The inglorious anti-intellectualism

Consider this:

[Folks] can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree

If you are nodding in agreement, then chances are that you are a tRump supporter thinking that your Dear Leader said this.  I am  also surprised you are here at this blog!

On the other hand, if you feel outraged by that statement, and are ready to fire off yet another Facebook post on how stupid tRump is, well, chances are that you were so maniacally supportive of Bernie Sanders that you still don't understand how you were a part of the reasons why tRump and not Hillary Clinton is the President.

tRump didn't say that about art history.  He cannot be bothered about it.  Right now, he is more concerned about how nasty Meghan Markle is!

It was Obama who dissed art history.

Beating up on liberal education is awesome bipartisanship!  Soon after Obama's remark, the editor of Inside Higher Ed even provided a chart on such bipartisan statements!

But, yes, Obama is no tRump.  He immediately realized his error and then even sent a handwritten apology.

However, the bipartisan beating up of liberal education continues.

Little defense of liberal education for an enlightened citizenry has been heard from any prominent political leader — even Democrats such as Barack Obama, whose education, two books written before his presidency and speeches were more steeped in liberal arts than any president in memory, but who as president caved in to lobbies for STEM education and school privatizers.

Take Mayor Pete, for instance.  With his awesome resume and accomplishments, he is a perfect example of what liberal education can do.  At Harvard, he majored in history and literature.  Kamala Harris majored in political science and economics.  Do I expect them to go rah-rah about the importance and value of liberal education? Nope.  Because it will be a vote-losing "elite" talk, in contrast to the lessons from the Coriolanus story--his life became a mess because he thought he was too good to seek approval from the masses.

So, everybody gangs up to beat up on liberal education. It is not good for democracy, and not good for progress.  It is already getting to be late for any course correction; RMS Titanic meets a white floating thing :(

Le Deuxième Sexe en Amérique

I grew up in an India that had a woman as a Prime Minister.  I grew up with an elder sister. In my classes, girls were smart, and attractive.

Even though I was fully aware of the restrictions on women of all ages, while men of all ages had a lot more freedom, I never thought twice about the ability of women to be engineers, doctors, or political leaders.

Here in the adopted land, I am shocked day in and day out on how much women are not taken seriously, especially in politics. 

Heck, even in college administration.  In the history of my university, which has gone through many transformations from its founding in 1856, guess how many female presidents we have had?  Let me make the math simple: How many female presidents of my university over the past 163 years?

One.

Yep. Only one. From 1995 to 2002.

But, hey, the consolation is that our story is more the rule than an exception. At least we had one female president.  The flagship university in the state hasn't had even that many. I don't think they have even had a female provost!

I have threaded together a few tweets about how the Democratic Party has a number of qualified female candidates in the contest and yet it is the (white) men who are being considered as electable. Even in 2019, women are considered not electable. 

In a potential toss up between the pussy-grabber and a qualified woman, the pussy-grabber winning because his opponent is a woman says a lot of awful things about my adopted home!

Seriously, the pussy-grabber?

Meanwhile, in the old country, a man who ditched his wife in order to freely go about his divine mandate of Hindu-fying India and restoring traditions is all set to win another election.

Something is rotten.

Elections have consequences

It does not really surprise nor shock me that neither my adopted country nor the old country is really doing anything about climate change.  Both are DINOs--democracies in name only.  But, at least they are DINOs and not anything worse!

I have no say in what India does or does not do; that's up to Indians to worry.  I am pissed off at the US that apparently cannot be bothered about climate change.

Bill and Melinda Gates write about the challenge of climate change in their annual letter.  And they refer to a summary by IPCC:

Source

I am not a big fan of all this "philanthropy" work that rich people do.  They hire an army of accountants and lawyers to figure out how to avoid paying taxes.  They also hire lobbyists to advocate to lower taxes for the filthy rich.  These taxes are what society needs in order to address our collective problems--from homelessness to higher education to ... yes, climate change too.

