently.
Look at Trumps diet, or television habits. Until the democrats got the cue to stop mocking him for it, they did so constantly. Their mockery was aimed at unmistakable symbols of class, or a lack thereof.
McDonalds burgers, fries, and frappes? Those are what I eat, and they're awesome!
"~800-588-2300/ em-pire!" I used to hear that every morning on TV before going to school, or before my mom went to work. In my free time, I watch hours of TV. Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
> Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
For the purposes of this discussion? One group is overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, the other for Republicans. Either you think one group isn't voting their interests, or there's some fundamental difference in terms of their interests that isn't reflected by this analysis of class.
Or maybe the ability of Democrats to successfully culturally signal "anti racism" despite doing absolutely nothing to lift black people out of their socioeconomic position is the Right-wing version of "What the fuck is wrong with Kansas?".
It's really not that implausible that people vote against their individual interests. Jason Brennan's libertarian Against Democracy makes this point better than I do, but basically, think of it in terms of *individual incentives*. For each voter, their incentive to vote in their own interests is actually very low, since their chance of effecting the outcome is minimal. Almost certainly they could find something else to do with the half an hour it takes to vote that would have higher expected value. So it's not a priori implausible that people simply ignore their own interests in voting, since the consequences are very small. At this point, you might say 'well, why the hell do people bother voting at all then', but the answer is that people like the sense that they are performing their civic duty, that they are taking part in a big important community activity and expressing their moral identity, and voting is a very low-cost, highly visible way of doing all those things. But if that's why your voting, you'll get weird cognitive dissonance if you then try and pick the candidate who is best for you, rather than best for the nation/your community. The latter, I suppose, might lead to groups voting in the interest of the groups, even though the members aren't trying to vote in their individual interests. But Brennan provides a fair amount of empirical evidence that people tend to try and vote in the national interest specifically (though I have forgotten exactly what, and no doubt, like all social scientific evidence it could be challenged).
The idea that people vote against their own interests gets a bad rep, because it's associated with people patronizing their enemies, especially their lower class enemies, but that's a separate matter from whether it's true.
That does seem to be the fundamental paradox of the modern Republican party. I don't think they can realistically shed the class condescension, though.
> Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
They don't. It's a strawman. I'm from Tampa, I eat barbecue and fast food, and I love the Olive Garden. I can hear the tune of the ad you're referring to, and I've watched hundreds of hours of TV in recent months.
I am also a highly paid professional deep within the most ultraliberal bubble in the country. Never once, not on *any* occasion, has anyone I've met attacked me even implicitly for these traits.
' In the book, Vance describes his life at Yale as bewildering, since he was among the small number of students from poor backgrounds and constantly felt like he was playing catch-up, learning that Cracker Barrel is not actually fine dining and figuring out which fork to use. But he has mostly kind things to say about his fellow students and faculty:
Yale made me feel, for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue. Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio.
In the movie, though, Vance’s story plays out quite differently. After the emergency call to his girlfriend, J.D. sits at the dinner table with fellow students and attorneys from high-powered law firms. He is nervous. While making conversation, he says that he is from Ohio and that his grandfather moved there from Kentucky’s hill country to work in a steel mill.
A quiet falls over the table. Everyone glances at each other knowingly. Nobody says anything. They change the subject, while J.D. sits crestfallen and mortified.
I yelled at the screen when I saw that. (Yelling happened multiple times throughout the movie.) Reading Hillbilly Elegy, I feel some kinship with Vance. My people are not from Appalachia, but they’re working-class Northerners, by way of immigrants, potato farmers in Maine, and shoot-your-dinner-from-the-porch North Carolina rednecks. I too am the first in my nuclear family to go to college (on a massive scholarship), and to earn two master’s degrees I’ll be paying for until I retire. Growing up, Cracker Barrel was my favorite special-occasion restaurant.
But my alma mater is an elite institution. Most of my friends were well-off, though a lot of them didn’t realize that the things they took for granted — parents who could send money to them, cable TV, Pop-Tarts for breakfast — were far beyond my imagining. Like J.D., I often felt out of place.
And yet that’s exactly why this scene rang so false. It seems impossible that everyone at that table would take J.D.’s biographical note as embarrassing; instead, as Vance himself points out in his book, his background makes him intriguing, someone different from the usual bunch. '
Of course, a Vox writer is hardly an unbiased source on something like this, but Vance himself is a conservative.
The truth is that people work on two tracks with this kind of thing. When, for political reasons, they want to be mean about [outgroup] they will mock them for [outgroup] cultural norms. But when they actually meet someone from [outgroup] as an individual, they will generally refrain from hostility and try to be nice, and tolerant of difference, especially if politics doesn't come up.
But also, American liberals are actually well aware that classism is a thing and is bad: it's a central part of their mythology (I don't mean that term pejoratively) that Republicans are bad because they think the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and don't understand that their lives are hard.
You're insisting on applying a singular definition of class based on aesthetics. I don't think it's as versatile as you suggest. Look around this thread for how easily your definition gets coerced as 'the upper class is [the Cultural Other I Most Distrust]. I know They hate me, therefore I must hate Them'. Helpful.
At any rate, this view is already a clear central beat of Trumpism, which claims that our aesthetics and way of life is being destroyed from the top down by a nefarious, morally vacuous and conveniently abstract elite who hate god and love nothing more than a good abortion (the fact you make no effort to integrate either of these founding dogmas when discussing New Republican Aesthetics is a dead giveaway of your SF elitism, for lack of a better term)
So, I don't see anything new here, politically. Except the prediction market stuff, which I find marvelously ironic in a post mostly about class. Do you not perceive how the SF-based futurist technobabble crowd constitutes a very coherent class, much more convincingly than the formless latte-sipping blob you seek to conjure? Is it lost on you how classist you sound, in this regard, with claims like "$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems and anyone who disagrees is stuck in the past (trust me I understand this better than you, guess you need to be engineer-adjacent to get it)"?
Finally, I think this interacts with your earlier piece on "gay rights are civil rites" in interesting ways, and I hope you explore that intersection in the future.
But the futurist technobabble crowd isn't a prominent political class. They exist, but they aren't an organised bloc in the same way that poor evangelical whites without college degrees and rich coastal whites with college degrees are organised blocs that vote together and each hate the other.
"$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems" is only a class signal in a much more European, capital-versus-labour conception of classes than Scott is gesturing towards. If you wanted an American upper-class signal about technology, you'd go for something about algorithmic bias or the impossibility of solving complex social problems with technology.
I find the idea that the only help possible for the poor is UBI or welfare more than a bit paternalistic and condescending. And quite likely untrue. Trump's answer for that was protectionism, aka make work available. And he got a lot more voters for this than Democrats get for UBI - especially among this very demographic.
Hard to find literally anyone who hasn't had significant financial problems. That is quite literally the only growth sector of our economy; financial engineering to ruin lives for profit.
They're culturally working class, with enough money to splurge on a jacked up truck. Like the blog post implies, teachers can be poor but culturally upper-class because they like espresso and read the NYT. A construction worker making good money is culturally working-class. That extra money just means a bigger truck, more date nights at Applebees, and a monster-sized TV to watch wrestling and the NFL.
It seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion, but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
I will point out that the Conservatives have been able to appeal to the Working Class here in the UK, beating the party that's literally called "Labour" in key constituencies, so it's not implausible that the Republicans could end up using similar rhetoric. Of course, Brexit had a big role in that.
Indian immigrants to the UK typically arrived wealthier and more educated than than Pakistani's or Bangaladeshi's. But it's anyway not a recent phenomenon that British Asians vote conservative in reasonable numbers.
The premise is basically that the Tories have had success with Asian voters because they have a message that appeals to them, and policies that have done relatively well for them. And now there are quite a lot of Asians active within the party, including in top government positions.
I kept expecting it to pivot to "Here's what we can offer Asian people to try and win them back." That's what I wanted anyway (I'm not a Tory). But no... it pivots to "We should fight back by imitating the tactics of the Black Panthers".
Were they? My impression is they were part political party, part street gang. I don't recommend the melding of politics and organized crime, personally.
The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere. This is such an outrageous article. The author, Neha Shah, is getting ahead of herself to call this group names. I couldn't take her seriously and continue reading after a couple of paragraphs.
'The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere' What's your evidence for this (other than that one article)?
I have a suspicion-and it's only a suspicion, this could be totally off-base and unfair (I mean that sincerely not sarcastically), that what you *actually* are picking up on is that The Guardian hates Modi and the BJP, But that's unsurprising and not in itself indicative of prejudice against India: The Guardian is a liberal, anti-populist, secular, centre-left paper, so it hates all right-wing religious parties everywhere. It hates Modi for the same reason it used to hate George Bush. It's a straightforward ideological clash, and no doubt Modi doesn't like The Guardian much either, or its Indian equivalents.
>but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
Are you sure? The part about expertise sounds unconvincing. I also hope Scott is not this naive on racism or the Democratic party. Or the Republican party for that matter.
That was a criticism on how prediction markets cannot replace credentialism, since you still better rely on people with credentials to design something that works. Averaging over the opinions of lots of people regarding design patterns, etc. would achieve a worse result than listening to a few experts.
Sure, but I bet prediction markets could choose a great team for designing a good Mars rover. Though when you want to buy a thing you use different financial instruments.
No, but it might do a decent job predicting whether WMDs would be found in Iraq in substantial quantities, or whether raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment in low-cost-of-living places. Right now, we rely on experts for these predictions, and those experts are rewarded for agreeing with current consensus and their political side's preferred policies--prediction markets or tournaments or similar things might do a lot better.
Further, a lot of experts are long on credentials and short on actual knowledge--consider the large set of established findings in social science that have been overturned in the last few years. Or earlier, the psychological theories that led to deciding which criminals should be given leniency or which witnesses' testimony should not be doubted. An alternative is pretty appealing, even without the huge political/class bias of most social scientists.
I don't view expertise as credentialism. If you would generally talk about credentialism, I am so incredibly on your side, I think with a few exceptions (doctors, pilots, etc.) credentials are extremely overrated. But real expertise is key in my opinion. I don't think the prediction market is gonna come up with the theory of relativity.
After voting for Democrats all my life, I started voting for Republicans around 2018. This was the reason.
There is plenty not to like in both parties. The rampant snobbery of the Democrats I met in the bay area pushed me over the edge. I thought Democrats believed in evaluating people as individuals instead of members of groups. A long string of incidents in which people at my large Bay Area employer applied stereotypes to blacks and people from the south were eye opening.
I think our Canadian political divides may split this way too. We never had American or even British levels of polarization, but (socially) working class Western populism against Eastern cultural elites has been an important political dimension through multiple party shakeups and coalition realignments. Pity the federal Conservatives keep picking such bland leaders.
Even more: I bet A LOT of people only vote Democrat because voting Republican just isn't an option. Wasn't since I was a young and still no change in sight - there had to appear a total outsider to make them appealing outside their base.
This means there are a lot of people that don't really like Democrats and would be quite happy to vote something else, if only there was another option with its head out of its ass. At the very least Republicans should continue the separation from the ultra-religious - being just pro-religion instead of fundamentalists would open them up to huge swathes of new voters.
Sure, but I think I'd have preferred to read the entirely-serious version. I don't like reading a sloppy generalization and having to decode whether it's satire about political strategy, or genuine advice pitched in the language of politics. Or just a mistake.
Scott wants the Republicans to make a coherent argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition, which then prompts a Democratic crisis, to turn against virtue signaling, pseudo-meritocracy, and the like.
If either succeed, America as a whole gets better options.
It's a pretty aspiration, but IMO a sincere reading was far too shallow to convince me that "coherent [Republican] argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition" isn't an over constrained problem. More the opposite in fact, if it needed to take such liberties just to vaguely gesture in that direction.
People like Mike Rowe demonstrate exactly why any claims that the republican party is pro-working class are a calculated fiction. Rowe is bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, and a repeated theme in his advocacy is that workers need to suck up bad conditions, take personal responsibility for safety problems, and work hard until they find success. At the same time, he argues against unions, saying that they no longer serve a purpose, he argues against regulations- not just environmental regulation that could arguably cost jobs, but also basic health and safety regulation, because supposedly those should be the worker's responsibility to keep track of. He argues that there needs to be widespread vocational training to address a "skills gap", which is a discredited economic theory.
The thread unifying this is clear. Rowe's not an advocate for workers in industry, he's an advocate for owners of industry. His SWEAT pledge reads like a satirical wish list that a coal baron might have for the perfect obedient employee who'd never protest or organize. Reducing regulations might marginally reduce unemployment, but it'll make heavy industry a hell of a lot more profitable at the low cost of worker lives and our environment. And funneling young workers into vocational schools with the promise of well-paying jobs when they graduate isn't a way to give low-skill people jobs- it's to create a large non-union labor base in manufacturing and construction. It's not a coincidence that the ideological advocacy Rowe puts out just happens to align with the interests of the people who have given him massive amounts of money.
The "skills gap" idea is that high unemployment following the 2008 recession was the result of structural shifts in the labor market such that jobs were available but there weren't workers with the technical education and skills to do them. Rowe's website loudly states: "Consider the reality of today’s job market. We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. "
It was a popular idea when unemployment was high, because it seemed like a simple solution- just train a bunch of people in basic vocational skills, and they'd all get jobs! The problem was, the causal arrow was in the wrong direction. When unemployment is high and labor supply outstrips labor demand, employers raise skill requirements to artificially cut down on potential applicants. When unemployment is low, those skill requirements disappear, and employers become willing to train people on the job (Here's a simple summary: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance). There are some middle-skill jobs for which there are legitimate education requirements that can't be taught on-the-job, but those aren't the jobs for which Rowe is pushing vocational training. They're stuff like nursing, paralegals, or low-level management (for reference, "Job Polarization and US Worker Skills" from Brookings).
The point isn't that vocational training is secretly bad. Vocational training can be great! The point is that Rowe's advocacy favors the employers, not the employees. Training a bunch more people to weld won't lower unemployment when labor supply outstrips demand, because (as discussed in the studies in the Yglesias article) the skills requirements are a response to unemployment, not a driver of it.
This seems like the designers of roundabouts and mixed pedestrian/vehicle areas in Europe: make things less clearly (and falsely) safe to make people pay attention. But I don't know because I honestly haven't been in those conditions.
It's also good personal advice, safety first somehow found its way out of industrial litigation-avoidance language into *child rearing* and it's awful, creating fragile, neurotic people who grew up under helicoptering parents. Exposing yourself to risk and danger is valuable at the personal level, a great deal of misery can be laid at the feet of personal harm avoidance being elevated to a saintly value.
People like black and white. Activity X is safe or unsafe. If it's safe I don't have to worry. If it's unsafe I shouldn't do it. It can be stressful (probably in an evolutionarily adaptive way) to see something as containing some danger and doing it anyway. So I have complete empathy for people who are only willing or able to have binary safety functions.
One thing this thought makes me curious about are what about people who do things they acknowledge are dangerous. For example smokers or illegal drug users. From the ones I've known they don't usually come across as people who are holding a nonbinary view of safety of their activity. Are they externally saying X is unsafe but internalizing that it is safe, or can humans regularly go into a "X is unsafe and I feel it's unsafe in my bones, but I'm going to do it anyway, no big deal"?
Not that this line of questioning is probably very valuable, but I believe it's interesting to think about.
That article is a good argument for why "safety third" is a reasonable thing to say. It's also bullshit- a position Rowe retreats to when people point out that what he's arguing is that regulations are unnecessary and counterproductive. I'll quote Rowe himself, in his Ted talk:
Safety first is, I mean going back to OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society, what if OSHA got it wrong? I mean, I, this is heresy what I’m about to say, but what if, what if it’s really safety third? Right? I mean, I mean really. What I mean to say is I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I’m working with, but the ones who really get it done, they’re not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first. The business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done. And, you know, I’ll never forget up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the Deadliest Catch guys, which I, which I also work on in the first season. We’re about 100 miles off the coast of Russia, fifty foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I’d ever seen. And I was back with a guy lashing the pots down. So I’m 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it’s doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous. I scampered down. I go into the wheelhouse and I say with some level of incredulity, ‘Captain, OSHA?’ And he says, ‘OSHA? Ocean.’ And he points out there and, but in that moment what he said next can’t be repeated in the lower 48. It can’t be repeated on any factory floor, any construction site, but he looked at me and he said, ‘Son,’ and he’s my age by the way, he calls me son. I love that. He says, ‘Son, I’m the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich. You want to get home alive. That’s on you.’
Aside from the fact that the story is clearly at least in part made up (OSHA-Ocean, really?), it demonstrates what Rowe is really advocating when he says safety third. He's not saying that "safety first" makes people complacent. He's saying that "safety first" is wrong because it makes the bosses responsible for safety, that safety should be the responsibility of each individual worker, and the boss's responsibility is to make as much money as possible. The ridiculous thing is that Rowe gives this story as if it's some grand argument against regulation, when in fact it's a perfect example of why we need regulations requiring safety. Of course the boss doesn't want to bother keeping things safe! That's why we have regulations in the first place- so those bosses don't get people killed by focusing only on making profits!
"And for the rest of that day — safety first I mean, I was like — So, the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else’s responsibility as though it’s our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things."
I think you've got an is/ought issue going on here. He isn't saying the boss's responsibility OUGHT to be making money. He is saying the boss's responsibility IS making money. So if you're trusting your boss, you're screwed. I assume based on reading the other article I linked that this line of logic continues from there: if you're trusting your safety coordinator your boss hired, you're screwed. And if you're trusting some distant agency, you're screwed. I mean, that sure sounds like what he's saying when he talks about disdain for his show's safety coordinator.
I don't have an is/ought issue, because Rowe's position is that everything ought to be the way it is. That's what his SWEAT pledge is all about: "I believe the most annoying sounds in the world are whining and complaining. I will never make them. If I am unhappy in my work, I will either find a new job, or find a way to be happy". If you've got a problem with the status quo, suck it up or leave, and any problems you have are your own responsibility.
And the whole reorientation being a narrative fiction is baked into the cake, always has been. Pointing that out on the part of the democrats(that's their project is an upper class OP) for cynical gain is how you'd get the reorientation.
And youre right that Rowe's an aide to industry, but youre misunderstanding the people who throw money at him, they want people in the trades and industry, messages like Mike's help provide an alternative narrative to COLLEGE OR NOTHING that high schoolers get drowned in.
The beautiful thing about scott's message-plan is that it allows your protestation to be dissmissed as upper class gatekeeping. "You care more about the environment and telling miners to code than you do about letting working men do their fucking job"
They make interesting noises in this direction, but haven’t fully committed. See how they’ve reacted to Romney’s recent child tax credit proposal, for instance.
This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
He will call out companies on Twitter over the low wage they pay their workers, but he was *against* a far more modest minimum wage increase when it came to his own state a few years back (I mean I'm happy for people to change their mind, but I don't get any sense that's what happened here?).
To his credit, he *did* provide his own recent minimum wage proposal. But the structure is bizarre, and honestly makes no sense. It would place a nearly 100% marginal tax rate on people in certain settings, which really doesn't seem like what he or the GOP wants. But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
Hawley's Twitter account is certainly a strident critic of Big Tech... but what are the actual policies he is proposing? I mean this genuinely, I have tried to find it, and I can't find much. Maybe they were going to be in that book deal that got cancelled, but that's the thing... he's not a pundit, he's a senator! Proposing legislation is kinda part of his job. The main thing I can find is his amendment to Section 230, but do you genuinely think he wants to pass that? I don't think it would actually fix his major criticisms of the industry?
This is not criticism of "Why doesn't the senate get anything done??". That has nothing to do with Hawley. But I think it's genuinely important to not just take "gesturing towards policy on Twitter" as equivalent to taking real substantive policy ambitions. There are lots of senators I disagree with, but you can absolutely find the concrete policies they support or reject. Like, just to stick with the obvious polarizing choices, when you go find some Bernie Sanders proposal, like it or not , I am confident that Sanders would *love* to enact that agenda. Maybe it's a terrible idea, but he sincerely thinks these are policies that should be made into law.
When it comes to Hawley, I honestly don't think that's the right perspective to take. Does he sincerely want his Section 230 Modification to pass? He doesn't really act like a senator who does. All the analysis I can find on both sides of the aisle seems to think that policy is pretty bad, and doesn't fit his mission. But is that even the point?
In his "defense", you can just say "What's the difference? The Senate won't pass anything anyways, so what matters is your performance to the public, and the values you stand up for". And like, that's actually kinda true, which is why I think you should give even less weight to the idea that Hawley is genuine about these policies.
Sorry for the rant, I admit it just bothers me. I would so much rather the GOP have real policy ambitions that I disagree with than the fact that they seem to have largely given up on those ambitions. And I think it's important to draw your own judgment on whether or not to "believe" senators on the policies they advocate, not just what they say their stance is. I think Hawley is genuinely wary of the effects of Big Tech and other large corporations, and would like to reign in their power. I do *not* believe the policies he gestures towards on Twitter are actually the ones he wants to enact. I think he knows the Section 230 reform wouldn't accomplish anything like what he wants.
The welfare stuff is odd because I think some of his *interest* in that is genuine, but he just isn't acting like it matters to him (trying to make a deal, do serious proposals, and whatnot). Until I see real reason to think otherwise, I just assume he's just got too much pressure from the conservative movement, which is still so antagonistic to welfare, for it to be anything but posturing from him. But like, I'd love to be proven wrong, his GOP colleague introduced a big new child poverty bill, let's see the support, or a genuine alternative.
A higher minimum wage that is the same for cities and the countryside where the cost of living is lower harms rural communities. So it's pretty logical why he'd be opposed to that, given the voters that support them.
Has anyone proposed a minimum wage that differs by county, based on the cost of living?
I see this as a great opportunity for a bipartisan deal. The Dems get high minimum wages for the, often black, working class employees in the cities. Reps get a more economically competitive countryside.
But it seems strictly worse than not having a formula, because a formula will be all Seeing Like A State and factor in the wrong things with the wrong weights for all the usual reasons. Whereas the local governments are closer to their own economies and better understand them and it enables local control.
Though maybe the factual question of "are tariffs good?" isn't relevant to the piece, or maybe it is but the economists who route the above article are in the 75% of at-risk experts :)
Trade benefits these people only in terms of lower costs for goods and such; it hurts them by specializing and offshoring the industries and jobs they could have obtained in the past - When the factory or the mill or the mine closes, I definitely need those low cost goods because my income is no more.
I have yet to see (could be just my ignorance) academic discussion around the jobs side of global trade that does not translate to buggy whip manufacturers learn new trades + learn to code!
I think I can argue that higher prices for goods, when coupled with much broader productive employment, is better for US society in general and many of the US middle and lower classes in specific than global wealth + low cost goods coupled with un- and under-employment because we offshored so much.
I, personally, from a upper middle class perspective, would much rather we employ more and pay higher prices for all sorts of goods than employ less and pay higher taxes to feed, house, and clean up the mess of a massive unemployed/underemployed population.
Ah, this one again. You do realise we've had three hundred years of specialisation and increased free trade in the modern era, and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim. Lack of flexibility in the market means disruption can cause temporary peaks of unemployment yes, but nothing lasting. If you are going to brandish the many-times-discredited spirit of Ludd around it is surely beholden on you to provide some actual evidence here?
> and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim
It's happened over and over again. Some of the revolutions of 1848 were partially triggered by mass unemployment caused by cheap imports from industrialized England. Right now, huge swaths of the US remain economically devastated due to factories closing and moving overseas. These "temporary peaks" have lasted decades.
Not to mention that disappearing industrial jobs have only been replaced with minimum wage service jobs that don't pay a person enough to live or support a family. There may not be mass unemployment but there are a huge number of people who work full time (in hours) but don't make a living wage or have health care because they've cobbled together multiple service jobs.
When I say opted out, please don't read too much into that. Obviously there are many people collecting SSDI who don't feel as if they had a choice in the matter. There is no doubt a complex interplay of factors driving the increase; including people addicted to opiates, general decrease in health and fitness driving more medical problems, etc. And certainly there is a group who are too physically unfit (or injured) for manual labor, but they're unskilled/unfit for any sort of desk job, and collecting SSDI is an attractive choice at that point.
Two things to consider here. Firstly, the reason British goods did well despite tariffs (the policy meant to stop this happening clearly didn't work, which is probably an important point) was not price but quality. More advanced manufacturing made for better quality products, as well as cheaper ones. The assumption that this was a like-for-like swap is too simplistic. The same applies for e.g. the US (or UK) automobile industry, where the products that replaced them were simply better for the majority of consumers (as good a definition of quality as you're going to get until an actual economist turns up). If your industry is producing lousy products it is going to be out-competed.
The same dynamic applies to offshoring, albeit with the quality here being that of the workers. If you need to open a garment factory you are going to do it somewhere cheap, but not anywhere. You need access to a skilled workforce, so you go to somewhere with such a body of people like Bangladesh. There one not only finds a pool of experienced workers, but you are able to employ a standard of worker who in the US would not take a factory floor job, because they have a degree or a trade specialisation. Quality employees (ideally at low cost) are important.
Secondly, is it true that loss of manufacturing causes long-standing unemployment? The pockets of deep unemployment I know are areas where resource production, basically mining and agriculture, have been out-competed. It's why chunks of West Virginia or County Durham are still basket cases whilst Detroit or Glasgow is on the up I guess. My best guess as to what is going on here is to do with transferable skills but there does seem to be more bounce-backability in former manufacturing areas than in old coal mining areas. This is impressionistic, but perhaps important.
As you can tell, I don't think the Luddite view has much merit. It seems to be based around the assumption of products being equal, and lumps together resource exaction with heavy industry. And you have to consider the possibility that what actually causes the long-term unemployment is not the actual changes but government intervention.
As a postscript, does not wanting to protect working-class jobs to protect their holders reek of upper-middle class paternalism? The underlying logic seems to be a kind of generous understanding that all these people have is their jobs, so we must protect them. As such, this policy seems not to fit with Scott's overall framework here.
Free trade costing jobs doesn't have to lead to aggregate unemployment to be true. It only has to lead to unemployment or reduced earnings for some subset of the population.
I support free trade, because it's helpful on net and doesn't distort the market like tariffs, but it is foolish to deny that outsourcing of jobs and movement of low-skill, labor-intensive jobs to other countries has severely impacted a significant portion of the US population.
Note that one of the major U.S. export industries, paying for those imports, is agriculture. Imports can be larger than exports only if foreigners are on net investing in the U.S., whether by buying stock or helping finance the deficit.
Or if the exports involve fewer jobs than the imports. How many man-hours does it take to make a smartphone, and how many to make $phone dollars worth of corn?
But to push back on your other point. The typical economist would probably say that gains from trade make everyone better off. The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused. People use money to buy goods and services and to the extent that people have more money they will buy more goods and services and increase the demand for labor. Not everything can be imported, you can't get a haircut from China for instance. So if we could take the gains from trade and channel that into uses that help the people who's jobs are lost in a reasonably targeted way then we all end up better off. And it's not a matter of just paying them the lost wages, but more helping the economies in geographic areas most affected by trade to readjust so that people can find new, better jobs in sectors more insulated from international trade (services, high-value/smaller scale production, etc).
That's the theory at least, Auter et al showed pretty convincingly that that didn't happen with the "China shock" in the 90's because of the speed at which the change happened. But there is some disagreement as to how strong of conclusions we should draw from that. Was the China shock just an exceptional one-time event? It seems unlikely that we'll have a comparable dynamic arise anytime soon. It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades. So it's not at all clear that protectionism will improve the situation at the current margin. After all, it's not as if the tariffs imposed under the Trump administration really changed the balance of trade. It just basically shifted some jobs from China to Vietnam (and other places in SE Asia) but didn't really do anything for the USs overall trade deficit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB.
> It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades.
I hear India and Africa are gearing up these days.
> The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused.
I don't think many people seriously advance this as the reason to stop or slow job exports. It's more that industry is regional, and the jobs that could replace them simply may not be available in those regions, and so these poor or working class people now have to relocate away from their friends and families just so they can keep eating because of policy decisions made by the political elites that don't serve or care about their interests. This seems to be one of the big reasons behind Trump's popularity.
Sure, the lower prices "help everyone" because now these poor people can afford to eat while making less money because their job no longer exists. Fantastic.
> And other poor people elsewhere in the country are making more money.
How does that work exactly? Many good paying blue collar jobs moved out of cities due to zoning, then they moved those jobs out of the country so the goods are cheaper. Which of these blue collar workers are better off exactly?
It's not an argument against change so much as an argument against too rapid a change. Younger generations are more far mobile.
Just pigpiling on Burin's comment to say: Those of us who grew up poor realize that being able to buy a laptop much more cheaply is cold comfort if there are no jobs we can do to afford to buy one.
Those who grew up poor know that the price of bread is massively important, and you buy it whether you have a job or not. And even if the bread is made with local wheat, the price of that wheat is set globally and is affected by tariffs and subsidies.
There's a reason why Home Pride and day-old bread was de rigeur growing up and not some highfalutin' brand actually made with something that didn't approach sawdust. Substitutionary effect is a very real thing to those of limited means, I assure you.
Also, no. No you don't. You skip certain foods altogether. If you can honestly tell me you've gone to a close friend's house to realize... hey it's dark.... and it's because the power got cut, feel free to chime in about your experiences. Otherwise, I can assure you: Tariffs help rich people get richer primarily. The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally. And overwhelmingly it does not.
"The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally." Is that a problem with tariffs, or a problem with the economy? Would you also recommend against automation or other productivity improvements because the benefits are spread unevenly? Or should we be looking at ways to spread the benefits instead?
Its a problem with tariffs. Productivity improvements don’t take very long to spread across society. When the wealthy can outsource the workforce to the third world and support a permanent underclass by robbing the middle class for social welfare, the benefits tend to accrue to the wealthy.
I don't think it's correct that the platform of capitalism and liberty does not excite people. I think that what is currently called "capitalism" - where there are companies that are too big to fail, who are de-facto controlling most of the economy and are in the process of taking control over the politics and public discourse - do not excite people, especially ones that are targeted for exclusion and oppression as "basket of deplorables".
I think that when a NYT journalist, fresh from participating in a struggle session where her colleague was forced to grovel and then fired because he dared to suggest that dissent from the Party Line may not be literally Hitler - when such person talks about "liberty", it does not excite people. And when some party functionary speaks about "liberty" one day, and then comes to an MSNBC show and shakes hands and exchanges smiles with people who call his electorate literally Hitler - that also makes it pretty hard to get excited about those words.
Trump got people excited because he actually tried to do what he promised to do. One may agree or disagree about whether those things were worth doing, or whether the approach he chose for doing them was the effective one, but one can see how people can get excited if a person says "I am going to do X" actually tries to do X, instead of half-assing an attempt to do 1/10 of X, failing to do even than and campaigning on "well, the other guy is even worse, so you don't have a choice but voting for me!"
That is not why Trump got people excited, and it is not even true that Trump actually tried to fulfill his promises more than other presidents.
Per Politifact, Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises, compared to nearly half for Obama (a discrepancy not explained by serving 1 term or control of congress). Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be, and was not paid for by Mexico. Trump had no experience governing and was not interested in learning. His focus was more on being a TV character, which is exactly what is appeal was. Being a TV character and emphatically placing the blame for all the country's problems on whatever groups, real or imagined, his base didn't like. Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
Here in your comment we also see The Great Asymmetry in our collective perception of American politics. A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist, classist, and out-of-touch dismissal Democrats have for the rural half of the country they are supposed to be governing. And perhaps it is! But meanwhile, your average Trump-style GOPer (which is increasingly becoming simply the average GOPer) will describe *all* Democrats as literally, literally evil communists who want to literally destroy you and everything you hold dear, and no one bats an eye.
My point is your "given" is false - there are a lot more communists (at least if we're using the colloquial meaning of it, e.g. somebody what would be ideologically at home with CCP or USSR, somebody who subscribes to Marxian economics and somebody who thinks capitalism is inferior to socialism and US should become socialist country) than you think and a lot less racists that the press is telling you. Though they exist too, but if I go to an average university campus, I have about an order of magnitude more chance encountering a communist than a racist. Thought there's one important caveat here - I don't include CRT adherents into this calculation as racists, even though this theory is basically pure racism, so maybe I should. Then I'd say it's about even chance.
Well if you start calling everyone who's not a communist a communist then of course there will be lots of them but what's the point of that?
Socialism is not communism and if you actually check there are very few people who even support full fledged socialism. What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist. There are plenty of us around.
I think it's no less reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known communists on basically every important question "communists", even if they don't carry the official party membership, than it is reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known racists on every important question "racist", even though they don't have an official paper to say so.
> What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist.
No, that's not true. There are a lot of opinions beyond "hard right wing nut" and "communist". But people who would support the Marxist economic ideology and its conclusions, who have no serious disagreement with the communist ideology, should be rightfully called so. There are a lot of place to not agree with the "right wing nuts" and at the same time not embrace Marxism - I myself am an example of it. Ans any person who points out that he seriously disagrees with Marxism and communist ideology - is certainly not a communist, and there are very many of those, even among Democrats. But that's not the reason to ignore the existence - and the proliferation - of communist views. It's not the new thing either - there has been a lot of communists in government and Hollywood and academia in times where communism meant Joseph Stalin, not some vague "Bernie Sanders plus". If people were willing to embrace it then, no wonder they'd be also willing to embrace it now - whatever you can say about Bernie and taking his ideas to the logical conclusion, he's certainly nowhere even close to Stalin!
Around 20% of the population believe that interracial marriage is wrong according to some surveys. We can take the number of people who support this extremely racist position as an absolute minimum number of racist Americans, even on a strict definition of racism as a conscious belief in racial superiority.
I don't know what percentage of the population believes that all things should be held in common and production reflect the principle of "from each to their ability, to each according to their need", but I bet it's less than 20%. Fuck, I don't even believe it, except as a kind of distant currently impractical Utopian ideal, and I'm one of the most left-wing people I know.
But "to each according to their need" has been nothing but "distant currently impractical Utopian ideal" in any communist country that ever existed, so that's wholly in adherence with common practice. Again, I think it is logical to think that if you agree with actual ideological practice of Communist Party in a country commonly referred to as "communist", then calling you a "communist" would be appropriate, even if you had disagreement about a practical applicability of specific slogan is specific circumstance. There were a lot of tactical disagreement among communists (ask Trotsky about it) so we must allow some room there.
Black Americans are the group most likely to oppose interracial marriage, at twice the rate of white Americans and six times the rate of Hispanic Americans. (Interestingly, women are 70% more likely than men to oppose interracial marriage!)
