Tuesday, July 26, 2022

What if Trump's Social Security and Medicare stand was never that big a deal to begin with

 [Note: David Weakliem recently looked at the actual data on this going back to the eighties. Check out his analysis here.]

As alluded to recently, Joseph and I have been having  an argument about political strategy. I contended that the Democrats should be focusing on three issues where the GOP had staked out especially unpopular positions: reproductive rights, the insurrection; and Social Security and Medicare. Joseph countered that, largely because of Trump's public commitment not to cut these programs. The GOP was, in a sense inoculated against these attacks.

For the record, my co-blogger Joseph is possibly the smartest person I know. What's more, he cited a number of other very smart people who were in general agreement including Josh Marshall who is probably our sharpest political analyst. I get very nervous when I find myself disagreeing with either, let alone both. And the Democratic establishment was clearly on board (more on that later in the post).

 I wasn't exactly persuaded but I had enough doubts about my position that I decided back-burner the topic and focus on other things. Then I saw this:

Yes, it's just one poll and we can't say for certain that the fifteen point shift is not an outlier. Even if the move is real, we can't say for sure what caused it. Still, if you see this big a jump in seniors, Social Security and Medicare are the obvious place to look.

 If data and common sense point to Republican vulnerability on the issue, why is conventional wisdom converging in the opposite direction? Perhaps it's because the pundits who shaped that conventional wisdom have always been overly invested in the idea that Trump's position on Social Security and Medicare was a key part of his success.

Think back to 2015.

 Pundits were at a loss to explain the rise of Donald Trump which is part of the reason so many tried to deny it was even happening. (Remember Nate Cohen's series of NYT articles in 2015 arguing that there was no way DJT could beat various candidates despite the fact he was crushing them in the polls.) For people whose job it is to explain things, this is incredibly disconcerting, so when Trump broke with the Republican line on two incredibly unpopular GOP positions, taxing the rich and cutting Social Security and Medicare, the pundit class finally had a theory they could converge on: Trump's success came from his combination of reactionary and liberal populist positions.

This was always a thin thread to hang an interpretation on. The stand was hardly the second coming of Huey P. Long. These GOP positions were so unpopular that even a majority of Republican voters opposed them. At most, Trump had mixed a couple of moderate positions into his reactionary and autocratic platform. 

What's more, they were always a relatively small part of the mix. If you read over the real-time coverage of the campaign, you'll see that SS and Medicare weren't that prominent and the guarantees left considerable wiggle room. [Emphasis added.]

Below is a head-to-head rundown on where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand — as best as anyone can tell. Incidentally, Trump's website makes little mention of Social Security; most of his policy positions come from what he has said in debates or speeches. Clinton's site has more details about her proposals and she has fleshed them out elsewhere.

 ...

At a June rally in Phoenix, Trump said: “We’re going to save your Social Security without killing it like so many people want to do.” During the campaign, Trump said something similar: “I will do everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is.”

 ...

But Trump left the window open to future reforms in his comments to AARP, saying: “As our demography changes, a prudent administration would begin to examine what changes might be necessary for future generations.”

So his position wasn't that far out of line with lots of Republicans, basically saying we may cut later rather than we should cut now. More importantly, this was never one of the main points of his campaign. I may have missed something in my Google searches, but it appears that Trump didn't talk that much about the issue (it merits two brief mentions in his 6,000+ word announcement speech, neither in the first half) and that it didn't get that much coverage. Perhaps there is data out there that shows that these positions were a major driver of support or that protecting Social Security and Medicare was top-of-mind when people thought Donald Trump, but if so it would be despite sparse coverage and a lack of emphasis from Trump himself.  

In the pundit class, however, the relationship loomed large. 

From Ezra Klein's influential Vox piece.

Trump is the only Republican running who actually agrees with the GOP base on this one. "They're gonna cut Social Security. They're gonna cut Medicare. They're gonna cut Medicaid," he said on Fox & Friends. "I'm the one saying that's saying I'm not gonna do that!"

And that's what makes a candidate like Trump potentially dangerous. On immigration, Trump holds a hard-line position that the Republican Party establishment has tried to mute, and so far Republican voters are loving it. On Social Security and Medicare, Trump — who opposes cuts — is closer to Republican voters than the party establishment is. On free trade deals, Trump shares a skepticism held by about half of Republican voters, but that's usually suppressed by the party's powerful business wing.