After such immoral but legal tax avoidance, these rich dudes then prioritize whatever they want to prioritize--over which society has no influence whatsoever.  I mean, for instance, when was the last time you heard about billionaires donating big money to struggling public universities that serve the underprivileged, and how many times have you heard about billionaires donating to elite universities that serve the privileged? On the other hand, had they paid their fair share of taxes, public universities and colleges won't be in such shit streets.  The tragic irony is that after subjecting public universities to such a financial crunch, they point their fingers at those same public institutions as failures!

I digressed.  At least I got that out of my system!

Now that there is Democratic control over the people's chamber of the Congress, there is at least a little of reason, logic, science, and evidence, that is being brought into climate change discussions.

The Science Committee hosted its first climate hearing of 2019 on Wednesday, after two other House committees had already held theirs. In sharp contrast to recent past Science Committee climate hearings, there was bipartisan agreement that climate change is real, human-caused, and harmful. The hearing brought up a number of possible policies to help America reduce and prepare for global warming, and participants aired their differences regarding the best way forward.

"bipartisan agreement that climate change is real, human-caused, and harmful."  "participants aired their differences regarding the best way forward."

Elections have consequences.

The 63 million who voted for climate change denialism--after all, this is a hoax, according to their deal leader--are unhappy with Democrats, especially the young and the fearless women, going after these pressing problems, I guess.  I wish we could make them even more unhappy, and real soon.

ps: More than six hours later, I read this commentary by Joseph Stiglitz, in which he writes:

Apple, Google, Starbucks, and companies like them all claim to be socially responsible, but the first element of social responsibility should be paying your fair share of tax. If everyone avoided and evaded taxes like these companies, society could not function, much less make the public investments that led to the Internet, on which Apple and Google depend.

Amen!

Stormy Climate

The bottom-line first: "the central question about storms in the Asia-Pacific is who pays for the damage."

 Although China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, America and Europe are estimated to have emitted 37% of the global total between 1850 and 2012. The Philippines, by comparison, emitted 0.5%. That has triggered repeated calls for wealthy countries to help poorer ones pay for the cost of the effects of climate change, not least from tropical storms. Those calls are unlikely to grow softer. But, with the Carolinas still reeling from Florence, and Mr Trump in the White House, America, at least, is unlikely to offer an encouraging answer.

Sometimes, I suspect that Republicans do not want to acknowledge climate change, or the human causation of climate change, because they worry that America will be asked to pay for it.  Because, the moment one acknowledges the human causation behind global climate change, then the immediate follow-up question will be about who caused it.  And if the question of who caused it comes up, ahem, America is on the hook for massive payments.  Climate reparations!  Republicans smell money--in this case, a potential loss of money.

Here in the US, we talk about the increasingly powerful storms.  But,

If storms can wreak such havoc in the world’s richest country, their impact in poor Asia-Pacific countries is even more far-reaching. Every year, the Asia-Pacific region is battered by more and bigger storms than reach America.

Meanwhile, people in Chennai are already worried about the coming monsoon season.  After the disastrous rains and flood of 2015, and then the cyclone that tore through the city in 2016, it has been "normal" for two years.  When the people of Chennai watched in real time the devastating floods in Kerala this past summer, it was deja vu for them.

Here in the US, the GOP couldn't care about the rest of the world.  Heck, the party and its dear leader do not care even about Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands!

Therefore, news was made when 17 Republican members of the House signed a symbolic resolution to "promising to take “meaningful and responsible action” to address human-caused climate change."  Seventeen.  Yep, 17.

It is the largest number of Republicans ever to join an action-oriented climate initiative in “maybe ever,” said Jay Butera, a congressional liaison for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which helped put together the resolution. “I’ve been working on this issue for 10 years,” he told me. “This is a high water mark.” Of course, these 17 Republicans represent just 7 percent of the House GOP.

Seven percent!

It should surprise nobody that the Democratic Party is the only hope for those worried about climate change.

More and more, voters seem to agree with California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who recently said, “If you want to go green, you better go blue.” Becerra was speaking from the stage at the Climate Summit, comfortable as part of an overwhelmingly blue majority.