I assume you don't believe anyone but white people can be racist, so doing some arithmetic brings me to the white population that opposes racial intermarriage to 5.4% of the total population, or about 17.8 million people.
For reference, it's about 7.2 million black people who oppose intermarriage, and 1.8 million Hispanics.
It's more difficult to determine how many Americans are communists. However, there was a YouGov poll with some interesting findings.
The same poll found that 6% of Americans think most nations of the world will have communist governments in the next 50 years. Is that an endorsement? Not sure!
The same poll found that 28% think government should control the distribution of wealth, 33% the economy overall, and 35% wages. Does that make them communists? Again, I'm not sure!
This would carry a bit more weight if you at least bothered to provide a counter-argument, let alone your substantiated opinions what it is.
> Per Politifact
I am not sure it can be considered an objective source when talking about Trump.
> Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises
Do I need to explain why promises are not fungible and treating them as replaceable commodity, numerically calculating the percentage of them as if fulfilling each of them requires the same effort and producing the same benefit is completely bogus?
Do I need to explain that trying to fullfill the promises and actually doing it is a very different thing?
> Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be
The question is not whether he built 100% of his largest promise, the question is whether he invested a serious and bona fide effort into getting the wall built. The answer to this question is: Yes.
> was not paid for by Mexico.
If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
> Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
You are welcome to express you hate and disdain for people that disagree with you as much as you like, but rest assured it won't give you an inch of understanding of them. Maybe you don't want it, that's you choice. Just know you don't have it.
> If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
Enlighten us, O Great One. What the hell does that actually mean to “real people”? I genuinely want to know.
Let me restate that so it’s completely clear: If “and Mexico is going to pay for it” doesn’t mean “Mexico will pay for it”, what does it mean, specifically to “real people”?
It's a boast, not a promise. The promise is to build the wall (and, more generally, to improve border security). If Trump can present it as "Mexico paying for it", just to stick it to the lefties, that'd be cool, but really it doesn't matter. Not anybody on the right ever objected to spending money on border security (we can leave alone the sad fact that nobody anymore objects to spending money on practically anything, that's another story), so there would be no problem if it is financed from federal budget - in fact, that was the logical expectation. I literally didn't see anybody who is not on the Left ever objecting to the fact that US money is spent on wall building - and I have seen much praise when budget allocations that Trump pushed through actually got to the building. The promise - and something that is actually discussed and meticulously tracked on the Right's forums and other hang-out places - is how much of the wall is built. The costs are very secondary and nobody is seriously talking about the Mexico part in any other way than finding some way to present it so just to stick it. But if you're interested about what the Right is discussing and what they are happy and unhappy with - literally nobody ever that I see reading Right places was ever genuinely complaining about not getting Mexico thing. Because nobody ever took it as serious geniune promise (unlike the wall itself, which people were very much upset when it was slow or not happening).
Trump had a specific policy about exactly how Mexico would pay for it. His plan was written up in mainstream liberal newspapers like NYTimes and WaPost.
I'd link it, but I don't think it would change anyone's minds by actually reading the truth.
I provided some pretty straightfoward evidence that Trump was not magically more committed to his platform than most presidents (because why would he be? Surely that onus is on you to prove), in fact the evidence suggested that Trump was significantly less of a promise-keeper than his predecessor. You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news (on the basis of what? What specific claims about Trump's promise-keeping are false or misleading?).
Next, you maneuver to re-interpret Trump's explicit promises in a way that affords near-infinite degrees of freedom to claim success by dropping key clauses that retroactively didn't pan out and pretending like they were metaphorical all along, while also projecting onto him some sort of hitherto untapped Herculean presidential effort in achieving policy goals (do you mean... he sometimes tweeted what he wanted in all caps?) Truth is, millions of people literally believed Mexico would pay for the wall. It was even a chant at his rallies!
I've spoken with lots of "real" Trump people -- not just weird ultra-online types who read Scott Alexander -- and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry. "He's funny", "he tells it like it is", "he's a brilliant businessman and that's just what this country needs", "I don't like him personally, but I'll take him over the socialist democrats any day", "he's been doing a pretty good job but I don't think he's gone far enough to get all the illegals out. Trust me, they are violent savages." And so on. Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes, they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship (the evil democrats), they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up. They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies. I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself. But what stuck me was his insistence -- absolute insistence -- that the attendance of the preceding Trump rally surpassed 1 million people (the authorities estimated 30,000 tops). Trump was lying about his crowd sizes until the very end, and they never stopped believing him. I'm sure that pastor still believes that Mexico is paying for the wall, too.
I am not sure where your "millions" comes from, but I am sure you can find some people who believed in Mexico paying. I mean, there are people who believe Earth is flat and gosts are real and true socialism has never been yet tried. What I am questioning is that it was take seriously by majority (or even substrantial minority) of Trump supporters as a real promise they expect Trump to fullfil. Yet less it is a "key" promise - of course the "key" is bulding the wall, not who is paying for it - again, the question of paying for security has never been even the slightest concern among the right. They never asked to cut budgets or reduce expenses for any security measures, quite the contrary. So even if they thought it's a real promise, it'd certainly wouldn't be a "key" one.
> You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news
No, that's not true. I called Politifact a biased source when it concerns Trump - based on the fact their coverage of politicians shows substantial left-wing bias, especially when it concerns Trump. I didn't analyze their coverage of Trump promise-keeping specifically, so I can not claim for a fact that their bias there is equal to their bias everywhere else, but I would be surprised if that were one area where they suddenly stopped being biased.
> and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry
You maybe spoke to them, but I seriously doubt you understood them or even listened to them very well. Otherwise "plain bigotry" wouldn't be one of the main reasons.
> Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes,
Part of being "strongman" is doing what you promise to do.
> they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship
I don't think after the coverage we've witnessed in 2015-2021 "leans into negative partisanship" is in any way unique to Trump. Nobody has on my memory been covered in more negative light than Trump. I thought Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad, but the Trump one has been like thermonuclear explosion to a cheap firework. It moved from "he's like Hitler" to "Hitler is way better than him" and then it went to 11 times 11 times 11.
> they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up
That one you got right. Of course, you still somehow managed to attribute it to "bigotry".
> They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
If by "islamophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about terrorism driven by fanatical islamist movement, then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that. Fanatical islamist movements are real, and their actions cause many death worldwide every year. And they are active in the US too. Ignoring it out of fear of drawing the ire of wokescolds is literally exchanging lives of people for woke points.
If by "xenophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about immigration law enforcement which is being dismantled by the Left, essentially trying to introduce open borders without ever passing it through Congress - then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that: immigration law is the law, and ridiculous situation where laws are not being enforced because Democratic administration doesn't like them should not happen in a country that is not a banana republic. What's the point in having laws if people can just decide to ignore them whenever they like?
Now we note that Trump not only promised but delivered actions for both of these. Which kinda was my point. You may not like his actions and consider it "bigotry", but his supporters disagree.
> Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies
That happens to people who follow politicians. The Left has been believing the obviously false and pointless "collusion" hoax for many years, some continue to believe it to this day. And that not concerning a litany of other lies and hoaxes we have witnessed over the years (like that Trump called Nazis "fine people", or that Kavanaugh is a rapist). Yes, lies unfortunately are part of the modern politics, and some people believe them.
> I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself
BTW, why is it "ridiculous"? It may not be true that antifa was a significant driver for the riot, but why it is "ridiculous" to believe that? Say, more "ridiculous" than believing US President is Putin's puppet, absent any evidence?
Let's consider some facts:
1. In 2020, antifa instigated hundreds of riots, some continuing to this very day - i.e. antifa has rioted in Portland just couple days ago. The press largely dismissed these riots as "mostly peaceful" protests, some politicians even praising and encourging them.
2. In these riots, multiple governmental buildings were attacked, and Antifa is notorious for their willingness to fight the police and vandalize and destroy government property.
3. There were other cases where leftist groups occupied both state capitol buildings (Wisconsin) and congressional offices, as part of political protest.
4. We know for a fact that many of Antifa operatives has been repeatedly released without any punishment or avoided arrest completely, and many local governments have been adopting velvet gloves approach to Antifa actions.
5. We know that riot in the Capitol and skirmish with the police has begun before Trump called his supporters - that have been listening to his speech at the other end of the mile-long National Mall - to go to the Capitol.
6. We know for a fact that Capitol riots have been planned significant time before the elections, and FBI has been aware of the ongoing planning.
7. We know for a fact that increased security has been refused by Congressional leadership and local police leadership.
8. We have seen video and photo evidence that at least some rioters were let in by the police beyond the fences.
9. We know for a fact some known antifa operatives have been seen and filmed at the Capitol (including inside the building).
10. We know for a fact that there was IEDs placed in several places to split and disorganize police response - action fitting an organized group and not a mob inflamed by a provocative speach.
11. We know for a fact that a lot of reporting that appear in the in major press after the riot has turned out to be false, such as reporting about Brian Sicknick's cause of death, or attributing death of somebody who hasn't even been near the Capitol and died of stroke, to the riots.
12. We know that at least some protesters tried to stop the rioters from fighting the police and entering the Capitol.
Given these facts - and the events in the preceding years - why it is "ridiculous" to believe that a) some organized group is behind the riots and b) that organized group is the same one that has been behind hundreds of othe riots and c) the press and the politicians are lying to us about it? I mean, I do not claim these are true statements - as there are many statements that aren't ridiculous but still are very false - but I don't see how they are "ridiculous". Yet less how this belief is more ridiculous than beliefs of anybody on the Left who embraced the Steele dossier and the "collusion" hoax.
Maybe the permanent residents of the glass house should be throwing stones around so readily.
> A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist,
Because it is true. It was saying the silent part loud, only this part is no longer silent for a while now. The disdain for the flyover country rubes that cling to their racist habits and need to be reeducated and reformed is heard loud and clear. Basket of deplorables is not the first one and not the last one, and if you take a poll in any bastion on the Left about whether it's true or not, you'll probably get the "yes" in the 90%s. And thanks to the internet, twitter, facebook and so on, the deplorables now know all about what their supposed betters think about them. And then one wonders - why would people think that someone who considers them barely human, uneducated, unwashed, illiterate rube in sore need of forcible reeducation and shouldn't be let anywhere near self-rule, who disdains them with their whole heart, who would say things like "all I want for Christmas is genocide" in public and be secure their peers will approve it - why would people think such a wonderful friendly people are evil and have some evil plans for them? Only bigotry could explain that!
That's not an apple to apple comparison. A single comment from the presidential candidate will of course get more reaction than a comment from a random Joe.
Now if you compare the reaction of Hillary's comments to Trumps comments; people certainly reacted to Trump and if none of this comments have the same staying power, it's because there were so many of them competing for airtime.
Well OK, I read it. What's frustrating is this is just a throw away line and I'll let him decide what drove him to write it. It detracts value for the alleged target audience, there is little shortage of opinion from people who signal hate for Republicans. Using a term such as disagree would have worked better.
What happens 99% of the time with an open letter of advice to Republicans is that the opining party suggests the Republicans should become progressives in order to fix their party. I figured it would be more substantive from the same guy who wrote "You're still crying wolf". It ended better than it started.
Since 'serious'!Scott is faultlessly charitable to everyone all the time, I read that as a reminder that he really knows he's not part of the coalition he's proposing here, even if he thinks it would be a positive realignment overall.
The part that surprised me was Scott assuming that Republicans hate him. I'm a Republican, and I love Scott. He takes surveys, so he knows he has a decent amount of Republican readers. By percentage he's much more popular with Republicans than the NYT, and probably nearly any other Democrat blogger.
I do feel like Scott could have left that line out. Quoting some other things Scott himself has written about writing, that have stuck in my mind:
> It’s written in a style of “I can see where you’re coming from, but have you considered X?” I thought I was the only person who had figured out that this worked better than “YOU ARE DUMB AND I HATE YOU. NOW PLEASE AGREE WITH ME.”
"7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
[...]
Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them.
For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. ..."
So either Scott got lazy here, or he didn't really target this essay at Republicans, or he felt like he needed to throw this in so no one would mistake him for a Republican sympathizer.
I read this as the loudest possible indicator that Scott could manage, right after naming it “A Modest Proposal”, that this was meant to be satirical in tone
It's a perfectly honest statement of fact and statement of intent. Frankly I think it perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the piece, and the piece would feel dishonest without it.
I read this article as really being addressed not to Republicans but to those "who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too" -- us progressives, in other words, and the "I hate you and you hate me" comment was just a bit of self- (and us) mockery.
Interesting. I kept reading but sort of tuned out the point far before that when he linked NPR about a phenomenon that doesnt exist (There is no identity crisis in the Republican party - maybe the ones in DC arent happy about their new identity but that's unchanged since about 2015. In fact, I'd say the party is more captive to the identity now than it was then: https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1363898468675293187)
Scott did follow with a few interesting ideas (some more than others) but the critical error he made in accepting that assumption poisons all suggestions.
One thing I've noticed, and I believe Scott has admitted to, is he will sometimes stick in explicit denunciations he either doesnt fully agree with (at least not in said full-throated manner) or in normal circumstances wouldnt feel the need to do. Something along the lines of "Richard Spencer is a moron" would fit the latter, you can fill in for the former. He does this to appease a wider audience and get some readership/possible discussion from those he would otherwise not in our current times.
I understand his motives for this and yet I believe it weakens his writing of which one of his greatest strengths is the endearing honesty of his arguments. I think you read that "I hate you and you hate me" line in the same way I have read some of those explicit denunciations before but I don't know if that's what Scott was doing here. His animosity for Republicans and Trump is real, although how hard felt it is remains cloaked.
Alas, that's where Scott departs from the "Proles" and is why he cannot properly advocate for them. He feels the need to cloak and protect himself from accusations of various -isms, as recent events attest. I don't blame him for this but it denotes the class difference.
To show this I'll commit the same sin he originally did and cite the NYT. Specifically, their recent story about Smith College. Consider the proles of the tale - the janitor, the cafeteria worker. Accused of an -ism, their response was not "I'm not racist, because xxx" or some groveling apology that pays deference to the party that aggrieved them as we have seen hundreds of times from middle and upper middle class types embroiled in these disputes. It was "When does this racist label go away?"
Whether something or someone is racist or not is not an all-consuming facet of life for these people, not in the same way it is for those who jockey for status by doling out accusations of it.
The issue Scott has is he ultimately agrees with the progressive point of view here, where he disagrees is where the lines are drawn and how much trouble you should be in if you are caught playing with fire (i.e., the nrx flirting).
The Proles have no time for that. They're not writing any dissertations about whether they are or are not guilty of racism. That's a higher class problem. All this dodging and cloaking is for someone else, maybe the conservatives in DC and various suburbs across the land that are defecting from the Republican party can have fun doing that once theyre caught in an imbroglio (and they will be).
We don't hate you, Scott. You're like the one writer I've read who absolutely loathed Trump for reasons that did not appear to be based on total nonsense, which was refreshing.
If either party were to actually do this, and do it in a way that didn't leave me suspecting it was a facade for same-old, same-old, I'd sign up, even though I have little use personally for significant parts of the culture described. (Nothing wrong with football, or church, and neither one is less desirable in the grand scheme of things than my personal hobbies, as long as I don't have to do either one.)
Importantly, this idea has already passed a critical empirical test. All of the other major British settler colonies (Canada, Australia, you can also count New Zealand) switched to race-blind points-based immigration systems several decades ago. All of them have higher % foreign born than the US, while avoiding the populist backlash that has afflicted Western countries with a higher level of low-skill immigration. Canadian support for their government's immigration policy is well above 70% the last time I checked.
It's actually quite easy to get rid of illegal immigration. You punish their employers.
Here's a policy: any illegal immigrant who is working can report their employer to the government. The illegal immigrant who reports will be made legal with their family; the other illegal immigrants working there can be offered the same deal in exchange for evidence if needed to win the case against their employer. Any remaining illegal immigrants are ejected.
The employer gets prosecuted unless they can prove that they checked the immigration status of their employees and reasonably believed that they were legal (ie the forgeries were good enough to trick someone, and they weren't just accepting any old forgery in order to escapt prosecution).
Get rid of the jobs and they stop coming, apart from actually desperate people seeking asylum, and people pretending to be such (which does mean that you need a good quality process for separating those two groups apart, which is a hard problem and any such process needs to acknowledge that it is a hard problem and that it will get it wrong occasionally, and you need to say whether you're happier with your mistakes resulting in letting in people who shouldn't be or returning people to actually dangerous situations).
We already punish employers of illegal workers in the Netherlands and otherwise make things hard for illegals. It has resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of illegal residents.
Your plan to reward illegal immigrants who snitch seems ill thought out. It assumes that they have no group loyalty, no loyalty to their employers, that they know the laws and that they have high trust in government promises.
For larger employers in the parts of the economy where illegal work is common, the better solution is just to regularly do unannounced checks at the work site. For small employees like illegal cleaning at homes, waiting for people in their environment to snitch is probably the only realistic chance.
I love Swift's Modest Proposal - is this in the same vein? Am I too stupid now to recognise that encouraging the eating of their children is a better way to feed the poor than providing charity is satire?
I don't know if you're stupid or not. I do know that I was thrilled to read someone who is intelligent outlining the issues I have in voting Democratic. And in the reality that my still-poor family largely shifted from voting 100% Democratic to almost 100% Republican in a 30 year span. Hint: It wasn't because they all became closet Nazis somewhere along the way.
It starts with "I think dead children should be used as a unit of currency. I know this sounds controversial, but hear me out." If that piques your interest, do check it out.
"Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, and starving college students may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon."
This is great. As someone who would like to see a smarter, better conservative movement, I couldn't agree more. For this to work you have to draw a line against the people who would like to hijack the movement and make it about economic class, because it's safer than attacking other things, i.e., wokeness.
I co-authored a report here on debunking the "working-class party myth," and it talks about the consensus in political science that economics doesn't motivate voters all that much. We say it's all about "social issues" (the left-wing academy just calls it "racism" or "racial resentment") but the idea that it's not about money or economic status is important.
Policy wise, a class based agenda can include smart stuff like war on credentialism, while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas, and we already have one party pushing that.
There is a way to square the circle here, and it would be a bonfire to credentialism as you indicate. A war on the institutions seems like where younger Republicans who I've talked to are leaning, anyways, but also some voices influential with boomers, like Tucker Carlson.
You also do see in some states where energy based employment is a big local factor that Republican gains among working class voters have proved more durable, because in that case, you can genuinely have both an economic interest argument align with a class argument like Scott puts forward (think the shift in West Virginia from Bill Clinton to Trump, or states like Ohio, New Mexico, the Dakotas, etc, where blue collar Democrats have shifted in numbers of varying sizes). Promises of job retraining programs worked for the Democrats in the 90s, but very quickly that went away once it became clear that these programs entailed having to move across the country.
A problem the conservative movement has is that like all movements, of all ideologies, it has racket like tendencies. This was true in the scam PAC era, the direct mail era, and yes, now the MyPillow era as well. Its not clear to me that this is something that can be solved anytime soon. The answer I think is what the Democrats do, and that is to put their slimiest people into positions of low profile institutional power (think corrupt Congresspeople in majority black districts like Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Waters, etc). The Democratic coalition allows for this to work because they don't ever need to put Alcee Hastings or Jesse Jackson in front of the wine mom crowd. The Republicans have a problem in that they don't have a good way to keep Matt Gaetz away from the Facebook feeds of winnable suburban moms.
One of the ways I've heard the argument you push back on the most is the idea that the Republicans need to become some version of Fidesz or Law and Justice, transplanted to the US. It mostly comes from people who are really pro-natalist and are jealous that the kind of social conservatism you see in those countries (the throne and altar kind, not the Barstool kind) is politically feasible. I think such an agenda would bomb in the US, and I say that as someone who likes a lot of it. Our cultural politics on fertility are not dominated by the spectre of half of our skilled college grads moving to London or Berlin to become baristas, and our fiscal situation is not one in which German and French taxpayers fork over a whole bunch of goodies to our budget every year. Mapping out a pro natalist agenda requires a recognition that much of the problem is cultural, not economic. There is a reason that Chad and Burkina Faso have replacement level fertility and we don't, and I don't think the answer is in tax credits.
1. Awful nice of you to let Josh Hawley ghostwrite a post after banning him from the comments a few weeks ago.
2. Lots of policy judgments are difficult to boil down to a number, or turn on value differences between various numbers. I am not sure exactly how prediction markets could be leveraged to solve climate change, for instance. A prediction market with a long enough time horizon might snuff out skeptics of the phenomenon itself (many bets made by climate bloggers in the 00s are just now being paid/welched) but I don't see it spurring on any action, at least distinct from the market market's consensus of "that's the future's problem."
3. In terms of rhetoric, Republicans pretty much are already here. The problem is that the working class pays the least attention to punditry and debates and therefore this cynical signaling will only go so far without actually delivering the goods. It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES, but under a Democratic administration things are going right back to deficit trolling.
A prediction market could determine that climate change exists, that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts), and that it would be bad (ask it to predict number of hurricanes and famines over the next few years).
A prediction market couldn't determine that we have a moral obligation to respond to it, but neither can experts, so my claim that prediction markets could replace/complement experts still seems true.
Please post something explaining why you think prediction markets make any sense at all. I'd rather argue with you about it - and who knows, maybe you have a non-obvious-to-me point - than roll my eyes and think about how someone with good ideas can also have really bizarre blind spots every time you mention your support for them.
Pretty much all of it. What I see is people basically gambling. At best, assuming no systemic flaws, they can determine what people believe enough that they are willing to place money on it - though if they work like stock markets, that could just be because they expect to sell to a greater fool before the bubble bursts.
I don't see much reason to believe that what people _believe_ is true. E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost, in the same amount - except wore than that, due to transaction costs etc.
Of course I don't in fact know much about how prediction markets work, or even if they all work the same way. (Their name caused me to have a mild prior that this was something invented by marketers, to appeal to the unthinking, and should probably be avoided. Life's too short to investigate every type of snake oil ... and I wouldn't even think about them at all, if someone who's usually clueful (you) wasn't prominently supporting them.
Prediction markets can do astonishingly well, especially if designed in the right way. I'm also not sure how committed Scott* would be to them being literal markets with money changing hands - I imagine he'd be happy with something like Tetlock's Good Judgement Project as a complementary system. The crux of the idea is to move away from vague qualitative predictions to fully testable precisely calibrated predictions, because then you can move away from a system gated by class and credentials to one gated by demonstrated consistent track record.
If you'd like to know more about these methods I strongly recommend reading Tetlock's book Superforecasting, by the way - he's very reflective and smart, and he tackles a lot of the 'obvious problems' with this kind of system.
*Scott as in the version of Scott fiercely defending this manifesto, which may or may not be identical to the actual Scott.
You pretty much need to have real quantities of real money on the line for it to work. Otherwise it becomes swamped with people simply signaling their positions without any skin in the game.
I don't claim to know how well prediction markets would work in practice, but the hope is:
People have a bunch of beliefs; some of those beliefs are right, some of them are wrong.
Prediction markets make it so that the people with accurate beliefs make money, and the people with inaccurate beliefs lose money.
Over time, the people with inaccurate beliefs either (a) improve their beliefs so that they can make more money, or (b) start avoiding the prediction market in self-defense, or in extreme cases (c) run out of money and can't place any more large bets. In all cases, their inaccurate beliefs gradually come to have less impact on the market.
Conversely, the people with accurate beliefs make a lot of money, and are encouraged to keep playing.
Are there ways this could possibly go wrong? Tons. But you can also see how it at least *might* go right.
I think my argument would be something like - we all agree the stock market works, not necessarily in a fundamental way of giving the "true" value of companies, but in a sense where it prices stocks in a way that incorporates all relevant information on whether a stock will go up or down. If you see a stock you think is overpriced and definitely going to go way up next week, you're either wrong, or have some kind of unique genius or insider information which you'll add to the stock and then cause it to be priced correctly.
Prediction markets try to do the same thing, but in a way where they value of the "stock" is the percent chance the thing will happen. Right now they're terrible because of a lot of trading limits. But if there were a prediction market where you could trade as much money as you wanted, one of two things would have to be true:
1. The prediction market's estimate is smarter than yours
2. You could make basically unlimited amounts of money by betting on the prediction market
Right now it's kind of 2 - prediction markets are dumber than I am, and I made thousands of dollars betting on them last year. The only reason I'm not a multi-millionaire is because there were limits - I could only bet a tiny amount. The same is true of anyone else who's smarter than prediction markets, which is why they stay dumb. If prediction markets removed their limits, it wouldn't mean I actually became a multimillionaire, it would mean that lots of people even smarter than I am would find it worth their time to bet on them in a way that brings them down to an accurate estimate.
I'm not sure about this, because the stock market has something else that makes it work. Prediction markets are always a zero sum game. Money in always equals money out.
The stock market is a positive sum game, because it's allocating investment capital. A huge share of stock investment comes from non-gamblers. They just use the prediction market portion of the stock market for information without participating. This is what happens when someone buys an index fund. There aren't index fund equivalents for prediction markets.
I'm also worried that prediction markets will be too volatile.
Well, first of all I'm not sure the stock market works. Stocks have consensus values, with lots of random jitter, commonly called "volatility", but all those values represent is what people are willing to buy/sell the stock for at any given time.
It's well known that dividends aren't much of a thing anymore, given that "capital gains" get better tax treatment, so companies buy back their own stock rather than issuing dividends; this has the probably intended side effect of hugely rewarding executives whose compensation depends on changes in the per-share stock price (not on total market capitalization).
I rather suspect that in the ordinary case, the stock price - or even the total market capitalization - is not in fact a good estimate of the future value of the corporation and its earnings, extended to infinity - or till the company gets wound down.
For the rest, I'm not sure what kind of predictions are traded, including both how reliably they can be measured, and how meaningful they are. Also the length of time for predictions to be fulfilled, and thus pay off - or otherwise.
I should probably look at some of these markets to learn these things. But of course that's to an extent where this thread started, since I'd expect a "prediction markets 101" as part of any discussion of what they are or are not good for.
Efficient market hypothesis supports prediction markets, as you say. We should also expect Condorcet's Jury Theorem to do some work here too, at least if we assume that those willing to bet in a prediction market are (individually) better predictors than a coin flip. Then the market's prediction will be quite accurate.
>E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost
It's in the pricing. First, a $1 share of X Will Happen at 75c is the same as a share of X Won't Happen at 25c. So you might have people with the exact same correct evaluation of the probability taking either end of the deal depending on risk vs profit tolerance, giving the prediction market the correct price level but still ending up with winners and losers.
Second, even with divergent estimations, the 50% of people who lose may have an estimation that's much less than 50% wrong -- e.g., if half the buyers think X has an 80% chance of occurring and the other half think, correctly, that it's almost a certainty (say 100% for simplicity), the market predicts 90% even though half of the buyers still lose out.
Finally, errors tend to cancel out, absent systematic bias of some kind (e.g. overestimation and underestimation of most things tend to be about equally common), and we'd assume those with better knowledge (e.g. domain experts) are more likely to invest, moving the price toward the correct level.
>What I see is people basically gambling
Suppose a small town has a Weather Market, with shares of "It (Will/Won't) Rain Tomorrow" worth $1 if it does/doesn't rain tomorrow. The real chance of rain is 75%. A group of townspeople, looking at various things, think the chances are about 60%, and buy some shares for 60c. The market predicts 60% chance of rain.
But we're meteorologists in a club for meteorology, and we have good data that indicates an 80% chance, so we try to buy as many shares as we can until the price is 80c. The price climbs to 78c, since we've bought quite a few due to our confidence in our meteorological data (remember, the townspeople can either sell us their It Will shares for > the 60c they paid, or take the other side by buying It Won't shares for < 40c which become our It Will shares, both of which appear to be good deals to them).
(We're kind of ignoring where the shares came from in the first place here -- market makers or people taking other sides with the same estimates, whatever.)
So in this toy example, you can see how the market might work, with our confidence in our more accurate data causing the market to move in the right direction, and the townspeople's estimate not being necessarily equally as wrong as ours is right.
I believe there's some evidence that prediction markets work, in some small-scale experiments and some data on how accurate aggregate judgments tend to be, along with the theoretical considerations Scott outlines in his comment, but I don't know much about the empirical side.
That reminds me that one of the scandals of coronavirus spreading through meat-packing plants was we found out managers were making bets on how many people would die; i.e. they were putting their money where their mouths were, but once the rage machine gets going, facts go out the window.
I think the biggest problem with using prediction markets as a source of truth is that either true believers can coordinate to spend money to affect the predictions, and people with a lot of money can also do so. Ideally, the market becomes so liquid that this doesn't work, but I'm not convinced that's likely to happen very soon.
Specifically, the idea of using a prediction market (what people with $$$ believe) to determine something more appropriately investigated via the scientific method pretty much reeks of snake oil to me.
You think that prediction markets have no basis in statistical or mathematical reality? I don't pretend they're infallible - see 2016's election results - but I do believe that unless people are just stupid they are much, much more than putting it all on black at The Venetian.
While I think prediction markets will "work," they'll hit the same Lucas Critique in that when they become what people use to make decisions, people will corrupt them.
Robin Hanson has done a lot of work on that idea. Attempting to bias a prediction market by betting on a favored but less likely outcome acts like a subsidy for all the smart money betting against you. And increasing liquididity makes them work BETTER.
This is a false dichotomy as no one is suggesting that the scientific method be replaced with prediction markets. Also see the replication crisis for evidence that appeals to the scientific method don’t solve every problem.
Scott suggested firing 75% of experts in favor of prediction markets? Maybe he's not suggesting a total replacement but there'd be a lot less scientific method going on.
Look, imagine two people betting on climate change. The first bets using the latest scientific research. The second one bets using guesses, crystal ball readings, and Facebook memes.
Who's going to make money on the prediction market? And who's going to lose their shirt?
You've set up a false dichotomy. Having a prediction market doesn't mean you ignore science.
It's not about what people with money believe. Is about what money believes. And (people with) money care about money, at least in the mid-long term.
People with money often have no idea where exactly they are investing; behind layers of financial instruments that wrap indices and whatnot. In the end, what performs well routinely will get money. And prediction markets (if they become reliable, legal, liquid, maybe subsidized) can be very profitable if they are inaccurate.
This is more of a method to aggregate information that is known than to discover information. Surely, the scientific method will be used and listened to by those who end up deciding where money is spent.
Imagine them more as a better method than "we polled 100 climate experts and 97% say X", while the other side dismisses the list because half of the experts are actually ex geology teachers, and then the science ends up half-ignored. It's a schelling point.
Sports have prediction markets all the time. You can watch a tennis match live and see the rates go up and down for the match, next point, next game, next set, and a ton of stuff. And they are usually priced reasonably -- at least given our political and fake-news standards.
I think the idea is that scientific results would be priced into the prediction market, since people trying to make money by betting would have an incentive to understand the science with as little political bias as possible.
What jumps to my mind is: why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would find it cheap and easy to make the prediction market "prove" that it's the right policy to require commercial launches for all satellites and NASA's budget to be quintupled and diverted entirely to pushing for manned missions to Mars.
For that matter, wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose? Again, why wouldn't China think it's a cheap thrill to, say, spend a billion dollars to effectively set the US military budget?
> wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose?
Huge conspiracies like this one are very hard.
> why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money?
The idea is that as soon as the rest of the money gets a hint that some market is off its value, they would rush there for the free gains. It's self correcting. No specific person or country has enough liquid money to force a ridiculous price regardless of what the rest of the world does. At the very least, it wouldn't be super easy.
It depends on the depth of the market. If you have $1000 riding on average temperature in 2021, it totally gets gamed. If you have $10 billion, less so.
I also think you are focusing on prediction markets as dictators of policy. But before getting there, we could at least promote them as just sources of (imperfect though somewhat objective) information, that we can then use at our discretion.
*Would* they? What kind of prediction would be asked in those cases?
The question has to have some sort of empirical verifier at its core, so I don't think the scenarios you outline specifically could happen, unless I'm not thinking imaginatively enough.
But, addressing the spirit of the argument: quite possible for Bezos to push a price in the wrong direction, but anyone who knew this would be able to take his money for as long as he's willing to throw it out there, providing some sort of a counterbalance in both the short (individual prediction) and long (after a few wealth transfers of billions of dollars, those opposing would be more effective opposition).
I suppose the hope would be that the market, by the time it's used for policy decisions, is too large for one player to effectively skew (if Bezos is pouring a billion in, probably a lot of other billionaires would be willing and able to jump in too?).
Even the richest of the rich are poor compared to the size of capital markets that could be arrayed against them (and would be if it seemed there was a possibility to grab all the wealth they were throwing away).
shouldn't we expect a prediction market to overprice the likelihood of bad outcomes, as people bet on those outcomes as a hedge? essentially using the bet as an insurance policy?
The directionality is not a priori guaranteed, you have countervailing forces like underpricing worlds where money become worthless, guessing how those will interact is not trivial.
If that inefficiency were proven true, masses of people like me who don't care about that particular hedge would just buy until it was priced back to a reasonable level. Heck, there would be entire PE firms set up to do this if there was enough money in it
if the demand for something is elevated (by hedgers), and there is no corresponding increase of supply (not quantity of supply, but supply curve), we should expect the price to be elevated. the effect may be small if the supply is very elastic, but it should be greater than zero.
That is the market working as intended. A price increase as a result of hedging risk, without corresponding action on the other side, indicates increased risk.
no, i am describing demand due to people who are willing to take an expected loss for the sake lowering variance of outcomes, similar to how people pay a premium for insurance.
say there is a 5% chance my house will flood, and this is reflected in the betting market. if that happened, it would be really bad; so i want to place 1,000,000 single-dollar bets that it will flood, and now if it does i can afford to fix it with my winnings.
i run out of people who are willing to sell this bet to me at 5 cents, so i keep buying at 6 cents, because it's still worth it for the insurance. we interpret the new price equilibrium as a 6% likelihood my house will flood, but that's inaccurate, because i was optimizing for something other than expected payout.
The financial markets have the exact same dynamics: risk-averse investors will pay a premium for downside protection, and there are entire industries (e.g. insurance) that take the other side to make money. However, this isn't enough to eliminate the risk premiums (i.e. difference between actual price and theoretical fair value): there are lots of ways to make money if you have capital, and so you won't take the other side of a risky bet unless it reaches a certain hurdle of expected returns.
That hurdle of expected returns is exactly the (expected) return of other financial instruments on the market so the the risk premiums will be connected to the interest rate essentially.
