Majority for Bill of Rights

 The U.S. Bill of Rights is glorious and is supposed to protect us from majority rule. But the Founders did not know about social media and how it would incite populism. We now have populism of the right and the left. 

Populists do “reach across the aisle” to go after “big tech.” 

My wish in any election is for divided government.

We also hear that the TV debates are (should be) the occasion for the candidates to state their positions. Not even close. They simply launch tested one-liners that do more to obfuscate than inform. The goal is a “gotcha” line and a populist majority.

On the bright side, there will soon be an originalist majority on the Supreme Court, courtesy of the populist-in-chief.

Ironic, perhaps. But what better way to revive and fortify the Bill of Rights when we most need it?

Retrogression

Margaret Heffernan writes beautifully and wisely. "While we can never render complexity simple, we could embrace it as an adventure, calling us to investigate the infinite permutations of life that it contains. Surrendering agency, action and adventure for convenience is a miserable bargain. In the uncharted world, who is content to be left hugging the shore when we could use our freedom t explore." (p. 103) 

Markets are dynamic. Politics can be anti-dynamic. Rapid change upsets many. Following increased international migration, for example, politicized identity politics is incited. This undermines Enlightenment recognition of the worth and integrity of individuals. Rather than expanding, the circle of trust becomes smaller. Only the group starts to matter. Lost are the benefits of meritocracy. Pinker noted how misplaced identity politics can be: “Equality is not the claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.” Presuming that it is even possible to classify people by simple groupings it is dangerous as well as ignorant. It is ironic that, in the name of diversity, many applicants are now favored for positions in government, universities, and other elite institutions on the basis of their group identification.  More than ironic, it is perverse because the real diversity is among individuals, not groups.

Never simple

MLK's I Have Dream speech was beguiling in many ways. But I heard a Stokely Carmichael speech shortly thereafter and felt deflated. Didn't he get the word that it must be about content of your character rather than color of your skin? Fast forward and everywhere you look it is about the color of everyone's skin. How awful. And history cannot be simple. But seemingly educated adults can be tone-deaf and push the likes of the NYT 1619 Project (I will forego the link).

But here is a bright spot. Williamson Evers has compiled some reading lists to help those with blind spots in their education. Thank you, Mr. Evers! 

What could go wrong?

From Wikipedia: “Executive Order 10988 is a United States presidential executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy on January 17, 1962 that recognized the right of federal employees to collective bargaining. This executive order was a breakthrough for public sector workers, who were not protected under the 1935 Wagner Act.”

JFK thought this was smart politics. What could go wrong? Lots. Some of America’s big problems these days can be traced to under-performing big-city public schools and those big-city cops who fall short. What do these two have in common? They are not easily removed because their unions and the unions' political cronies protect them.

From the New Yorker: “The Rubber Room: The battle overNew York’s worst teachers”. These people are so awful that they cannot be left to tech. But they cannot be fired either. So they are warehoused in the “Temporary Reassignment Center” instead. NYC has more than one of these. Eric Hanushek has famously shown the harm done by bad teachers. But removing them is almost impossible in the big city unionized districts.

Walter Olson makes the same point re unionized big city police forces. The damage done by the few bad cops is well understood. But there is no rubber room. They are kept on the job, usually until they retire. The consequences are also well known and easily seen on various media platforms.

Presidential power and executive orders and cronyism have always been areas of concern. Executive Order 10988 and its effects are clear. I would not be surprised if the consequences of the two orders contribute to the same boiling point.

ADDED

AFSCME political efforts.

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Great conversation.

ADDED

https://lawliberty.org/complicating-our-crises/

ADDED

https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/nyc-pledged-to-ban-teacher-rubber-rooms-they-went-underground-instead/

Happy July 4

Tribalism is natural and often hideous. But over many years, it had been tamed – to some extent.

Every group has historical grievances. These are incited and nurtured by demagogues (mostly politicians) as a matter of course. They are even assisted by some who actually want to be seen as victims, very odd way to seek (and find) status.  Strange but apparently true.