An inconvenient truth!

In Lake Wobegon, everybody is above average

As trump continues to merrily sail with the supporting white supremacist winds (thank you, New Yorker) it is not only his adopted party folks who are trying to figure out how to deal with him and their own political futures--the Democrats are seemingly having a tougher time figuring out what message they want to convey to voters in 2018 and 2020, other than being anti-trump.

The temptation is to go uber-left.  After all, that was Bernie Sanders' platform, and of Elizabeth Warren's too.  I hope better sense will prevail.

Take for instance the case of minimum wages.   It is tempting to think that we can make the lives of the lower-income households by simply mandating higher wages.  If only the world were that simple:

There is new evidence that raising the minimum wage pushes business owners to replace low-skilled workers with automation. And it shows that old, young, female and black low-skilled workers face the highest levels of unemployment after a minimum-wage increase.
Economists Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics and David Neumark of UC Irvine studied 35 years of government census data for their working paper, which was released in August, titled "People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs."

After a long gap, I recently went to Target.  I was shocked that even that store has introduced self-checkout counters.  Which is exactly what happens when we make labor more expensive:

These automatable jobs include positions like supermarket check-out clerks, who can be replaced by self-service checkout cashiers, and assembly-line workers in manufacturing plants, who can be replaced by robotic arms. Low-skilled workers, for the study, are defined as those who have a high school diploma or less.

As Catherine Rampell writes:

It’s easier, or perhaps more politically convenient, to assume that “pro-worker” policies never hurt the workers they’re intended to help.

Or, as I learnt in graduate school, the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

More from Rampell:

We’ve already seen preliminary evidence that raising wages in Seattle to $13 has produced sharp cuts in hours, leaving low-wage workers with smaller paychecks. And that’s in a high-cost city. Imagine what would happen if Congress raised the minimum wage to $15 nationwide.
In West Virginia, the median hourly wage is just $14.79; in Arkansas, it’s $14.48; and in Mississippi, it’s a depressingly low $14.22. A $15 minimum wage could be binding on more than half of jobs in these states. In fact, in every state (not including D.C.), it could cover at least a quarter of positions.

Two years ago, I wrote in an op-ed about the minimum wage increase in Oregon:

Be careful what you wish for, we are advised. But then we don’t follow that advice anyway.

This guy gets pissed off that I always critique without offering solutions.  I will once again say the same thing: We work out the solutions politically.  Unlike a challenge of how to get humans to the moon and back, or how to vaccinate people, these are not technical issues.  In a democracy, we are, therefore, at the mercy of voters and politicians.

On this issue of minimum wages, all I can state with certainty is this: We do need to increase the federal minimum wage from the pathetic low of $7.25.  (States can have their own minimum wages, but it cannot be lower than the federal minimum.)  What is more urgent is the need to strengthen the safety net for the workers--from health care to child care to affordable housing to ... The new social contract that I have been arguing for years.  A new contract for which those with earnings that are way higher than the minimum wages have to pay higher taxes.  This much I know for sure.  The rest is up to the Democratic Party in 2018 and 2020.

No college and all sports is the Republican dream

The other day, I told the friend that I doubt if there is even one Prius in the US with a confederate flag bumper sticker on it.  We might make fun of the liberals, yes, but at least they don't drive around with symbols of hate.

The stereotype of Prius owners exists because it reflects a great deal of the reality about them.  Similar is the stereotype of Republicans as military-loving and anti-intellectual types.  In those deep red states, the irony is their passion for college sports.  Yep, those very folks who aim their guns on colleges love, love, love football and basketball so much that they seem to tolerate the academic aspects of it because, well, without college there is no sport!

And with trump and his minions now in charge, hey, I am not at all surprised with this latest survey results:

A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

Fifty-eight percent of the Republicans say that colleges have a negative effect on the country.  58!  These are the same idiots who gladly voted for trump!

