Who is a true progressive?

My problem with Bernie Sanders and his Berniacs has always been--yes, even from back when he was battling it out with Hillary Clinton--that their positions on many issues are no different from tRump's own awful ideas.  Like bringing manufacturing back to America.  The complaints about offshoring.  Putting tighter limits on immigration.

Yet, Bernie and the Berniacs are considered to be "progressives," while these progressives criticize tRump and his trumpeters!

I worried about this even back in May 2015, when the campaign fever was barely above normal.  In this post, I quoted a bunch of experts, one of whom asked:

Wouldn’t a true progressive support equal opportunity for all people on the planet, rather than just for those of us lucky enough to have been born and raised in rich countries?

That's what I expect from a true progressive.  Yes, I consider myself to be a true progressive, in contrast to, for instance, Bernie Sanders, who has a long track record of anti-immigrant positions.

But, wouldn't a true progressive want to provide opportunities for all people on the planet, and not merely for the luck ones who were accidentally born here in the US?

tRump and his toadies have now used the cover of COVID-19 in order to suspend immigration.

“By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” the president said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”

Chances are most Bernie supporters would agree with that, even though logic and evidence point to another direction: "numerous studies have concluded that immigration has an overall positive effect on the American work force and wages for workers".

Again, from that post in May 2015:

Unfortunately, most of the debate in rich countries today, on both the left and the right, centers on how to keep other people out. That may be practical, but it certainly is not morally defensible.

Morally indefensible.  Let them in poor countries eat cakes!

The following is a slightly edited post from May 10, 2015.
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The last few days I came across one too many commentaries about income and wealth inequality. Inequality within the US, and across the world.  Robert Samuelson's column is in the context of an anniversary.

In 1975, the Brookings Institution — perhaps Washington’s best known think tank — published an elegant essay by Arthur Okun, who had been one of the leading economists of the Johnson administration. The essay was called “Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff.” Its premise, as the title suggests, was that government faced a choice in fashioning its economic and social policies. A bias toward more equality might weaken economic growth by dulling the incentives to work, save and invest; on the other hand, leaving matters to the market could worsen inequality by widening income and wealth gaps. We could balance equality and efficiency. Once stated, the logic seems impeccable.

Inequality is now worse than it was forty years ago!

But, that is within the US.

If we, however, looked at the entire seven-billion-plus that we are on this planet, global inequality has reduced.  So much so that the managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives concludes his blog-post with:

the 21st century would be a time of rising equality across the global income distribution.

Data do show that globally inequality is decreasing even as within-country inequality is rising in many countries.  And that is Kenneth Rogoff's point of departure:

Wouldn’t a true progressive support equal opportunity for all people on the planet, rather than just for those of us lucky enough to have been born and raised in rich countries?

He explains:

If current concerns about inequality were cast entirely in political terms, this inward-looking focus would be understandable; after all, citizens of poor countries cannot vote in rich ones. But the rhetoric of the inequality debate in rich countries betrays a moral certitude that conveniently ignores the billions of people elsewhere who are far worse off.

Whenever I ask students in my classes whether we should worry about the increasing inequality in the US, or about the welfare of the economically disadvantaged billions outside the US, after they look at the data, not a student whimpers about the grossness of the inequality in America.  Rogoff reminds us about some of that data:

the middle class in rich countries remains an upper class from a global perspective. Only about 15% of the world’s population lives in developed economies. Yet advanced countries still account for more than 40% of global consumption and resource depletion.

People in America complain because the "ovarian lottery" seems to have lost its value:

global inequality has been reduced significantly over the past three decades, implying that capitalism has succeeded spectacularly. Capitalism has perhaps eroded rents that workers in advanced countries enjoy by virtue of where they were born. But it has done even more to help the world’s true middle-income workers in Asia and emerging markets.

Keep in mind that despite all that economic progress (I won't worry about the non-economic issues for now, because I do that in many other posts) in China and India and Vietnam and wherever, the average American is immensely richer than the average person in many countries around the world.

There is one more way in which all those people in other countries can be given a fair shot at improving their economic conditions:

Allowing freer flows of people across borders would equalize opportunities even faster than trade, but resistance is fierce.

However, when I bring up this point in my classes, students suddenly become a tad defensive.  

Rogoff doesn't mince words:

Unfortunately, most of the debate in rich countries today, on both the left and the right, centers on how to keep other people out. That may be practical, but it certainly is not morally defensible.

And for a good measure, he reminds us about this too:

Europe’s long history of exploitative colonialism makes it hard to guess how Asian and African institutions would have evolved in a parallel universe where Europeans came only to trade, not to conquer.

Add to that America's slave trade.  And there are more to the list.

We lack definitive answers only when we frame the inequality problem a certain way.  It is just that we don't want to work towards those answers.  We choose to avoid them.  We are being cunningly political.