Most candidates who tried to stack this many heterodoxies would be quickly squelched by the party establishment. But Trump isn't beholden to the GOP for money, staff, power, or press attention. That frees him to take positions that Republican voters like but Republican Party elites loathe.

It may be true that support for Trump, so far, is about personality rather than policy. But as the primary wears on, Republican voters might find that they actually agree with him. And that's going to put the rest of the Republican field — all those candidates who were playing by the establishment's rules — in a very tough position.

Klein does get points for pulling away from the then popular "Trump doesn't have a chance" camp, but as mentioned before, there doesn't seem to much evidence that Social Security and Medicare played a big role in Trump's securing the nomination.

Though it has fallen down the memory hole, Trump's real break with the Republican Party line was not over entitlements, but over taxes.

Donald Trump is finally showing us more of his economic plan beyond the "Make America Great Again" slogan on his red hat.

America has now learned:

-- He wants to tax the rich more and the middle class less.

-- He wants to lower corporate taxes.

-- He wants to cut government spending and stop raising the debt ceiling.

"The hedge fund people make a lot of money and they pay very little tax," Trump said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg. "I want to lower taxes for the middle class."

In short, Trump is willing to raise taxes on himself and those like him.  

We all know how that worked out.

 Fast forward to 2022. Republicans are talking about cutting, privatizing, or killing Social Security with an openness they hadn't shown in at least twenty years. Trump himself lost interest in the topic long ago. But among the pundit class and much of the Democratic establishment, a few six-year old statements had permanently inoculated not just Trump, but the entire GOP on this issue.

What's remarkable here is not just the convergence but the certainty. A large part of the Republican Party is pissing on the third rail of American politics and yet no influential Democrats thought it was worth pulling the switch just in case the power was on.

If attacks on Social Security have eroded seniors' support for the GOP, they have done so almost entirely on their own. Progressives seldom mention the issue. AARP has been uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. Talking Points Memo, probably the best progressive political news and analysis site has dropped it entirely as far as I can tell.

And while Blake Masters, a GOP senate candidate from Arizona, has warranted a number of TPM stories, his suggestion that we privatize Social Security went unmentioned, despite the fact that almost one fifth the population of the state is 65 or over.


Even in Florida, which has a lot of seniors, Val Demings is all but silent on the topic, despite the fact that her opponent and his fellow senator are both on the record as wanting to cut or kill the program.

There's no conspiracy here, no hidden agenda. These people simply believe with a great deal of confidence that while pushing back against Republican attacks on Medicare and particularly Social Security might be the right thing to do, it is not a winning political strategy.

If there were any doubt in the Democratic establishment's mind, hedging the bet would be cheap, easy and pretty much risk free. A few campaign ads, some viral videos, a couple of lines in stump speeches, a bullet point in campaign websites,  raising the subject in interviews.

The most bizarre part of this is that for decades, one of the unassailable truths of American politics was that attacking Social Security and Medicare was bad for Republicans and defending them was good for Democrats, and yet, in the space of a few years for no particularly good reason, the political establishment became absolutely certain of the exact opposite.

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Monday, July 25, 2022

The data are thin but still worth keeping an eye on

A couple of months ago, we did a post prompted by this Nate Cohn NYT piece where we talked about draconian anti-abortion bills being proposed and sometimes passed in states with neither anti-abortion majorities or trigger laws.

 Recently, though, some of the news has been coming from a different direction. [Emphasis added]

The geographic pattern evident in the results suggests that a national outcry over a court decision to overturn Roe might not carry many political consequences in the states where abortions could be immediately restricted. In some of those states, new abortion restrictions may tend to reinforce the political status quo, even as they spark outrage elsewhere in the country.

But in some states, a fight over new abortion restrictions might pose serious political risks for conservatives, perhaps especially in the seven mostly Republican-controlled states that are seen as most likely to enact new restrictions even though a majority of voters tend to support legal abortion.

Mississippi is the third most anti-abortion state in the country according to the NYT piece.

 Yes, n = 1 and this could be a bad poll or an outlier, but should these results be valid not being able to get majority support for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in the state where Jackson is the capital, that's worth noting.