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, younger adults have much more positive views of colleges and universities than older adults. About half (52%) of Republicans ages 18 to 29 say colleges and universities have a positive impact on the country, compared with just 27% of those 65 and older. By contrast, there are no significant differences in views among Democrats by age, with comparable majorities of all age groups saying colleges and universities have a positive impact.

"just 27% of those 65 and older" Republican leaners think that college does good.  I wonder who these people voted for in the November election!

These anti-college Republicans elected a guy with no plans for the future of the country.

Trump’s innovation maybe wasn’t to bash college so much as to ignore it. Previous candidates, in both parties, paid at least lip service to the idea of expanding educational opportunities and retraining workers whose jobs were eliminated by changes in the U.S. economy. The first indications that that was changing came in the 2012 GOP primary, when Rick Santorum (B.A., Penn State; M.B.A, Pitt; J.D., Dickinson Law) accused Barack Obama of being a “snob” for trying to expand access to education. Trump didn’t bother to make the case for retraining or education; he simply promised dispossessed blue-collar workers that their jobs in mills, factories, and especially coal mines were going to come back.

As simple as that.  Just ignore higher education.  After all, nothing good ever comes from that, right?  Further, colleges are nothing but full of those damn liberals and it is better to shut them all down!

I will borrow Paul Krugman's words to wrap up this post:

Republicans have changed in the age of Trump: what was already a strong strain of anti-intellectualism has become completely dominant. The notion that there was a golden age of conservative intellectuals is basically a myth. But there used to be at least some pretense of taking facts and hard thinking seriously. Now anyone pointing out awkward facts – immigrants haven’t brought a reign of terror, coal jobs can’t be brought back, Trump lost the popular vote – is the enemy. In fact, I’d argue that anti-intellectualism was, in its own way, as big a factor in the election as racism.
What this means for the future is grim. America basically invented the modern, educated society, leading the way on universal K-12 education, building the world’s finest and most comprehensive higher education system; this in turn was an important factor in how we became leader of the free world. Now a powerful political movement basically wants to make America ignorant again.

Sad!

Turns out that Republicans hate the free market!

Every trip to India is filled with reminders of many types on how different the economic landscape there is compared to everyday life here in the US.  Women eking out a living by selling flowers outside temples, for instance. While I marvel at their entrepreneurship and perseverance, their livelihood is a planet away from the kinds of economic and labor issues we are worried about here.

Thus, every trip I wonder why the American politicians--especially the demagogue who won with substantial support from mainstream Republicans--beat up on the "competition" from India.  Have any of these politicians ever been to India?  Have they ever tried to understand the everyday life of an average Indian?  Do these dirty rotten scoundrels even know--let alone understand--that more than half of the homes in India, and a larger percentage in the rural areas, lack toilets?  Toilets!  The demagogue with a golden toilet surely cannot understand that. But even his very sanctimonious supporters?

It is a shame, a disgrace, that the demagogue and his adopted party now are all out to gut international trade in order to "compete" against the likes of India?  While their focus is on China, a change in the way we think about trade is bound to affect more than merely the US-China relationship.  We have already seen the effects on Mexico, for instance.

A Morning Consult poll indicates that Republicans overwhelmingly feel the U.S. has suffered during the last two decades of globalization. As Vice President-elect Mike Pence put it: “[T]he free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing.”

Imagine that!  The Republicans have lost faith in the free market!  The same Republicans who complain that Democrats are socialists.  The same Republicans who cheered on the criticisms that Obama is a communist.  Dirty rotten Republicans!

And, oh, how was Pence until very recently?

Pence has consistently backed free trade deals over the past 15 years, and in 2014 he called for swift passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama trade deal that Trump repeatedly savaged on the campaign trail. On the campaign trail, Pence argued that he and Trump were both free traders.

The joke is not only on the Republicans, but on all of us.  Even the poor women selling flowers for livelihood outside the temples in India!

Back in the USSR

While liberals adored the hippie-life that Oregon represented, I was equally impressed with the state's Republican leaders that I had read about back in my California days.