There goes the neighborhood!

It is very difficult, extremely difficult, to make most of us accept something that we wish we did not have to.  Which is why I have, for instance, stopped even attempting to reason with trump supporters--even if they might have some modicum of decency within them. 

But, just because we don't like a truth, well, that truth does not simply disappear. Instead, it keeps raising its head over and over again, despite our attempts to ignore it or to whack it down the hole. We don't like our views upended and we will do our best to resist the truth.

No, this post is not about trump; though the latest detailed NY Times report might as well be a classic example of what this post is about.

For a long time, I have been blogging that choosing your parents well makes one hell of a difference. (you can now see why that NY Times piece on trump also fits here.)  But, we resist the idea that so much of our future depends on that accident of birth.  Providing evidence that researchers have gathered, I continue to point out this out.

Way back in 2011, for example, I quoted Branko Milanovic (via Catherine Rampell)

an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were)

That goes against the idea that we prefer to believe--that individuals can and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and they can and will succeed. “I built what I built myself.”

More evidence on this: The American Dream Is Harder To Find In Some Neighborhoods

Note it says neighborhoods.  Now check back with that Milanovic statement.

So, what does the latest piece say?

A new online data tool being made public Monday finds a strong correlation between where people are raised and their chances of achieving the American dream.
Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has been working with a team of researchers on this tool — the first of its kind because it marries U.S. Census Bureau data with data from the Internal Revenue Service. And the findings are changing how researchers think about economic mobility.

Like with climate change, here too we can have researchers do study after study.  Like with climate change, people will dis the studies just because they don't support their preferred view of the world.  The truth doesn't depend on what we prefer though.

Chetty found that if a person moves out of a neighborhood with worse prospects into to a neighborhood with better outlooks, that move increases lifetime earnings for low-income children by an average $200,000. Of course, moving a lot of people is impractical, so researchers are instead trying to help low-performing areas improve.

If Mohammad can't go to the mountain, then we have to explore ways in which the mountain can get to Mohammad.  This is where public policies come in--policies that can address this accident of (mis)fortune.  Policies on  "early childhood development, college and career readiness, family stability and strong social networks, ... segregation, ...pre-K programs and affordable housing."

Those are exactly the kind of issues that trump and the Republicans love to talk about, right?  As in how they can kill such programs and policies!  There is, according to them, a miracle drug that cures all: tax cuts for those who were born in the correct neighborhoods!

“I built what I built myself.” My ass!

What's the secret number for success in life?

Every once in a while, people seem to wake up and realize that geography matters. And then they make a big deal out of it, while some of us--especially those who teach and think economic geography--wonder, ahem, if only you would listen to us!

I have blogged many times, like here, that the best thing one can do for a high probability of economic success is to choose the parents well.  But, of course, that is not a choice that is in our control.  It is not the parents as in the genes within us, but in terms of where we are born and raised.  A good chunk of one's life trajectory is decided right there.

Today, the media reports on yet another research that the geography matters, when it comes to economic success and failures.  In this case, it was about "the geography of economic well-being and distress" after the Great Recession:

We found some really startling results. First and foremost, we're looking at the recovery years here. This dataset starts in 2010 - so after the recession is over. And what we find is that not only does the recovery not lift distressed communities, it actually bypasses them altogether

What does that look like?

You see double-digit loss in employment. You see significant loss in business establishments - again, double digits. This just does not mirror what's happening in the rest of the country. So those that were most vulnerable before the recession are worse off after those early years of the peak recovery.

And if one compares the elite zip codes and the distressed ones?

If you look at the topmost prosperous and the bottommost distressed, it really is like looking at two different countries. In the most-prosperous ZIP codes, you're unlikely to run into somebody who hasn't graduated from high school. You're unlikely to see a vacant home. Your're unlikely to run into somebody who lives below the poverty rate. All of those factors are inverted in the bottom decile, where you have the vast majority of adults out of work. You have establishments eroding very quickly.

Ok, what about when we look at the communities in between the two extremes?

Communities between these two extremes have managed only to tread water in recent years, the study found. Employment in communities in the median ZIP codes increased only slightly and the number of businesses did not grow at all.

The really, really awful part is this:

once a downward spiral begins, it is very difficult for residents or local political leaders to reverse the slide. “When businesses close and there is no investment, the tax base erodes,” Mr. Lettieri said. “Local governments can’t invest their way out.”

Many students in my classes know this all too well from their personal experiences.

So, can you give us a bottom-line?

Where you start has an enormous impact on where you end up in life.

Aha!  Yet another piece of research about the same conclusion. One can then easily imagine the implications for "equality of opportunity" for kids born in the "wrong" zip codes, right?

I will stay away from discussing this with the students in my economic geography class.  I provide them with enough depressing news already!