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Friday, July 22, 2022

Am I an idiot?

This is Joseph.

Mark had a polite comment on one of the positions that I held:
Conventional pundit wisdom was that Trump's statements about defending Social Security and Medicare had inoculated the GOP against that line of attack. Pundits can be idiots

While I hope I avoid the full "idiot" level, I thought it was worth reflecting why my analysis was wrong. After all, numbers like this need to be explained if you think that people just assume social security and Medicare are safe from Republican meddling:

 

That is a 15 point drop on the generic ballot in two months among the 65+ crowd. 

I think it is important that we be accountable when we are wrong. So what did I miss?

Pondering it for a while, I think I overlooked the real impact of the Supreme Court, in general, and Dobbs, in particular. The quest to overturn Roe versus Wade goes back to the 1980's and Ronald Reagan. But after 50 years this could be dismissed as posturing, after all the ruling had survived two generations of judges who were heavily Republican appointed. But then, one day, it happened.

This seems to me to have had two immediate implications.

  1. Older voters do not like radical change and all of the sudden the Supreme Court was delivering a series of radical rulings, Thermostatic politics kicked in, as well as the general distrust of radical change among those with less time to adapt to it
  2. Suddenly these threats looked less like bombast and more like a real threat.
If I am correct, the implication of abortion is far beyond just the backlash against a known right. It suddenly made the Republican party look like they would do extreme and/or crazy things. Can people like that be trusted with power? 

The supreme court continues with rulings that at least appear to be partisan. Which only makes matters worse. Remember, the same pundits who claimed that people were overwrought about abortion rights are not anywhere near as credible now. Nor is there a great deal of evidence that lawyers think the opinion was especially sound. 

So my gut instinct is that I missed a tipping point, where the old "they would never do that" claims of the pundit class suddenly lost efficacy and voters became alarmed at what could happen next. As they probably should be. 

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Thursday, July 21, 2022

Thursday Tweets

At least here in California, this is what the NIMBY/YIMBY fight actually look like, with valid arguments on both sides.


I should probably talk more about this Monkey Cage piece.






Recommended.

If the food poisoning, cultural appropriation, overpriced menu, and annoying brand hadn't already done it, this would keep me away from the chain.


"First as tragedy, then as farce."

That guy. 



Checking in with the Paypal Mafia.





Musk's hard right pivot did score him a lot of kind words from Rupert's publications.


Do they covet the blood of the young, because that's Thiel's thing.


Conventional pundit wisdom was that Trump's statements about defending Social Security and Medicare had inoculated the GOP against that line of attack. Pundits can be idiots.







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Wednesday, July 20, 2022

"If FIFTY BANKERS ever arrive at your office all at once, (1) you have done something terrible but (2) it is absolutely their problem, not yours."

I might get into trouble for such a long quote, but I wanted to give you a sense of how sharp and funny Matt Levine's writing is (all the more remarkable given his output). Most of his work appear behind the Bloomberg paywall but for cheapskates like me, there's a free but highly influential newsletter (link at the bottom of the page).

 Highly recommended. Essential if you follow business and finance.

If you sell nickel futures at a price of $25,000 per ton, and then the price of nickel futures goes up to $100,000 per ton, then in some simple arithmetic sense you have lost $75,000 per ton. If you sold 100 tons of nickel futures, then you have lost more than $7 million. But if you sold 150,000 tons of futures, the math changes a bit; it becomes non-linear and relativistic. If you sold 150,000 tons of nickel futures at $25,000 per ton, and then the price goes up to $100,000, your banks will call you up and say “uh you have lost $11 billion, can you pay that please,” and you will say “I would prefer not to,” and an insane series of events will happen:

  1. The nickel exchange will cancel a bunch of trades and declare that actually the market price of nickel is $48,000 per ton, magically reversing most of your losses.
  2. Then the exchange will call you and say “okay let’s close you out of that trade at $48,000 per ton.”
  3. Then you will say “no, this is still too much money for me to lose, I prefer not to.”
  4. Then your banks will say “well okay how much are you willing to lose?”
  5. You will say “I would close out this trade at $30,000, that’s how much money I am willing to lose.”
  6. Your banks will say “okay fine, we’ll wait for nickel prices to go back below $30,000, meanwhile we’ll just lend you the money to stay in the position.”
  7. They will.
  8. Eventually nickel prices will go below $30,000 and you will get out of the trade at a modest loss.
  9. If prices never go below $30,000 then I guess your banks are very sad, but honestly they’re pretty sad about all of this anyway.