Yes, that's right. There will be a risk premium, just as there is with financial instruments. Indeed, arbitrageurs will even be looking for inconsistencies between financial instruments and prediction markets, so you'd expect prediction markets to have similar risk-aversion priced into them.
Even earlier than that I think. But the point here is that Republicans have developed a distrust of experts, since many of them are culturally blue tribe-ish. Prediction markets are much harder to bias, so they may have greater trust in them. Thus, they may be a solution to the Republican's expertise crisis.
Plus Scott thinks prediction markets are a great idea and might actually outperform many current experts, if and when they are implemented correctly.
"Experts suck because they are wrong" and "Experts suck because Republicans don't believe them" are two different claims with two different solutions.
For instance, Scott says earlier that a prediction market could successfully predict global warming contingent on emissions. Perhaps it could, but so could James Hansen, who did just this, in 1984. His predictions are roundly mocked by smart-ass graphs that do not account for the "contingent on emissions part" (they projected continued CFC emissions and thus overshot warming).
Republicans would just deploy the same cheesy meme warfare against the prediction market. Opposition to climate change mitigation does not stem from some suspicion that atmospheric physicists might be left-wing, but from an extremely wealthy and powerful fossil fuel lobby that makes a lot of money by foisting its externalities on the year 2100.
Scott isn't making either claim, as far as I can tell. The entire conceit of the article is "here's how the Republican party can achieve greater political success, incidentally some of my proposals happen to align with my goals". The fact is that the Republican party base doesn't trust experts, and prediction markets are proposed as a way of compensated for the epistemic disadvantage that comes with that distrust.
I can't speak to Hanson, since I haven't looked at what prediction he made when (aside from the flooded NY interview, and I gather he has denied saying what he was quoted as saying) but the prediction in the first IPCC report gave a range for future warming, and actual warming was well below the bottom of the range. So far the IPCC has pretty consistently overpredicted, although that was, I think, the worst case. For details see: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
A cursory glance at the IPCC1 report shows their "Business as Usual" emissions paths (page 70) assuming CFC-11 levels doubling from the early 90s (when they actually peaked).
Etiology is complicated. Yes, the fossil fuel industry loves the denialists and funnels money into some of them. But frankly, AGW denial has grown beyond what bribery could pull off by itself. The industry may have been waving a flamethrower around, but you don't get a forest fire unless there's fuel.
And, well, when universities' social psych departments are ideological laundries and their humanities departments are finishing schools and propaganda machines, there's plenty of fuel for "academics are the enemy". STEM is nowhere near as tainted, but people who don't move in academic spheres don't have the experience to spot the difference.
Prediction markets are harder to bias- except that prediction markets, if they're at all effective, will be biased in the long run towards correct predictions. If those correct predictions contradict things republicans believe, republicans will not adjust their beliefs, they will simply ignore the prediction markets.
This is the tragedy of unilaterally favoring the truth over war. You will accede to the other when they are right, but they won't accede to you when you are right. So you do worse than if you lie.
What things? Food output has trended steadily up, not down, and there has been no clear pattern on hurricanes. So far as predictions, Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC in protest at the person who was doing to be running the next iteration of that part of the report claiming, with no peer reviwed evidence, that climate change was increasing hurricanes. His view was that it might make them a little stronger and a little less frequent, but that the effects were too uncertain to count on.
Or am I misinterpreting what things you were referring to?
A prediction market can predict, but cannot determine. What determines whether or not climate change exists is a set of meteorological conditions. Unless there's some Straussian point I'm missing.
(By the way, confusing our understanding of the state of the world with the actual state of the world strikes me as a serious ongoing problem, so I don't mean this to be pedantic: I think there are important stakes to this.)
It would be very hard to use it to predict whether it was bad. What you are describing is predicting two out of the many different effects that have to be added up. Also, famines over the next few years, if they happen, are going to be due to political causes, as over the last few decades. What you need for that part of the argument is a prediction of total production of food crops, or perhaps prices of food crops relative to prices in general.
So far as selling ideas, I think it will be very hard to persuade masses of people about the virtues of prediction markets. You might do better by setting up a mechanism so that individual experts can make predictions and bet on them, with whether they have done so widely publicized. That's a much easier approach to explain to people.
>that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts)
Can a prediction market predict a conditional probability? Do participants in the market have an incentive to predict accurately in this case?
An example: Suppose a local government is deciding whether to build a bridge. They decide that it is only worth it to build the bridge if at least a thousand people use the bridge in the first year. They use a prediction market to figure out the probability that this will happen, and they will only fund the bridge if the predicted odds are greater than 50%.
The prediction market opens, and comes up with a probability of 20%. But, you think the market is wrong. You think the real probability is more like 80%. But you don't have enough capital to single-handedly move the market to above 50%. If you bet on the bridge having more than a thousand people, then the government will decide not to build the bridge, and refund your money after resolving the market as invalid. You have no incentive to participate.
The only way I can see to keep people honest is to occasionally act against what the market predicts. So, if the market predicts the odds of the bridge being worthwhile are 1%, then sometimes you build the bridge anyway, just to make sure the participants have some skin in the game.
There's also other types of conditional questions that aren't covered by that example. You could have e.g. markets for all the conditions (covid deaths with X policy and without Y policy), and then someone might bet on all of them with the same money.
I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud here; but I thiink there's been deep thought into conditional markets, that could be interesting to read up on to get a better sense of whether they would work.
If there's a circularity where you're betting on X, and whether X happens depends on the prediction market for X, then yeah, it can sometimes completely lose its value as a prediction tool. There's often other financial instruments that might do what you want, e.g. bonds with payouts related to performance metrics.
In your example with the bridge, if it doesn't get built you gain nothing, but you lose nothing either. (I'm assuming negligible transaction costs, and perhaps an option to have the money you bet invested in an index fund to avoid the opportunity cost.) You still have an incentive to participate, as there is a chance that other bettors (along with you) eventually move the market above 50%, and the bridge does get built.
The argument is not that they are necessarily better at persuasion, but more accurate. It's likely that this makes them more persuasive, but that is not a black/white issue and not just about politics.
Even if prediction markets are more accurate in predicting the future than experts - and I would want a randomized controlled trial with specific experts before I would be willing to concede this - that doesn't make them better at producing policy that is a) persuasive to policymakers, and b) actually effective in addressing problems. A prediction market might be able to predict temperature increases due to global climate change, but can it tell you if the government should invest in renewable energy, set up a carbon tax, or just do nothing?
The goal of experts in policymaking isn't simply to be accurate - that's the bare minimum. It's also to produce policy proposals that are acceptable to both policymakers and the public, and that actually address the core problem. If prediction markets can only do the bare minimum - and again, that isn't proven - they aren't really capable of substituting for expertise.
A prediction market for climate change would be great, it would expose what I see as worst case scenario bias in environmental journalism. For example sea level rise is rarely even framed as "Sea levels are expected to rise from (min) to (max) over the next (time period) with a most likely value of (median) according to (source)". It is almost always framed "Sea level will rise up to (max)", sometimes without the "up to".
This subject has become a giant game of Dilbert's topper. All the incentives are to exaggerate as they can't be held accountable in a meaningful timeframe and they will be punished by the activists for wrong think.
I'll take the under for sea level on whatever environmental journalists come up with and invest my entire 401K on it. I suggest those numbers will come down if they had to put money on it. Extreme weather predictions would also be quite interesting, so how big an increase in extreme cold events are you predicting?
I'll be very curious to see how institutional investors (Blackrock, Vanguard, etc.) handle climate change. We've gotten a sneak preview of this with COVID where the vaccine companies are basically giving away vaccinations in part because these investors who "own" them care much more about the health of the economy and long-term cash flows than short term profits in a few small pharma companies (Matt Levine has written about this several times).
The potential parallels to climate change seem rather obvious and I will be very curious how this evolves over the next half-decade.
I am skeptical that these firms are pricing in "climate change" versus "governments will eventually do something about climate change," but I'm not sure how you would disaggregate those, in either a regular market or a prediction market if we're using these firms as a toy example.
Big money has long ago priced in climate change in markets that would be affected (insurance, agriculture, etc.)
There's definitely a lot of charitable/socially-conscious investing going on, too. The cynical take is that they're trying to appeal to their socially-conscious investors; the hopeful take is that rich and powerful people actually do care about society, too.
Was it confirmed that he actually banned Hawley and not just someone impersonating him? If so he might want to retract the banning, people like Hawley have power and even if Scott doesn't want him on his side making unnecessary enemies is never good in the long term.
The job of prediction markets (if they work) would be to predict the actual consequences of various policies.
They don't tell you what to do; you still use your personal values to decide which consequences are more important. But they tell you what you're choosing between: what you're really giving up by choosing a particular policy, and what you're really getting in exchange. They fight against wishful thinking and outright fraud.
The CARES Act, which essentially established a pop-up welfare state (a rickety one with lots of holes and cliffs, but bigger than any we've had before) in response to the pandemic. Measured by total redistribution and not memes about $600, CARES was one of the more generous schemes in the developed world, mostly by way of the superdole, which impressively reduced *overall* poverty in a time where unemployment peaked at 25% and jobless claims are still running at about 10x their pre-pandemic clip.
It is also the type of thing that Republican leadership would lay down on the tracks to stop under any circumstances other than "massive crisis, Republican president." If Hillary had been President they would've probably forced a full employer liability shield in return for some Burger King coupons.
And if they did, they would wipe the mat with Republicans. But Wokeness and idpol are central identity (ha) elements to Democrats that are not there for Republicans, so the pivot Scott describes is a lot easier for Reps.
The pivot for Dems would not have to be so dramatic. Dems are all about "equality" and "justice", so it wouldn't take much for them to pivot their "we support poor and marginalized people" rhetoric into genuine policy that supports poor and marginalized people. People like Sanders in the progressive wing of the party are already making inroads here.
The major problem with modern leftists like the Dems is that they believe that things are good for poor people that those people themselves often don't think are good for them.
Applying the theoretical 'woke' solution where financially and culturally marginalized get elevated to positions of power could work, except that they don't actually believe in the solution that they claim to believe in. After all, they are not favoring Ben Carson or Condoleezza Rice over Joe Biden, even though woke theory says they should.
If Democrats credibly became pro-gun (protect yourself from secret Nazis or whatever), they would wipe the floor electorally. But they won't and have been going the other way for decades.
Someone talked about Matt Yglesias elsewhere on this page, but he really wants the Democrats to stop picking useless fights on guns that never accomplish anything in exchange, and in exchange they win elections.
What Scott is talking about here is Idpol. It's expanding identity politics, but it is about activating and mobilizing around an identity. The same type of silly tests that people use to police who is really identity X would be used here. Did you watch the Superbowl?
I too would be interested to see this, but it's less obviously necessary; the Democrats aren't going through the same identity crisis as the Republicans, and they have lots of relatively sturdy ideology lodestars to work with - e.g., techno-liberalism, identitarianism, new socialism - any of which could result in a winning coalition. By contrast it's much less clear what a viable model for the GOP would be going forward that would be both interesting and could win elections.
Republicans run vastly more statehouses than Democrats, just recently held the trifecta (during which they locked in a dominant Supreme Court majority for the next generation), and (IMO) are a mortal lock to win back the house in 2022 and will probably claim the Senate. People are always saying shit like this about the Republicans needing to evolve or die, and for life of me I can't see why. Republicans are doing fine, and they will almost certainly continue to do fine.
Matt Yglesias is basically sketching that out in his substack.
As a crude summary:
- De-emphasise wokeness because it is a clear vote loser
- Rebuild 'state capacity' and actually do things (especially in Democrat states as models to build support for national programs)
- Favour simplicity over complexity
- Take on entrenched interests which limit state capacity (public sector unions)
- Pursue significant and sustained stimulus including 'catch-up' inflation
- Prefer universal, simple welfare to targeted and complex
- Make structural changes (districts, electoral college, filibusters, supreme court, etc) which support democrats (easier to form govt and to actually do things)
I guess the question is what are the societal and cultural factors upstream of political parties that prevent Scott's or Matt's recommendations from coming to fruition? And how to change those such that these politics could happen?
"Trump outmanuevered the Republican establishment by finding a front where he could go on the offensive. He ignored the unfavorable terrain of race/sex/etc, and focused on class."
Not sure about this part! His signature issue was immigration, and ran on banning literally every Muslim in the world from coming here. It's clear that was part of his appeal, especially in the primaries.
I think much of that was less Trump and more Biden.
Hillary was programmed in a lab in 2016 to repel white voters, while Trump was programmed to repel Hispanics. In the 2016 Dem Primary, Hillary did horrible with white working class voters, but very well with Hispanic and Black voters.
In the 2020 Dem Primary, Bernie did much better with Hispanic voters, but just as poorly with black voters. Biden did well with working class whites and black voters, but matched Hillary's lukewarm performance with wine track Democrats.
So the improvement in 2020 for Trump among Hispanics was partially because Hispanics were not antagonized, but also because Biden performed poorly with them.
My theory on why Trump also did better with Asians is that there is something repellent in the Democrat's embrace of BLM to non-black minority voters, but again, thats just my crazy theory.
I think it is a bad mistake to interpret Trump as losing votes on any front. According to Wikipedia's List of United States Presidential Elections by Popular Vote Margin, he got over 74 million votes, making him the second most voted for presidential candidate in history, after Joe Biden. That's:
- ~11.5 million more votes than he got in 2016.
- ~5 million more votes than Barack Obama got in 2008.
I voted Biden, but saying someone lost votes when they gained 11.5 million overall is a tough sell to me, and I think it drives us to draw the wrong conclusions.
That's not completely true, as his promise to bring back industry jobs in the US was a huge part of his appeal. But I agree that immigration policy is the big obstacle to the kind of realignment Scott describes.
Primarily what you know is the claims made about his campaign and his appeal are what MSM said. The same guys who got Brexit and Trump’s election wrong, so its not like they’re great social or political analysts...
Please keep in mind that the decisive part of his appeal was his opponent. If you look at the exit polls from 2016 (I haven't fully reviewed 2020 yet), you'll see that 60% of voters in swing states that Trump *won* thought that Trump was unfit for the presidency. The voters who put him over the top weren't voting for Trump, they were voting against Hillary/Democrats. People are fed up with the status quo, and Democrats keep running leftover 1990s neoliberals. I think that if Trump hadn't been an utter buffoon, or if Biden had has even an ounce of wokeness, Trump would've won again. And he would've been carried over the finish line by people who can't stand him.
I am a young rightist who works in DC. I will attest that already you will find, on staffs and in higher education, bright anti-“Cathedral” people (or whatever actually numinous term you prefer, as opposed to the vacuous ‘anti-establishment’) who not only read such authors as Lasch and Lind, but listen to avowedly “class reductionist” or “post-left” thinkers. We care about policy solutions to economic problems, but consider ourselves constrained by the “white question” within what one could call conservatism. We understand why we attract minority voters — realistic rhetoric about urban crime probably captures much of the variance — but we saw the Trump campaign systematically (some would say intentionally, with regard to Kushner et al) refrain from wholeheartedly pursuing greater gains among demographics that predictably swung to the right. What’s more, we try to persuade our friends who stop at Tucker Carlson (rhetoric) and American Compass (policy) to consider whether they go far enough in their orientation towards these problems. Our self-understanding is that we will see neither a critical mass of our kind with platforms not a growing number of representatives who are able to combine passion with prudence. But our numbers continue to grow, and our ideas will only get better. You do good work with this blog; we don’t hate you. But then again, when you address yourself to Republicans, you might well speak past us, if the party leadership has its way.
We're doing them outside, with a big fire to keep the air flowing. Bourbon is provided and consumption is encouraged for sterilization purposes. DC has about 100 new cases a day and dropping. We consider the risk on par with outdoor dining, and, of course, attendance is way down from what it was in the before time.
All right, thanks. I continue to recommend that readers not go to meetups until the pandemic is over, but I understand I don't control you and I appreciate that you're taking the risk seriously.
Saturation bombardment of the mid-Atlantic with high-yield thermonuclear warheads would accomplish that well enough. We could eradicate Covid-19 in your region by some time this afternoon. Please let's have more thoughtful and less absolute goals.
One thing to note: this kind of thinking is usually undergirded by an idea that the problem is that millionaire donors don't want to get on board. The truth of the matter is that the Republicans lost millionaire donors for the most part since 2008 and with trends ever since 1992. The Paul Singer & Charles Koch types, they don't move the needle in comparison to the gobs of corporate cash the Democrats are capable of raising.
The Republicans raise far more money from small to mid size businesses than anyone else. Construction firms, mid sized oil & energy ventures, hoteliers, franchisees, etc. They are a party that much like the Canadian Conservatives, relies on a sort of petit bourgeoise for fundraising, a group that is largely culturally conservative but also in values, very economically conservative. The state is a massive problem in their lives, from 1099 Reporting problems, taxation, regulation, and overall unhelpfulness. This group is more libertarian economically than most millionaires are. Winning them over is going to be hard without a platform that really addresses the issues that small to mid size businesses face.
If you want to know what this group looks like culturally, think back to the Tea Party upsurge in 2010. You had a lot of small business types, family farmers, etc enter Congress, and the movement that supported them was ideologically similar, but utterly out of step culturally with the professional DC Republican class.
There are probably some very real clashes of interest involved in this. I don't think pro natalism or economic interventionism is going to be a problem, but I do think that massive state action that harms this group's livelihoods and encourages more concentration of economic power into fewer hands, albeit run in concert with a state led value driven economic agenda, is going to be a problem. The US Republicans are unique among world political parties (besides the Canadian Tories and the UK Tories between Thatcher & Cameron) in appealing to this group and relying on them for support. I don't exactly treasure the concept of chucking them overboard.
Interestingly the Conservative Party in the UK has done this kind of cultural appeal with great success in the 2019 general election, where they managed to steal dozens of seats from former Labour (the biggest left-wing party in the UK) heartlands in the North of England. They had suffered from being economically 'left behind' due to the lingering effects of large scale deinsutralisation from the 1960s-80s, and the Conservatives managed to win these seats due to a promise to "Get Brexit Done", to "level up" the regional economy, and because the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was seen as not credible as a leader. Now they are lauching a so-called "war on woke" to try to retain these voters (see this article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/02/20/tories-bet-on-culture-wars-to-unite-disparate-voters). All of this is somewhat similar (if not the same in aprts) to the points in this article and I'm wondering how much of a template this is for Republicans in the US.
That's mostly about Brexit rather than directly centering appeals to the working class . The percentage of voters saying the conservatives look after the interests of the working class is more or less than same in 2015 and 2019 (with a small dip in 2017) yet they still won a lot of those voters.
Always be careful about claims the Tories are fighting a "war on woke", especially when they come from the left. The Tories have ignored huge opportunities to pick a fight with the woke, most notably when the statues were being toppled.
And when they do something about it they usually do it quietly. They've made laws protecting statues, and they've announced a new academic free speech policy. But they've not made huge speeches about it. Overall the impression I get is that the party sees this as problem and wants to solve it. Not that they want a big war to shore up their vote.
I only read Douthat intermittently, but he has alluded to young voices in the Republicans cooking up a new form of Conservatism. It's very much different to the previous iteration of neo-libralism, before the populists took over. It seems to be based on social conservatism and strong institutions.
Quite seriously Scott, there is need for a properly functioning left and right in politics, and you have really put your finger on what the right needs to do to be relevant. I'd love to read a conversation between you and Douthat. Add Dominic Cummings for flavour (although I thing you and he are rather overlapping here).
The first time I encountered Dominic Cummings' writing I was pleasantly surprised to find his high opinion of Scott -- he has a tag [1] for Scott, and his essay [2] on the "intersection of decision-making, technology, high performance teams and government" has the following pretty flattering quote in the summary:
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia: ... An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
(sorry I don't know how to convert words to hyperlinks in substack comments, hence the links below)
1. You are using "upper class" to mean what almost everybody else means by "upper middle class". Of course "the upper middle class à la lanterne" (well, la classe moyenne supérieure...) doesn't have the right ring to it, but "les aristocrats à la lanterne" doesn't sound Republican either.
2. Isn't renaming it "the upper class" a step in precisely the wrong direction? Working-class people who vote Republican often look up to the rich (without knowing any rich people themselves), would like to be rich, etc. What they dislike is people who know more than they do or who hold themselves to know more than they do. Saying that this disliked group of people is legitimately "upper" is precisely what you don't want, if you want to appeal to those voters, no?
I think this is calling back to the previous post where money and class are separate. Trump is rich, but not upper-class (except of course he is, but for some reason it didn't take). But yeah, I think you need at least more sneer quotes if you're going after "the 'upper' class" (perhaps include a Trumpian eyeroll when you say "upper").
Upper class is just a bad label to use. I agree that it has too much cachet. That to these people, upper has a cadence of legitimacy that words like academics, elites, and establishment don't.
Invoking authority and hierarchy isn't enough. Many of these people respect kingship. What they don't respect is a king with no clothes.
Yup. Notes to Republicans: (a) Never, ever use the term "lower class". That sounds too negative. Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living. (b) Come up with a different term for "upper class" (which sounds too positive - upper class means rich, and we all want to be rich, even if we don't admit it). "Snob class"? Meh. I'm not a marketing person (obviously), but I'm guessing you have a few on staff.
If this is ever pursued seriously, just the term 'elites' can carry the day if deliberately and directly contrasted with 'working class'. Almost everyone who voted for Trump knows on a visceral level the contrast between these two groups and almost instinctively could define it.
> Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living.
Indeed, it's much more positive-sounding.
> Come up with a different term for "upper class"
Indeed. If a legislator said they weren't "upper class" I'd point out that him and people like him *literally make the laws*, so they are clearly ruling class which is pretty much a synonym for upper class.
> "Snob class"?
That's getting towards the connotations one wants to elicit: of really snooty people who look down on everyone else.
Maybe a better term might be "hoity-toity well educated people", or something like that but a bit more catchy.
But I think it's only a subset of educated people that the working class despise: those who aren't in STEM fields but instead in useless impractical stuff like critical theory. The wast majority of people respect those with real skills, such as physicians who can heal the sick, civil engineers who can build bridges that stay up, programmers whose code runs and does something useful, etc.
It's also really not clear to me that the *true* upper class exerts the same role they did in Fussell's day. I have no doubt they exist and have a lot of money but their representation in the "elites" (construed in wealth and power terms) seems pretty marginal, and I say that as someone who's been to my share of Met Galas.
My simplifying it, you are feeding the common leftist delusion that they are on the side of the working class. Trying to make the Republicans better, by doing things that make the Democrats worse is perhaps not what you intended?
I think this shows that Fussell's class book does not port well to politics in the 2020s. While Fussell's point (or was it Alexander's friend's point? I think the latter) that class is a series of separate ladders is true *to a degree*, it's hard to separate class from money completely. Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money. Republicans are against minimum wage increases; it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the *working* class, or against the upper class.
Of course, Republicans *already* try and fight this in class language — they don't use the word, and they don't adopt Scott's specific proposals, but they do almost anything else; "elite" means "upper class" in Scott's sense. But it's pretty deceptive when they do: their policies help rich people (most of whom are in the Republican class—rich are still strongly Republicans!), and hurt poor people (opposite.)
Really, what we have here is a good, old-fashioned cultural conflict, of Red v Blue tribe. Class doesn't fit it.
Two additional points: First, Republicans are usually against expertise not out of class warfare but because they dislike what it tells them; above all, on climate change—a topic we really really don't have time to screw around with attacking expertise on—it mitigates against a lot of things that the Red tribe like, e.g. SUVs, suburbs, etc. It also does a lot of things that are straight-up economic: to adapt to climate change and to de-carbonize the economy both take lots of money & government programs, which Republicans are against because they hate high taxes — again, something that already fits very badly into their pre-existing class frame.
Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base. IMS it was a better predictor for voting Trump than any other single variable in 2016. Going to make alliances tricky.
Basically, I think the Republicans already try this; it fits very badly with the parts of their program they are most passionate about; and in some very important areas (climate change) it is leading to utter disaster.
Your argument takes it for granted that the left's interpretation of the effect of policies is correct. The standard economic argument against the minimum wage isn't that it reduces profits or raises costs but that it makes it harder for unskilled workers to get a job, especially a first job, because it prices them out of the market. From that standpoint, the supporters of a higher minimum wage are people who won't have their employment prospects affected by it and want to feel good about how much they are helping the poor.
Climate policy would be a long argument, and this probably isn't the place to have it.
You articulate the economics 101 policy model. The problem is that when you take econ 102 and learn about market inefficiencies—or just look at actual examples that have been studied—turns out the real world doesn't look like the models. And the people actually organizing for the higher minimum wage tend to be minimum wage workers; the others are just cheering them on.
Being civil here, this is an very classist statement, both in the economic and cultural sense (both of which are inherently interwoven). Many skilled laborers are paid minimum-wage and kept there not only because of profit-model of market institutions like companies but the very socio-economic situations people live in. Farm labor, retailers, construction workers, infrastructure workers, factory labor, etc. etc. all work both skilled and necessary jobs for our society and the very least that can be done is assuring their lives are filled with less strife and economic instability. Just because they couldn't afford to get a college degree doesn't mean their labor value is worth the FEDERALLY MANDATED MINIMUM. Overall, and incredibly ignorant take on your part.
Your statement suggests that you may be overestimating how much of the labor force is paid minimum wage. Of hourly paid workers, it's a bit under 2%. That is a tiny fraction of the number who don't have a college degree.
Whether they are worth either the present or the proposed minimum wage depends on how much value their labor produces. If it costs $15/hr to hire someone for a job that produces $10/hour of revenue, he won't get hired. That has nothing to do with his moral value, only his economic value. And if your insisting that he ought to get $15/hour results in his being permanently unemployed you are hurting him, not helping him, however righteous it makes you feel.
Most of the jobs you listed make bank. Semi skilled construction and farm labour especially, at least where I am. Nowhere near our relatively high provincial minimum.
I'm confused by your reaction to my comment. Perhaps I misrepresented my position. I am agreeing with you that minimum wage people have labor skills which they can use to get hired.
By contrast, those who are unskilled, by and large people who have yet to enter the job market, but also some minimum wage workers, will not be helped by minimum wage increases and in fact be hurt because the labor market will contract, making it harder to find entry-level jobs.
In addition, a too high minimum wage can even negatively impact those with marketable job skills. See, for example, the UW minimum wage study, which found that Seattle's raising of the minimum wage to $13 an hour a few years ago "reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis." On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month.
BTW, the city council cut public funding for the study after that preliminary report. But my my city's city council could be a post in itself :-)
Your claim is way beyond what the evidence shows. There is considerable empirical data that shows that the least-productive workers (e.g. those with poor English skills) are hurt disproportionately by minimum wages. And there is lots of anecdotal evidence that the adjustment to a binding minimum wage includes things like making workers' hours less predictable, things that cut costs while making workers less happy. A solidly center-left economist such as David Neumark at UC Irvine has written a number of careful literature reviews that wipe out the "labor markets don't follow the Econ 101" view of the world.
OTOH, John Cochrane, the Grumpy Economist at Stanford, argues that the minimum wage isn't that big of a policy problem and that classical liberals ought to devote more attention to other policy distortions.
It's kind of funny telling David Friedman he needs to learn about market inefficiencies in Econ 102... although he has admitted to never taking a course for credit in either the subject he teaches or the one the school he teaches at is dedicated to.
The only "market inefficiency" argument I am familiar with that implies that the standard model is wrong is the one proposed by Card and Krueger, which requires monopsony employers of low skilled labor. Given that low skilled labor is relatively unspecialized, that seems implausible. Is that the inefficiency you are thinking of, or did you have a different one to propose?
"Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money."
Got any evidence for that?
"it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the working class, or against the upper class."
Exit polls are not reliable, and the "modern racism scale" is actually an anti-racism scale; that is, one scores most racist on it if one supports treating races most equally.
"but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base."
This sort of argument, if you want to dignify it as such, when all it really is is a slur, is so typical of mandarin political posturing (can't really call it thinking). In 2008, it was you oppose Obamacare because you are a racist. Blah, Blah, Blah.
You have cracked it: "mandarin" is the term that Scott was looking for.
- They are the historical poster children for credentialed experts leading cushy lives instead of doing real work.
- They were not actually the aristocracy, neatly resolving the dilemma of trying-to-say-upper-middle-class-but-it-is-too-awkward-so-we-said-upper-class-instead.
It further has an interesting multivocality about it. China is never far from questions of national greatness, and the term refers to a Chinese political class. This means it will be possible to call people mandarins while meaning anything from the soft use above to:
- [Aggressive] They make the country weak, and so might as well be aligned with China
- [Paranoid] They actually are a communist spy working for China
- [Racist] They seem like a Chinese person, which is bad
As a consequence it does a good job of wrapping up social class as a domestic strategy and opposition to China as a foreign policy strategy in a single word.
I firmly expect Democrats to walk face-first into the trap of condemning it as racist while simultaneously endorsing it through "akshually" style articles about how the mandarins are usually credited with maintaining an efficient imperial administration, and were a key factor in the tendency of China to remain Chinese despite being ruled by dynasties originating from outside traditional Chinese borders. In this way they will cede narrative control for a cycle or two.
Reminder that I don't endorse this. But I bet it would be effective.
This is magnificent. Hope some Republican politicians are reading this. A Republican party with this kind of platform is one I could actually wholeheartedly support, instead of only occasionally in the interests of maintaining balance of power.
I should clarify that Sir Humphrey has no *party* politics in the sense that he does not want either *party* to hold power for an extended time. This is not so far from how I feel :-)
But a GOP That Used the Word Class would not be substantively different! Certainly this would be much better messaging than whatever they're doing now (and I suppose better messaging can sometimes lead to better policy) but the whole premise of this post is that this approach has the potential to unify all the pre-existing ideological factions within the GOP.
More like: Do stuff for poor people, really do stuff instead of talking, while losing the Woke and you'll dominate elections for decades.
And I do hope Scott does a Democrats version. I'm curious as to whether his analysis of what will solidify their power is in line or opposed to my own.
The issue is that they try to do stuff for poor people, but that is often stuff that many poor people don't want and/or stuff that makes the lives of poor people worse. These policies are often things that look great from an ivory tower and/or benefit a favored poor group at the expense of another poor group.
For example, the anti-poverty policy that I hear Democrats talk most about is raising the minimum wage, but that will harms rural communities that have low costs of living and can barely compete by leveraging those low costs of production. It doesn't actually compensate for being out-competed by (illegal) migrants.
Exactly. I've had this argument several times to no avail. If minimum wage is raised to $15 or (like Costco) something higher, do they really think the guy who is only paid minimum wage and would be paid less if it was legal to do so will still have his job? That bored housewives and talented high school and college students won't come out of the woodwork for twice the pay to replace yet another lower/working class job? In major cities it's more or less moot because starting pay is already near $15 - heck, here in suburban Cleveland the lowest paying advertised fast food job is $10.75 and McDonald's is already at $13. If you're in New Hope, Kentucky though? Yeah, say goodbye to your miserable job Lower/Working Class Man and enjoy even more miserable unemployment.
Romney's and now Biden's child tax credit is such a huge thing for larger working class families precisely if it's managed through Social Security and is automatically deposited vs. playing the IRS Lottery of figuring out what or if you qualify for it at year-end. There are light years of difference between a Maybe amount of cash when you file taxes vs getting $1,000 a month auto deposited into the account you use to buy groceries.
So part of me really likes this, wants to agree with everything here, and would probably vote for this republican party. Which raises the alarm bell in my head that goes "This isn't how republicans actually think; this is just how you wish they would think".
I don't think I have any special insight as to why (that is, I can think of some reasons - it's hard to imagine someone like Ted Cruz or Mike Pence or Trump Jr. or whoever explicitly embracing this framing, and if you try to picture it and it feels weird your guess is as good as mine as to why this is). But specific points of disagreements:
Using betting markets instead of experts: This can work for top-level strategies (at least, if you have a lot of liquidity). But like I pointed out the other day (link again https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/using-betting-markets-to-make-decisions/), there's an issue where betting markets are an order of magnitude slower and more complicated than the decision they reflect. You can use them for something big like "should we approve the AZ vaccine" or "should we build a transit system in Charlotte", but for short-turnaround decisions like "on which side of the street should we put the entrance to this station" You can't replace experts with them. There's no real getting around needing competent people who can make decisions in your organization.
On 4, I just have the minor point that "saying cops are bad because classism and not racism" still seems impossible for republicans because it's anti-cop? Or am I misreading the point of that bit?
Re: Cops—I imagine that a goodly number of people in the Republican party who get lumped in as "pro-cop" are really just anti-calling-cops-racist, because in their minds racism doesn't exist. I have literally seen people defending cops by pointing out that more white people are killed by cops than black people.
Bizarre. My only complaint was the opposite. I just kept thinking, "yeah, scott, this is the entire populist right and an episode of tucker carlson in a nutshell."
I am not sure that the term "class" is the best candidate for Scott's proposal. In fact, some Republicans are already articulating most of these ideas through the use of the term "elites", which I favour (I thought of using "intelligentsia" but the term is too elitist, LOL.
You can persuasively argue that elitism can be the target: a group of people who consider themselves better than the rest in everything they do: their policies, their diets, their environmental choices, the cars they drive. The Republican party can be the party of those who value hard work, decency and the traditional American cultural experience, Ford F-150 included.
You can then shed (hopefully) the linkages with racism and conspiracy theories and just represent everyone and anyone who is alienated by the sanctimonious speech and actions of the elite. Those part of the elite are detached from reality, they do not understand the real struggles of average people. And average people ought to be celebrated and protected.
The problem with choosing the elites as your enemy is that they're...well...elite. And they'll leverage that elitism to piss in your cornflakes at every opportunity, which in a 24/7 digital age news cycle makes for a whole lot of hot cereal.
The site you linked for the "college degree for childcare" has the 404 error page so I went to their homepage. Didn't find that story but saw a link for "How to get pregnant fast". Er, don't we all know how that works? And if you're trying for a baby, what worked for my sister was "have an elderly relative pray to St. Anne for a surprise for you; when your mother conveys this message, tell her "well it worked, I'm pregnant!"
5.1.2 In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?
5.1.3 How do your interactions with the child enhance her/his potential to interact positively with other children?
Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?
Yep, for a three month old baby, the daycare has to ensure their interactions "enhance their potential to interact positively with other children".
So, all this and more being dumped on childcare providers means that the qualifications needed are becoming more academic. Straight out of school minding kids isn't enough anymore. But a bachelor's degree isn't necessary, either. We have intermediate frameworks - a Level 5 qualification is the medium standard here, and you can do it as a student or mature student on a Post Leaving Certificate course. If you're unemployed/on social welfare, you can get a Back to Education Allowance while you're on the course. You can then go into employment or progress on to a college degree in the field.