There was the famous governor, Tom McCall--thanks to his concern for the environment, we have public access to the awesome beaches, and the first ever legislation that emphasized recycling.  Yep, a Republican.

Or, there was Senator Mark Hatfield, who often voted against his fellow Republicans, and whose principled policy positions might be considered to be dangerously left by today's GOP standards.  Yes, a Republican.

Now, Oregon has become a deep blue state.  It has been three decades since a Republican was voted into the governor's office.  For almost a decade now, both our US senators have been Democrats.  The statewide offices are almost always Democratic.  I worry that we are becoming a one-party state.

It is not that I have problems with our two senators--not at all.  In fact, I have often tweeted supporting their policy positions.  I have no problems with the governors either.  I am concerned that the lack of strong opposition is not always a good thing.  Maybe it is the logic of thesis and antithesis that drives my thinking.  But, hey, that is good enough grounds for being concerned.

Catherine Rampbell's column, therefore, resonates with me.  She writes there that the GOP's implosion, while a good thing as far as purging the crazies out of the party, can also be a bad development because we might not have the healthy debates that we need to have on various policy issues.

Right now a number of bad ideas booming on the left need a credible, coherent, megaphoned rebuttal. These are ideas that may sound nice and perhaps appear helpful. But pursuing many of them would be, at best, irrelevant and ineffective, a waste of time and resources; at worst, they would be actively harmful to the marginalized groups that bleeding-heart liberals claim to champion.
These are proposals such as bringing back Glass-Steagall, a banking law whose repeal actually had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis. Its resurrection is perplexingly popular on the left.
Or banning genetically modified organisms.
Or instituting a $15-an-hour minimum wage nationwide, even though that’s higher than the current median wage in four states and three territories.
Or free college for all, including rich people.
Or arbitrary tax carve-outs for items such as tampons (which constitute a giveaway to rich people, too, and ultimately require raising tax rates on everything else, which can disproportionately hurt poor people).  

You might think that none of these can easily happen at DC because even a weakened set of zombie Republicans at the Senate and the House will put up a good fight.  True.

Many of these ideas have little chance of making it into federal law, given current Capitol Hill dynamics. But inspired states and municipalities are going forward with some of them. Additionally, liberal firebrands such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have made clear their intention to pressure a President Clinton from the left when and where she would have policymaking power.

If only we had responsible politicians and a responsible citizenry, right?  But, that requires rational voters, and we simply ain't.

Campaign slogan for 2016: The Public Sucks!

Ah, politics!  I can describe it the way women have been joked about by men: you can't live with them, and you can't live without them!

Ouch, ouch, those rotten eggs that landed on my face stink like crazy ;)

Where was I?  Women?  No, no, I was talking about politics.

Today, yet again I am thinking that Obama is one damn good Republican president and I have no idea why the GOP is always upset with him.  Maybe it is because he is black?

Consider this.  Obama even came here to Oregon, to talk up the fast-tracking of the trade deal across the Pacific.  He even chose an appropriate Republican venue for it--the campus of the University of Oregon Nike, which liberals love to hate.  Guess what happened at the US Senate?  

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked consideration of giving President Obama power to accelerate a broad trade accord with Asia, a rebuke that the president helped bring on himself.

That's right.  The Democrats, with one exception, blocked it, and the Obama-hating Republicans voted to support him.

Isn't politics the best theatre that money can get!

It gets even more entertaining: Obama is pissed off at the Democrats.  Hehehe, fun times!

Mr. Obama has said Democrats have been spreading disinformation about the Pacific trade accord and the authority he is seeking, singling out Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for her role in opposing the accord.

The GOP's mood?

Republican leaders were pleased with the turn of events.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate Republican conference chairman, said Democrats were “throwing their own president under the bus.”

Ok, enough about that.  Let us move on to one more exhibit of how Obama is the best Republican president that the GOP can have, shall we?

Remember that old GOP slogan "drill baby, drill!"?  Republicans are almost always pissed off at the Democrats because of the opposition to drilling offshore or in the Arctic.