I cannot stress enough that this is not how it works if you are a small customer. This is the white-glove treatment that only the biggest customers get. If you are big enough, you get to tell the exchange how much money you’re willing to lose, and the exchange and your banks will make sure you don’t lose more than that.

Here is a wild Bloomberg News story about Xiang Guangda, the Chinese metals tycoon who runs Tsingshan Holding Group Co., who is nicknamed “Big Shot,” and who blew up the London Metals Exchange in March. We talked about it at the time, but this story adds a lot more detail about what Xiang, his bankers and the LME were thinking and doing. It is not pretty! Xiang shorted something like 150,000 tons of nickel somewhere in the $20,000s, and when nickel prices went up to $100,000 he said “no thank you”:

After nickel started spiking on March 7, Tsingshan struggled to meet its margin calls. … The LME had eventually intervened to halt trading a couple of hours after nickel hit $100,000. It also canceled billions of dollars of transactions, bringing the price back to $48,078, where it closed the previous day, in what amounted to a lifeline for Xiang and Tsingshan.

And then the LME said “well, okay, $48,000?” and Xiang again said “no thank you”:

To reopen the market, the LME proposed a solution: Xiang should strike a deal with holders of long positions to close out his trade. But a price of around $50,000 would be more than twice the level at which he had entered his short position, and would mean accepting billions of dollars in losses. ...

Xiang told the assembled bankers he had no intention of closing the position anywhere near $50,000. A few hours later he was delivering the same message to Matthew Chamberlain, chief executive of the LME. Tsingshan was a strong company, he said, and it had the support of the Chinese government. There would be no backing down.

And so his banks said “well okay what price would be acceptable” and he said “$30,000” and they said “fine”:

On March 14, a week after the chaos that engulfed the nickel market, Tsingshan announced a deal with its banks under which they agreed not to pursue the company for the billions it owed for a period of time. In exchange, Xiang agreed a series of price levels at which he would reduce his nickel position once prices dropped below about $30,000. 

Eventually nickel got below $30,000 and he got out of the position at about a $1 billion loss. “The loss has been roughly offset by the profits of his nickel operations over the same period.”

The article also describes the scene at Xiang’s office on the evening of March 8:

Within hours, more than 50 bankers had arrived at his office wanting to hear how he planned to respond to the crisis. He told them simply: “I’m confident that we will overcome this.”

If FIFTY BANKERS ever arrive at your office all at once, (1) you have done something terrible but (2) it is absolutely their problem, not yours.

 (And yes, it's a variation on an old joke, but it's a damned good version.)

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Tuesday, July 19, 2022

"HODL Mode"

But first, a word from our CEO

Sure it was a Ponzi scheme, but it was an innovative Ponzi scheme.

From the Block:

Celsius remained unable to make any public statements due to legal advice, but people with knowledge of the situation told The Block the firm was looking to avoid lengthy bankruptcy proceedings. Sources said Celsius believes much of its retail clientele would prefer the firm avoid bankruptcy and that users could show their support by engaging "HODL Mode" in their Celsius account, a security feature that keeps users from withdrawing or sending funds while activated, in the hopes that the legal team would see the strength of feeling existing among users. Celsius did not respond to requests for comment at that time.
"Strength of feeling" is a telling phrase. Culture (with emphasis on the first four letters) always plays an outsized role in almost all web3 businesses. While many crypto investors are simply in it because it superficially looks like a good deal, a substantial segment are there not just because they think they'll get rich but because they see themselves as warriors willing to face financial ruin to advance a noble cause. 

For these investors, "HODL" is an emotionally charged term of great power. The idea of making that into a feature is inspired in an incredibly evil sort of way. Just imagine what Ponzi or Madoff could have done with it.

There's a lot more ugliness in the Celsius story. The always reliable Coffeezilla walks us through the latest twists and turns.