So increasing professionalism required, yes, but a college degree not necessary.
Having those milestones doesn't make professionalism reasonable; the fact that those milestones require professionalism demonstrates they are unreasonable.
I don't think any of those milestones require any degree of professionalism. They require empathy and a basic understanding of how to socialize a baby. The fact that anyone believes such things require credentials is frankly insulting.
I think there are any number of people who can care for a baby but would respond to a question like "Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?" with "Huh?". Or who couldn't translate the bureaucratese "In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?" into something like "If the baby's crying, do you check to see if it needs to be changed or fed?"
Second question: if you get the Republicans to explicitly start opposing "expertise", do you think you're going to be able to fine-tune that you mean "oh, but MDs are still fine", or do you accept that there's a chance it might get into "everyone who wears glasses, up against the wall"?
Medical school is a trade school. Trade schools are the opposite of universities. The War on College can be extended to med school requirements. Medical school admissions may favor people who majored in biology, but they also accept people who majored in philosophy. They do not accept people who do not have a college degree. Scott has blogged before about just how useful his undergraduate degree was once he got to med school. I can't find the post at the moment, but if I recall correctly it was a less than glowing endorsement of the system.
"The degree requirement seemed like more of a class barrier / signaling mechanism than an assertion that only people who knew philosophy could make good teachers and doctors."
This manifesto could be tweaked to appeal to a significant portion of the left too - there are plenty of progressives who are tired of the tyranny of academia on policy and culture. And honestly I’m not sure the GOP is any more a natural fit for this kind of renewal than Democrats. Both parties are stacked with Yale law grads rearranging their nameplates.
Biggest problem I see with this is Republicans would have to decide where they stand on labor unions. If they still are against them, this working class rhetoric seems pretty hollow. If they decide they're for them, there goes the fundraising base.
Ah yes, my favorite definition of "rich educated people" include construction workers (the incoming secretary of labor is a former construction union president) and truckers.
I guess you'd have to polarise them, working class unions vs elitist unions (back to the using ID politics to trick non-degree holders into looking bad)
I agree. It's a lot easier to get people to vote for you if your policies make them better off financially. So if the Republicans do want to attract working class voters, they need to do more than just anti-elite culture war posturing, they need to go for economic policies that help working class people. Some ideas:
- increase minimum wage
- bringing back offshored jobs
- (possibly) UBI: this is more popular with Democrat than Republican voters but i saw a poll where 52% of Republican voters supported it, and i doubt if Biden will enact it by 2024. One downside is that many would look at is as a free handout to the lazy.
- something about affordable housing, e.g. so that any American on a full time minimum wage job can afford to buy a house.
However, slave labor in prison fits very neatly into a popular American narrative-- anyone who's accused is guilty, and guilty people deserve however they're treated in prison.
The catch is the NLRA makes unions under US law uniquely objectionable. Duty of fair representation, "good faith" bargaining requirements, and exclusivity aren't inherent requirements of collective bargaining but are the law of the land.
I don't say this often, but I don't know if you fully thought this through to the conclusion. This just teaches Republicans to be more persuasive. If they take this on and theoretically win the votes needed to gain power, they'll still be left with the same core policies, more or less. Try using "class" to support a Republican policy you DON'T like, and I think you'll see where this can backfire.
As a low-income, highly-educated, almost-Marxist, I find this oddly persuasive and kind of chilling.
It's true that the Republicans would be *better* in some sense if they adopted this sort of approach, but is that "better for the country/world" or "better at destroying everything I hold dear"?
Yeah. San Francisco has basically already shown this: If you're a highly-educated person who's not already part of the political establishment, the entire political establishment will unify in declaring you as the enemy and do everything possible to attack you, no matter how much they hurt themselves in the process.
Depends what you mean by "a real left party". I want to see well-funded public services, higher taxes on the rich and nationalisation of certain industries that I think are more effectively run in the public sector. I don't want to see academics sent to work in the fields or to re-education camps. If you think the latter are "real left" and the former are not, then we disagree on the definitions of a word.
Working class people may look on me with suspicion, hatred, or disdain (I doubt it but I'll go with it) but that doesn't make me their enemy. I would argue that their enemies are the people who control them and make their lives worse: the people who own the media, the people who own the government, and the people who own the means of production.
(substack commending is weird. Sorry if this appears twice, or deleted, or twice deleted, or some shit)
I'm taking this that, since the popular view of Republicans from Democrats/non-Republicans that I see all over social media is that they are plutocrats who hate gays, minorities, trans people, women, non-Christians, and anyone who isn't a white cishet old man, then it can only be an improvement if the GOP can shift that perception to being "we are the party of the working class and that means BiPOC as well as white persons of all genders and sexual orientations!"
I mean, to be fair, Republicans are the party of Evangelical Christianity. This doesn't necessarily mean that they *hate* gays, non-Christians, and other non-cis-heteronormative people; but it does mean that they strongly prefer a world where such people were a continuously shrinking minority. They certainly wouldn't want to pass any policies that would encourage such people to continue committing their sins, right ?
Why did you name this A Modest Proposal? Am I missing the satire? This seems like a legitimately amazing idea to me. Am I somehow a really horrible person without knowing it?
Yes! And a person who read the original Swift essay about killing, cooking, and eating children and took it seriously and thought it was a great idea would be A) a moron and B) a terrible person. I'm taking this Scott essay seriously and I think it's a great idea. Am I missing something?
I assume the idea is that despite Scott's best efforts to persuade them that social class and economic class are distinct, he still expects the idea of focusing on class to appear as outrageous to Republicans as Swift's proposal to eat children appears to non-horrible people.
I think this is right. Current Republicans equate class struggle with Marxism, and there is no place for Commies in the red party! Scott's argument only works if 'class' is defined in the Fussel manner as independent from income level.
I'll join your camp, although since I'm the target audience maybe I'm just too dumb to get it since I went to an obscure undergraduate school and Ohio State (sacre bleu!) for grad school.
This is the best article on politics I've read in... well, months at least. I'm seriously amazed by it.
I think it's about blurring the lines and maybe providing a bit of deniability. Scott here is giving a proposal for how the GOP could have an intellectually exciting platform. It also happens to cohere strongly with values that any long-time reader of SSC will recognise Scott himself holds. But Scott is a self-identified Democrat who moves in Blue Tribe circles, and saying things as blunt as "here's how you could get me to vote Republican" might not be in his best interests.
Scott has zero Blue Tribe cred; he's committed way too many blasphemies. I was "warned" against him by Blue Tribers years ago, and that was before he had a public row with the NYT that blew up into a Grey vs. Blue fireball (despite his best efforts to avoid that coding).
Listening to Scott is, among the Blue Tribe, evidence of heresy.
The Swift essay proposes a means "For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick."
His technique is based on this observation:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."
But the idea of the "War on Christmas" is not that someone with some Jewish/Hindu/Islamic etc. friends may say "Happy holidays."
This is a motte and bailey.
Upper class people do tend to be more circumspect. That's the motte.
The bailey is the "WAR ON CHRISTMAS" Jackbooted leftist bureaucrats are coming to destroy Christian culture.
Take Tucker Carlson on December 6, 2020 in relation to guidelines to limit holiday gatherings. "If death is inevitable — and that may be the one thing you’re not allowed to say in this country, but it’s still true — then maybe we should pause before we destroy the living in the name of trying to eliminate it. Politicians understand this threat. They’ve figured out that Christmas is bigger than they are, and therefore, it’s a threat to them. Better cancel it — and, in fact, they’re trying hard."
Thank you for this, really. It's such a joy to read things like that. I feel like you scraped the stew of vague ideas and intuitions in brain and shaped it into a coherent theory.
Elites like Broadway, but mainly for plays by Tony Kushner, Jez Butterworth, Tom Stoppard, and so on (perhaps a Sondheim musical here and there as a guilty treat). The lower classes crowd in to watch Mamma Mia with the Chinese tourists and then get dinner at Red Lobster.
But there's still a view that credentials are somewhat merit-based. Trump's message was "I'm working-class but just as good as the upper class, as demonstrated by my money and credentials".
This is a great piece, and with a good deal of truth in it. However, in France, Marine Le Pen's party has been trying to do that without amazing successes - the main problem is that an anti-immigration agenda is a requirement for a Republican/conservative platform and it's pretty hard to be anti-immigration without looking (and often not only looking) racist.
I would think a French politician could do it by merely being Francophile. Since French culture is the best culture in the world, why dilute it with lost of nasty foreigners, whatever their skin color?
I think that's the "without amazing success" part - she's held back by here anti-immigration line. Although considering her party were almost literally Nazis (and may just be pretending not to be now) she's at least achieved "terrifying" success.
What you are stating is the globalist delusion that only a small minority oppose immigration. Yet surveys show that wanting to reduce immigration is very popular.
Hypothesis: a large number of people might personally want to reduce immigration, and might vote for anti-immigration measures if they have secret ballots, but only people who are *much* more anti-immigration than average are committed enough to hold this opinion in *public*. Hence, the political parties which make strong commitment to reducing immigration a big part of their platforms, and their most vocal supports, are going to be much further right than the majority of their actual voters.
Anti-immigration is her main plank but she has tried to shift her party's public discourse toward (some of) the things you describe. The Rassemblement National does describe itself as a working class party (and is in fact a working class party sociologically) but it's anti-immigration stance which is at the core of the party's existence stop it to turn it's success among the working class into overall electoral success.
Eric Weinstein talks a lot about this. The Democrats/Elites/Upper class (or whatever name you want to give them) have done a great job making a popular position, that of a xenophilic restrictionist, seem non existent. The idea that you must support open borders or you are by definition a racist is nonsensical.
Keeping in mind that Scott somehow managed to accidentally become so successful at blogging that he got himself condemned by the NYT, I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP.
The problem with that is, of course, that the next blogging hiatus would be insufferably long.
If I had to choose between unhinged tweeting habits and brilliant essays in a president/politician, I would choose the brilliant essays. If I had to choose between a self-funded psychiatric clinic or a presidency/politicianship in a blogger, I'd choose the self-funded psychiatric clinic.
Reason being, mostly, that I like my bloggers a little bit more underground than being the president/major political figure in a global superpower. Just think about how huge the rate of NYT hitpieces would be, it really boggles the mind...
If you divorce class from wealth, what actually makes the class described here the "upper class?" Like, I sort of feel that way too, but that's because I'm in it, and so ascribe higher status within a blue-tribe status framework. But if the "lower class" here has more political power, and sees themselves as having higher status (i.e. a F-150 is certainly higher status than a Prius or a bus pass in at least half the country), why are they the lower class?
This only matters insofar as most people think they should be on the "lower class" side of a class war. I'm not sure in the world described by Scott here that I should support the political power of a party of pilots over the party of social workers unless I'm fully bought into its honest support of a platform broadly helpful to the poor (...and I don't see them shaking off the pathos that led them to elect Donald Trump.)
All that said, I agree that this would be a better republican party than we have now, and would push the dems to be better.
> 3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for "mainstream media". Being against the "mainstream media" sounds kind of conspiratorial.
I think you missed a step here. Americans -- except the class designated as the opposition -- LOVE conspiracy theories. Roswell, chemtrails, JFK, Masons, you name it, you can make millions with a miniseries about it that suggests there's something to it. The underclasses tend to have even wilder (and conventional yet unacceptable to the opposition class) ones. So "mainstream media" is great, the only thing that would be better is more scare quotes
"There's a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa."
No; it realigns every 36-40 years. The current party system (seventh) started in either 2016 or 2000; the previous was either from 1976 to 2016 (Trump had a coalition right opposite that of Carter) or 1964-2000 (2000 was the first election with clear "red states and blue states").
I find this so interesting. What is it about Marxism that you find appealing?
It sounds like you're saying that you find Marxism interesting as a philosophy, not necessarily that you think his philosophy is superior and should be enacted. If that is right, that makes sense. Or am I reading you wrong?
It sounds like you're referring to Marx's position that history will naturally progress to a point of global capitalism wherein all identity markers other than class will fade away, leaving just the proletariat on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other, and that at that point the revolution will occur and the dictatorship of the proletariat be established. Am I reading you right? If so, I think we're at my point of confusion, namely, how do you account for the fact that instead of the above occurring, the USSR and China had national largely non-industrial worker based communist revolutions that led to great famine and great oppression? I really can't wrap my head around a promotion of communism that doesn't account for what seem to be massive failures on its part. If your answer was, oh, China and the USSR didn't practice true Marxism I'd accept that as an answer but elsewhere you seem to indicate to me that you approved of Maoist tactics so am I right in assuming you do think China and the USSR are good models of communism?
It's rooted in economic ideas that were obsolete long before Marx, such as labor theory of value. Many new concepts such as marginal utility theory, economic calculation problem and comparative advantage principle are needed to understand modern economy and value of highly compensated middlemen.
I have. Their history of murdering and impoverishing their own citizens is a turn off for me.
Why should anyone look at centuries old philosophies that proved disastrous every time they were attempted? Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution without having personally experienced the hardship of pre-industrial living. He would have made great friends with the Unibomber. Now this post gives us new ideas to think about and try with possibly good results.
"Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution"
There are lots of bad takes on Marx, but this is easily the most hilarious.
Go read the Manifesto. It's brimming with paeans to early capitalism, touting its superiority to feudalism and praising it for abolishing "the idiocy of rural life" etc.
Later on, Marx did become concerned with the effects of capitalism on the natural environment, calling attention to what he termed the "metabolic rift". But he was faaaaaar from a luddite or a reactionary, and his theory of Communist revolution requires capitalist development, "without which want is merely made general".
I think he writes his own material.
test reply
Furthermore, it's hard to say how much "voting a bit more for Trump in 2020 vs 2016" is any indication of appeal in 2020 rather than an indication of *lack* of the *extreme* anti-appeal he had to these people in 2016, or the special appeal Obama had in 2012 and 2008.
There might be a few places where Trump did as well among minorities as Bush did in 2004 (I'm thinking mainly in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami), but those are rare.
Lower Middle
I think something more like this.
"Listen, the most true truth is that even though the elites act like they care about you when they're on CNN, behind closed doors they laugh at you. They call you "rurals" in the exact tone you imagine. 'The rurals.' They steal your money through unfair tax loopholes and tell you they earned it by working harder. I've seen it and I can't stand it anymore."
That's the thing, right? What is the difference between a futures market and a sufficiently deep casino book that somehow manages to capture somewhat abstract predictions? It feels to me like the more it becomes unique, the shallower and less predictive it gets. There are plenty of real instruments that capture questions like "what will the inflation rate in the US be in 10 years" and "the electric car is the future of transportation" that seem way more robust than something that is just something like the Simon/Ehrlich bet writ large.
I think the ability to trade your bets before them being realized is a big part of it?
I mean, the GameStonks thing shows that a few billionaires like Elon Musk are able to manipulate markets *even more* than the hedge funds, by making people do it for the lulz.
Out of how much was spent overall?
So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?
If the actual numbers don't matter, why did you say $2.3 billion from 25 people? If the actual numbers don't matter why do you not want to say the full amount?
Then why did you say something to begin with?
Nice
There's been research on this. The causality goes from politicians supporting certain policies to donations going to them. When politicians decide not to run for any more terms, they don't become less accomodating to the donor class. Garett Jones has been pointing out that they actually veer against populism when not "in cycle".
"So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?" What a totally insane non-sequitur.
Staying on topic, if your argument is that America isn't an oligarchy you're just very misinformed (or intentionally lying).
This article is a good starting point if you're trying to come to grips with the fact that America is not a democracy, if by 'democracy' you mean that policy is set based on the wishes of voters: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
The most relevant excerpt: "When the preferences of economic elites and
the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,
the preferences of the average American appear to have
only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant
impact upon public policy."
That's a very interesting paper! Thanks for sharing.
Although the paper does define economic elite as in the 90th percentile, so were talking about households that make $160,000+/year which is a bit different than billionaires controlling things. I'm also surprised they looked at income instead of wealth when defining their elite. Even more strange they define the average citizen's preferences as being the 50th percentile. So instead of looking at the aggregate preferences of everyone outside the elite class or everyone altogether, they are just looking at a specific middle band.
Additionally organized interest groups were split into two categories: business interest groups and mass public interest groups. I would think mass public interest groups would be a close representation of the mass public feelings, but I suppose a lot of people don't get involved in mass public interest groups. (Which fits in with what the Vox article says below.)
To showcase both sides, here's a rebuttal on Vox: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
It looks like the first accusation is basically of p-hacking. Something we sadly see regularly today, especially in social sciences. Of the 1,779 bills in the dataset, the economic elite and the average American agreed on 1,594, leaving only 185 bills to examine the difference between them. There's some more crunch in the article itself and a rebuttle from the authors of the original paper.
By the way, I never said I thought democracy was that policy is set based on the wishes of the voters, and either you made a mistake by claiming that or are being deceptive here.
> Who cares?
Boy you sure gave up quick.
> Who cares? When you're getting 2.3 billion dollars from 25 people, you do whatever the fuck they want.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
Why don't politicians charge a whole hell of a lot more?
There are plenty of people willing to do it. All you have to do is lie incessantly to your constituents, say in Congress for a couple decades, and you'll have amassed a decent amount of wealth. If you aren't willing to do it, the elites can just find somebody else.
I’m not understanding what your point is. Is this oredicated on the premise that Democrats are better for the working class? Or are you arguing against the system in general. How is the article anti-white, please.
*predicated. Substack really needs an edit function.
Well, until we're talking about racists, at which point we must steelman them beyond all common sense.
Part of the conflict theory article was about realizing he needed to learn how to talk to conflict theorists. It looks like this is an explicit appeal to conflict theorists, so therefore should look like conflict theory.
Class issues, weren't you talking about conflict theory?
Everyone, take a drink.
Last time we played that game, 42 people were found dead of alcohol poisoning. My username is in honor of them.
So why are you bringing it up?
How much had he previously assumed?
It's a pitch to a political faction which is itching for conflicts. Scott thinks they've long had a mistaken approach and he's trying to smuggle in some of his preferences under the veil of a conflict he has placed them on one side of.
Politics is supposed to be about productive conflict between interest groups.
If you're hearing lot of dog whistles, you may actually be a dog...
The post seems pretty explicit that this is a dog whistle:
"You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and “classism”."
That's not a dog whistle, that's just a regular whistle.
I guess I don't keep up with the lingo. What is the difference?
The difference is the regular whistle is something that is said plainly and is taken as it said. The dog whistle is when somebody tried to imbue meaning that is supposedly there but people fail to see it, except the explainer and imagined secret target audience of the dog whistle.
For example, if you criticize somebody for being elitist, and somebody comes and says it's actually "dog whistle" for saying he's a Jew - i.e. you are actually secretly signalling your imaginary anti-Semitic adherents that the real meaning of your message is attacking Jews, but nobody else - except for example comrade Finnydo above - could see it. Of course, usually it's complete baloney, people who are really anti-Semitic just plain say so, and they are rarely shy about it. Pretty much nobody is construing a complex narrative of class and populism to just secretly tell "jews bad" - neither most of the people who think so are actually capable of such subterfuge anyway. But this way you can smear a person without bothering with any proof - how would you prove you didn't secretly mean "Jews"? There's no evidence you could ever present to disprove such an accusation.
The strange thing is that the people who seem to hear dog-whistles all the time are rarely the supposed target of the dog-whistle.
It sounds like you are wary of the weaponization of dog whistle acusations. But that doesn't mean they dont exist.
This is an exact quote from Scott's text:
" Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.
Instead, just use the words "class" "
Hey.
I think you meant "woof!"
Tell that to those who want to eat the rich.
History repeats itself, and the iterations get ever faster.
"Ban Mckinsey" sounds more on point.
I'm guessing Jack isn't against the idea of strategy consultants (abstractly construed) so much as McKinsey in particular. I'm reminded of this essay, written by an anonymous insider: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners
The "upper class" that Donald Trump belongs to is a very different "upper class" from Boston Brahmins and the 'upper crust' who go to operas and throw gallant balls. See Scott's previous post for a better explanation: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
Did you get to that part and then instantly stop reading to post a comment? Because Scott explained what he meant by that immediately after saying it.
Donald Trump is not a rich man. He's a poor man who happens to have a lot of money. There's a difference.
I think there’s another level of irony in there. New York of the 20th century had a thing where putting on working-class mannerisms is an upper-middle habit.
So in Trump we have someone with some rich roots and some less-rich roots putting on the New York working man face in order to get their support; then he is viewed by non-New York upper-middle as actually “worker” (and a bunch of others thought so too.) Was he from the poor part of Queens? No. He may not be “Boston Brahmin” but that’s primarily because his grandfather and mother were more recent immigrants, so there wasn’t enough geologic time to go full Brahmin.
To get taken seriously in the 1970s and 1980s New York people did that, acting the way they thought people would if they were raised over a bar and worked on a loading dock. It was a form of signaling. I saw the leftovers of it, growing up in the tri-state area. It was also an act of the imagination.
Of course it strawmans the other side. It's a description of a form of demagoguery that Scott is arguing would be more effective than the current form. He may also believe that it is more nearly correct, but we can't expect a political party to limit itself to fair arguments for its position.
Ideally you strawman people you are sure won't vote for you — ones who the people who might vote for you don't like.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/earl_long_on_no.html
It's their side that talks most openly about liquidating kulaks, though.
Or would it just make the Democrats lean harder into "the opposite of what the Republicans are like" and make them more elitist?
That would play into the Republicans' hands. If the democrats did that, they would lose a subsequent election by a landslide.
That's pretty much what happened in 2016.
Pluse Hilary as an individual came across as robotic and unlikeable.
>Republican party
>anti-white
lmao
Yes.
Which part of his proposal is "anti-white"?
The transition wasn't completely binary but looking at presidential elections after 1960 and before 1990 purely based on which states the Democrat won:
Democrats did relatively worse in the South in 64, 68, 72 (only won one state and it wasn't in the South), 84 (same), and 88.
In 1980 it was about the same in the South as in other regions (although the West was especially Republican).
The only year the Democrat did significantly better in the South than in the country as a whole was 1976, when the candidate (Carter) was a southerner.
So overall I think it's safe to say that while the Democrats were still competitive in the South after the 60s, they definitely weren't "the party of the South" anymore.
Thinking further you could definitely argue that the transition took a lot longer in congressional and state elections. But even then I think the 60s is a good estimate for when Democrats stopped being "the party of the South" even if they kept a strong presence there.
OT: I wish people couldn't delete their own comments.
You get people writing high-effort and thoughtful responses that suddenly make no sense because the words they're responding to don't exist.
Adding an edit function would be helpful. It also might make the problem worse. Perhaps an edit function that allows people to click through to see the edits?
Partly for this reason, I often quote the part of the parent comment that I'm commenting on.
On the other hand, it demonstrates that some people have some residual sense of shame and reconsider intemperate things they have said on the Internets. I tend to think twice before I hit "post", but that's just me.
Seconded. The Wayback Machine often lets you do an endrun around this, which seems like a good solution, but it doesn't work here.
(A) Ignoring non-presidential elections is silly.
(B) Republican presidents did well in the south because they did well everywhere from 68 to 92, winning an average of more than 40 states per election. But if you look at the vote totals, they did worse in the south until the mid to late 80s, and the south didn't vote solidly for a republican until Bush in 2000.
Yes Republican dominance in the South didn't set in until the 90s. But I don't think you can really say the Democrats were "the party of the South" during a period where their presidential candidates were more likely to win non-Southern states than Southern ones.
but they weren't. in 68, demo/dixiecrats combined win the south. 76, democrats win the south. In 1980 and 88, republicans win almost everywhere, but all the most republican states are western. in 88 there are one or two republican states that are highly republican, and then the real shift happens over the next decade. the only exception is 1972.
In 64, practically the only states the Democrats lost were in the South. In 68, saying "the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case. It's true that the landslides in 72, 80, and 84 make it harder to draw conclusions but at the least those don't show a clear Democratic overperformance in the South.
And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South." And that stronger statement doesn't really seem to hold up after the early 60s.
> the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case.
Yes it is when you're claiming republicans won the south. 30% dixiecrat, 30% democrat and 40% republican is NOT republican dominance.
> And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South."
the statement is republicans didn't dominate the south until the 90s. dixiecrats were democrats, not republicans. They didn't call themselves the dixiecans, after all.
🙄
The phrase "3D jobs" is fascinating!
I had to clean up Uncle Norman's apartment after he dropped dead at the age of 90. He had been incontinent for a while. I hired professionals. 2 bedroom apt, say 1,000 sq. ft. $10/sq.ft. I am not complaining. It was a debt of honor, a family thing.
Knausgaard's first book in his famous series revolves around this task that he and his brother have to manage
Fucking dog had fucking papers...
That's quite surprising to me. In the US at least there is still a large "degree premium" which is used to explain why so many people are going to college. Is that not the case in Ireland? If so do you still only have a small minority of 18 year olds going the college route or have you also seen the same level of explosion in demand for higher education?
I'm always a bit leery when people point to random well-made items from their grandparents time that still work trying to argue that things used to be better made.
it's survivorship bias on steroids. in 100 years time some kid will be showing off their grandfathers blender from 2020 and people will make wow noises about craftsmanship... while completely ignoring the million crappier blenders sold the same year that simply didn't survive till 2120.
You can buy some really nice fancy toasters even now that will probably last extremely well but most people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a toaster.
(Please excuse my less-than-timely reply!)
I don't think this is true now - but it might be in the future. I agree that the main reason some of our crappy plastic toasters might be around in 50 years will be, as you say, that we produce bloody millions of the things and they decay with a sort of radioactivity-style half-life such that in 50 years probably some will have survived by sheer luck.
But, I don't think that's the main reason 50-year-old toasters are around now. I think the reason is that 50 years ago appliances like toasters were made according to a vastly different design philosophy which yielded far more long-lived products than we make today despite our better technology:
1. Instead of failure-prone but super-cheap-to-produce microelectronics on printed-circuit boards, devices had comparatively-expensive but comparatively-simple electromechanical mechanisms that were repairable by the average tinkerer using standard parts and tools.
2. Instead of moulded plastic cases, devices were made from metal (and Earthed rather than double-insulated), which was much more sturdy. If there were plastic/Bakelite parts they were entirely cosmetic and non-load-bearing.
3. Instead of being cheap enough to be essentially disposable, appliances were something of an investment and were made repairable by default - screwed together rather than glued or plastic-moulded, colour-coded wires (and usually with wiring diagrams made available by the manufacturers - imagine asking the manufacturer for a wiring diagram for your radio nowadays!), and enough free space inside the casing to actually work on the thing.
By way of evidence, consider cars in Cuba. It's not owing to survivorship bias that all those 1950s Cadillacs are still running there. It's made possible by the design philosophy of those cars - in particular the commonly-available and hand-workable materials, the dramatically under-stressed low-revving low-compression engines, the repairable nature of the design, and the support provided by the manufacturer (in the form of thorough documentation, workshop manuals, standardised parts, etc. all made-available to the consumer). Good luck keeping a Tesla car running for seventy years!
Also consider the television repair business, made possible by both the repairable nature of the sets, and the manufacturer support in the form of manuals, spare parts, etc.; as manufacturers learned they could get away with making irreparable products and simply not supplying documentation or spare parts, this entire industry has practically ceased to exist.
Consider also the number of people nowadays who know how to change the oil in their car (or even for that matter change a spare wheel!), or to wire a new plug onto a domestic appliance, or to service their bicycle themselves, or to use a soldering iron, or (...)
I think the general principle might be that as things become cheaper to produce, they become more disposable, and as products become more disposable the less appetite consumers have for repairing them - or even adequately performing basic maintenance - and these two trends form a mutually-supporting cycle.
If you tried to sell a business model like Apple's or Tesla's (videlicet "You can't repair this yourself, you have to bring it to us - and only to us - and we will decide whether it shall be repaired or whether you must scrap it and buy a new one") to the generation that bought their transistor radios in kit form, wired plugs onto their own appliances, changed their own oil, etc. etc. there would have been absolute outcry!
Finally, for today's "nice toasters that cost hundreds of dollars": in my experience, such things don't cost hundreds of dollars because they are more repairable or even necessarily better build-quality. They're just flashier-looking and have more "features" (I use the term in a sense that "bagels fit in the slot" counts as a feature but "the element is user-replaceable" doesn't). I think probably the reasons for this are that A) to the demographic they're marketed-to, a £300 toaster is every bit as disposable as a £30 toaster is to you or me, and B) after this many iterations of the "manufacturers' slightly less repairable <-> consumers' slightly less appetite to repair" cycle, the people who buy £300 toasters have no greater desire or ability to maintain or repair their appliances, or to differentiate between high-build-quality and low-build-quality appliances, than a £30 toaster consumer.
Hey Internaut. What do you think is the supply demand situation for blue collar jobs in Ireland? How can we improve the prestige? What about the quality? How big of a mistake was removing the trade track from education?
Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. It's great to get your insight, and disappointing that I can't find that insight anywhere else.
I keep hearing the degree premium is as strong as ever here in the US... but that's because wages for people without degrees keep going down rather than going up for people with a Bachelor's.
A bunch of my friends work in cleaning in ireland and it's normally not the most lucrative job unless you own your own company and have some good connections.
The degree premium is going to be confounded all to hell, especially in ireland.
Since college admission works directly off exam points it tends towards ruthlessly and brutally fair and since most of the cost of tertiary education is covered by the state with extra grants for low income students ireland is unusually good at taking bright kids from poor backgrounds and tossing them into university which means that college gets even more strongly correlated with base IQ than in the states.
So when someone with a college degree makes more money it's hard to say if it's simply that bright people are both more likely to score well on exams and do well in the workforce because that confounds it all to hell.
throw in irelands strong tradition of exporting it's young people whenever there's an economic downturn where people with good credentials have an easier time getting jobs in the UK, America, Australia... etc
Please excuse my ignorance, but what are 3D Jobs? All I'm getting from Google are results about 3D graphics and the like, and since that has no obvious connection to window washing, I'm assuming it's a case of can't find the esoteric due to similarly named mainstream.
What are "WCR" and "CCU", and "this one job"?
I totally get this. Last year we bought and renovated a home in an area where we have few contacts. After a series of disappointments getting estimates from the guys on the first page of search results, we started soliciting contractors by word of mouth. Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it; referrals give them as much business as they can handle.
Not only were they not plugged in online, they barely use available payment tools. Some didn’t even take credit cards. But they were licensed and insured and totally professional in their work.
The contractors on the first page of results all seemed to be following some sort of SEO playbook and might even have been using the same suite of materials and tools, marketed to guys who want to up their game. They made extensive use of glossy pamphlets and scheduling tools that seemed designed to calm my assumed fears as a suburban housewife that the guy ringing my doorbell at 10am would indeed be Frank from Electro Inc. They also charged up the wazoo compared to the guys sticking to phone calls and paper checks. We simply couldn’t afford most of the guys using the Advanced Professionalism Web Optimization Package. I assume those fancy 21st century business tools consume a lot of overhead.
It occurred to me that the economy is like an iceberg; a vast amount of important stuff is underwater and we probably have no idea how much based on the parts we can see analyzing web data. Now when I hear theories about how close we are to automating everything, I wonder if the people theorizing have ever had to find someone to rewire their house.
>Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it;
This isn't just a working-class phenomenon. My mother made wedding cakes for decades. Most of the sugarcraft guild have no websites of their own, they don't need them because they're craftspeople who don't lack for work.
Going round wedding faires with my SO apparently I'm not allowed look at the cakes any more because I couldn't keep the expressions off my face. Almost everything I've ever seen at a wedding faire nobody in my mothers circles would have ever allowed leave their workshop. Most of it would have scored badly in the childrens sections of sugarcraft competitions.
The people who constantly have to plug for business at faires are the people who are so poor at their job that they can't get anyone to recommend them to friends and so end up short of work.
I keep hearing upper-middle class people with houses saying "are there ANY plumbers who are sane, can arrive at the agreed hour, and clean up after? willing to pay for it."
So I imagine that the ones who DO meet the requirements are in high demand and earn WAY more than a librarian or teacher.
Surprisingly, it's the same in science and engineering.
The internet will tell you a lot, but the important parts are either hidden in experts' heads or siloed in corporate R&D. There is even some in physical books that nobody bothered to OCR. Once you go past undergrad level the availability of information drops off a cliff.
Are there any online sources you do recommend for getting exposure to a variety of interesting blue-collar information? I can follow a bunch of academics on Twitter and have a reliable source of neat studies, or read the blogs of programming nerds and learn about useful computer things, but I don't know of a good way to regularly encounter a breadth of content for real-life skillsets and jobs (or trust myself to evaluate which such things are genuinely good).
This. The practical knowledge that sustains modern life is rapidly disappearing. Fucking water and heat are going to become some sort of sci-fi cult mystery.
I took.it to mean jobs in which you have to use your hands, like plumbing, unlike ones that only require you to read.
"Dirty, Demeaning, or Dangerous" jobs
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).
So where do the boat paraders, brand new $70k truck ralliers, and Trump supporters who flew to the Capitol riot, staying in fancy hotels - fit in with this white working class? Maybe these "petty exurban bourgeoise" are a small sliver of Trump's base. But they're certainly the most visible and vocal.
See the previous post about the difference between economic class and social class.
The core assumption of this piece, that social class can beat out economic class as a principle for organizing political coalitions neglects the role of near zero real interest rates in easing tensions within coalitions. Republicans don't have to face trade-offs between low taxes, high military spending, and social security benefits for their massive elderly base. Dems don't have to face a trade-off between high taxes on their upper middle-class base and expansive welfare for poor minorities. The coalition between all the rungs of a social class ladder is possible in a zero-interest rate vetocracy where tradeoffs are nil, and the state can't do anything ambitions for the bottom rung, but I don't see it enduring if those conditions change.
Why can't the state do anything ambitions for the bottom rung? UBI, say?
Well, the party that wants to right now is geographically disadvantaged, and you need to control a trifecta in order to do anything. Dems can only do whatever their 3-4 most conservative members will sign off on jamming through in reconciliation.
The trade offs are all still there though. Deficit spending on cheap credit gives you more money to allocate but it doesn't determine who gets it. We could raise taxes and have even more military spending or higher social security payments than we do now. We could cut those things and have even lower taxes than we do now.
And everything all kind of balances anyway. Sure, if you have low interest rates you can spend on credit, but then asset prices inflate. Housing costs more. The cost of living increases relative to wages.