Obama being the best Republican president has, of course, approved drilling in the Arctic:

Mr. Obama — acting on his own, since these are all executive actions requiring nothing from Congress — has opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining. He’s still studying whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, though the country’s leading climate scientists have all told him it would be a disaster. And now he’s given Shell the green light, meaning that, as with Keystone, it will be up to the environmental movement to block the plan

Thus writes Bill McKibben, who "teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the founder of the global climate campaign 350.org."

You know what?  I take back that comment about comparing politics and women.  Because, politics is infinitely more entertaining than women are.

Ouch, ouch, ouch--stop pelting me with those lumps of coal, you crazy women! ;)

Even Democrats are taking on teachers and their unions? Good for them!

Reading this in the Economist reminded me of the election-time strike in Chicago by members of the teachers union there and had lost track of whatever happened after the strike; now, I know at least this much:

Some of the toughest decisions Mr Emanuel had to make in his first term concerned schools. He demanded merit pay for teachers and a longer school day (Chicago’s was only 5 hours 45 minutes) and earmarked for closure 50 half-empty schools in poor districts. Teachers went on strike for the first time in 25 years, but Mr Emanuel got the longer day and the closures went ahead in 2013. The teachers kept their seniority-based pay system.
Mr Emanuel ploughed some of the money saved by closures into charter schools, which made him even more unpopular with the teachers’ unions. But charter schools have worked well in Chicago.

 Emanuel was, if you recall, the aggressive White House Chief of Staff in the first couple of years of Obama's presidency.  Chicago pols are some tough people, I suppose.

But taking on that safe Democratic votes of teachers and unions?

It turns out that Emanuel is not the lone Democrat on this issue.  Consider the following that was directed at "a teacher union member who said he represents the students":

“You represent the teachers. Teacher salaries, teacher pensions, teacher tenure, teacher vacation rights. I respect that. But don’t say you represent the students.”

Ouch!  And that was not from Wisconsin's Scott Walker, but from, get this, Andrew Cuomo!  Yep, from that blue state of New York.   The son of Mario Cuomo.

And, he said more:

Cuomo referred to the teacher unions and the entrenched education establishment as an “industry” that is more interested in protecting the rights of its members than improving the system for the kids it is supposed to be serving.
“Somewhere along the way, I believe we flipped the purpose of this,” Cuomo said. “This was never a teacher employment program and this was never an industry to hire superintendents and teachers.
“This was a program to educate kids.” ...

Ouch!

You think that maybe, perhaps, even the Democrats are beginning to wonder if the teachers' unions have drifted far from their mission?  Even if you had doubts, all you had to do was read the opening lines in a powerful essay in the New Yorker a few years ago, in 2009:

In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent. The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.

Yep, that was the Rubber Room!

That same essay noted:

Leading Democrats often talk about the need to reform public education, but they almost never openly criticize the teachers’ unions, which are perhaps the Party’s most powerful support group.

And now it is happening. In Chicago. In the state of New York. And more.

As Reason observes:

The fact that this fiery anti-union tirade passed the lips of a blue state Democrat tells you everything you need to know about just how thoroughly teaches union have alienated many of their natural political allies. And this isn't merely some quirk of New York politics, as the same thing has happened on a local scale in numerous cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Democratic politicians everywhere are more willing to take on teachers unions than ever before.

I bet this will be some interesting political theatre. Get ready.

Liberalizing immigration will not lead to the Camp of the Saints

Russell Peters has a funny routine about the mixing of different groups and the coming "beige-ification" of the planet--that eventually we the global population will be a mix of Indian and Chinese genes with the rest, because these two populations account for a third of the world.

There is a serious demographic argument underlying that joke--the different rates of population growth across the geographic areas, especially across countries.  With Europe and Japan rapidly depopulating, whether or not to allow foreigners into the borders will take on a more urgent tone.  In relatively immigration-friendly countries like the US and the UK, it also means that we are at important crossroads where the tightening or relaxing of immigration policies could have long lasting economic implications.