Retrogressing, we get more tribalism. The consequences range from awful to catastrophic.

There is a new ingredient. Jonathan Haidt and Martin Gurri (and others) note that social media (especially “like” buttons and the re-tweet option) magnify the tendency to vilify and tribalize. We get more polarization, in politics, in media, in the arts.

Print media outlets have lost advertising revenue and pander for subscribers any way they can, including pushing tribalist themes. (NYT “1619 Project” and many more.)

Many elites have been cowed and/or displaced – with positive and negative consequences. Think about groupthink in schools and universities. Grievance studies. These elites lose credibility.

Can we right the ship? Various thinkers, including Haidt and Gurri and others, are pointing the way. 

Godspeed. Happy July 4.

ADDED

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlKPK7J206gIV0z2tBh0pHQp-EAAYASAAEgJnvvD_BwE

Not static

In the time of pandemic, changes that had been underway speed up. People adapt and change a little faster, technology adapts and changes faster, even the rules-of-the-game change and adapt. The three prompt each other.

Rules-of-the-game involves politics and is the most sluggish of the three. The first two are dynamic and involve trial-and-error learning. (There is always some path dependence.) The third corner of the triangle, institutional change, involves all the problems of public choice. Early pandemic CDC and FDA missteps are well known.

But all three changes tug on and constrain each other. Even the severest critics of markets should (perhaps) appreciate the speed at which tele-medicine, remote work, on-line teaching and meeting as well as new modes of shopping have developed and adapted in just weeks. Hotels, restaurants, airlines, are scrambling to find new ways to perform and earn trust. Where will they be in two more months -- and beyond?

If you thought that less than 50 years from the Wright Bros. to the moon landing was fast, don't even think about long-run forecasts and what futurists say. Peak oil and peak population never came. Long-run sustainability is a worry if the world is static. But one lesson from the last two months, for those who need reminding, is that it is not static.




ADDED Yes, there's an app for that. Many more to follow.

Common sense choices

Economists tell students and others that there are "needs" and "wants". And the distinction is subjective and personal for most people. "I need a drink." Likewise, who knows which are "essential services."?  Politicians, of all people?

The news have been full of examples of questionable calls by various politicians on this question. Daycare? Essential for many working parents. "Green" Teslas?  Essential for "Greens"?

The even tougher questions involve how and where and when.

"Fatal conceit" is a wonderful two-word gem. "Central planning is hard work" is too wordy. Both refer to the obvious fact that most knowledge is beyond the ken of politicians. This is one reason why we want to limit their powers. And why we rely on trial-and-error experimentation by people with "skin in the game" to figure things out.

Does the governor of California know what is essential for 40-million Californians? With the best of intentions, he cannot know. By now, he should know that not all individuals are equally at risk, not all environments are equally risky and that heavy doses of humility are in order.

My favorite local retailer has a special line for the over-60 folks.Fine. Perhaps require them to wear masks. Even take their temperature if you like. Let the over-60s and all others decide if they want to shop at such a place. My favorite grocers and my favorite restaurants have never given me food poisoning. They know their business.

The list goes on. Publish common-sense guidelines (even though they are well known) if you must. But rely more on common sense choices than what politicians prescribe.

CORRECTION

Body temperature not enough. Face masks and social distancing until we are past the crisis.

Covid 19 in Santa Monica and Sweden

Palisades Park in Santa Monica has long been my favorite weekend escape. Many others feel the same way. It is a pleasant place for walks, picnics, exercise and much more. Some weeks ago, the City authorities posted Closure signs that no one took seriously. People kept on enjoying and the cops patrolled with loudspeakers. That failed. Now, the whole thing is fenced off. Why? Keeping a safe distance in this place is easy.

Santa Monica's rulers are left-wing and presumably admirers of Swedish policies. But they could not be further apart. The Swedes seemingly rely on the good judgment of their citizens to be prudent in public. But that is not the way in Santa Monica. Seemingly, it is the good judgment of the City's leaders that is missing.