The way out of high interest rates is to print the debt. That causes nominal prices and wages to increase (inflation), but the consequent higher interest rates cause asset prices, i.e. housing prices, to decline relative to wages. So now the working man pays more in taxes to fund social security without deficit spending, but spends less on rent. Cancels out. The retiree's social security check comes and they spend more on food and transportation but less on rent. Cancels out again.
The inflation also makes the coalition easier to hold, because nothing looks like a cut. You get a constructive spending reduction by just not increasing spending as fast as inflation. You get a constructive increase in revenues at the same tax rate because nominal wages increase relative to nominal assets and income/sales taxes are a percentage of wages/dividends and capital gains taxes are a percentage of the *nominal* asset price increase, so that inflation and high interest rates increases real government revenues without a nominal rate increase.
It's not obvious that this actually makes a coalition politically more difficult than low interest rates.
Orwell made poignant observation of this in Wigan Pier, the upper class guy going broke trying to keep up appearances, versus the well-off laborer
At that point, I feel like you've basically reduced class structure to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe and just renamed them in a way that's more palatable to Red Tribe.
Thats what it kind of always was, didn't you know?
The US doesn't only think of "Class" in terms of money. Some *behaviors* are trash, while others are better.
Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
If you blessed them with millions of dollars, they wouldn't be percieved differently.
Look at Trumps diet, or television habits. Until the democrats got the cue to stop mocking him for it, they did so constantly. Their mockery was aimed at unmistakable symbols of class, or a lack thereof.
McDonalds burgers, fries, and frappes? Those are what I eat, and they're awesome!
"~800-588-2300/ em-pire!" I used to hear that every morning on TV before going to school, or before my mom went to work. In my free time, I watch hours of TV. Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
> Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?
For the purposes of this discussion? One group is overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, the other for Republicans. Either you think one group isn't voting their interests, or there's some fundamental difference in terms of their interests that isn't reflected by this analysis of class.
Or maybe the ability of Democrats to successfully culturally signal "anti racism" despite doing absolutely nothing to lift black people out of their socioeconomic position is the Right-wing version of "What the fuck is wrong with Kansas?".
From the perspective of the Right, perhaps. Are you sure you understand the perspective and incentives of a hypothetical Black voter?
It's really not that implausible that people vote against their individual interests. Jason Brennan's libertarian Against Democracy makes this point better than I do, but basically, think of it in terms of *individual incentives*. For each voter, their incentive to vote in their own interests is actually very low, since their chance of effecting the outcome is minimal. Almost certainly they could find something else to do with the half an hour it takes to vote that would have higher expected value. So it's not a priori implausible that people simply ignore their own interests in voting, since the consequences are very small. At this point, you might say 'well, why the hell do people bother voting at all then', but the answer is that people like the sense that they are performing their civic duty, that they are taking part in a big important community activity and expressing their moral identity, and voting is a very low-cost, highly visible way of doing all those things. But if that's why your voting, you'll get weird cognitive dissonance if you then try and pick the candidate who is best for you, rather than best for the nation/your community. The latter, I suppose, might lead to groups voting in the interest of the groups, even though the members aren't trying to vote in their individual interests. But Brennan provides a fair amount of empirical evidence that people tend to try and vote in the national interest specifically (though I have forgotten exactly what, and no doubt, like all social scientific evidence it could be challenged).
The idea that people vote against their own interests gets a bad rep, because it's associated with people patronizing their enemies, especially their lower class enemies, but that's a separate matter from whether it's true.
Thank you, that's an interesting perspective. I'll look into that book.
Only a Libertarian could oppose Democracy on the basis that people aren't self interested enough - usually the complaint is the other way around!
This post is an odd combination of class condescension and attacks on the Dems for class condescension.
That does seem to be the fundamental paradox of the modern Republican party. I don't think they can realistically shed the class condescension, though.
> Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?
They don't. It's a strawman. I'm from Tampa, I eat barbecue and fast food, and I love the Olive Garden. I can hear the tune of the ad you're referring to, and I've watched hundreds of hours of TV in recent months.
I am also a highly paid professional deep within the most ultraliberal bubble in the country. Never once, not on *any* occasion, has anyone I've met attacked me even implicitly for these traits.
Here's some similar testimony:
' In the book, Vance describes his life at Yale as bewildering, since he was among the small number of students from poor backgrounds and constantly felt like he was playing catch-up, learning that Cracker Barrel is not actually fine dining and figuring out which fork to use. But he has mostly kind things to say about his fellow students and faculty:
Yale made me feel, for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue. Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio.
In the movie, though, Vance’s story plays out quite differently. After the emergency call to his girlfriend, J.D. sits at the dinner table with fellow students and attorneys from high-powered law firms. He is nervous. While making conversation, he says that he is from Ohio and that his grandfather moved there from Kentucky’s hill country to work in a steel mill.
A quiet falls over the table. Everyone glances at each other knowingly. Nobody says anything. They change the subject, while J.D. sits crestfallen and mortified.
I yelled at the screen when I saw that. (Yelling happened multiple times throughout the movie.) Reading Hillbilly Elegy, I feel some kinship with Vance. My people are not from Appalachia, but they’re working-class Northerners, by way of immigrants, potato farmers in Maine, and shoot-your-dinner-from-the-porch North Carolina rednecks. I too am the first in my nuclear family to go to college (on a massive scholarship), and to earn two master’s degrees I’ll be paying for until I retire. Growing up, Cracker Barrel was my favorite special-occasion restaurant.
But my alma mater is an elite institution. Most of my friends were well-off, though a lot of them didn’t realize that the things they took for granted — parents who could send money to them, cable TV, Pop-Tarts for breakfast — were far beyond my imagining. Like J.D., I often felt out of place.
And yet that’s exactly why this scene rang so false. It seems impossible that everyone at that table would take J.D.’s biographical note as embarrassing; instead, as Vance himself points out in his book, his background makes him intriguing, someone different from the usual bunch. '
https://www.vox.com/culture/21547861/hillbilly-elegy-review-netflix
Of course, a Vox writer is hardly an unbiased source on something like this, but Vance himself is a conservative.
The truth is that people work on two tracks with this kind of thing. When, for political reasons, they want to be mean about [outgroup] they will mock them for [outgroup] cultural norms. But when they actually meet someone from [outgroup] as an individual, they will generally refrain from hostility and try to be nice, and tolerant of difference, especially if politics doesn't come up.
But also, American liberals are actually well aware that classism is a thing and is bad: it's a central part of their mythology (I don't mean that term pejoratively) that Republicans are bad because they think the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and don't understand that their lives are hard.
You're insisting on applying a singular definition of class based on aesthetics. I don't think it's as versatile as you suggest. Look around this thread for how easily your definition gets coerced as 'the upper class is [the Cultural Other I Most Distrust]. I know They hate me, therefore I must hate Them'. Helpful.
At any rate, this view is already a clear central beat of Trumpism, which claims that our aesthetics and way of life is being destroyed from the top down by a nefarious, morally vacuous and conveniently abstract elite who hate god and love nothing more than a good abortion (the fact you make no effort to integrate either of these founding dogmas when discussing New Republican Aesthetics is a dead giveaway of your SF elitism, for lack of a better term)
So, I don't see anything new here, politically. Except the prediction market stuff, which I find marvelously ironic in a post mostly about class. Do you not perceive how the SF-based futurist technobabble crowd constitutes a very coherent class, much more convincingly than the formless latte-sipping blob you seek to conjure? Is it lost on you how classist you sound, in this regard, with claims like "$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems and anyone who disagrees is stuck in the past (trust me I understand this better than you, guess you need to be engineer-adjacent to get it)"?
Finally, I think this interacts with your earlier piece on "gay rights are civil rites" in interesting ways, and I hope you explore that intersection in the future.
But the futurist technobabble crowd isn't a prominent political class. They exist, but they aren't an organised bloc in the same way that poor evangelical whites without college degrees and rich coastal whites with college degrees are organised blocs that vote together and each hate the other.
"$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems" is only a class signal in a much more European, capital-versus-labour conception of classes than Scott is gesturing towards. If you wanted an American upper-class signal about technology, you'd go for something about algorithmic bias or the impossibility of solving complex social problems with technology.
https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/1365017699433259024
I find the idea that the only help possible for the poor is UBI or welfare more than a bit paternalistic and condescending. And quite likely untrue. Trump's answer for that was protectionism, aka make work available. And he got a lot more voters for this than Democrats get for UBI - especially among this very demographic.
"A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/10/capitol-insurrectionists-jenna-ryan-financial-problems/
Hard to separate psychologically connected issues from a simple tendency to make bad decisions.
Hard to find literally anyone who hasn't had significant financial problems. That is quite literally the only growth sector of our economy; financial engineering to ruin lives for profit.
I remember the statistic was comparing to the national average, so it does mean something.
On the other hand, there are probably simpler explanations: people that are doing well just aren't as likely to be in the street, no matter the side.
yeah, and with our 40 year span of 'nobody but the top does well' economics we should have lots of violence to look forward to.
They're culturally working class, with enough money to splurge on a jacked up truck. Like the blog post implies, teachers can be poor but culturally upper-class because they like espresso and read the NYT. A construction worker making good money is culturally working-class. That extra money just means a bigger truck, more date nights at Applebees, and a monster-sized TV to watch wrestling and the NFL.
Middle class, not upper class (which is pretty invisible, but I suppose wields significant power?)
I hope the sarcastic tone I read this in is the sarcastic tone you wrote it in.
It seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion, but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
I will point out that the Conservatives have been able to appeal to the Working Class here in the UK, beating the party that's literally called "Labour" in key constituencies, so it's not implausible that the Republicans could end up using similar rhetoric. Of course, Brexit had a big role in that.
Indian immigrants to the UK typically arrived wealthier and more educated than than Pakistani's or Bangaladeshi's. But it's anyway not a recent phenomenon that British Asians vote conservative in reasonable numbers.
Thanks. Is that the only thing they have in common with each other though?
(Presumably, this explains why this was not brought up in English speaking media)
I just don't understand any of this well.
There has been a trend of Hindus moving towards the conservatives over time: https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1210305652318494739
There was an amazingly self-revealing article in the Guardian last year on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/27/how-did-british-indians-become-so-prominent-in-the-conservative-party
The premise is basically that the Tories have had success with Asian voters because they have a message that appeals to them, and policies that have done relatively well for them. And now there are quite a lot of Asians active within the party, including in top government positions.
I kept expecting it to pivot to "Here's what we can offer Asian people to try and win them back." That's what I wanted anyway (I'm not a Tory). But no... it pivots to "We should fight back by imitating the tactics of the Black Panthers".
They failed to achieve racial justice so they couldn’t have been that good.
Were they? My impression is they were part political party, part street gang. I don't recommend the melding of politics and organized crime, personally.
What were some of their tactics that you liked?
The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere. This is such an outrageous article. The author, Neha Shah, is getting ahead of herself to call this group names. I couldn't take her seriously and continue reading after a couple of paragraphs.
Was the article bad? Yes! Is it a huge leap to accuse an entire news organization that they hate Indians because of this? Absolutely.
'The Guardian hates British Indians. Or really, Indians anywhere' What's your evidence for this (other than that one article)?
I have a suspicion-and it's only a suspicion, this could be totally off-base and unfair (I mean that sincerely not sarcastically), that what you *actually* are picking up on is that The Guardian hates Modi and the BJP, But that's unsurprising and not in itself indicative of prejudice against India: The Guardian is a liberal, anti-populist, secular, centre-left paper, so it hates all right-wing religious parties everywhere. It hates Modi for the same reason it used to hate George Bush. It's a straightforward ideological clash, and no doubt Modi doesn't like The Guardian much either, or its Indian equivalents.
>but really this is just Scott outlining what it would take to make him a Republican and I doubt he's their target demographic.
Are you sure? The part about expertise sounds unconvincing. I also hope Scott is not this naive on racism or the Democratic party. Or the Republican party for that matter.
Elaborate on this naivete please.
What's strange about preferring prediction markets over credentialism? That's classic SSC think right there.
I guess prediction markets could not design a good Mars rover?
A prediction market just averages the opinions of lots of people, so no, it can't design anything, that's not how it works.
That was a criticism on how prediction markets cannot replace credentialism, since you still better rely on people with credentials to design something that works. Averaging over the opinions of lots of people regarding design patterns, etc. would achieve a worse result than listening to a few experts.
Sure, but I bet prediction markets could choose a great team for designing a good Mars rover. Though when you want to buy a thing you use different financial instruments.
No, but it might do a decent job predicting whether WMDs would be found in Iraq in substantial quantities, or whether raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment in low-cost-of-living places. Right now, we rely on experts for these predictions, and those experts are rewarded for agreeing with current consensus and their political side's preferred policies--prediction markets or tournaments or similar things might do a lot better.
Further, a lot of experts are long on credentials and short on actual knowledge--consider the large set of established findings in social science that have been overturned in the last few years. Or earlier, the psychological theories that led to deciding which criminals should be given leniency or which witnesses' testimony should not be doubted. An alternative is pretty appealing, even without the huge political/class bias of most social scientists.
It would be difficult to *design* a rover, but they could predict whether the rover survives landing.
I don't view expertise as credentialism. If you would generally talk about credentialism, I am so incredibly on your side, I think with a few exceptions (doctors, pilots, etc.) credentials are extremely overrated. But real expertise is key in my opinion. I don't think the prediction market is gonna come up with the theory of relativity.
Yeah, I'd become a Republican. We could use a working class party.
I'd go Republican for this.
After voting for Democrats all my life, I started voting for Republicans around 2018. This was the reason.
There is plenty not to like in both parties. The rampant snobbery of the Democrats I met in the bay area pushed me over the edge. I thought Democrats believed in evaluating people as individuals instead of members of groups. A long string of incidents in which people at my large Bay Area employer applied stereotypes to blacks and people from the south were eye opening.
I think our Canadian political divides may split this way too. We never had American or even British levels of polarization, but (socially) working class Western populism against Eastern cultural elites has been an important political dimension through multiple party shakeups and coalition realignments. Pity the federal Conservatives keep picking such bland leaders.
Even more: I bet A LOT of people only vote Democrat because voting Republican just isn't an option. Wasn't since I was a young and still no change in sight - there had to appear a total outsider to make them appealing outside their base.
This means there are a lot of people that don't really like Democrats and would be quite happy to vote something else, if only there was another option with its head out of its ass. At the very least Republicans should continue the separation from the ultra-religious - being just pro-religion instead of fundamentalists would open them up to huge swathes of new voters.
Given the history of things starting “a modest proposal...” you’re probably at least half-right
Indeed, thisd is obviously joking, in a "ha ha only serious" way.
Sure, but I think I'd have preferred to read the entirely-serious version. I don't like reading a sloppy generalization and having to decode whether it's satire about political strategy, or genuine advice pitched in the language of politics. Or just a mistake.
I think there’s a sincere reading somewhere here:
Scott wants the Republicans to make a coherent argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition, which then prompts a Democratic crisis, to turn against virtue signaling, pseudo-meritocracy, and the like.
If either succeed, America as a whole gets better options.
It's a pretty aspiration, but IMO a sincere reading was far too shallow to convince me that "coherent [Republican] argument with persuasive sway over the Democratic coalition" isn't an over constrained problem. More the opposite in fact, if it needed to take such liberties just to vaguely gesture in that direction.
Going off the book review, it sounds like he's emulating the style of the writer he is aping the classification from.
The original "modest proposal" was satire.....
This kind of is as well.
Go watch American Dharma. This is exactly what Brannon expects to happen in US politics...
Try to distinguish between what you want to happen and what will likely happen.
And analyze *exactly* why you want it.
God damn it. Brannon. Can we get editing, please?
FFS. Why is Apple constantly replacing Bannon?
I dunno, but I prefer to make my own typos, rather than having an "Artificial Intelligence" make them or me.
for me.
In other words "I hope this doesn't offend my political affiliations by insinuating that it's possible that the working class is also human".
That's a huge leap but okay.
This is the project a number of GOP senators, notably Hawley and Rubio, have been pursuing pretty explicitly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/opinion/sunday/republican-party-trump-2020.html
People like Mike Rowe demonstrate exactly why any claims that the republican party is pro-working class are a calculated fiction. Rowe is bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, and a repeated theme in his advocacy is that workers need to suck up bad conditions, take personal responsibility for safety problems, and work hard until they find success. At the same time, he argues against unions, saying that they no longer serve a purpose, he argues against regulations- not just environmental regulation that could arguably cost jobs, but also basic health and safety regulation, because supposedly those should be the worker's responsibility to keep track of. He argues that there needs to be widespread vocational training to address a "skills gap", which is a discredited economic theory.
The thread unifying this is clear. Rowe's not an advocate for workers in industry, he's an advocate for owners of industry. His SWEAT pledge reads like a satirical wish list that a coal baron might have for the perfect obedient employee who'd never protest or organize. Reducing regulations might marginally reduce unemployment, but it'll make heavy industry a hell of a lot more profitable at the low cost of worker lives and our environment. And funneling young workers into vocational schools with the promise of well-paying jobs when they graduate isn't a way to give low-skill people jobs- it's to create a large non-union labor base in manufacturing and construction. It's not a coincidence that the ideological advocacy Rowe puts out just happens to align with the interests of the people who have given him massive amounts of money.
The "skills gap" idea is that high unemployment following the 2008 recession was the result of structural shifts in the labor market such that jobs were available but there weren't workers with the technical education and skills to do them. Rowe's website loudly states: "Consider the reality of today’s job market. We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. "
It was a popular idea when unemployment was high, because it seemed like a simple solution- just train a bunch of people in basic vocational skills, and they'd all get jobs! The problem was, the causal arrow was in the wrong direction. When unemployment is high and labor supply outstrips labor demand, employers raise skill requirements to artificially cut down on potential applicants. When unemployment is low, those skill requirements disappear, and employers become willing to train people on the job (Here's a simple summary: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance). There are some middle-skill jobs for which there are legitimate education requirements that can't be taught on-the-job, but those aren't the jobs for which Rowe is pushing vocational training. They're stuff like nursing, paralegals, or low-level management (for reference, "Job Polarization and US Worker Skills" from Brookings).
The point isn't that vocational training is secretly bad. Vocational training can be great! The point is that Rowe's advocacy favors the employers, not the employees. Training a bunch more people to weld won't lower unemployment when labor supply outstrips demand, because (as discussed in the studies in the Yglesias article) the skills requirements are a response to unemployment, not a driver of it.
For the sake of fairness, here's a link to a relavent article from Rowe for his side of the safety bit:
https://www.ishn.com/articles/93505--dirty-jobs--guy-says-safety-third-is--a-conversation-worth-having-
This seems like the designers of roundabouts and mixed pedestrian/vehicle areas in Europe: make things less clearly (and falsely) safe to make people pay attention. But I don't know because I honestly haven't been in those conditions.
It's also good personal advice, safety first somehow found its way out of industrial litigation-avoidance language into *child rearing* and it's awful, creating fragile, neurotic people who grew up under helicoptering parents. Exposing yourself to risk and danger is valuable at the personal level, a great deal of misery can be laid at the feet of personal harm avoidance being elevated to a saintly value.
People like black and white. Activity X is safe or unsafe. If it's safe I don't have to worry. If it's unsafe I shouldn't do it. It can be stressful (probably in an evolutionarily adaptive way) to see something as containing some danger and doing it anyway. So I have complete empathy for people who are only willing or able to have binary safety functions.
One thing this thought makes me curious about are what about people who do things they acknowledge are dangerous. For example smokers or illegal drug users. From the ones I've known they don't usually come across as people who are holding a nonbinary view of safety of their activity. Are they externally saying X is unsafe but internalizing that it is safe, or can humans regularly go into a "X is unsafe and I feel it's unsafe in my bones, but I'm going to do it anyway, no big deal"?
Not that this line of questioning is probably very valuable, but I believe it's interesting to think about.
That article is a good argument for why "safety third" is a reasonable thing to say. It's also bullshit- a position Rowe retreats to when people point out that what he's arguing is that regulations are unnecessary and counterproductive. I'll quote Rowe himself, in his Ted talk:
Safety first is, I mean going back to OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society, what if OSHA got it wrong? I mean, I, this is heresy what I’m about to say, but what if, what if it’s really safety third? Right? I mean, I mean really. What I mean to say is I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I’m working with, but the ones who really get it done, they’re not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first. The business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done. And, you know, I’ll never forget up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the Deadliest Catch guys, which I, which I also work on in the first season. We’re about 100 miles off the coast of Russia, fifty foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I’d ever seen. And I was back with a guy lashing the pots down. So I’m 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it’s doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous. I scampered down. I go into the wheelhouse and I say with some level of incredulity, ‘Captain, OSHA?’ And he says, ‘OSHA? Ocean.’ And he points out there and, but in that moment what he said next can’t be repeated in the lower 48. It can’t be repeated on any factory floor, any construction site, but he looked at me and he said, ‘Son,’ and he’s my age by the way, he calls me son. I love that. He says, ‘Son, I’m the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich. You want to get home alive. That’s on you.’
Aside from the fact that the story is clearly at least in part made up (OSHA-Ocean, really?), it demonstrates what Rowe is really advocating when he says safety third. He's not saying that "safety first" makes people complacent. He's saying that "safety first" is wrong because it makes the bosses responsible for safety, that safety should be the responsibility of each individual worker, and the boss's responsibility is to make as much money as possible. The ridiculous thing is that Rowe gives this story as if it's some grand argument against regulation, when in fact it's a perfect example of why we need regulations requiring safety. Of course the boss doesn't want to bother keeping things safe! That's why we have regulations in the first place- so those bosses don't get people killed by focusing only on making profits!
You cut off his conclusion in that excerpt:
"And for the rest of that day — safety first I mean, I was like — So, the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else’s responsibility as though it’s our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things."
I think you've got an is/ought issue going on here. He isn't saying the boss's responsibility OUGHT to be making money. He is saying the boss's responsibility IS making money. So if you're trusting your boss, you're screwed. I assume based on reading the other article I linked that this line of logic continues from there: if you're trusting your safety coordinator your boss hired, you're screwed. And if you're trusting some distant agency, you're screwed. I mean, that sure sounds like what he's saying when he talks about disdain for his show's safety coordinator.
I don't have an is/ought issue, because Rowe's position is that everything ought to be the way it is. That's what his SWEAT pledge is all about: "I believe the most annoying sounds in the world are whining and complaining. I will never make them. If I am unhappy in my work, I will either find a new job, or find a way to be happy". If you've got a problem with the status quo, suck it up or leave, and any problems you have are your own responsibility.
Social Class is not Economic Class
And the whole reorientation being a narrative fiction is baked into the cake, always has been. Pointing that out on the part of the democrats(that's their project is an upper class OP) for cynical gain is how you'd get the reorientation.
And youre right that Rowe's an aide to industry, but youre misunderstanding the people who throw money at him, they want people in the trades and industry, messages like Mike's help provide an alternative narrative to COLLEGE OR NOTHING that high schoolers get drowned in.
The beautiful thing about scott's message-plan is that it allows your protestation to be dissmissed as upper class gatekeeping. "You care more about the environment and telling miners to code than you do about letting working men do their fucking job"
Spoken like someone who has never known the satisfaction of doing hard honest work.
Could you spell out "the mother of all labour misallocations" a bit? I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I'm curious.
They make interesting noises in this direction, but haven’t fully committed. See how they’ve reacted to Romney’s recent child tax credit proposal, for instance.
Yes, 100% agreed. All posturing. But the posturing is still new.
How have they reacted?
Rubio said (without referring to him by name) that Romney's plan isn't "pro-family" because it doesn't have work requirements:
https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1364016905435164672?s=20
This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
He will call out companies on Twitter over the low wage they pay their workers, but he was *against* a far more modest minimum wage increase when it came to his own state a few years back (I mean I'm happy for people to change their mind, but I don't get any sense that's what happened here?).
To his credit, he *did* provide his own recent minimum wage proposal. But the structure is bizarre, and honestly makes no sense. It would place a nearly 100% marginal tax rate on people in certain settings, which really doesn't seem like what he or the GOP wants. But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
Hawley's Twitter account is certainly a strident critic of Big Tech... but what are the actual policies he is proposing? I mean this genuinely, I have tried to find it, and I can't find much. Maybe they were going to be in that book deal that got cancelled, but that's the thing... he's not a pundit, he's a senator! Proposing legislation is kinda part of his job. The main thing I can find is his amendment to Section 230, but do you genuinely think he wants to pass that? I don't think it would actually fix his major criticisms of the industry?
This is not criticism of "Why doesn't the senate get anything done??". That has nothing to do with Hawley. But I think it's genuinely important to not just take "gesturing towards policy on Twitter" as equivalent to taking real substantive policy ambitions. There are lots of senators I disagree with, but you can absolutely find the concrete policies they support or reject. Like, just to stick with the obvious polarizing choices, when you go find some Bernie Sanders proposal, like it or not , I am confident that Sanders would *love* to enact that agenda. Maybe it's a terrible idea, but he sincerely thinks these are policies that should be made into law.
When it comes to Hawley, I honestly don't think that's the right perspective to take. Does he sincerely want his Section 230 Modification to pass? He doesn't really act like a senator who does. All the analysis I can find on both sides of the aisle seems to think that policy is pretty bad, and doesn't fit his mission. But is that even the point?
In his "defense", you can just say "What's the difference? The Senate won't pass anything anyways, so what matters is your performance to the public, and the values you stand up for". And like, that's actually kinda true, which is why I think you should give even less weight to the idea that Hawley is genuine about these policies.
Sorry for the rant, I admit it just bothers me. I would so much rather the GOP have real policy ambitions that I disagree with than the fact that they seem to have largely given up on those ambitions. And I think it's important to draw your own judgment on whether or not to "believe" senators on the policies they advocate, not just what they say their stance is. I think Hawley is genuinely wary of the effects of Big Tech and other large corporations, and would like to reign in their power. I do *not* believe the policies he gestures towards on Twitter are actually the ones he wants to enact. I think he knows the Section 230 reform wouldn't accomplish anything like what he wants.
The welfare stuff is odd because I think some of his *interest* in that is genuine, but he just isn't acting like it matters to him (trying to make a deal, do serious proposals, and whatnot). Until I see real reason to think otherwise, I just assume he's just got too much pressure from the conservative movement, which is still so antagonistic to welfare, for it to be anything but posturing from him. But like, I'd love to be proven wrong, his GOP colleague introduced a big new child poverty bill, let's see the support, or a genuine alternative.
A higher minimum wage that is the same for cities and the countryside where the cost of living is lower harms rural communities. So it's pretty logical why he'd be opposed to that, given the voters that support them.
Has anyone proposed a minimum wage that differs by county, based on the cost of living?
See here for how something like that could be calculated: https://www.niche.com/about/methodology/counties-with-the-lowest-cost-of-living/
I see this as a great opportunity for a bipartisan deal. The Dems get high minimum wages for the, often black, working class employees in the cities. Reps get a more economically competitive countryside.
Aren't you're now just making the case for a repeal of the federal minimum wage? The states and cities can then do as they like.
No, having a law that varies based on a clear formula is not the same as not having a formula.
But it seems strictly worse than not having a formula, because a formula will be all Seeing Like A State and factor in the wrong things with the wrong weights for all the usual reasons. Whereas the local governments are closer to their own economies and better understand them and it enables local control.
Then instead of outsourcing jobs from detroit to china, they can outsource them to north dakota. Interesting.
Possibly worth noting that trade benefits the poor, who spend more of their income than the rich on highly traded goods: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/131/3/1113/2461162
Though maybe the factual question of "are tariffs good?" isn't relevant to the piece, or maybe it is but the economists who route the above article are in the 75% of at-risk experts :)
Trade benefits these people only in terms of lower costs for goods and such; it hurts them by specializing and offshoring the industries and jobs they could have obtained in the past - When the factory or the mill or the mine closes, I definitely need those low cost goods because my income is no more.
I have yet to see (could be just my ignorance) academic discussion around the jobs side of global trade that does not translate to buggy whip manufacturers learn new trades + learn to code!
I think I can argue that higher prices for goods, when coupled with much broader productive employment, is better for US society in general and many of the US middle and lower classes in specific than global wealth + low cost goods coupled with un- and under-employment because we offshored so much.
I, personally, from a upper middle class perspective, would much rather we employ more and pay higher prices for all sorts of goods than employ less and pay higher taxes to feed, house, and clean up the mess of a massive unemployed/underemployed population.
Ah, this one again. You do realise we've had three hundred years of specialisation and increased free trade in the modern era, and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim. Lack of flexibility in the market means disruption can cause temporary peaks of unemployment yes, but nothing lasting. If you are going to brandish the many-times-discredited spirit of Ludd around it is surely beholden on you to provide some actual evidence here?
> and at no point has it led to the predicted mass unemployment someone always seems to claim
It's happened over and over again. Some of the revolutions of 1848 were partially triggered by mass unemployment caused by cheap imports from industrialized England. Right now, huge swaths of the US remain economically devastated due to factories closing and moving overseas. These "temporary peaks" have lasted decades.
Not to mention that disappearing industrial jobs have only been replaced with minimum wage service jobs that don't pay a person enough to live or support a family. There may not be mass unemployment but there are a huge number of people who work full time (in hours) but don't make a living wage or have health care because they've cobbled together multiple service jobs.
Also the number of workers collecting disability has risen significantly since the 90s. There is a growing population of prime working age that has opted out of the workforce. See here: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2016/sect01.html#chart2
When I say opted out, please don't read too much into that. Obviously there are many people collecting SSDI who don't feel as if they had a choice in the matter. There is no doubt a complex interplay of factors driving the increase; including people addicted to opiates, general decrease in health and fitness driving more medical problems, etc. And certainly there is a group who are too physically unfit (or injured) for manual labor, but they're unskilled/unfit for any sort of desk job, and collecting SSDI is an attractive choice at that point.
Two things to consider here. Firstly, the reason British goods did well despite tariffs (the policy meant to stop this happening clearly didn't work, which is probably an important point) was not price but quality. More advanced manufacturing made for better quality products, as well as cheaper ones. The assumption that this was a like-for-like swap is too simplistic. The same applies for e.g. the US (or UK) automobile industry, where the products that replaced them were simply better for the majority of consumers (as good a definition of quality as you're going to get until an actual economist turns up). If your industry is producing lousy products it is going to be out-competed.
The same dynamic applies to offshoring, albeit with the quality here being that of the workers. If you need to open a garment factory you are going to do it somewhere cheap, but not anywhere. You need access to a skilled workforce, so you go to somewhere with such a body of people like Bangladesh. There one not only finds a pool of experienced workers, but you are able to employ a standard of worker who in the US would not take a factory floor job, because they have a degree or a trade specialisation. Quality employees (ideally at low cost) are important.
Secondly, is it true that loss of manufacturing causes long-standing unemployment? The pockets of deep unemployment I know are areas where resource production, basically mining and agriculture, have been out-competed. It's why chunks of West Virginia or County Durham are still basket cases whilst Detroit or Glasgow is on the up I guess. My best guess as to what is going on here is to do with transferable skills but there does seem to be more bounce-backability in former manufacturing areas than in old coal mining areas. This is impressionistic, but perhaps important.
As you can tell, I don't think the Luddite view has much merit. It seems to be based around the assumption of products being equal, and lumps together resource exaction with heavy industry. And you have to consider the possibility that what actually causes the long-term unemployment is not the actual changes but government intervention.
As a postscript, does not wanting to protect working-class jobs to protect their holders reek of upper-middle class paternalism? The underlying logic seems to be a kind of generous understanding that all these people have is their jobs, so we must protect them. As such, this policy seems not to fit with Scott's overall framework here.
Free trade costing jobs doesn't have to lead to aggregate unemployment to be true. It only has to lead to unemployment or reduced earnings for some subset of the population.
I support free trade, because it's helpful on net and doesn't distort the market like tariffs, but it is foolish to deny that outsourcing of jobs and movement of low-skill, labor-intensive jobs to other countries has severely impacted a significant portion of the US population.
Note that one of the major U.S. export industries, paying for those imports, is agriculture. Imports can be larger than exports only if foreigners are on net investing in the U.S., whether by buying stock or helping finance the deficit.
Or if the exports involve fewer jobs than the imports. How many man-hours does it take to make a smartphone, and how many to make $phone dollars worth of corn?
There has been a lot of academic work on the effects of trade on employment in the last couple decades (check out https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21906/w21906.pdf for example for a key paper in that area).
But to push back on your other point. The typical economist would probably say that gains from trade make everyone better off. The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused. People use money to buy goods and services and to the extent that people have more money they will buy more goods and services and increase the demand for labor. Not everything can be imported, you can't get a haircut from China for instance. So if we could take the gains from trade and channel that into uses that help the people who's jobs are lost in a reasonably targeted way then we all end up better off. And it's not a matter of just paying them the lost wages, but more helping the economies in geographic areas most affected by trade to readjust so that people can find new, better jobs in sectors more insulated from international trade (services, high-value/smaller scale production, etc).
That's the theory at least, Auter et al showed pretty convincingly that that didn't happen with the "China shock" in the 90's because of the speed at which the change happened. But there is some disagreement as to how strong of conclusions we should draw from that. Was the China shock just an exceptional one-time event? It seems unlikely that we'll have a comparable dynamic arise anytime soon. It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades. So it's not at all clear that protectionism will improve the situation at the current margin. After all, it's not as if the tariffs imposed under the Trump administration really changed the balance of trade. It just basically shifted some jobs from China to Vietnam (and other places in SE Asia) but didn't really do anything for the USs overall trade deficit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB.
> It's not as if there is ANOTHER country with 1 billion people that is way below it's economic capacity and suddenly find it's footing over the course of a couple of decades.
I hear India and Africa are gearing up these days.
> The idea that there is a fixed amount of "work" and that if we import more goods (i.e. export the jobs) is confused.
I don't think many people seriously advance this as the reason to stop or slow job exports. It's more that industry is regional, and the jobs that could replace them simply may not be available in those regions, and so these poor or working class people now have to relocate away from their friends and families just so they can keep eating because of policy decisions made by the political elites that don't serve or care about their interests. This seems to be one of the big reasons behind Trump's popularity.
Sure, the lower prices "help everyone" because now these poor people can afford to eat while making less money because their job no longer exists. Fantastic.
And other poor people elsewhere in the country are making more money. The argument is a general one against change.
To get past that you need some argument to show that, on average, the losses are going to poor people and the gains to rich people.
> And other poor people elsewhere in the country are making more money.
How does that work exactly? Many good paying blue collar jobs moved out of cities due to zoning, then they moved those jobs out of the country so the goods are cheaper. Which of these blue collar workers are better off exactly?