In the absence of tight border controls against migration, people would move around a lot more than they do now because of the immense economic incentives:

An individual worker, however talented, cannot hope to replicate the fertile environment of a rich economy all on his own. But transplanting a worker into rich soil can supercharge his productivity. A Mexican worker earns more in the United States than in Mexico because he can produce more, thanks to the quality of US technology and institutions.

This is, after all, another way of presenting Warren Buffett's argument on winning the "ovarian lottery" and that he couldn't have produced all the wealth that he did if he had been born in some country that is much poorer than the US. 

What could happen in a hypothetical scenario where half of the developing world’s workforce moved to to the rich world?

If migration closes a quarter of the migrants’ productivity gap with the rich world, their average income would rise by $7,000. That would be enough to raise global output by 30%, or about $21 trillion. Other studies find even bigger effects. A 2007 paper by Paul Klein, now at Simon Fraser University, and Gustavo Ventura, now at Arizona State University, reckons that full labour mobility could raise global output by up to 122%. Such gains swamp the benefits of eliminating remaining barriers to trade, which amount to just 1.8-2.8% of GDP, reckons Mr Mukand.

Yes, a strictly theoretical argument it is, because there is no way that such a large-scale movement of people will ever be allowed, despite the healthy track record that we have about the successes: from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, the Persian Gulf countries, Singapore, ...

There is, of course, a gut-level economic opposition to an inflow of labor--from the worry that it will depress wages.  That it could lead to a Grapes of Wrath scenario of labor undercutting each other's wages as they search for productive employment. But, more often than not, our guts mislead us:

In a recent paper on western Europe Francesco D’Amuri of the Italian central bank and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis find that immigration encourages natives to take more complex work. Such “job upgrades” are responsible for a 0.6% increase in native wages for each doubling in immigrant labour-force share. Where immigration disadvantages subsets of the population, Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego reckons that charging an entry fee to migrants or their employers could help pay for training or benefits for those who lose out.

There is then the social opposition to immigration: people coming in from other cultures will mess up the "native" culture.  The controversial novel, The Camp of the Saints, captured this very well, though, when I read it a few years ago, there were many instances when I had to force myself to read through despite the atrocious attitudes towards the brown skin.  People might couch the same worries in more polite and politically-correct ways, but the non-economic reasons might perhaps be even weightier than the "they will take my jobs" argument.  It is considerably easier to present the logic and evidence on economic issues than it is to educate people to get rid of their biases against peoples of other cultures.  

As the GOP found out from the recently concluded elections, demographics is destiny.  It is yet another case of political contradictions: the Democrats will all their unions are stereotypically against more labor coming into the country, and yet they are the party overwhelmingly preferred by the non-Whites, including the immigrant population.  The GOP, which talks way more economic liberalization, is increasingly hostile to reforming immigration policies because of the worry deep down that immigrants and their children vote Democratic.

The rich countries have very little time left to figure out how they want to deal with immigration.  It is a demographic race against the clock. 

The White House of Horrors

Pretty good, from the NY Times :)

Cartoon of the day: US government

Why are Kristof and Friedman afraid of our messy democracy?

Of course, I yell and scream about how messed up the American democracy is.  But then I am not stupid enough to suggest that these democratic processes--the checks and balances, in particular--that we have are the worst form of democracy.

Yet, that is what both Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman do.  Friedman I can understand--over the last few years the guy has been wandering off on his own and sometimes I even wonder why the NY Times has him on the payroll.  Well, he is better than Maureen Dowd :)

But, et tu, Kristof? WTF!

In his column today, Kristof writes:

In my travels lately, I’ve been trying to explain to Libyans, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Chinese and others the benefits of a democratic system. But if Congressional Republicans actually shut down the government this weekend, they will be making a powerful argument for autocracy. Chinese television will be all over the story.

Hello?  This is one fantastic example of democracy in action.  I disagree with the stupidity of both the GOP and the Dems, but this is what representative democracy means.  In fact, I wish they had argued like this every time any President felt that penile urge to bomb the shit out of some country or the other. 