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Monday, July 18, 2022

When it comes to the political fall-out of Dobbs, functional Republicans have a better grasp than many Democrats do

Mentally, a lot of Democrats are in a strange place these days. They... hell, let's be honest, we won (since I'm clearly taking sides here).  We control the White House and, to a lesser degree, congress. The upcoming election is challenging but, at least for the moment, polls have been trending in our favor and the Republicans have given us a lot to work with.

Given the stakes of the next two elections, this would seem to be a moment for focus on the poor quality of Republican candidates and on issues where the GOP has locked itself into incredibly unpopular positions (particularly reproductive rights, the insurrection and the attack on Social Security and Medicare).

But instead of focus, we are all too often seeing despair and panic, or at the very least, a sense of helplessness.

 Take this reader letter that Josh Marshall ran along with approving comments in his editor's blog recently. [Emphasis added.]

    Just read your latest piece. I still think you are correct on the Codify Roe promise. But every single day that goes by without explicit promises, in living rooms and cars, the energy wanes. The right to abortion (and the right to privacy in general), affects many, many people. The actuality of it, on a day to day or week to week basis, doesn’t.

 We saw a lot of think pieces a couple of months ago arguing that the electoral impact of repealing Roe would be limited since the new laws and their impact would largely be confined to strongly anti-abortion states. (Something we pushed back against at the time.)

In defense of NYT and the rest, in May it was still possible that the outrage would fade and the impact would not go much past women who sought abortions in these states and did not have the option of traveling somewhere that the procedure was available. A serious (arguably unprecedented) roll back of civil rights, but with little political consequences.

We now know how wrong that view was and the horror stories -- underage rape victims, ectopic pregnancies, life-threatening miscarriages, denial of vital medications, travel restrictions -- will only continue to multiply affecting all women between 8 and 55 who may at some point find themselves even temporarily in states with a Republican legislature, and the families of those people and their employers.

Among Republicans, all but the Flavor Aid drinkers are obviously aware of this because they are desperate to change the subject.




(And too many Democrats are eager to oblige them.)




From the LA Times:

In Texas, dispensing methotrexate to someone who uses it to induce a miscarriage after 49 days of gestation is a felony; that makes pharmacists hesitant to fill such prescriptions for almost anyone with a uterus. A new total ban on abortion in Tennessee will effectively criminalize any medication that could disrupt pregnancy past the point of fertilization, with strict exceptions for a patient who will otherwise die. And in Virginia, confusion over rules about who is permitted to prescribe drugs “qualified as abortifacients” may be blocking access to the medication.

“That’s what was shocking to me,” said Schwarz, a 27-year-old who lives in Tysons Corner, Va. “In a state where I thought I was relatively protected regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, I found out I wasn’t.”

Methotrexate was originally developed as a chemotherapy agent more than 60 years ago. But in low doses, it has proved to be one of the safest, least expensive and most effective treatments for roughly a dozen autoimmune conditions, from juvenile idiopathic arthritis to Crohn’s disease.

“It’s one of the most common medications that I prescribe,” said Dr. Grant Schulert, a pediatric rheumatology specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “It’s really a mainstay of our practice.”

...

In one case, a pharmacist initially refused to dispense methotrexate to an 8-year-old girl in Texas. In a note the child’s doctor shared with Edens, the pharmacist wrote, “Females of possible child bearing potential have to have diagnosis on hard copy with state abortion laws.” 

...

“The majority of rheumatic diseases affect females at substantially higher rates than males,” Edens explained. “The prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis in women to men is 3 to 1. For lupus it’s 10 to 1. And so rheumatology is a very female-predominate patient population.”

This is not a fade away kind of issue.

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Friday, July 15, 2022

Please stop talking about Biden retiring

This is Joseph.

This post by Robert Reich is very good. Worth reading in full. He makes good points about the health issues that arise with age:

It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging. "Bodily decrepitude," said Yeats, "is wisdom." I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but our president seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add “for someone his age?”). I still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather whom I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I’m not tempting fate by my stating this fact). But I’ve lived through several kidney stones and a few unexplained fits of epilepsy in my late thirties. I’ve had both hips replaced. And my hearing is crap. Even with hearing aids, I have a hard time understanding someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant. You’d think that the sheer market power of 60 million boomers losing their hearing would be enough to generate at least one chain of quiet restaurants

But this is absolutely the wrong time to be having this conversation. 