It's not an argument against change so much as an argument against too rapid a change. Younger generations are more far mobile.
Employing more people in $location because they happen to have the right citizenship isn’t really a net positive to the world though.
What exactly is the reason to prefer the former scenario when the latter is presumably more economically efficient?
Just pigpiling on Burin's comment to say: Those of us who grew up poor realize that being able to buy a laptop much more cheaply is cold comfort if there are no jobs we can do to afford to buy one.
Those who grew up poor know that the price of bread is massively important, and you buy it whether you have a job or not. And even if the bread is made with local wheat, the price of that wheat is set globally and is affected by tariffs and subsidies.
There's a reason why Home Pride and day-old bread was de rigeur growing up and not some highfalutin' brand actually made with something that didn't approach sawdust. Substitutionary effect is a very real thing to those of limited means, I assure you.
Also, no. No you don't. You skip certain foods altogether. If you can honestly tell me you've gone to a close friend's house to realize... hey it's dark.... and it's because the power got cut, feel free to chime in about your experiences. Otherwise, I can assure you: Tariffs help rich people get richer primarily. The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally. And overwhelmingly it does not.
Lack of tariffs/protectionism since obviously we don't have an edit function and I need to stop and think a bit more before hitting Post
"The overall positive impact on an economy is not guaranteed to spread equally." Is that a problem with tariffs, or a problem with the economy? Would you also recommend against automation or other productivity improvements because the benefits are spread unevenly? Or should we be looking at ways to spread the benefits instead?
Its a problem with tariffs. Productivity improvements don’t take very long to spread across society. When the wealthy can outsource the workforce to the third world and support a permanent underclass by robbing the middle class for social welfare, the benefits tend to accrue to the wealthy.
I don't think it's correct that the platform of capitalism and liberty does not excite people. I think that what is currently called "capitalism" - where there are companies that are too big to fail, who are de-facto controlling most of the economy and are in the process of taking control over the politics and public discourse - do not excite people, especially ones that are targeted for exclusion and oppression as "basket of deplorables".
I think that when a NYT journalist, fresh from participating in a struggle session where her colleague was forced to grovel and then fired because he dared to suggest that dissent from the Party Line may not be literally Hitler - when such person talks about "liberty", it does not excite people. And when some party functionary speaks about "liberty" one day, and then comes to an MSNBC show and shakes hands and exchanges smiles with people who call his electorate literally Hitler - that also makes it pretty hard to get excited about those words.
Trump got people excited because he actually tried to do what he promised to do. One may agree or disagree about whether those things were worth doing, or whether the approach he chose for doing them was the effective one, but one can see how people can get excited if a person says "I am going to do X" actually tries to do X, instead of half-assing an attempt to do 1/10 of X, failing to do even than and campaigning on "well, the other guy is even worse, so you don't have a choice but voting for me!"
That is not why Trump got people excited, and it is not even true that Trump actually tried to fulfill his promises more than other presidents.
Per Politifact, Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises, compared to nearly half for Obama (a discrepancy not explained by serving 1 term or control of congress). Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be, and was not paid for by Mexico. Trump had no experience governing and was not interested in learning. His focus was more on being a TV character, which is exactly what is appeal was. Being a TV character and emphatically placing the blame for all the country's problems on whatever groups, real or imagined, his base didn't like. Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
Here in your comment we also see The Great Asymmetry in our collective perception of American politics. A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist, classist, and out-of-touch dismissal Democrats have for the rural half of the country they are supposed to be governing. And perhaps it is! But meanwhile, your average Trump-style GOPer (which is increasingly becoming simply the average GOPer) will describe *all* Democrats as literally, literally evil communists who want to literally destroy you and everything you hold dear, and no one bats an eye.
Being a racist is a lot more fireable than being a Communist.
Given there are close to zero communists around and plenty of racists, what's your point?
My point is your "given" is false - there are a lot more communists (at least if we're using the colloquial meaning of it, e.g. somebody what would be ideologically at home with CCP or USSR, somebody who subscribes to Marxian economics and somebody who thinks capitalism is inferior to socialism and US should become socialist country) than you think and a lot less racists that the press is telling you. Though they exist too, but if I go to an average university campus, I have about an order of magnitude more chance encountering a communist than a racist. Thought there's one important caveat here - I don't include CRT adherents into this calculation as racists, even though this theory is basically pure racism, so maybe I should. Then I'd say it's about even chance.
Well if you start calling everyone who's not a communist a communist then of course there will be lots of them but what's the point of that?
Socialism is not communism and if you actually check there are very few people who even support full fledged socialism. What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist. There are plenty of us around.
I think it's no less reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known communists on basically every important question "communists", even if they don't carry the official party membership, than it is reasonable to call somebody who agrees with known racists on every important question "racist", even though they don't have an official paper to say so.
> What you do is to call everyone who's not a hard right wing nut case a communist.
No, that's not true. There are a lot of opinions beyond "hard right wing nut" and "communist". But people who would support the Marxist economic ideology and its conclusions, who have no serious disagreement with the communist ideology, should be rightfully called so. There are a lot of place to not agree with the "right wing nuts" and at the same time not embrace Marxism - I myself am an example of it. Ans any person who points out that he seriously disagrees with Marxism and communist ideology - is certainly not a communist, and there are very many of those, even among Democrats. But that's not the reason to ignore the existence - and the proliferation - of communist views. It's not the new thing either - there has been a lot of communists in government and Hollywood and academia in times where communism meant Joseph Stalin, not some vague "Bernie Sanders plus". If people were willing to embrace it then, no wonder they'd be also willing to embrace it now - whatever you can say about Bernie and taking his ideas to the logical conclusion, he's certainly nowhere even close to Stalin!
Your first paragraph but replace communist with racist.
Around 20% of the population believe that interracial marriage is wrong according to some surveys. We can take the number of people who support this extremely racist position as an absolute minimum number of racist Americans, even on a strict definition of racism as a conscious belief in racial superiority.
I don't know what percentage of the population believes that all things should be held in common and production reflect the principle of "from each to their ability, to each according to their need", but I bet it's less than 20%. Fuck, I don't even believe it, except as a kind of distant currently impractical Utopian ideal, and I'm one of the most left-wing people I know.
Among general population - probably way less than 20%. On campus - I wouldn't be so sure. Evidence: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article237089274.html
But "to each according to their need" has been nothing but "distant currently impractical Utopian ideal" in any communist country that ever existed, so that's wholly in adherence with common practice. Again, I think it is logical to think that if you agree with actual ideological practice of Communist Party in a country commonly referred to as "communist", then calling you a "communist" would be appropriate, even if you had disagreement about a practical applicability of specific slogan is specific circumstance. There were a lot of tactical disagreement among communists (ask Trotsky about it) so we must allow some room there.
As of 2017, that appears to be 9%, not 20%. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on-intermarriage/
Black Americans are the group most likely to oppose interracial marriage, at twice the rate of white Americans and six times the rate of Hispanic Americans. (Interestingly, women are 70% more likely than men to oppose interracial marriage!)
I assume you don't believe anyone but white people can be racist, so doing some arithmetic brings me to the white population that opposes racial intermarriage to 5.4% of the total population, or about 17.8 million people.
For reference, it's about 7.2 million black people who oppose intermarriage, and 1.8 million Hispanics.
It's more difficult to determine how many Americans are communists. However, there was a YouGov poll with some interesting findings.
Per a 2020 YouGov poll, 18% of Americans had a favorable opinion of Marxism and 14% had a favorable opinion of communism. https://victimsofcommunism.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/10.19.20-VOC-YouGov-Survey-on-U.S.-Attitudes-Toward-Socialism-Communism-and-Collectivism.pdf
A 2019 poll found that 43% of Americans view "some form of socialism" as a good thing. https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx
The same poll found that 6% of Americans think most nations of the world will have communist governments in the next 50 years. Is that an endorsement? Not sure!
The same poll found that 28% think government should control the distribution of wealth, 33% the economy overall, and 35% wages. Does that make them communists? Again, I'm not sure!
Another poll by Pew found that 9% have a very positive opinion of socialism. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/25/stark-partisan-divisions-in-americans-views-of-socialism-capitalism/
So based on this, can we say there are more communists or racists in the US? No. But they're probably in the same ballpark.
> That is not why Trump got people excited
This would carry a bit more weight if you at least bothered to provide a counter-argument, let alone your substantiated opinions what it is.
> Per Politifact
I am not sure it can be considered an objective source when talking about Trump.
> Trump kept only around a quarter of his promises
Do I need to explain why promises are not fungible and treating them as replaceable commodity, numerically calculating the percentage of them as if fulfilling each of them requires the same effort and producing the same benefit is completely bogus?
Do I need to explain that trying to fullfill the promises and actually doing it is a very different thing?
> Notably, his border wall fell well short of what he claimed it would be
The question is not whether he built 100% of his largest promise, the question is whether he invested a serious and bona fide effort into getting the wall built. The answer to this question is: Yes.
> was not paid for by Mexico.
If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
> Pure sideshow, grievance, and bigotry.
You are welcome to express you hate and disdain for people that disagree with you as much as you like, but rest assured it won't give you an inch of understanding of them. Maybe you don't want it, that's you choice. Just know you don't have it.
> If you think anybody on the Right seriously expected it to be paid by Mexico and not federal budget, you may need to seriously adjust your ideas before discussing anything about why people liked Trump. I mean, you can engage in any delusion you like, as long as it pleases you, but rest assured it won't have anything to do with real people.
Enlighten us, O Great One. What the hell does that actually mean to “real people”? I genuinely want to know.
I think if you don't know what real people are, it's probably beyond me to explain it, sorry.
Let me restate that so it’s completely clear: If “and Mexico is going to pay for it” doesn’t mean “Mexico will pay for it”, what does it mean, specifically to “real people”?
It's a boast, not a promise. The promise is to build the wall (and, more generally, to improve border security). If Trump can present it as "Mexico paying for it", just to stick it to the lefties, that'd be cool, but really it doesn't matter. Not anybody on the right ever objected to spending money on border security (we can leave alone the sad fact that nobody anymore objects to spending money on practically anything, that's another story), so there would be no problem if it is financed from federal budget - in fact, that was the logical expectation. I literally didn't see anybody who is not on the Left ever objecting to the fact that US money is spent on wall building - and I have seen much praise when budget allocations that Trump pushed through actually got to the building. The promise - and something that is actually discussed and meticulously tracked on the Right's forums and other hang-out places - is how much of the wall is built. The costs are very secondary and nobody is seriously talking about the Mexico part in any other way than finding some way to present it so just to stick it. But if you're interested about what the Right is discussing and what they are happy and unhappy with - literally nobody ever that I see reading Right places was ever genuinely complaining about not getting Mexico thing. Because nobody ever took it as serious geniune promise (unlike the wall itself, which people were very much upset when it was slow or not happening).
It was a joke.
We laughed and smiled
And it was more fun when idiots on the left didn't get the joke.
Then we laughed at them too.
Trump had a specific policy about exactly how Mexico would pay for it. His plan was written up in mainstream liberal newspapers like NYTimes and WaPost.
I'd link it, but I don't think it would change anyone's minds by actually reading the truth.
I provided some pretty straightfoward evidence that Trump was not magically more committed to his platform than most presidents (because why would he be? Surely that onus is on you to prove), in fact the evidence suggested that Trump was significantly less of a promise-keeper than his predecessor. You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news (on the basis of what? What specific claims about Trump's promise-keeping are false or misleading?).
Next, you maneuver to re-interpret Trump's explicit promises in a way that affords near-infinite degrees of freedom to claim success by dropping key clauses that retroactively didn't pan out and pretending like they were metaphorical all along, while also projecting onto him some sort of hitherto untapped Herculean presidential effort in achieving policy goals (do you mean... he sometimes tweeted what he wanted in all caps?) Truth is, millions of people literally believed Mexico would pay for the wall. It was even a chant at his rallies!
I've spoken with lots of "real" Trump people -- not just weird ultra-online types who read Scott Alexander -- and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry. "He's funny", "he tells it like it is", "he's a brilliant businessman and that's just what this country needs", "I don't like him personally, but I'll take him over the socialist democrats any day", "he's been doing a pretty good job but I don't think he's gone far enough to get all the illegals out. Trust me, they are violent savages." And so on. Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes, they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship (the evil democrats), they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up. They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies. I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself. But what stuck me was his insistence -- absolute insistence -- that the attendance of the preceding Trump rally surpassed 1 million people (the authorities estimated 30,000 tops). Trump was lying about his crowd sizes until the very end, and they never stopped believing him. I'm sure that pastor still believes that Mexico is paying for the wall, too.
I am not sure where your "millions" comes from, but I am sure you can find some people who believed in Mexico paying. I mean, there are people who believe Earth is flat and gosts are real and true socialism has never been yet tried. What I am questioning is that it was take seriously by majority (or even substrantial minority) of Trump supporters as a real promise they expect Trump to fullfil. Yet less it is a "key" promise - of course the "key" is bulding the wall, not who is paying for it - again, the question of paying for security has never been even the slightest concern among the right. They never asked to cut budgets or reduce expenses for any security measures, quite the contrary. So even if they thought it's a real promise, it'd certainly wouldn't be a "key" one.
> You responded by essentially calling Politifact fake news
No, that's not true. I called Politifact a biased source when it concerns Trump - based on the fact their coverage of politicians shows substantial left-wing bias, especially when it concerns Trump. I didn't analyze their coverage of Trump promise-keeping specifically, so I can not claim for a fact that their bias there is equal to their bias everywhere else, but I would be surprised if that were one area where they suddenly stopped being biased.
> and their reasons for supporting or admiring Trump are usually pretty simple and often based on misinformation or just plain bigotry
You maybe spoke to them, but I seriously doubt you understood them or even listened to them very well. Otherwise "plain bigotry" wouldn't be one of the main reasons.
> Lots of people generally like his "strongman" vibes,
Part of being "strongman" is doing what you promise to do.
> they like how strongly he leans into their negative partisanship
I don't think after the coverage we've witnessed in 2015-2021 "leans into negative partisanship" is in any way unique to Trump. Nobody has on my memory been covered in more negative light than Trump. I thought Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad, but the Trump one has been like thermonuclear explosion to a cheap firework. It moved from "he's like Hitler" to "Hitler is way better than him" and then it went to 11 times 11 times 11.
> they like that he talks differently/is an outsider/is a chaotic wildcard who shakes things up
That one you got right. Of course, you still somehow managed to attribute it to "bigotry".
> They agree with his xenophobia and Islamophobia.
If by "islamophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about terrorism driven by fanatical islamist movement, then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that. Fanatical islamist movements are real, and their actions cause many death worldwide every year. And they are active in the US too. Ignoring it out of fear of drawing the ire of wokescolds is literally exchanging lives of people for woke points.
If by "xenophobia" you mean, as most Party press does, a genuine concern about immigration law enforcement which is being dismantled by the Left, essentially trying to introduce open borders without ever passing it through Congress - then yes, they do. And they are completely justified in that: immigration law is the law, and ridiculous situation where laws are not being enforced because Democratic administration doesn't like them should not happen in a country that is not a banana republic. What's the point in having laws if people can just decide to ignore them whenever they like?
Now we note that Trump not only promised but delivered actions for both of these. Which kinda was my point. You may not like his actions and consider it "bigotry", but his supporters disagree.
> Many of them also believe his lies, including his very dumb, obviously false and pointless lies
That happens to people who follow politicians. The Left has been believing the obviously false and pointless "collusion" hoax for many years, some continue to believe it to this day. And that not concerning a litany of other lies and hoaxes we have witnessed over the years (like that Trump called Nazis "fine people", or that Kavanaugh is a rapist). Yes, lies unfortunately are part of the modern politics, and some people believe them.
> I recently spoke with a youth pastor from my hometown who believed that antifa was behind the capitol insurrection, a ridiculous lie in and of itself
BTW, why is it "ridiculous"? It may not be true that antifa was a significant driver for the riot, but why it is "ridiculous" to believe that? Say, more "ridiculous" than believing US President is Putin's puppet, absent any evidence?
Let's consider some facts:
1. In 2020, antifa instigated hundreds of riots, some continuing to this very day - i.e. antifa has rioted in Portland just couple days ago. The press largely dismissed these riots as "mostly peaceful" protests, some politicians even praising and encourging them.
2. In these riots, multiple governmental buildings were attacked, and Antifa is notorious for their willingness to fight the police and vandalize and destroy government property.
3. There were other cases where leftist groups occupied both state capitol buildings (Wisconsin) and congressional offices, as part of political protest.
4. We know for a fact that many of Antifa operatives has been repeatedly released without any punishment or avoided arrest completely, and many local governments have been adopting velvet gloves approach to Antifa actions.
5. We know that riot in the Capitol and skirmish with the police has begun before Trump called his supporters - that have been listening to his speech at the other end of the mile-long National Mall - to go to the Capitol.
6. We know for a fact that Capitol riots have been planned significant time before the elections, and FBI has been aware of the ongoing planning.
7. We know for a fact that increased security has been refused by Congressional leadership and local police leadership.
8. We have seen video and photo evidence that at least some rioters were let in by the police beyond the fences.
9. We know for a fact some known antifa operatives have been seen and filmed at the Capitol (including inside the building).
10. We know for a fact that there was IEDs placed in several places to split and disorganize police response - action fitting an organized group and not a mob inflamed by a provocative speach.
11. We know for a fact that a lot of reporting that appear in the in major press after the riot has turned out to be false, such as reporting about Brian Sicknick's cause of death, or attributing death of somebody who hasn't even been near the Capitol and died of stroke, to the riots.
12. We know that at least some protesters tried to stop the rioters from fighting the police and entering the Capitol.
Given these facts - and the events in the preceding years - why it is "ridiculous" to believe that a) some organized group is behind the riots and b) that organized group is the same one that has been behind hundreds of othe riots and c) the press and the politicians are lying to us about it? I mean, I do not claim these are true statements - as there are many statements that aren't ridiculous but still are very false - but I don't see how they are "ridiculous". Yet less how this belief is more ridiculous than beliefs of anybody on the Left who embraced the Steele dossier and the "collusion" hoax.
Maybe the permanent residents of the glass house should be throwing stones around so readily.
should *not* be... sigh.
> A single comment from the Democratic nominee 5 years ago, describing half of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" is still talked about today and seen as emblematic of the elitist,
Because it is true. It was saying the silent part loud, only this part is no longer silent for a while now. The disdain for the flyover country rubes that cling to their racist habits and need to be reeducated and reformed is heard loud and clear. Basket of deplorables is not the first one and not the last one, and if you take a poll in any bastion on the Left about whether it's true or not, you'll probably get the "yes" in the 90%s. And thanks to the internet, twitter, facebook and so on, the deplorables now know all about what their supposed betters think about them. And then one wonders - why would people think that someone who considers them barely human, uneducated, unwashed, illiterate rube in sore need of forcible reeducation and shouldn't be let anywhere near self-rule, who disdains them with their whole heart, who would say things like "all I want for Christmas is genocide" in public and be secure their peers will approve it - why would people think such a wonderful friendly people are evil and have some evil plans for them? Only bigotry could explain that!
It was “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
That's not an apple to apple comparison. A single comment from the presidential candidate will of course get more reaction than a comment from a random Joe.
Now if you compare the reaction of Hillary's comments to Trumps comments; people certainly reacted to Trump and if none of this comments have the same staying power, it's because there were so many of them competing for airtime.
"I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck."
Stopped reading. Not sure what the rest was but this is just lazy.
You missed out, this is some good shit right here.
Well OK, I read it. What's frustrating is this is just a throw away line and I'll let him decide what drove him to write it. It detracts value for the alleged target audience, there is little shortage of opinion from people who signal hate for Republicans. Using a term such as disagree would have worked better.
What happens 99% of the time with an open letter of advice to Republicans is that the opining party suggests the Republicans should become progressives in order to fix their party. I figured it would be more substantive from the same guy who wrote "You're still crying wolf". It ended better than it started.
glad you read the rest, perhaps some other articles might help to explain some of his choices.
Since 'serious'!Scott is faultlessly charitable to everyone all the time, I read that as a reminder that he really knows he's not part of the coalition he's proposing here, even if he thinks it would be a positive realignment overall.
I don't think it's a signal, Scott just hates them.
Probably not them individually, just the aggregate, and I can't blame him tbh.
The part that surprised me was Scott assuming that Republicans hate him. I'm a Republican, and I love Scott. He takes surveys, so he knows he has a decent amount of Republican readers. By percentage he's much more popular with Republicans than the NYT, and probably nearly any other Democrat blogger.
Keep reading. I voted Trump - twice - and everything he says is what I've been saying for eons. Channeling Clinton: It's class (not race), stupid.
It's good stuff man, don't let that one sentence stop you.
I do feel like Scott could have left that line out. Quoting some other things Scott himself has written about writing, that have stuck in my mind:
> It’s written in a style of “I can see where you’re coming from, but have you considered X?” I thought I was the only person who had figured out that this worked better than “YOU ARE DUMB AND I HATE YOU. NOW PLEASE AGREE WITH ME.”
or in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
"7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
[...]
Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them.
For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. ..."
So either Scott got lazy here, or he didn't really target this essay at Republicans, or he felt like he needed to throw this in so no one would mistake him for a Republican sympathizer.
I just want to say though jarring, I liked the line. Let's start out with some
brutal honesty. It also has a bit of black humor. And I don't think his primary target is Republicans. (But that is just my take on it. )
Is it still brutal honesty if it's 100% brutal but only about 25% honesty?
I didn't stop reading, but I was very disappointed in Scott.
I expect in the long run he'll recant that line as intellectually dishonest (does he really hate them?)
I hope that the long run is short, for his apology.
I was disappointed in Scott as well for that line. I assume it was just poor writing, not true. (Perhaps that's hope).
I read this as the loudest possible indicator that Scott could manage, right after naming it “A Modest Proposal”, that this was meant to be satirical in tone
It's a perfectly honest statement of fact and statement of intent. Frankly I think it perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the piece, and the piece would feel dishonest without it.
But that's the whole point - "this is how you could be less awful AND attract more voters at the same time, win-win!"
It was pretty startling, but it's a great article. I'm glad to see your read the rest.
And don't sweat it. I suspect that in a few days Scott is going to publish an article addressing the Democrats that contains the same line.
I read this article as really being addressed not to Republicans but to those "who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too" -- us progressives, in other words, and the "I hate you and you hate me" comment was just a bit of self- (and us) mockery.
Interesting. I kept reading but sort of tuned out the point far before that when he linked NPR about a phenomenon that doesnt exist (There is no identity crisis in the Republican party - maybe the ones in DC arent happy about their new identity but that's unchanged since about 2015. In fact, I'd say the party is more captive to the identity now than it was then: https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1363898468675293187)
Scott did follow with a few interesting ideas (some more than others) but the critical error he made in accepting that assumption poisons all suggestions.
One thing I've noticed, and I believe Scott has admitted to, is he will sometimes stick in explicit denunciations he either doesnt fully agree with (at least not in said full-throated manner) or in normal circumstances wouldnt feel the need to do. Something along the lines of "Richard Spencer is a moron" would fit the latter, you can fill in for the former. He does this to appease a wider audience and get some readership/possible discussion from those he would otherwise not in our current times.
I understand his motives for this and yet I believe it weakens his writing of which one of his greatest strengths is the endearing honesty of his arguments. I think you read that "I hate you and you hate me" line in the same way I have read some of those explicit denunciations before but I don't know if that's what Scott was doing here. His animosity for Republicans and Trump is real, although how hard felt it is remains cloaked.
Alas, that's where Scott departs from the "Proles" and is why he cannot properly advocate for them. He feels the need to cloak and protect himself from accusations of various -isms, as recent events attest. I don't blame him for this but it denotes the class difference.
To show this I'll commit the same sin he originally did and cite the NYT. Specifically, their recent story about Smith College. Consider the proles of the tale - the janitor, the cafeteria worker. Accused of an -ism, their response was not "I'm not racist, because xxx" or some groveling apology that pays deference to the party that aggrieved them as we have seen hundreds of times from middle and upper middle class types embroiled in these disputes. It was "When does this racist label go away?"
Whether something or someone is racist or not is not an all-consuming facet of life for these people, not in the same way it is for those who jockey for status by doling out accusations of it.
The issue Scott has is he ultimately agrees with the progressive point of view here, where he disagrees is where the lines are drawn and how much trouble you should be in if you are caught playing with fire (i.e., the nrx flirting).
The Proles have no time for that. They're not writing any dissertations about whether they are or are not guilty of racism. That's a higher class problem. All this dodging and cloaking is for someone else, maybe the conservatives in DC and various suburbs across the land that are defecting from the Republican party can have fun doing that once theyre caught in an imbroglio (and they will be).
The cafeteria lady just wants a new job.
We don't hate you, Scott. You're like the one writer I've read who absolutely loathed Trump for reasons that did not appear to be based on total nonsense, which was refreshing.
He obviously meant the republican establishment and not Republican voters, so this entire discussion is moot.
If either party were to actually do this, and do it in a way that didn't leave me suspecting it was a facade for same-old, same-old, I'd sign up, even though I have little use personally for significant parts of the culture described. (Nothing wrong with football, or church, and neither one is less desirable in the grand scheme of things than my personal hobbies, as long as I don't have to do either one.)
ditto. But I would try to persuade them on trade and immigration.
Immigration is so the upper class has an easily exploitable labor force to exploit.
Low skill workers pay the price and the upper class gets their toilets cleaned for pennies.
If you want to bring in new "experts" so we can pay the existing experts half?
Hell yeah.
Importantly, this idea has already passed a critical empirical test. All of the other major British settler colonies (Canada, Australia, you can also count New Zealand) switched to race-blind points-based immigration systems several decades ago. All of them have higher % foreign born than the US, while avoiding the populist backlash that has afflicted Western countries with a higher level of low-skill immigration. Canadian support for their government's immigration policy is well above 70% the last time I checked.
Are the laws enforced? When illegal immigrants are found and in custody, are they deported?
I think the biggest concern conservatives have is that it's not really possible to eject people that sneak in.
It's actually quite easy to get rid of illegal immigration. You punish their employers.
Here's a policy: any illegal immigrant who is working can report their employer to the government. The illegal immigrant who reports will be made legal with their family; the other illegal immigrants working there can be offered the same deal in exchange for evidence if needed to win the case against their employer. Any remaining illegal immigrants are ejected.
The employer gets prosecuted unless they can prove that they checked the immigration status of their employees and reasonably believed that they were legal (ie the forgeries were good enough to trick someone, and they weren't just accepting any old forgery in order to escapt prosecution).
Get rid of the jobs and they stop coming, apart from actually desperate people seeking asylum, and people pretending to be such (which does mean that you need a good quality process for separating those two groups apart, which is a hard problem and any such process needs to acknowledge that it is a hard problem and that it will get it wrong occasionally, and you need to say whether you're happier with your mistakes resulting in letting in people who shouldn't be or returning people to actually dangerous situations).
I've proposed something much like this on the old blog, but I was wondering what the other British-settler-colonies were doing right now.
We already punish employers of illegal workers in the Netherlands and otherwise make things hard for illegals. It has resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of illegal residents.
Your plan to reward illegal immigrants who snitch seems ill thought out. It assumes that they have no group loyalty, no loyalty to their employers, that they know the laws and that they have high trust in government promises.
For larger employers in the parts of the economy where illegal work is common, the better solution is just to regularly do unannounced checks at the work site. For small employees like illegal cleaning at homes, waiting for people in their environment to snitch is probably the only realistic chance.
That's actually an ingenious idea.
I love Swift's Modest Proposal - is this in the same vein? Am I too stupid now to recognise that encouraging the eating of their children is a better way to feed the poor than providing charity is satire?
I don't know if you're stupid or not. I do know that I was thrilled to read someone who is intelligent outlining the issues I have in voting Democratic. And in the reality that my still-poor family largely shifted from voting 100% Democratic to almost 100% Republican in a 30 year span. Hint: It wasn't because they all became closet Nazis somewhere along the way.
But... if they were voting 100% Democratic, why were they watching Fox News? Why were they ignoring “left wing” real journalistic sources?
No, you're not too stupid. Maybe just not familiar with Scott's writing. He's written another "modest proposal" essay too: http://web.archive.org/web/20101014114328/http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html
It starts with "I think dead children should be used as a unit of currency. I know this sounds controversial, but hear me out." If that piques your interest, do check it out.
This is making me real fired up.
I recommend the book "In Defense of Elitism" by Joel Stein. Funniest book I've read in years.
"Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, and starving college students may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon."
This is great. As someone who would like to see a smarter, better conservative movement, I couldn't agree more. For this to work you have to draw a line against the people who would like to hijack the movement and make it about economic class, because it's safer than attacking other things, i.e., wokeness.
I co-authored a report here on debunking the "working-class party myth," and it talks about the consensus in political science that economics doesn't motivate voters all that much. We say it's all about "social issues" (the left-wing academy just calls it "racism" or "racial resentment") but the idea that it's not about money or economic status is important.
https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-national-populist-illusion-why-culture-not-economics-drives-american-politics/
Policy wise, a class based agenda can include smart stuff like war on credentialism, while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas, and we already have one party pushing that.
"while if you try to do lowest common denominator economic class stuff you just get more left-wing ideas"
This isn't obvious (at least, when it comes to White people):
https://oklahomawatch.org/2020/07/01/how-oklahoma-voted-on-medicaid-expansion/
https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/1365017699433259024
There is a way to square the circle here, and it would be a bonfire to credentialism as you indicate. A war on the institutions seems like where younger Republicans who I've talked to are leaning, anyways, but also some voices influential with boomers, like Tucker Carlson.
You also do see in some states where energy based employment is a big local factor that Republican gains among working class voters have proved more durable, because in that case, you can genuinely have both an economic interest argument align with a class argument like Scott puts forward (think the shift in West Virginia from Bill Clinton to Trump, or states like Ohio, New Mexico, the Dakotas, etc, where blue collar Democrats have shifted in numbers of varying sizes). Promises of job retraining programs worked for the Democrats in the 90s, but very quickly that went away once it became clear that these programs entailed having to move across the country.
A problem the conservative movement has is that like all movements, of all ideologies, it has racket like tendencies. This was true in the scam PAC era, the direct mail era, and yes, now the MyPillow era as well. Its not clear to me that this is something that can be solved anytime soon. The answer I think is what the Democrats do, and that is to put their slimiest people into positions of low profile institutional power (think corrupt Congresspeople in majority black districts like Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Waters, etc). The Democratic coalition allows for this to work because they don't ever need to put Alcee Hastings or Jesse Jackson in front of the wine mom crowd. The Republicans have a problem in that they don't have a good way to keep Matt Gaetz away from the Facebook feeds of winnable suburban moms.
One of the ways I've heard the argument you push back on the most is the idea that the Republicans need to become some version of Fidesz or Law and Justice, transplanted to the US. It mostly comes from people who are really pro-natalist and are jealous that the kind of social conservatism you see in those countries (the throne and altar kind, not the Barstool kind) is politically feasible. I think such an agenda would bomb in the US, and I say that as someone who likes a lot of it. Our cultural politics on fertility are not dominated by the spectre of half of our skilled college grads moving to London or Berlin to become baristas, and our fiscal situation is not one in which German and French taxpayers fork over a whole bunch of goodies to our budget every year. Mapping out a pro natalist agenda requires a recognition that much of the problem is cultural, not economic. There is a reason that Chad and Burkina Faso have replacement level fertility and we don't, and I don't think the answer is in tax credits.
1. Awful nice of you to let Josh Hawley ghostwrite a post after banning him from the comments a few weeks ago.
2. Lots of policy judgments are difficult to boil down to a number, or turn on value differences between various numbers. I am not sure exactly how prediction markets could be leveraged to solve climate change, for instance. A prediction market with a long enough time horizon might snuff out skeptics of the phenomenon itself (many bets made by climate bloggers in the 00s are just now being paid/welched) but I don't see it spurring on any action, at least distinct from the market market's consensus of "that's the future's problem."
3. In terms of rhetoric, Republicans pretty much are already here. The problem is that the working class pays the least attention to punditry and debates and therefore this cynical signaling will only go so far without actually delivering the goods. It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES, but under a Democratic administration things are going right back to deficit trolling.
A prediction market could determine that climate change exists, that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts), and that it would be bad (ask it to predict number of hurricanes and famines over the next few years).
A prediction market couldn't determine that we have a moral obligation to respond to it, but neither can experts, so my claim that prediction markets could replace/complement experts still seems true.
Please post something explaining why you think prediction markets make any sense at all. I'd rather argue with you about it - and who knows, maybe you have a non-obvious-to-me point - than roll my eyes and think about how someone with good ideas can also have really bizarre blind spots every time you mention your support for them.
What part of it doesn't seem to make sense?
Pretty much all of it. What I see is people basically gambling. At best, assuming no systemic flaws, they can determine what people believe enough that they are willing to place money on it - though if they work like stock markets, that could just be because they expect to sell to a greater fool before the bubble bursts.
I don't see much reason to believe that what people _believe_ is true. E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost, in the same amount - except wore than that, due to transaction costs etc.
Of course I don't in fact know much about how prediction markets work, or even if they all work the same way. (Their name caused me to have a mild prior that this was something invented by marketers, to appeal to the unthinking, and should probably be avoided. Life's too short to investigate every type of snake oil ... and I wouldn't even think about them at all, if someone who's usually clueful (you) wasn't prominently supporting them.
Prediction markets can do astonishingly well, especially if designed in the right way. I'm also not sure how committed Scott* would be to them being literal markets with money changing hands - I imagine he'd be happy with something like Tetlock's Good Judgement Project as a complementary system. The crux of the idea is to move away from vague qualitative predictions to fully testable precisely calibrated predictions, because then you can move away from a system gated by class and credentials to one gated by demonstrated consistent track record.
If you'd like to know more about these methods I strongly recommend reading Tetlock's book Superforecasting, by the way - he's very reflective and smart, and he tackles a lot of the 'obvious problems' with this kind of system.
*Scott as in the version of Scott fiercely defending this manifesto, which may or may not be identical to the actual Scott.
You pretty much need to have real quantities of real money on the line for it to work. Otherwise it becomes swamped with people simply signaling their positions without any skin in the game.
I don't claim to know how well prediction markets would work in practice, but the hope is:
People have a bunch of beliefs; some of those beliefs are right, some of them are wrong.
Prediction markets make it so that the people with accurate beliefs make money, and the people with inaccurate beliefs lose money.