The more I think about it, Kristof can do us all a great service by showcasing this political show(down) as a classic example of representative democracy. 

The only consolation is that Kristof at least did not lead towards a conclusion that Friedman wrote a few months ago:

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Really, Mr. Friedman?  I can think a lot more worse things before I get anywhere near the messy system we have in place.  And that was not even the worst line; he added:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Look away and puke, dear reader.  Don't mess up your keyboard!

"Spend, spend, spend" say the Democans

Call them not Democrats or Republicans at Congress. Instead, refer to them as Democans.
When they talk about the budget without talking about the real big expenditures, I say that is a wonderful example of bipartisanship.

Neither one wants to talk about the mandatory spending, but that is where the real money is! (source for the graph, via)
So, what is in this mandatory spending that takes up nearly 60 percent of the budget?

If only the joke weren't on us voters!
And, of course, even within the Discretionary Spending, way too much agreement on the need to spend a gazillion billion on defense :(

I like how Ezra Klein sums up the situation:

Well, the business of the American government is insurance. Literally. If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

The State of the Union, in a cartoon :)

The President will address Congress and the country on January 25th.  Senator Mark Udall has pitched the idea of a bipartisan seating arrangement.
Cartoonists, take it away :)

Congressional Comedy: the reading of the Constitution

What a farce that was!  Political theatre--an expensive production that was a dud!!!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee :(

A chart compares the elephant and the donkey on tax cuts

Andy Borowitz had the best line in this context: "This tax cut bullshit wouldn't be happening if we had a Democrat in the White House."
The original post here. (ht)

The lame (duck) Congress

I was laughing all the way through this one :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lame Duck Congress - Jake Tapper
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

The sharperning red-blue divide

It is not only across the country, but within states as well.

A couple of years ago, Bill Bishop argued in his book, The Big Sort, that Americans seem to choose where to live based on their political beliefs.  (I would think that my own small neighborhood does not represent Bishop's view--we have everybody from the Tea Partiers to the peace-loving left.  Bishop's point does seem to be valid at larger geographic units.)  This election underscores that geographic clustering within states:
Exhibit 1, which is a letter in the local newspaper, on the election of the Democrat John Kitzhaber as governor:

Probably comes across as sour grapes, but Gov.-elect John Kitzhaber was not elected by the state of Oregon. He was elected by two ultraliberal counties, Lane and Multnomah. Lane, with the University of Oregon and The Register-Guard, and Multnomah County combined for 67.9 percent for Kitzhaber and 32.1 percent for Dudley. The other 34 counties voted 43.6 percent for Kitzhaber and 56.4 percent for Dudley. Doesn’t exactly come across as equal representation. Of the 36 counties, only seven voted in favor of Kitzhaber, and 29 counties were a sea of red for Dudley.

Exhibit 2, which is a short essay in the New York Review of Books, on the re-election of the Democrat Patty Murray as Washington's senator:

Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound. In Seattle, our very liberal Democrat congressman, Jim McDermott, is being returned to D.C. for his twelfth term with a majority (so far) of 82 percent of the vote, which is a tad down from his 2008 figure. In fact, most of western Washington’s Democratic candidates for the House (four successful, one unsuccessful, and one yet to be decided) defended the administration’s record in their campaigns. But when you drive eastward over the Interstate 90 bridge that crosses the long and skinny Lake Washington, to Bellevue and beyond, you enter Republican territory, whose redness steadily deepens over the next three hundred miles to the Idaho border.
The north-south line of “the mountains,” meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier. On November 2, all twenty counties east of the mountains voted for Dino Rossi, while Patty Murray’s support was concentrated in the urban settlements on Puget Sound.

Update: This letter in the newspaper from the state's capital reflects the view expressed in Exhibit 1:

As long as the "states" of Portland and Eugene have their say, there will be no such thing as a two-party state. They dictate what goes and what doesn't.