Why would the Democrats projects weakness ahead of the 2022 congressional races?

With a 50-50 senate there are currently five toss-up races (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). Losing the senate is obviously terrible. Even more aggressively, this is a context where the Democrats strategy is to try and add two senators. That means winning all five toss-up races, barring a surprise. It goes without saying that if South Carolina is competitive then things are going really well, but political strategy is not usually based on the other party completely collapsing. 

It is also worth noting all of the key powers holding congress gives. The ability to have the Jan 6th committee is based on holding the house. The ability to appoint judges, including any surprise supreme court vacancies, is based on holding the senate. There are other nice features, like the ability to pass reconciliation bills that can't be held hostage that are based on congressional control. This stuff is important.

Based in the 2020 timelines, events that you need to be ready for start around February of the election year. Lynden Johnson dropped out of a president race on March 31, 1968 -- the same year as the election. So if Joe Biden had a thoughtful conversation over the summer of 2023 that would be plenty of time for the 2024 elections. But more importantly, unless he is about to actually resign and have Kamela Harris be the incumbent, how does talking about it now help?

Even if you wanted Kamela, would it not make sense to wait for 2 years to fully pass given the 22nd amendment to maximize possible future options. Keep in mind, this argument is about the future of the candidate and not his present. 

Finally, would it even be good politics for Joe Biden to retire? I think that the jury is definitely out. Keep in mind that it is possible that Donald Trump will run in 2024. Obviously, Biden versus Trump is a known good match-up. The age issue is less salient politically when two candidates of similar ages are running and Biden has a style that is very good at kicking Trump off of his rhythm. If it is a different candidate then maybe calculations need to be made but the key issue is how Biden is holding up health-wise, and that is not an easy criterion to evaluate externally. 

But no matter how you look at it, the mid-terms are a crucial piece of information about a decision that is currently not even remotely time sensitive. There are actual years before the decision would need to be made and all a premature decision would do is bring about lame duck status even faster and make things look bad before the midterm elections. How does this help? 

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Thursday, July 14, 2022

Thursday Tweets -- "Maybe it was me that made the mess."




Never a good sign.


But they aren't out of ideas yet.




As loud as the outcry over the original decision was, I suspect the real impact of the repeal of Roe will come from the steady drip, drip, drip...














The 'R' in 'ERCOT' stands for 'Reliability.'










Have to have some political tweets.


















It's not often I sympathize with DJT, but not being able to talk about the one actual accomplishment of your presidency because it pisses off anti-vaxxers would suck.


Didn't know you could commit treason against a person.

Interesting point.










If the NYT had only mentioned his name.






And to add injury to insult.



We were there first.

And misc.



He added if they'd been making better time, they'd all be dead now.


 "Maybe it was me that made the mess."

Don't worry, he's got this.
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Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Why do serious journalists keep talking about good fires?

Because they work.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Last year and the year before, in an unprecedented environmental disaster, wildfires in California’s Sequoia National Park and nearby national forests roared through treasured sequoia groves in the Southern Sierra Nevada, generating flames hundreds of feet high and killing nearly 20% of all the giant sequoia trees left in the world.

But the Washburn fire burning now in Yosemite National Park, licking around the edges of the roughly 500 giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove — some over 200 feet tall and more than 2,000 years old  — so far hasn’t killed a single one of the massive old-growth trees there.

A big part of the reason, experts say, is that park officials completed 23 projects at the grove since 1971 to thin brush and set controlled burns to remove dead wood and vegetation that had built up over more than century of fire suppression.

That left less dead material on the forest floor, and fewer shrubs and small trees like firs that can make fires burn hotter. As a result, the forest was restored to a more natural condition, experts say, similar to the way it would have looked centuries ago when lightning strikes and burning from native tribes sent low-impact fires through the Sierra every 10 years or so.

With a few notable exceptions (ProPublica, Reveal, Marketplace, NPR), the national coverage of the California wildfires has been, terrible. Sadly ecstatic disaster porn, with superficial coverage of causes and no interest whatsoever in solutions, which is especially sad because this is one of the few crises where we know what we need to do.

Liz Weil from her definitive ProPublica piece on the subject:

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.


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Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog... we were talking about SCOTUS leaks.