Over time, the people with inaccurate beliefs either (a) improve their beliefs so that they can make more money, or (b) start avoiding the prediction market in self-defense, or in extreme cases (c) run out of money and can't place any more large bets. In all cases, their inaccurate beliefs gradually come to have less impact on the market.
Conversely, the people with accurate beliefs make a lot of money, and are encouraged to keep playing.
Are there ways this could possibly go wrong? Tons. But you can also see how it at least *might* go right.
I think my argument would be something like - we all agree the stock market works, not necessarily in a fundamental way of giving the "true" value of companies, but in a sense where it prices stocks in a way that incorporates all relevant information on whether a stock will go up or down. If you see a stock you think is overpriced and definitely going to go way up next week, you're either wrong, or have some kind of unique genius or insider information which you'll add to the stock and then cause it to be priced correctly.
Prediction markets try to do the same thing, but in a way where they value of the "stock" is the percent chance the thing will happen. Right now they're terrible because of a lot of trading limits. But if there were a prediction market where you could trade as much money as you wanted, one of two things would have to be true:
1. The prediction market's estimate is smarter than yours
2. You could make basically unlimited amounts of money by betting on the prediction market
Right now it's kind of 2 - prediction markets are dumber than I am, and I made thousands of dollars betting on them last year. The only reason I'm not a multi-millionaire is because there were limits - I could only bet a tiny amount. The same is true of anyone else who's smarter than prediction markets, which is why they stay dumb. If prediction markets removed their limits, it wouldn't mean I actually became a multimillionaire, it would mean that lots of people even smarter than I am would find it worth their time to bet on them in a way that brings them down to an accurate estimate.
What part of this seems wrong to you?
I'm not sure about this, because the stock market has something else that makes it work. Prediction markets are always a zero sum game. Money in always equals money out.
The stock market is a positive sum game, because it's allocating investment capital. A huge share of stock investment comes from non-gamblers. They just use the prediction market portion of the stock market for information without participating. This is what happens when someone buys an index fund. There aren't index fund equivalents for prediction markets.
I'm also worried that prediction markets will be too volatile.
Well, first of all I'm not sure the stock market works. Stocks have consensus values, with lots of random jitter, commonly called "volatility", but all those values represent is what people are willing to buy/sell the stock for at any given time.
It's well known that dividends aren't much of a thing anymore, given that "capital gains" get better tax treatment, so companies buy back their own stock rather than issuing dividends; this has the probably intended side effect of hugely rewarding executives whose compensation depends on changes in the per-share stock price (not on total market capitalization).
I rather suspect that in the ordinary case, the stock price - or even the total market capitalization - is not in fact a good estimate of the future value of the corporation and its earnings, extended to infinity - or till the company gets wound down.
For the rest, I'm not sure what kind of predictions are traded, including both how reliably they can be measured, and how meaningful they are. Also the length of time for predictions to be fulfilled, and thus pay off - or otherwise.
I should probably look at some of these markets to learn these things. But of course that's to an extent where this thread started, since I'd expect a "prediction markets 101" as part of any discussion of what they are or are not good for.
Efficient market hypothesis supports prediction markets, as you say. We should also expect Condorcet's Jury Theorem to do some work here too, at least if we assume that those willing to bet in a prediction market are (individually) better predictors than a coin flip. Then the market's prediction will be quite accurate.
>E.g. for every person who makes a correct prediction in the stock market, who gains, there's someone else who made an incorrect prediction, and lost
It's in the pricing. First, a $1 share of X Will Happen at 75c is the same as a share of X Won't Happen at 25c. So you might have people with the exact same correct evaluation of the probability taking either end of the deal depending on risk vs profit tolerance, giving the prediction market the correct price level but still ending up with winners and losers.
Second, even with divergent estimations, the 50% of people who lose may have an estimation that's much less than 50% wrong -- e.g., if half the buyers think X has an 80% chance of occurring and the other half think, correctly, that it's almost a certainty (say 100% for simplicity), the market predicts 90% even though half of the buyers still lose out.
Finally, errors tend to cancel out, absent systematic bias of some kind (e.g. overestimation and underestimation of most things tend to be about equally common), and we'd assume those with better knowledge (e.g. domain experts) are more likely to invest, moving the price toward the correct level.
>What I see is people basically gambling
Suppose a small town has a Weather Market, with shares of "It (Will/Won't) Rain Tomorrow" worth $1 if it does/doesn't rain tomorrow. The real chance of rain is 75%. A group of townspeople, looking at various things, think the chances are about 60%, and buy some shares for 60c. The market predicts 60% chance of rain.
But we're meteorologists in a club for meteorology, and we have good data that indicates an 80% chance, so we try to buy as many shares as we can until the price is 80c. The price climbs to 78c, since we've bought quite a few due to our confidence in our meteorological data (remember, the townspeople can either sell us their It Will shares for > the 60c they paid, or take the other side by buying It Won't shares for < 40c which become our It Will shares, both of which appear to be good deals to them).
(We're kind of ignoring where the shares came from in the first place here -- market makers or people taking other sides with the same estimates, whatever.)
So in this toy example, you can see how the market might work, with our confidence in our more accurate data causing the market to move in the right direction, and the townspeople's estimate not being necessarily equally as wrong as ours is right.
I believe there's some evidence that prediction markets work, in some small-scale experiments and some data on how accurate aggregate judgments tend to be, along with the theoretical considerations Scott outlines in his comment, but I don't know much about the empirical side.
One of those e.g.-s is supposed to be an i.e... but I can't edit. Shoot.
I thought Gwern's introduction was pretty good: https://www.gwern.net/Prediction-markets
That reminds me that one of the scandals of coronavirus spreading through meat-packing plants was we found out managers were making bets on how many people would die; i.e. they were putting their money where their mouths were, but once the rage machine gets going, facts go out the window.
Thank you
I think the biggest problem with using prediction markets as a source of truth is that either true believers can coordinate to spend money to affect the predictions, and people with a lot of money can also do so. Ideally, the market becomes so liquid that this doesn't work, but I'm not convinced that's likely to happen very soon.
Specifically, the idea of using a prediction market (what people with $$$ believe) to determine something more appropriately investigated via the scientific method pretty much reeks of snake oil to me.
You think that prediction markets have no basis in statistical or mathematical reality? I don't pretend they're infallible - see 2016's election results - but I do believe that unless people are just stupid they are much, much more than putting it all on black at The Venetian.
While I think prediction markets will "work," they'll hit the same Lucas Critique in that when they become what people use to make decisions, people will corrupt them.
Robin Hanson has done a lot of work on that idea. Attempting to bias a prediction market by betting on a favored but less likely outcome acts like a subsidy for all the smart money betting against you. And increasing liquididity makes them work BETTER.
This is a false dichotomy as no one is suggesting that the scientific method be replaced with prediction markets. Also see the replication crisis for evidence that appeals to the scientific method don’t solve every problem.
Scott Alexander38 min ago:
"A prediction market could determine that climate change exists"
Scott suggested firing 75% of experts in favor of prediction markets? Maybe he's not suggesting a total replacement but there'd be a lot less scientific method going on.
Look, imagine two people betting on climate change. The first bets using the latest scientific research. The second one bets using guesses, crystal ball readings, and Facebook memes.
Who's going to make money on the prediction market? And who's going to lose their shirt?
You've set up a false dichotomy. Having a prediction market doesn't mean you ignore science.
It's not about what people with money believe. Is about what money believes. And (people with) money care about money, at least in the mid-long term.
People with money often have no idea where exactly they are investing; behind layers of financial instruments that wrap indices and whatnot. In the end, what performs well routinely will get money. And prediction markets (if they become reliable, legal, liquid, maybe subsidized) can be very profitable if they are inaccurate.
This is more of a method to aggregate information that is known than to discover information. Surely, the scientific method will be used and listened to by those who end up deciding where money is spent.
Imagine them more as a better method than "we polled 100 climate experts and 97% say X", while the other side dismisses the list because half of the experts are actually ex geology teachers, and then the science ends up half-ignored. It's a schelling point.
Sports have prediction markets all the time. You can watch a tennis match live and see the rates go up and down for the match, next point, next game, next set, and a ton of stuff. And they are usually priced reasonably -- at least given our political and fake-news standards.
I think the idea is that scientific results would be priced into the prediction market, since people trying to make money by betting would have an incentive to understand the science with as little political bias as possible.
What jumps to my mind is: why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would find it cheap and easy to make the prediction market "prove" that it's the right policy to require commercial launches for all satellites and NASA's budget to be quintupled and diverted entirely to pushing for manned missions to Mars.
For that matter, wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose? Again, why wouldn't China think it's a cheap thrill to, say, spend a billion dollars to effectively set the US military budget?
> wouldn't it be super easy for foreign nations to use strawmen or puppets to swing the prediction markets any way they choose?
Huge conspiracies like this one are very hard.
> why would this not be exactly equivalent to letting rich people or corporations set any policy they wish to, for a certain amount of money?
The idea is that as soon as the rest of the money gets a hint that some market is off its value, they would rush there for the free gains. It's self correcting. No specific person or country has enough liquid money to force a ridiculous price regardless of what the rest of the world does. At the very least, it wouldn't be super easy.
It depends on the depth of the market. If you have $1000 riding on average temperature in 2021, it totally gets gamed. If you have $10 billion, less so.
I also think you are focusing on prediction markets as dictators of policy. But before getting there, we could at least promote them as just sources of (imperfect though somewhat objective) information, that we can then use at our discretion.
*Would* they? What kind of prediction would be asked in those cases?
The question has to have some sort of empirical verifier at its core, so I don't think the scenarios you outline specifically could happen, unless I'm not thinking imaginatively enough.
But, addressing the spirit of the argument: quite possible for Bezos to push a price in the wrong direction, but anyone who knew this would be able to take his money for as long as he's willing to throw it out there, providing some sort of a counterbalance in both the short (individual prediction) and long (after a few wealth transfers of billions of dollars, those opposing would be more effective opposition).
I suppose the hope would be that the market, by the time it's used for policy decisions, is too large for one player to effectively skew (if Bezos is pouring a billion in, probably a lot of other billionaires would be willing and able to jump in too?).
short and long TERM* why is there no edit
Even the richest of the rich are poor compared to the size of capital markets that could be arrayed against them (and would be if it seemed there was a possibility to grab all the wealth they were throwing away).
shouldn't we expect a prediction market to overprice the likelihood of bad outcomes, as people bet on those outcomes as a hedge? essentially using the bet as an insurance policy?
The directionality is not a priori guaranteed, you have countervailing forces like underpricing worlds where money become worthless, guessing how those will interact is not trivial.
fair!
If that inefficiency were proven true, masses of people like me who don't care about that particular hedge would just buy until it was priced back to a reasonable level. Heck, there would be entire PE firms set up to do this if there was enough money in it
if the demand for something is elevated (by hedgers), and there is no corresponding increase of supply (not quantity of supply, but supply curve), we should expect the price to be elevated. the effect may be small if the supply is very elastic, but it should be greater than zero.
That is the market working as intended. A price increase as a result of hedging risk, without corresponding action on the other side, indicates increased risk.
no, i am describing demand due to people who are willing to take an expected loss for the sake lowering variance of outcomes, similar to how people pay a premium for insurance.
say there is a 5% chance my house will flood, and this is reflected in the betting market. if that happened, it would be really bad; so i want to place 1,000,000 single-dollar bets that it will flood, and now if it does i can afford to fix it with my winnings.
i run out of people who are willing to sell this bet to me at 5 cents, so i keep buying at 6 cents, because it's still worth it for the insurance. we interpret the new price equilibrium as a 6% likelihood my house will flood, but that's inaccurate, because i was optimizing for something other than expected payout.
The financial markets have the exact same dynamics: risk-averse investors will pay a premium for downside protection, and there are entire industries (e.g. insurance) that take the other side to make money. However, this isn't enough to eliminate the risk premiums (i.e. difference between actual price and theoretical fair value): there are lots of ways to make money if you have capital, and so you won't take the other side of a risky bet unless it reaches a certain hurdle of expected returns.
That hurdle of expected returns is exactly the (expected) return of other financial instruments on the market so the the risk premiums will be connected to the interest rate essentially.
Yes, that's right. There will be a risk premium, just as there is with financial instruments. Indeed, arbitrageurs will even be looking for inconsistencies between financial instruments and prediction markets, so you'd expect prediction markets to have similar risk-aversion priced into them.
Experts had already determined all these things by the 1990s.
Even earlier than that I think. But the point here is that Republicans have developed a distrust of experts, since many of them are culturally blue tribe-ish. Prediction markets are much harder to bias, so they may have greater trust in them. Thus, they may be a solution to the Republican's expertise crisis.
Plus Scott thinks prediction markets are a great idea and might actually outperform many current experts, if and when they are implemented correctly.
"Experts suck because they are wrong" and "Experts suck because Republicans don't believe them" are two different claims with two different solutions.
For instance, Scott says earlier that a prediction market could successfully predict global warming contingent on emissions. Perhaps it could, but so could James Hansen, who did just this, in 1984. His predictions are roundly mocked by smart-ass graphs that do not account for the "contingent on emissions part" (they projected continued CFC emissions and thus overshot warming).
Republicans would just deploy the same cheesy meme warfare against the prediction market. Opposition to climate change mitigation does not stem from some suspicion that atmospheric physicists might be left-wing, but from an extremely wealthy and powerful fossil fuel lobby that makes a lot of money by foisting its externalities on the year 2100.
Scott isn't making either claim, as far as I can tell. The entire conceit of the article is "here's how the Republican party can achieve greater political success, incidentally some of my proposals happen to align with my goals". The fact is that the Republican party base doesn't trust experts, and prediction markets are proposed as a way of compensated for the epistemic disadvantage that comes with that distrust.
Scott said he was serious about the prediction market stuff and I take him at his word (and disagree with it).
I can't speak to Hanson, since I haven't looked at what prediction he made when (aside from the flooded NY interview, and I gather he has denied saying what he was quoted as saying) but the prediction in the first IPCC report gave a range for future warming, and actual warming was well below the bottom of the range. So far the IPCC has pretty consistently overpredicted, although that was, I think, the worst case. For details see: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
A cursory glance at the IPCC1 report shows their "Business as Usual" emissions paths (page 70) assuming CFC-11 levels doubling from the early 90s (when they actually peaked).
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_assessments_far_overview.pdf
The word "CFC" does not appear in your blog post, so... thank you for proving my point.
Etiology is complicated. Yes, the fossil fuel industry loves the denialists and funnels money into some of them. But frankly, AGW denial has grown beyond what bribery could pull off by itself. The industry may have been waving a flamethrower around, but you don't get a forest fire unless there's fuel.
And, well, when universities' social psych departments are ideological laundries and their humanities departments are finishing schools and propaganda machines, there's plenty of fuel for "academics are the enemy". STEM is nowhere near as tainted, but people who don't move in academic spheres don't have the experience to spot the difference.
Prediction markets are harder to bias- except that prediction markets, if they're at all effective, will be biased in the long run towards correct predictions. If those correct predictions contradict things republicans believe, republicans will not adjust their beliefs, they will simply ignore the prediction markets.
The same goes for Democrats, of course.
This is the tragedy of unilaterally favoring the truth over war. You will accede to the other when they are right, but they won't accede to you when you are right. So you do worse than if you lie.
What things? Food output has trended steadily up, not down, and there has been no clear pattern on hurricanes. So far as predictions, Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC in protest at the person who was doing to be running the next iteration of that part of the report claiming, with no peer reviwed evidence, that climate change was increasing hurricanes. His view was that it might make them a little stronger and a little less frequent, but that the effects were too uncertain to count on.
Or am I misinterpreting what things you were referring to?
I am referring to the temperature things, yes.
Temperature has continued to trend up, but the IPCC has pretty consistently overestimated by how much it would go up:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
A prediction market can predict, but cannot determine. What determines whether or not climate change exists is a set of meteorological conditions. Unless there's some Straussian point I'm missing.
(By the way, confusing our understanding of the state of the world with the actual state of the world strikes me as a serious ongoing problem, so I don't mean this to be pedantic: I think there are important stakes to this.)
It would be very hard to use it to predict whether it was bad. What you are describing is predicting two out of the many different effects that have to be added up. Also, famines over the next few years, if they happen, are going to be due to political causes, as over the last few decades. What you need for that part of the argument is a prediction of total production of food crops, or perhaps prices of food crops relative to prices in general.
So far as selling ideas, I think it will be very hard to persuade masses of people about the virtues of prediction markets. You might do better by setting up a mechanism so that individual experts can make predictions and bet on them, with whether they have done so widely publicized. That's a much easier approach to explain to people.
>that it's human caused (ask it to predict temperature conditional on emissions cuts)
Can a prediction market predict a conditional probability? Do participants in the market have an incentive to predict accurately in this case?
An example: Suppose a local government is deciding whether to build a bridge. They decide that it is only worth it to build the bridge if at least a thousand people use the bridge in the first year. They use a prediction market to figure out the probability that this will happen, and they will only fund the bridge if the predicted odds are greater than 50%.
The prediction market opens, and comes up with a probability of 20%. But, you think the market is wrong. You think the real probability is more like 80%. But you don't have enough capital to single-handedly move the market to above 50%. If you bet on the bridge having more than a thousand people, then the government will decide not to build the bridge, and refund your money after resolving the market as invalid. You have no incentive to participate.
The only way I can see to keep people honest is to occasionally act against what the market predicts. So, if the market predicts the odds of the bridge being worthwhile are 1%, then sometimes you build the bridge anyway, just to make sure the participants have some skin in the game.
There's also other types of conditional questions that aren't covered by that example. You could have e.g. markets for all the conditions (covid deaths with X policy and without Y policy), and then someone might bet on all of them with the same money.
I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud here; but I thiink there's been deep thought into conditional markets, that could be interesting to read up on to get a better sense of whether they would work.
If there's a circularity where you're betting on X, and whether X happens depends on the prediction market for X, then yeah, it can sometimes completely lose its value as a prediction tool. There's often other financial instruments that might do what you want, e.g. bonds with payouts related to performance metrics.
"Social impact bonds" is an example I was thinking of (and couldn't remember the name until after I posted)
In your example with the bridge, if it doesn't get built you gain nothing, but you lose nothing either. (I'm assuming negligible transaction costs, and perhaps an option to have the money you bet invested in an index fund to avoid the opportunity cost.) You still have an incentive to participate, as there is a chance that other bettors (along with you) eventually move the market above 50%, and the bridge does get built.
Why would this information persuade Shelley Moore Capito to vote for policies that hurt the coal mining industry?
It would be no worser than experts saying it.
If prediction markets are no more persuasive than experts to policymakers, why are they worth supporting?
Look, I'm not really sold on prediction markets, but just because there's a person who isn't listening to things it doesn't mean they are useless.
Fair. I just don't see the point of substituting markets for experts if markets don't produce better or more persuasive recommendations.
The argument is not that they are necessarily better at persuasion, but more accurate. It's likely that this makes them more persuasive, but that is not a black/white issue and not just about politics.
Even if prediction markets are more accurate in predicting the future than experts - and I would want a randomized controlled trial with specific experts before I would be willing to concede this - that doesn't make them better at producing policy that is a) persuasive to policymakers, and b) actually effective in addressing problems. A prediction market might be able to predict temperature increases due to global climate change, but can it tell you if the government should invest in renewable energy, set up a carbon tax, or just do nothing?
The goal of experts in policymaking isn't simply to be accurate - that's the bare minimum. It's also to produce policy proposals that are acceptable to both policymakers and the public, and that actually address the core problem. If prediction markets can only do the bare minimum - and again, that isn't proven - they aren't really capable of substituting for expertise.
A prediction market for climate change would be great, it would expose what I see as worst case scenario bias in environmental journalism. For example sea level rise is rarely even framed as "Sea levels are expected to rise from (min) to (max) over the next (time period) with a most likely value of (median) according to (source)". It is almost always framed "Sea level will rise up to (max)", sometimes without the "up to".
This subject has become a giant game of Dilbert's topper. All the incentives are to exaggerate as they can't be held accountable in a meaningful timeframe and they will be punished by the activists for wrong think.
I'll take the under for sea level on whatever environmental journalists come up with and invest my entire 401K on it. I suggest those numbers will come down if they had to put money on it. Extreme weather predictions would also be quite interesting, so how big an increase in extreme cold events are you predicting?
I'll be very curious to see how institutional investors (Blackrock, Vanguard, etc.) handle climate change. We've gotten a sneak preview of this with COVID where the vaccine companies are basically giving away vaccinations in part because these investors who "own" them care much more about the health of the economy and long-term cash flows than short term profits in a few small pharma companies (Matt Levine has written about this several times).
The potential parallels to climate change seem rather obvious and I will be very curious how this evolves over the next half-decade.
BlackRock has actually made this a centerpiece of their public messaging recently... See e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1957979/blackrock-is-forcing-wall-street-to-take-climate-risk-seriously/amp/
I am skeptical that these firms are pricing in "climate change" versus "governments will eventually do something about climate change," but I'm not sure how you would disaggregate those, in either a regular market or a prediction market if we're using these firms as a toy example.
Big money has long ago priced in climate change in markets that would be affected (insurance, agriculture, etc.)
There's definitely a lot of charitable/socially-conscious investing going on, too. The cynical take is that they're trying to appeal to their socially-conscious investors; the hopeful take is that rich and powerful people actually do care about society, too.
That’s funny, I didn’t realize Josh Hawley was an SSC reader. Do you mind linking to which post he commented on?
It was an impersonator. He liked my post calling him out as an impersonator, on the strength of his profile.
Was it confirmed that he actually banned Hawley and not just someone impersonating him? If so he might want to retract the banning, people like Hawley have power and even if Scott doesn't want him on his side making unnecessary enemies is never good in the long term.
It was a gimmick account, guys. (Might not be once this post gets quoted on Tucker Carlson).
"Rhetorical class war" was the cutting edge of Republican strategy in 2015 but I think all this stuff is mostly priced in.
It was an impersonator. He liked my post calling him out as an impersonator, on the strength of his profile.
The job of prediction markets (if they work) would be to predict the actual consequences of various policies.
They don't tell you what to do; you still use your personal values to decide which consequences are more important. But they tell you what you're choosing between: what you're really giving up by choosing a particular policy, and what you're really getting in exchange. They fight against wishful thinking and outright fraud.
(Again, IF they work.)
> It took a once-in-a-century crisis to get them to un-ass some coin in the form of CARES
What is this a reference to?
The CARES Act, which essentially established a pop-up welfare state (a rickety one with lots of holes and cliffs, but bigger than any we've had before) in response to the pandemic. Measured by total redistribution and not memes about $600, CARES was one of the more generous schemes in the developed world, mostly by way of the superdole, which impressively reduced *overall* poverty in a time where unemployment peaked at 25% and jobless claims are still running at about 10x their pre-pandemic clip.
It is also the type of thing that Republican leadership would lay down on the tracks to stop under any circumstances other than "massive crisis, Republican president." If Hillary had been President they would've probably forced a full employer liability shield in return for some Burger King coupons.
That was meant to be 15% not 25%. Please forgive the lack of an edit button for those of us with fat fingers.
I would vote for that version of the Republican party
This is interesting! Are you going to do a similar post for the Democrats? Would be cool to read them side-by-side.
Please make this a reality.
Democrats could do most of these things to appeal to the Republican base too.
And if they did, they would wipe the mat with Republicans. But Wokeness and idpol are central identity (ha) elements to Democrats that are not there for Republicans, so the pivot Scott describes is a lot easier for Reps.
The pivot for Dems would not have to be so dramatic. Dems are all about "equality" and "justice", so it wouldn't take much for them to pivot their "we support poor and marginalized people" rhetoric into genuine policy that supports poor and marginalized people. People like Sanders in the progressive wing of the party are already making inroads here.
The major problem with modern leftists like the Dems is that they believe that things are good for poor people that those people themselves often don't think are good for them.
Applying the theoretical 'woke' solution where financially and culturally marginalized get elevated to positions of power could work, except that they don't actually believe in the solution that they claim to believe in. After all, they are not favoring Ben Carson or Condoleezza Rice over Joe Biden, even though woke theory says they should.
If Democrats credibly became pro-gun (protect yourself from secret Nazis or whatever), they would wipe the floor electorally. But they won't and have been going the other way for decades.
Someone talked about Matt Yglesias elsewhere on this page, but he really wants the Democrats to stop picking useless fights on guns that never accomplish anything in exchange, and in exchange they win elections.
What Scott is talking about here is Idpol. It's expanding identity politics, but it is about activating and mobilizing around an identity. The same type of silly tests that people use to police who is really identity X would be used here. Did you watch the Superbowl?
I wonder what class do people fall in if they watch only the half-time show and Superbowl ads?
That's "making fun of Superbowl"
What if I run a small business where I work with my hands and also make birding jokes about the superb owl? Although I am in Canada
I too would be interested to see this, but it's less obviously necessary; the Democrats aren't going through the same identity crisis as the Republicans, and they have lots of relatively sturdy ideology lodestars to work with - e.g., techno-liberalism, identitarianism, new socialism - any of which could result in a winning coalition. By contrast it's much less clear what a viable model for the GOP would be going forward that would be both interesting and could win elections.
Republicans run vastly more statehouses than Democrats, just recently held the trifecta (during which they locked in a dominant Supreme Court majority for the next generation), and (IMO) are a mortal lock to win back the house in 2022 and will probably claim the Senate. People are always saying shit like this about the Republicans needing to evolve or die, and for life of me I can't see why. Republicans are doing fine, and they will almost certainly continue to do fine.
Matt Yglesias is basically sketching that out in his substack.
As a crude summary:
- De-emphasise wokeness because it is a clear vote loser
- Rebuild 'state capacity' and actually do things (especially in Democrat states as models to build support for national programs)
- Favour simplicity over complexity
- Take on entrenched interests which limit state capacity (public sector unions)
- Pursue significant and sustained stimulus including 'catch-up' inflation
- Prefer universal, simple welfare to targeted and complex
- Make structural changes (districts, electoral college, filibusters, supreme court, etc) which support democrats (easier to form govt and to actually do things)
I guess the question is what are the societal and cultural factors upstream of political parties that prevent Scott's or Matt's recommendations from coming to fruition? And how to change those such that these politics could happen?
"Trump outmanuevered the Republican establishment by finding a front where he could go on the offensive. He ignored the unfavorable terrain of race/sex/etc, and focused on class."
Not sure about this part! His signature issue was immigration, and ran on banning literally every Muslim in the world from coming here. It's clear that was part of his appeal, especially in the primaries.
"he gained some minority votes but lost more white votes for an overall loss."
The White voters he lost were mostly college-educated; Trump gained among the Alabama WWC.
OK, but he still lost votes, which was the point.
I think much of that was less Trump and more Biden.
Hillary was programmed in a lab in 2016 to repel white voters, while Trump was programmed to repel Hispanics. In the 2016 Dem Primary, Hillary did horrible with white working class voters, but very well with Hispanic and Black voters.
In the 2020 Dem Primary, Bernie did much better with Hispanic voters, but just as poorly with black voters. Biden did well with working class whites and black voters, but matched Hillary's lukewarm performance with wine track Democrats.
So the improvement in 2020 for Trump among Hispanics was partially because Hispanics were not antagonized, but also because Biden performed poorly with them.
My theory on why Trump also did better with Asians is that there is something repellent in the Democrat's embrace of BLM to non-black minority voters, but again, thats just my crazy theory.
I think it is a bad mistake to interpret Trump as losing votes on any front. According to Wikipedia's List of United States Presidential Elections by Popular Vote Margin, he got over 74 million votes, making him the second most voted for presidential candidate in history, after Joe Biden. That's:
- ~11.5 million more votes than he got in 2016.
- ~5 million more votes than Barack Obama got in 2008.
I voted Biden, but saying someone lost votes when they gained 11.5 million overall is a tough sell to me, and I think it drives us to draw the wrong conclusions.
That's not completely true, as his promise to bring back industry jobs in the US was a huge part of his appeal. But I agree that immigration policy is the big obstacle to the kind of realignment Scott describes.
How do you know this?
Primarily what you know is the claims made about his campaign and his appeal are what MSM said. The same guys who got Brexit and Trump’s election wrong, so its not like they’re great social or political analysts...
Please keep in mind that the decisive part of his appeal was his opponent. If you look at the exit polls from 2016 (I haven't fully reviewed 2020 yet), you'll see that 60% of voters in swing states that Trump *won* thought that Trump was unfit for the presidency. The voters who put him over the top weren't voting for Trump, they were voting against Hillary/Democrats. People are fed up with the status quo, and Democrats keep running leftover 1990s neoliberals. I think that if Trump hadn't been an utter buffoon, or if Biden had has even an ounce of wokeness, Trump would've won again. And he would've been carried over the finish line by people who can't stand him.
Agree - Biden would have won in 2016 and Clinton would have lost in 2020.
Migration is a class issue.
I am a young rightist who works in DC. I will attest that already you will find, on staffs and in higher education, bright anti-“Cathedral” people (or whatever actually numinous term you prefer, as opposed to the vacuous ‘anti-establishment’) who not only read such authors as Lasch and Lind, but listen to avowedly “class reductionist” or “post-left” thinkers. We care about policy solutions to economic problems, but consider ourselves constrained by the “white question” within what one could call conservatism. We understand why we attract minority voters — realistic rhetoric about urban crime probably captures much of the variance — but we saw the Trump campaign systematically (some would say intentionally, with regard to Kushner et al) refrain from wholeheartedly pursuing greater gains among demographics that predictably swung to the right. What’s more, we try to persuade our friends who stop at Tucker Carlson (rhetoric) and American Compass (policy) to consider whether they go far enough in their orientation towards these problems. Our self-understanding is that we will see neither a critical mass of our kind with platforms not a growing number of representatives who are able to combine passion with prudence. But our numbers continue to grow, and our ideas will only get better. You do good work with this blog; we don’t hate you. But then again, when you address yourself to Republicans, you might well speak past us, if the party leadership has its way.
You should come to the DC meetups. We're having one this Saturday!
Are things okay enough in DC that you're sure this is safe COVID-wise?
Only 200 microcovids, very low risk. https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=15&riskProfile=average&setting=indoor&theirMask=n95&topLocation=US_11&voice=normal&yourMask=n95
We're doing them outside, with a big fire to keep the air flowing. Bourbon is provided and consumption is encouraged for sterilization purposes. DC has about 100 new cases a day and dropping. We consider the risk on par with outdoor dining, and, of course, attendance is way down from what it was in the before time.
Ah, If it's outdoors it's only 90microcovids
https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=15&riskProfile=average&setting=outdoor&theirMask=thin&topLocation=US_11&voice=normal&yourMask=thin
this is great, thanks for the reference
The difference between indoor and outdoor should be *much* larger than 200 vs 90. This link suggests a 20x factor.
Agreed, however in my experience people wear much worse masks outdoors so I shifted from "unsealed N95" to "cotton mask".
All right, thanks. I continue to recommend that readers not go to meetups until the pandemic is over, but I understand I don't control you and I appreciate that you're taking the risk seriously.
As a resident of the mid-Atlantic, I wish you wouldn't. It's not worth the risk. Please let's beat the pandemic.
Please don't shame people for healthy and safe socialization that doesn't signal correctly to you.
Saturation bombardment of the mid-Atlantic with high-yield thermonuclear warheads would accomplish that well enough. We could eradicate Covid-19 in your region by some time this afternoon. Please let's have more thoughtful and less absolute goals.
Democrats have somehow managed to introduce a mind-virus which equates government spending with compassion.
One thing to note: this kind of thinking is usually undergirded by an idea that the problem is that millionaire donors don't want to get on board. The truth of the matter is that the Republicans lost millionaire donors for the most part since 2008 and with trends ever since 1992. The Paul Singer & Charles Koch types, they don't move the needle in comparison to the gobs of corporate cash the Democrats are capable of raising.
The Republicans raise far more money from small to mid size businesses than anyone else. Construction firms, mid sized oil & energy ventures, hoteliers, franchisees, etc. They are a party that much like the Canadian Conservatives, relies on a sort of petit bourgeoise for fundraising, a group that is largely culturally conservative but also in values, very economically conservative. The state is a massive problem in their lives, from 1099 Reporting problems, taxation, regulation, and overall unhelpfulness. This group is more libertarian economically than most millionaires are. Winning them over is going to be hard without a platform that really addresses the issues that small to mid size businesses face.
If you want to know what this group looks like culturally, think back to the Tea Party upsurge in 2010. You had a lot of small business types, family farmers, etc enter Congress, and the movement that supported them was ideologically similar, but utterly out of step culturally with the professional DC Republican class.
There are probably some very real clashes of interest involved in this. I don't think pro natalism or economic interventionism is going to be a problem, but I do think that massive state action that harms this group's livelihoods and encourages more concentration of economic power into fewer hands, albeit run in concert with a state led value driven economic agenda, is going to be a problem. The US Republicans are unique among world political parties (besides the Canadian Tories and the UK Tories between Thatcher & Cameron) in appealing to this group and relying on them for support. I don't exactly treasure the concept of chucking them overboard.
Interestingly the Conservative Party in the UK has done this kind of cultural appeal with great success in the 2019 general election, where they managed to steal dozens of seats from former Labour (the biggest left-wing party in the UK) heartlands in the North of England. They had suffered from being economically 'left behind' due to the lingering effects of large scale deinsutralisation from the 1960s-80s, and the Conservatives managed to win these seats due to a promise to "Get Brexit Done", to "level up" the regional economy, and because the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was seen as not credible as a leader. Now they are lauching a so-called "war on woke" to try to retain these voters (see this article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/02/20/tories-bet-on-culture-wars-to-unite-disparate-voters). All of this is somewhat similar (if not the same in aprts) to the points in this article and I'm wondering how much of a template this is for Republicans in the US.
That's mostly about Brexit rather than directly centering appeals to the working class . The percentage of voters saying the conservatives look after the interests of the working class is more or less than same in 2015 and 2019 (with a small dip in 2017) yet they still won a lot of those voters.
Always be careful about claims the Tories are fighting a "war on woke", especially when they come from the left. The Tories have ignored huge opportunities to pick a fight with the woke, most notably when the statues were being toppled.
And when they do something about it they usually do it quietly. They've made laws protecting statues, and they've announced a new academic free speech policy. But they've not made huge speeches about it. Overall the impression I get is that the party sees this as problem and wants to solve it. Not that they want a big war to shore up their vote.
Seems like shameless Douthat-bait to get yourself mentioned in his column ;-) He won't be able to restrain himself, and we all know he lurks here.