 Monday, July 9, 2012

The increasingly self-serving ethics of journalism

(As usual, Brad DeLong gets credit for spotting this one)

Just to recap, I've been complaining (whining, moaning, bitching, etc.) about the state of journallism for a while. Many of those complaints assume (explicitly or implicitly) that journalism is forming a dangerously insular and cohesive group identity (I'm writing outside my field so my terminology might be a bit off -- if a social scientist out there has any notes, I'm open to suggestions).

Assuming I'm on to something here, one of the things we would expect is an ethical code that has notably different standards of behavior inside and outside of the group. Intra-group crimes (like plagiarism where the primary victim is another journalist) would be viewed as grave while offenses against subjects and readers would be seen as less serious. This difference would be particularly notable where journalists and non-journalists are mutually responsible for an offense.

Which takes us to the example of the day. As you probably know, the recent health care decision has produced as usual amount of leak-driven coverage. This has deeply offended Charles Lane of the Washington Post. Here's are some of the phrases that Lane uses when discussing the leaks and leakers:

"slimy"

"oozing slime"

"Cassius and Brutus inside the court, creeping up behind the chief justice with their verbal daggers"

"shame on the treacherous insiders"

And here's how Lane talks about Jan Crawford, the reporter who published the leaks,

"a fine journalist"

"kudos to Jan Crawford for a nifty little scoop"

According to Lane, Crawford's story damages the Supreme Court and misleads the reader, but the responsibility is apportioned so that all of the blame falls on the sources for passing the story on to the reporter. He even goes further and praises the reporter for passing the story on to us.

I suppose it might be possible to come up with a situation where two parties knowingly work together to produce something bad for society and yet one party shoulders all of the blame while the other is praiseworthy but Lane is no where near making that case here, nor does he seem to realize that he needs to.
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Monday, July 11, 2022

An amusing footnote to Joseph's Elon Musk post

Following up on Friday's post.


Elon Musk talks a lot about humanity, and his love of humanity, and his need to save humanity in a way that isn't at all creepy or indicative of a messiah complex.



Musk's latest mission is to save humanity from the dangers of population collapse (a notion Joseph rebutted in the previously mentioned post). Part of this concern might have been meant to deflect media attention from the news that Musk had impregnated a direct report.


 When you get into the conversation around population collapse alarmists, you quickly notice that the concern focuses specifically on the collapse of certain populations (the US, Europe, Japan). Africa and Latin America don't get a lot of attention. While we don't want to paint with too broad a brush, much of this is definitely great replacement adjacent.

There is also a strong eugenics lite quality here, further emphasized by some of Musk's comments about the right people having children.

"Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception," Musk said. He returned to that thread several times over the next month, adding on June 14, "I mean, I'm doing my part haha."

On June 17, Musk tweeted the opening scene of "Idiocracy," the 2006 Mike Judge comedy depicting a world in which highly intelligent people are reluctant to reproduce while those with low IQs continue to have large families, dumbing down the Earth's population. "When I ask my friends why they're not yet having kids (very few are), it sounds exactly like the movie," he wrote.

 

 Mike Judge used a somewhat cringey premise (which was the main thing Musk seemed to take away from the movie) to set up a satirical take on 2006 America. That premise was basically an update of "the Marching Morons," a classic science fiction story with a memorable ending.

The elite have tried everything rational to solve the population problem, but the problem cannot be solved rationally. The solution requires a way of thinking that no longer exists – Barlow's "vicious self-interest" and his knowledge of ancient history.

Barlow derives a solution based on his experience in scamming people into buying worthless land and knowledge of lemmings' mass migration into the sea: convince the morons to travel to Venus in spaceships that will kill their passengers out of view of land. The story predates the moon landing, and the safety of space travel is summed up in a description of a rocket that crashed on the moon. Propaganda depicts Venus as a tropical paradise, with "blanket trees", "ham bushes" and "soap roots". In a nationalistic frenzy, every country tries to send as many of their people to Venus as possible to stake their claim.

Barlow's help includes using his knowledge of Nazi propaganda tactics: postcards are sent from the supposedly happy new residents of Venus to relatives left behind, describing a wonderful, easy life, in the same way as fraudulent postcards were sent to relatives of those incinerated in the Nazi death-camps.