Ross, if you're reading this, please don't mention me in your column - I've had enough NYT mentions to last me a lifetime.
I only read Douthat intermittently, but he has alluded to young voices in the Republicans cooking up a new form of Conservatism. It's very much different to the previous iteration of neo-libralism, before the populists took over. It seems to be based on social conservatism and strong institutions.
Quite seriously Scott, there is need for a properly functioning left and right in politics, and you have really put your finger on what the right needs to do to be relevant. I'd love to read a conversation between you and Douthat. Add Dominic Cummings for flavour (although I thing you and he are rather overlapping here).
The first time I encountered Dominic Cummings' writing I was pleasantly surprised to find his high opinion of Scott -- he has a tag [1] for Scott, and his essay [2] on the "intersection of decision-making, technology, high performance teams and government" has the following pretty flattering quote in the summary:
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia: ... An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
(sorry I don't know how to convert words to hyperlinks in substack comments, hence the links below)
[1] https://dominiccummings.com/tag/scott-alexander/
[2] https://dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/
1. You are using "upper class" to mean what almost everybody else means by "upper middle class". Of course "the upper middle class à la lanterne" (well, la classe moyenne supérieure...) doesn't have the right ring to it, but "les aristocrats à la lanterne" doesn't sound Republican either.
2. Isn't renaming it "the upper class" a step in precisely the wrong direction? Working-class people who vote Republican often look up to the rich (without knowing any rich people themselves), would like to be rich, etc. What they dislike is people who know more than they do or who hold themselves to know more than they do. Saying that this disliked group of people is legitimately "upper" is precisely what you don't want, if you want to appeal to those voters, no?
I think this is calling back to the previous post where money and class are separate. Trump is rich, but not upper-class (except of course he is, but for some reason it didn't take). But yeah, I think you need at least more sneer quotes if you're going after "the 'upper' class" (perhaps include a Trumpian eyeroll when you say "upper").
Upper class is just a bad label to use. I agree that it has too much cachet. That to these people, upper has a cadence of legitimacy that words like academics, elites, and establishment don't.
Invoking authority and hierarchy isn't enough. Many of these people respect kingship. What they don't respect is a king with no clothes.
Yup. Notes to Republicans: (a) Never, ever use the term "lower class". That sounds too negative. Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living. (b) Come up with a different term for "upper class" (which sounds too positive - upper class means rich, and we all want to be rich, even if we don't admit it). "Snob class"? Meh. I'm not a marketing person (obviously), but I'm guessing you have a few on staff.
If this is ever pursued seriously, just the term 'elites' can carry the day if deliberately and directly contrasted with 'working class'. Almost everyone who voted for Trump knows on a visceral level the contrast between these two groups and almost instinctively could define it.
> Always use "working class". As in people who actually work for a living.
Indeed, it's much more positive-sounding.
> Come up with a different term for "upper class"
Indeed. If a legislator said they weren't "upper class" I'd point out that him and people like him *literally make the laws*, so they are clearly ruling class which is pretty much a synonym for upper class.
> "Snob class"?
That's getting towards the connotations one wants to elicit: of really snooty people who look down on everyone else.
"Chattering classes" captures the idea quite well (although I don't know if it's as well-known in the US as in the UK, but this could be changed).
No, Trump didn't become upper class when he was elected president.
"Snob class" feels like it's good (but probably there's still something better).
Tucker uses zoom class vs. essential workers.
I like it
"Office class"/"office drones". "Ivory tower".
Maybe a better term might be "hoity-toity well educated people", or something like that but a bit more catchy.
But I think it's only a subset of educated people that the working class despise: those who aren't in STEM fields but instead in useless impractical stuff like critical theory. The wast majority of people respect those with real skills, such as physicians who can heal the sick, civil engineers who can build bridges that stay up, programmers whose code runs and does something useful, etc.
Coastal Elites?
I watched the Tucker Carlson vid someone here linked, and he called them the "Professional Woke Class."
I agree I've simplified this for popular consumption because "upper middle class" doesn't really make a snappy-sounding enemy.
It's also really not clear to me that the *true* upper class exerts the same role they did in Fussell's day. I have no doubt they exist and have a lot of money but their representation in the "elites" (construed in wealth and power terms) seems pretty marginal, and I say that as someone who's been to my share of Met Galas.
My simplifying it, you are feeding the common leftist delusion that they are on the side of the working class. Trying to make the Republicans better, by doing things that make the Democrats worse is perhaps not what you intended?
I think this shows that Fussell's class book does not port well to politics in the 2020s. While Fussell's point (or was it Alexander's friend's point? I think the latter) that class is a series of separate ladders is true *to a degree*, it's hard to separate class from money completely. Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money. Republicans are against minimum wage increases; it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the *working* class, or against the upper class.
Of course, Republicans *already* try and fight this in class language — they don't use the word, and they don't adopt Scott's specific proposals, but they do almost anything else; "elite" means "upper class" in Scott's sense. But it's pretty deceptive when they do: their policies help rich people (most of whom are in the Republican class—rich are still strongly Republicans!), and hurt poor people (opposite.)
Really, what we have here is a good, old-fashioned cultural conflict, of Red v Blue tribe. Class doesn't fit it.
Two additional points: First, Republicans are usually against expertise not out of class warfare but because they dislike what it tells them; above all, on climate change—a topic we really really don't have time to screw around with attacking expertise on—it mitigates against a lot of things that the Red tribe like, e.g. SUVs, suburbs, etc. It also does a lot of things that are straight-up economic: to adapt to climate change and to de-carbonize the economy both take lots of money & government programs, which Republicans are against because they hate high taxes — again, something that already fits very badly into their pre-existing class frame.
Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base. IMS it was a better predictor for voting Trump than any other single variable in 2016. Going to make alliances tricky.
Basically, I think the Republicans already try this; it fits very badly with the parts of their program they are most passionate about; and in some very important areas (climate change) it is leading to utter disaster.
Your argument takes it for granted that the left's interpretation of the effect of policies is correct. The standard economic argument against the minimum wage isn't that it reduces profits or raises costs but that it makes it harder for unskilled workers to get a job, especially a first job, because it prices them out of the market. From that standpoint, the supporters of a higher minimum wage are people who won't have their employment prospects affected by it and want to feel good about how much they are helping the poor.
Climate policy would be a long argument, and this probably isn't the place to have it.
You articulate the economics 101 policy model. The problem is that when you take econ 102 and learn about market inefficiencies—or just look at actual examples that have been studied—turns out the real world doesn't look like the models. And the people actually organizing for the higher minimum wage tend to be minimum wage workers; the others are just cheering them on.
Right, minimum wage people, aka people who are already employed and not totally unskilled workers who have never worked a job.
Being civil here, this is an very classist statement, both in the economic and cultural sense (both of which are inherently interwoven). Many skilled laborers are paid minimum-wage and kept there not only because of profit-model of market institutions like companies but the very socio-economic situations people live in. Farm labor, retailers, construction workers, infrastructure workers, factory labor, etc. etc. all work both skilled and necessary jobs for our society and the very least that can be done is assuring their lives are filled with less strife and economic instability. Just because they couldn't afford to get a college degree doesn't mean their labor value is worth the FEDERALLY MANDATED MINIMUM. Overall, and incredibly ignorant take on your part.
Your statement suggests that you may be overestimating how much of the labor force is paid minimum wage. Of hourly paid workers, it's a bit under 2%. That is a tiny fraction of the number who don't have a college degree.
Whether they are worth either the present or the proposed minimum wage depends on how much value their labor produces. If it costs $15/hr to hire someone for a job that produces $10/hour of revenue, he won't get hired. That has nothing to do with his moral value, only his economic value. And if your insisting that he ought to get $15/hour results in his being permanently unemployed you are hurting him, not helping him, however righteous it makes you feel.
Most of the jobs you listed make bank. Semi skilled construction and farm labour especially, at least where I am. Nowhere near our relatively high provincial minimum.
I'm confused by your reaction to my comment. Perhaps I misrepresented my position. I am agreeing with you that minimum wage people have labor skills which they can use to get hired.
By contrast, those who are unskilled, by and large people who have yet to enter the job market, but also some minimum wage workers, will not be helped by minimum wage increases and in fact be hurt because the labor market will contract, making it harder to find entry-level jobs.
In addition, a too high minimum wage can even negatively impact those with marketable job skills. See, for example, the UW minimum wage study, which found that Seattle's raising of the minimum wage to $13 an hour a few years ago "reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis." On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month.
BTW, the city council cut public funding for the study after that preliminary report. But my my city's city council could be a post in itself :-)
Your claim is way beyond what the evidence shows. There is considerable empirical data that shows that the least-productive workers (e.g. those with poor English skills) are hurt disproportionately by minimum wages. And there is lots of anecdotal evidence that the adjustment to a binding minimum wage includes things like making workers' hours less predictable, things that cut costs while making workers less happy. A solidly center-left economist such as David Neumark at UC Irvine has written a number of careful literature reviews that wipe out the "labor markets don't follow the Econ 101" view of the world.
OTOH, John Cochrane, the Grumpy Economist at Stanford, argues that the minimum wage isn't that big of a policy problem and that classical liberals ought to devote more attention to other policy distortions.
It's kind of funny telling David Friedman he needs to learn about market inefficiencies in Econ 102... although he has admitted to never taking a course for credit in either the subject he teaches or the one the school he teaches at is dedicated to.
The only "market inefficiency" argument I am familiar with that implies that the standard model is wrong is the one proposed by Card and Krueger, which requires monopsony employers of low skilled labor. Given that low skilled labor is relatively unspecialized, that seems implausible. Is that the inefficiency you are thinking of, or did you have a different one to propose?
Finally, a chance for my username to check out: https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jecper/v16y2002i2p155-174.html
"Rich people still vote Republican. People without college degrees who own & run successful businesses are against a minimum wage increase because it will cut into their profits; their employees want it because it will give them more money."
Got any evidence for that?
"it's really hard to say that this is a fight for the working class, or against the upper class."
This is straightforward:
https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/1365017699433259024
"Second, I know some people think it's overstated, but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base."
Not according to the polls.
Evidence that rich people vote Republican: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/); that racism predicts Republican voting: https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/modern-racism-can-predict-how-americans-voted-during-2016-presidential-election-of-donald-trump-study-finds-57278
There's a lot more; there's been a lot of research on these areas, to judge by the reporting.
As for the white non-college men... the working class today is significantly non-white and non-men, so that doesn't mean all that much.
Exit polls are not reliable, and the "modern racism scale" is actually an anti-racism scale; that is, one scores most racist on it if one supports treating races most equally.
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1015760998450581506
A more accurate measure of racism would be asking people if they consider themselves racist.
I think things along the lines of "resume studies" are better for detecting bias people won't openly admit to:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/throw-whitey-under-trolley/
I think the highest income levels no longer vote Republican.
"but there really is a lot of racism in the Republican base."
This sort of argument, if you want to dignify it as such, when all it really is is a slur, is so typical of mandarin political posturing (can't really call it thinking). In 2008, it was you oppose Obamacare because you are a racist. Blah, Blah, Blah.
Go away, and take your little dog with you.
I don't endorse this, but:
You have cracked it: "mandarin" is the term that Scott was looking for.
- They are the historical poster children for credentialed experts leading cushy lives instead of doing real work.
- They were not actually the aristocracy, neatly resolving the dilemma of trying-to-say-upper-middle-class-but-it-is-too-awkward-so-we-said-upper-class-instead.
It further has an interesting multivocality about it. China is never far from questions of national greatness, and the term refers to a Chinese political class. This means it will be possible to call people mandarins while meaning anything from the soft use above to:
- [Aggressive] They make the country weak, and so might as well be aligned with China
- [Paranoid] They actually are a communist spy working for China
- [Racist] They seem like a Chinese person, which is bad
As a consequence it does a good job of wrapping up social class as a domestic strategy and opposition to China as a foreign policy strategy in a single word.
I firmly expect Democrats to walk face-first into the trap of condemning it as racist while simultaneously endorsing it through "akshually" style articles about how the mandarins are usually credited with maintaining an efficient imperial administration, and were a key factor in the tendency of China to remain Chinese despite being ruled by dynasties originating from outside traditional Chinese borders. In this way they will cede narrative control for a cycle or two.
Reminder that I don't endorse this. But I bet it would be effective.
This is magnificent. Hope some Republican politicians are reading this. A Republican party with this kind of platform is one I could actually wholeheartedly support, instead of only occasionally in the interests of maintaining balance of power.
Username very much does not check out. ;)
Sir Humphrey explicitly has no politics, besides hoping for regular changes of power :-) In any case, the username is the one I use on DSL
I should clarify that Sir Humphrey has no *party* politics in the sense that he does not want either *party* to hold power for an extended time. This is not so far from how I feel :-)
Nevertheless, I think he embodies the "upper class" that Scott talks about here. Oxford-educated, disdainful of the masses, fond of the "high arts"...
Yes, well this could also describe me...maybe I should be careful what I wish for.
But a GOP That Used the Word Class would not be substantively different! Certainly this would be much better messaging than whatever they're doing now (and I suppose better messaging can sometimes lead to better policy) but the whole premise of this post is that this approach has the potential to unify all the pre-existing ideological factions within the GOP.
I sure hope this will be followed up with a part 2: A Modest Proposal For Democrats: Use The Word "Class"
More like: Do stuff for poor people, really do stuff instead of talking, while losing the Woke and you'll dominate elections for decades.
And I do hope Scott does a Democrats version. I'm curious as to whether his analysis of what will solidify their power is in line or opposed to my own.
The issue is that they try to do stuff for poor people, but that is often stuff that many poor people don't want and/or stuff that makes the lives of poor people worse. These policies are often things that look great from an ivory tower and/or benefit a favored poor group at the expense of another poor group.
For example, the anti-poverty policy that I hear Democrats talk most about is raising the minimum wage, but that will harms rural communities that have low costs of living and can barely compete by leveraging those low costs of production. It doesn't actually compensate for being out-competed by (illegal) migrants.
Exactly. I've had this argument several times to no avail. If minimum wage is raised to $15 or (like Costco) something higher, do they really think the guy who is only paid minimum wage and would be paid less if it was legal to do so will still have his job? That bored housewives and talented high school and college students won't come out of the woodwork for twice the pay to replace yet another lower/working class job? In major cities it's more or less moot because starting pay is already near $15 - heck, here in suburban Cleveland the lowest paying advertised fast food job is $10.75 and McDonald's is already at $13. If you're in New Hope, Kentucky though? Yeah, say goodbye to your miserable job Lower/Working Class Man and enjoy even more miserable unemployment.
Romney's and now Biden's child tax credit is such a huge thing for larger working class families precisely if it's managed through Social Security and is automatically deposited vs. playing the IRS Lottery of figuring out what or if you qualify for it at year-end. There are light years of difference between a Maybe amount of cash when you file taxes vs getting $1,000 a month auto deposited into the account you use to buy groceries.
So part of me really likes this, wants to agree with everything here, and would probably vote for this republican party. Which raises the alarm bell in my head that goes "This isn't how republicans actually think; this is just how you wish they would think".
I don't think I have any special insight as to why (that is, I can think of some reasons - it's hard to imagine someone like Ted Cruz or Mike Pence or Trump Jr. or whoever explicitly embracing this framing, and if you try to picture it and it feels weird your guess is as good as mine as to why this is). But specific points of disagreements:
Using betting markets instead of experts: This can work for top-level strategies (at least, if you have a lot of liquidity). But like I pointed out the other day (link again https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/using-betting-markets-to-make-decisions/), there's an issue where betting markets are an order of magnitude slower and more complicated than the decision they reflect. You can use them for something big like "should we approve the AZ vaccine" or "should we build a transit system in Charlotte", but for short-turnaround decisions like "on which side of the street should we put the entrance to this station" You can't replace experts with them. There's no real getting around needing competent people who can make decisions in your organization.
On 4, I just have the minor point that "saying cops are bad because classism and not racism" still seems impossible for republicans because it's anti-cop? Or am I misreading the point of that bit?
Re: Cops—I imagine that a goodly number of people in the Republican party who get lumped in as "pro-cop" are really just anti-calling-cops-racist, because in their minds racism doesn't exist. I have literally seen people defending cops by pointing out that more white people are killed by cops than black people.
Bizarre. My only complaint was the opposite. I just kept thinking, "yeah, scott, this is the entire populist right and an episode of tucker carlson in a nutshell."
I am not sure that the term "class" is the best candidate for Scott's proposal. In fact, some Republicans are already articulating most of these ideas through the use of the term "elites", which I favour (I thought of using "intelligentsia" but the term is too elitist, LOL.
You can persuasively argue that elitism can be the target: a group of people who consider themselves better than the rest in everything they do: their policies, their diets, their environmental choices, the cars they drive. The Republican party can be the party of those who value hard work, decency and the traditional American cultural experience, Ford F-150 included.
You can then shed (hopefully) the linkages with racism and conspiracy theories and just represent everyone and anyone who is alienated by the sanctimonious speech and actions of the elite. Those part of the elite are detached from reality, they do not understand the real struggles of average people. And average people ought to be celebrated and protected.
Thank you for the engaging piece!
The problem with choosing the elites as your enemy is that they're...well...elite. And they'll leverage that elitism to piss in your cornflakes at every opportunity, which in a 24/7 digital age news cycle makes for a whole lot of hot cereal.
The site you linked for the "college degree for childcare" has the 404 error page so I went to their homepage. Didn't find that story but saw a link for "How to get pregnant fast". Er, don't we all know how that works? And if you're trying for a baby, what worked for my sister was "have an elderly relative pray to St. Anne for a surprise for you; when your mother conveys this message, tell her "well it worked, I'm pregnant!"
Anyway, by the magic of Google, the original story comes from 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/district-among-the-first-in-nation-to-require-child-care-workers-to-get-college-degrees/2017/03/30/d7d59e18-0fe9-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html and is partially reasonable. Childcare - or Early Years Practitioner, as we're calling it round here where I work - is more than babysitting. With so many milestones etc. that schools, pre-schools and daycares are meant to be hitting for literal babies - see sample below of standards from the Irish National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education:
Birth - 18 months
5.1.2 In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?
5.1.3 How do your interactions with the child enhance her/his potential to interact positively with other children?
Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?
Yep, for a three month old baby, the daycare has to ensure their interactions "enhance their potential to interact positively with other children".
So, all this and more being dumped on childcare providers means that the qualifications needed are becoming more academic. Straight out of school minding kids isn't enough anymore. But a bachelor's degree isn't necessary, either. We have intermediate frameworks - a Level 5 qualification is the medium standard here, and you can do it as a student or mature student on a Post Leaving Certificate course. If you're unemployed/on social welfare, you can get a Back to Education Allowance while you're on the course. You can then go into employment or progress on to a college degree in the field.
So increasing professionalism required, yes, but a college degree not necessary.
Having those milestones doesn't make professionalism reasonable; the fact that those milestones require professionalism demonstrates they are unreasonable.
I don't think any of those milestones require any degree of professionalism. They require empathy and a basic understanding of how to socialize a baby. The fact that anyone believes such things require credentials is frankly insulting.
Either insulting or simply reflective too many workers chasing too few jobs.
I think there are any number of people who can care for a baby but would respond to a question like "Describe how you engage the child’s interest (including the child with special needs) in objects, in her/his surroundings and in social interactions with others?" with "Huh?". Or who couldn't translate the bureaucratese "In your care routines, can you indicate how you show sensitivity towards the child’s signals and cues and how you respond appropriately, adequately and consistently?" into something like "If the baby's crying, do you check to see if it needs to be changed or fed?"
I know lots of people who cannot successfully navigate the getting of credentials from the government but are entirely competent to care for babies.
Just one question. Why do you think Republicans hate you?
Second question: if you get the Republicans to explicitly start opposing "expertise", do you think you're going to be able to fine-tune that you mean "oh, but MDs are still fine", or do you accept that there's a chance it might get into "everyone who wears glasses, up against the wall"?
Medical school is a trade school. Trade schools are the opposite of universities. The War on College can be extended to med school requirements. Medical school admissions may favor people who majored in biology, but they also accept people who majored in philosophy. They do not accept people who do not have a college degree. Scott has blogged before about just how useful his undergraduate degree was once he got to med school. I can't find the post at the moment, but if I recall correctly it was a less than glowing endorsement of the system.
Ah, here it is. In the obvious place: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
"The degree requirement seemed like more of a class barrier / signaling mechanism than an assertion that only people who knew philosophy could make good teachers and doctors."
This manifesto could be tweaked to appeal to a significant portion of the left too - there are plenty of progressives who are tired of the tyranny of academia on policy and culture. And honestly I’m not sure the GOP is any more a natural fit for this kind of renewal than Democrats. Both parties are stacked with Yale law grads rearranging their nameplates.
Biggest problem I see with this is Republicans would have to decide where they stand on labor unions. If they still are against them, this working class rhetoric seems pretty hollow. If they decide they're for them, there goes the fundraising base.
Only rich educated people have unions and they have them to keep working class out.
Fuck unions.
Ah yes, my favorite definition of "rich educated people" include construction workers (the incoming secretary of labor is a former construction union president) and truckers.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. I know lots of working class tradesmen who are in unions.
My impression from reading internet is that in USA only cops have unions.
Also teachers. The advantage of a public employee's union is that you get to sit on both sides of the bargaining table.
I guess you'd have to polarise them, working class unions vs elitist unions (back to the using ID politics to trick non-degree holders into looking bad)
I agree. It's a lot easier to get people to vote for you if your policies make them better off financially. So if the Republicans do want to attract working class voters, they need to do more than just anti-elite culture war posturing, they need to go for economic policies that help working class people. Some ideas:
- increase minimum wage
- bringing back offshored jobs
- (possibly) UBI: this is more popular with Democrat than Republican voters but i saw a poll where 52% of Republican voters supported it, and i doubt if Biden will enact it by 2024. One downside is that many would look at is as a free handout to the lazy.
- something about affordable housing, e.g. so that any American on a full time minimum wage job can afford to buy a house.
Another policy might be modern slavery including prison labour. This fits into many narratives:
- essentially all Americans think slavery is bad
- "why should American workers have to compete with slave labour?"
- plays up the anti-China angle
- multinational companies often have slave labour in their supply chains. Forcing them to get rid of it may help to bring jobs back to USA
- Kamala Harris may well be the democratic nominee in 2024. Focussing on this issue may embarrass her given her record in prison labour in California.
However, slave labor in prison fits very neatly into a popular American narrative-- anyone who's accused is guilty, and guilty people deserve however they're treated in prison.
Fundraising base? Big money all goes into the dem coffers these days. Wall Street and silicon valley are true blue.
Ever heard of a guy named Charles Koch?
The catch is the NLRA makes unions under US law uniquely objectionable. Duty of fair representation, "good faith" bargaining requirements, and exclusivity aren't inherent requirements of collective bargaining but are the law of the land.
I don't say this often, but I don't know if you fully thought this through to the conclusion. This just teaches Republicans to be more persuasive. If they take this on and theoretically win the votes needed to gain power, they'll still be left with the same core policies, more or less. Try using "class" to support a Republican policy you DON'T like, and I think you'll see where this can backfire.
Have you watch Tucker?
He has the top rated show in cable history and he has been hitting these themes non-stop for years.
That is how he goosed his rating. Picking the right enemy.
As a low-income, highly-educated, almost-Marxist, I find this oddly persuasive and kind of chilling.
It's true that the Republicans would be *better* in some sense if they adopted this sort of approach, but is that "better for the country/world" or "better at destroying everything I hold dear"?
Highly Educated people ought to be terrified of a real left party.
You are the enemy. Not an ally.
Yeah. San Francisco has basically already shown this: If you're a highly-educated person who's not already part of the political establishment, the entire political establishment will unify in declaring you as the enemy and do everything possible to attack you, no matter how much they hurt themselves in the process.
Depends what you mean by "a real left party". I want to see well-funded public services, higher taxes on the rich and nationalisation of certain industries that I think are more effectively run in the public sector. I don't want to see academics sent to work in the fields or to re-education camps. If you think the latter are "real left" and the former are not, then we disagree on the definitions of a word.
Working class people may look on me with suspicion, hatred, or disdain (I doubt it but I'll go with it) but that doesn't make me their enemy. I would argue that their enemies are the people who control them and make their lives worse: the people who own the media, the people who own the government, and the people who own the means of production.
(substack commending is weird. Sorry if this appears twice, or deleted, or twice deleted, or some shit)
I would like to see a UBI, good stable jobs, free healthcare that is EXACTLY the same for all of us and 80% of Academia shut down.
So you would outlaw someone paying a doctor with their own money for extra care? This didn't work out so well in the UK.
Requiring a college degree to be an office manager is really bullshit.
I'm taking this that, since the popular view of Republicans from Democrats/non-Republicans that I see all over social media is that they are plutocrats who hate gays, minorities, trans people, women, non-Christians, and anyone who isn't a white cishet old man, then it can only be an improvement if the GOP can shift that perception to being "we are the party of the working class and that means BiPOC as well as white persons of all genders and sexual orientations!"
In online Trump world, gays and Blacks and Latinos were showered with love.
To the point it seemed like over compensation.
Lots of times Black folks would come to argue and agitate and end up joining the community. We found common enemies.
I mean, to be fair, Republicans are the party of Evangelical Christianity. This doesn't necessarily mean that they *hate* gays, non-Christians, and other non-cis-heteronormative people; but it does mean that they strongly prefer a world where such people were a continuously shrinking minority. They certainly wouldn't want to pass any policies that would encourage such people to continue committing their sins, right ?
Why did you name this A Modest Proposal? Am I missing the satire? This seems like a legitimately amazing idea to me. Am I somehow a really horrible person without knowing it?
I assume it's named after the Jonathan Swift essay.
Yes! And a person who read the original Swift essay about killing, cooking, and eating children and took it seriously and thought it was a great idea would be A) a moron and B) a terrible person. I'm taking this Scott essay seriously and I think it's a great idea. Am I missing something?
I assume the idea is that despite Scott's best efforts to persuade them that social class and economic class are distinct, he still expects the idea of focusing on class to appear as outrageous to Republicans as Swift's proposal to eat children appears to non-horrible people.
I think this is right. Current Republicans equate class struggle with Marxism, and there is no place for Commies in the red party! Scott's argument only works if 'class' is defined in the Fussel manner as independent from income level.
I'll join your camp, although since I'm the target audience maybe I'm just too dumb to get it since I went to an obscure undergraduate school and Ohio State (sacre bleu!) for grad school.
This is the best article on politics I've read in... well, months at least. I'm seriously amazed by it.
I think it's about blurring the lines and maybe providing a bit of deniability. Scott here is giving a proposal for how the GOP could have an intellectually exciting platform. It also happens to cohere strongly with values that any long-time reader of SSC will recognise Scott himself holds. But Scott is a self-identified Democrat who moves in Blue Tribe circles, and saying things as blunt as "here's how you could get me to vote Republican" might not be in his best interests.
Scott has zero Blue Tribe cred; he's committed way too many blasphemies. I was "warned" against him by Blue Tribers years ago, and that was before he had a public row with the NYT that blew up into a Grey vs. Blue fireball (despite his best efforts to avoid that coding).
Listening to Scott is, among the Blue Tribe, evidence of heresy.
The Swift essay proposes a means "For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick."
His technique is based on this observation:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
It is Tucker Carlson's show for the last 4 years distilled.
It is brilliant. It is delivering the best ratings in the history of cable.
Where does the war on Christmas fit in this?
Carlson's show is grievance and some of it overlaps with this.
Santa is high class. Elves are working class. Vive la révolution!
It is always easy to spot the people who don't watch Tucker.
He viciously attacks your class night after night.
I love it.
"He viciously attacks your class night after night". Just another kind of woke.
Which class do you think says "Merry Christmas" and which says "Happy Holidays" to avoid offending someone?
But the idea of the "War on Christmas" is not that someone with some Jewish/Hindu/Islamic etc. friends may say "Happy holidays."
This is a motte and bailey.
Upper class people do tend to be more circumspect. That's the motte.
The bailey is the "WAR ON CHRISTMAS" Jackbooted leftist bureaucrats are coming to destroy Christian culture.
Take Tucker Carlson on December 6, 2020 in relation to guidelines to limit holiday gatherings. "If death is inevitable — and that may be the one thing you’re not allowed to say in this country, but it’s still true — then maybe we should pause before we destroy the living in the name of trying to eliminate it. Politicians understand this threat. They’ve figured out that Christmas is bigger than they are, and therefore, it’s a threat to them. Better cancel it — and, in fact, they’re trying hard."
I mean, there are plenty of talking points recommended that I would assume Scott doesn't actually agree with, high tariffs for instance.
Thank you for this, really. It's such a joy to read things like that. I feel like you scraped the stew of vague ideas and intuitions in brain and shaped it into a coherent theory.
>They conspicuously love Broadway
This is the only part you got wrong. Wealthy proles like Trump love the kitsch of Broadway musicals. Tacky tourists visiting NYC love Broadway.
Upper class people see off-off-Broadway plays.
Elites like Broadway, but mainly for plays by Tony Kushner, Jez Butterworth, Tom Stoppard, and so on (perhaps a Sondheim musical here and there as a guilty treat). The lower classes crowd in to watch Mamma Mia with the Chinese tourists and then get dinner at Red Lobster.
All legitimate. But replace “upper class” with “credentialed class” to avoid ongoing confusion (much of it deliberately created).
Good point. Although ironic that Trump never shut up about his own.
Countersignalling. He had unmatched wisdom.
“Unmatched” is accurate
But there's still a view that credentials are somewhat merit-based. Trump's message was "I'm working-class but just as good as the upper class, as demonstrated by my money and credentials".
This is a great piece, and with a good deal of truth in it. However, in France, Marine Le Pen's party has been trying to do that without amazing successes - the main problem is that an anti-immigration agenda is a requirement for a Republican/conservative platform and it's pretty hard to be anti-immigration without looking (and often not only looking) racist.
I would think a French politician could do it by merely being Francophile. Since French culture is the best culture in the world, why dilute it with lost of nasty foreigners, whatever their skin color?
I suspect the french regard French-speaking foreigners as culturally French, at least to some extent.
Macron gave a speech in 2018, in which he said he wanted French power to be based on lots of Africans speaking French. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Kph52MfRo
'To some extent' doesn't mean that it is sufficient to want them to immigrate.
Judging by the story linked to, he wasn't talking about Africans in France but about Africans in Africa.
I'm confused by your invocation of Le Pen here - isn't anti-immigration her main plank?
I think that's the "without amazing success" part - she's held back by here anti-immigration line. Although considering her party were almost literally Nazis (and may just be pretending not to be now) she's at least achieved "terrifying" success.
I think that's the opposite of the truth.
What you are stating is the globalist delusion that only a small minority oppose immigration. Yet surveys show that wanting to reduce immigration is very popular.
Hypothesis: a large number of people might personally want to reduce immigration, and might vote for anti-immigration measures if they have secret ballots, but only people who are *much* more anti-immigration than average are committed enough to hold this opinion in *public*. Hence, the political parties which make strong commitment to reducing immigration a big part of their platforms, and their most vocal supports, are going to be much further right than the majority of their actual voters.
Anti-immigration is her main plank but she has tried to shift her party's public discourse toward (some of) the things you describe. The Rassemblement National does describe itself as a working class party (and is in fact a working class party sociologically) but it's anti-immigration stance which is at the core of the party's existence stop it to turn it's success among the working class into overall electoral success.
Eric Weinstein talks a lot about this. The Democrats/Elites/Upper class (or whatever name you want to give them) have done a great job making a popular position, that of a xenophilic restrictionist, seem non existent. The idea that you must support open borders or you are by definition a racist is nonsensical.
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1004363916397277189
Keeping in mind that Scott somehow managed to accidentally become so successful at blogging that he got himself condemned by the NYT, I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP.
The problem with that is, of course, that the next blogging hiatus would be insufferably long.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a US president who writes brilliant essays in his after-work hours, instead of unhinged tweets?
If I had to choose between unhinged tweeting habits and brilliant essays in a president/politician, I would choose the brilliant essays. If I had to choose between a self-funded psychiatric clinic or a presidency/politicianship in a blogger, I'd choose the self-funded psychiatric clinic.
Reason being, mostly, that I like my bloggers a little bit more underground than being the president/major political figure in a global superpower. Just think about how huge the rate of NYT hitpieces would be, it really boggles the mind...
By day, a mild-mannered psychiatrist. By night, a brilliant underground blogger leading the war against Moloch.
"I'm starting to worry that this is going to end with him accidentally becoming chairman of the GOP"
"What do you mean I am now President of the United States because of all the write-in votes?" 😀
Demand a recount.
If you divorce class from wealth, what actually makes the class described here the "upper class?" Like, I sort of feel that way too, but that's because I'm in it, and so ascribe higher status within a blue-tribe status framework. But if the "lower class" here has more political power, and sees themselves as having higher status (i.e. a F-150 is certainly higher status than a Prius or a bus pass in at least half the country), why are they the lower class?
This only matters insofar as most people think they should be on the "lower class" side of a class war. I'm not sure in the world described by Scott here that I should support the political power of a party of pilots over the party of social workers unless I'm fully bought into its honest support of a platform broadly helpful to the poor (...and I don't see them shaking off the pathos that led them to elect Donald Trump.)
All that said, I agree that this would be a better republican party than we have now, and would push the dems to be better.
You'll want to check out his most recent book review for an idea of separating class from wealth
I don't think he wants them to identify as the lower class but the working class.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
brb sending this to my consultant friends in the GOP
I like this proposed kayfabe arc. Republicans and Democrats, make it happen! Last season's arc is getting stale.
If you doubt politics today is purely kayfabe, listen to this short answer by Justin Amash (former House rep): https://youtu.be/P4SeBpJQL9k?t=2350
Amash: "It's literally *scripted*".
This implies that getting votes should be a goal of a political party, but we already know votes don't matter any more.
> 3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for "mainstream media". Being against the "mainstream media" sounds kind of conspiratorial.
I think you missed a step here. Americans -- except the class designated as the opposition -- LOVE conspiracy theories. Roswell, chemtrails, JFK, Masons, you name it, you can make millions with a miniseries about it that suggests there's something to it. The underclasses tend to have even wilder (and conventional yet unacceptable to the opposition class) ones. So "mainstream media" is great, the only thing that would be better is more scare quotes
"There's a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa."
No; it realigns every 36-40 years. The current party system (seventh) started in either 2016 or 2000; the previous was either from 1976 to 2016 (Trump had a coalition right opposite that of Carter) or 1964-2000 (2000 was the first election with clear "red states and blue states").