But Barlow is duped by his erstwhile assistants. Barlow does not realize that the elite despise him, as they despise all people from the past for not having solved The Problem earlier. In the end, Barlow is placed on a spaceship to Venus to share the fate of his victims and realizes that crime does not pay, just before he dies.
Given Musk's fondness for classic science fiction, perhaps he has a copy.

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Friday, July 8, 2022

Are we running out of people?

This is Joseph. 

I noticed that this tweet from Elon Musk:
Showed up just after this story:
I also see this pinned tweet:
It seems to me that this whole sorry saga misses several important points. Let us consider them. 

One, the key to raising children is not being the sperm donor, which while a necessary step is far from a sufficient one. The real effort is the bearing of the children and taking the time to properly do tasks like childminding and educating children. One rich person having children with many women (Musk has 10 children by 3 different mothers) is not really doing much to address the fertility crisis. 

Two, Earth reached a population of one billion people around 1804 CE. That is 218 years ago. Recorded history goes back to at least 3200 BCE. That means we had 5,000 years of successful human civilization with less than a billion humans. I think we can start getting worried about underpopulation when we hit one billion going the other way. Until then, I think concerns about whether there are enough people seem odd. 

Finally, having children with a subordinate at work seems like a suboptimal decision. It is hard to ensure that there was a proper balance of power in the relationship. While the person in question, Shivon Zilis, seems to have a lot of agency in their career, it is always a concern in these cases. 

So I would say that this strategy was not the optimal way to handle concerns about a population crisis. It might be fine for Musk and he likely has the resources to support this eccentricity, but I think that is what we need to call if it we are honest. 

There are good pro-natalist policies that could be considered. My personal hint is that there is no way to understate the importance of childcare and that a positive childcare experience probably helps people match the number of children they prefer with the number of children they have. But I think these should be considered in the context of human happiness and not because we think we might be going extinct as a species.
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Thursday, July 7, 2022

Sometimes the future is what it used to be.





Back in 2017, we had a thread discussing a series of predictions Arthur C. Clarke made in 1964 about life in the year 2000, in particular, the suggestion that what we would now call telecommuting or "work from home" would make cities obsolete. The creative class/utopian urbanists' school was even stronger five years ago than it is today, so the standard take on why Clarke got this wrong was that he underestimated the vitality and appeal of cities.

I offered an alternate theory.

But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.

This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.

Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.

For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.

When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)

Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right. 

Obviously, we have since had a chance to try out some of these ideas. We've had a huge disruption of the office model at a time when demand for skilled workers is comparable to conditions when Clarke was making his predictions. 

Businesses are currently trying to decide what the new standard will be. At the moment, the hybrid model seems to be winning but what calls there are for a return to completely office based work seem to be coming from management,

It's possible that workers will come around and we'll see a return to the old model though things seem to be moving the other way as lots of companies are starting to downsize their office space and saving a tremendous amount of money in the process.  

Perhaps Clarke wasn't so wrong after all.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2022

When optimal is suboptimal

Whenever a metric maxes out it creates problems. Back in my teaching days, I used to try in vain to explain to colleagues and particularly to administrators that a test where anyone, let alone numerous students, made 100% was a bad test. A "perfect" score meant you didn't actually know how well that student did. Did they just barely make that hundred or could they have aced a much more difficult test? 

Worse yet, if more than one student make 100%, we have no way of ranking them. When we start calculating final grades and averaging these tests, we invariably give the same amount of credit to two students who had substantially different levels of mastery.

This was especially problematic given the push at one big suburban district (not coincidentally my worst teaching experience) to define an A at 93 and above rather than grading on some kind of a curve. Since there was little standardization on the writing of the tests for the most part and arguably even less in the grading of any even slightly open-ended questions, the set cut-off made absolutely no sense. Trying to tweak the difficulty level of the test so that the students doing A level work fell within that eight-point range was nearly impossible and pretty much required writing exams where the top of the class was likely to max out the instrument.

This Mitchell and Webb radio sketch looks at the same underlying question from a different angle and while I would probably argue that the one year interval is a bit short, I can't entirely dispute the logic. While this specific example might make people a bit uneasy, substitute in zero shoplifting and the reasoning would actually be fairly sound.

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