ADDED

Report from Sweden.

More on Sweden

Moving sand, Venice Beach

Outdoor transmission

Second image is a 5-minute walk from fenced off Ocean Ave. People are hard to control.

What do we know? What are we learning and re-learning? My top ten

   -- Black swans can happen anytime, anywhere.

2 -- Initial responses are inevitably confused. But trial-and-error learning happens and we do get better. The U.S. was horribly unprepared going into WWI and WWII but, once on track, American productivity stunned enemies as well as friends.

3 -- Policy makers are inevitably pressed to do something. They often flail and go off in wrong directions. Some of the errors have tragic consequences. Others just feed political cronies.

4 -- Scientists as well as investors are quickly mobilized and they do perform. There will be new and better treatments. Doomsday forecasts are almost inevitable but usually too pessimistic.

5 -- Philanthropy and generosity (by the wealthy and by the less wealthy) is widespread and a great blessing.

6 -- Prescriptions for more high-density living and greater use of public transit are once again seen as misbegotten. Romantics and many planners are seen (once again) as not informed by the wiser choices of real people.

7  -- Crises speed up change. All of us chose a blend of communications channels. The shift from eye-to-eye in-person contact to electronic has been going on for some time. It is always a matter of discovering whether there is a better blend for any of us. Technology changes and people change. Both evolve more or less in concert.

8 -- Just as exuberant post-WWII spending finally ended the Great Depression (not the New Deal, not war expenditures) there will be exuberant spending and shopping once the lock-down orders are lifted. This will help to blunt some of the economic doomsday forecasts.

9 -- Fewer people are interested in Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren “democratic socialism”.  Otherwise, all political bets are off. No one can know what silly things any political candidate can say or do at any time.

1 -- In times of crises, there is base behavior and also glorious and gracious behavior. My belief is that there is more of the latter.

Envy

The 10 richest men of all time

• Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable
• Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)
• Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
• Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
• Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
• John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
• Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
• Mir Osman Ali Khan ( 1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
• William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
• Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn

Source: Money.com, Celebrity Net Worth (found at Marginal Revolution).

Two of the all-time top ten are well known American capitalists. The other eight perhaps a bit unsavory. Note that inequality warriors presume that all wealth is a sure sign of bad behavior. This often works. Non-zerosum is subtle and envy runs deep and is exploited by politicians.

We know that Carnegie and Rockefeller did us much good -- just like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. But they are suspect nevertheless. "Robber Barons" is the unfortunate term routinely applied by those who think we live in a zero-sum world.

Innovators, on average, get about 4% of the wealth they create (Nordhaus). A better prepared Michael Bloomberg might have tried this approach. Would many in the audience and celeb interviewers have fainted?

The Economist reviews Thomas Piketty's latest and notes "... it is hard to to conclude that, deep down, Mr. Piketty believes the worth of a society is measured by its Gini coefficient." He and many others.

ADDED

Billionaires and super-billionaires.

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Because they can

I never took the Stanford Marshmallow test but presume that I am patient.  The current issue of The Economist notes that transportation in Los Angeles ought to involve more buses and less rail transit -- and also congestion pricing on the freeways. Finally.

Tom Rubin sent this:




It is hard to fathom the bizarreness of the situation but the graphic helps. While $20-$25 billion have been spent on rail transit in LA county since the mid-1980s, transit use is down -- while the area's population is up by over 1 million (many of them low-income immigrants). It boggles and it would be hard to engineer a worse outcome but our social engineers are at work.

It's about anti-car greenness and all of the silliness that the romantics conjure -- while in bed with those on the receiving end of all the billions.  Drive down LA's Wilshire Blvd right now and observe subway work in progress. Bootleggers and Baptists having a party.

Beyond LA, politicians from both U.S. parties borrow and spend because they can. There are no bond market signals that the world is tiring of ever more U.S. debt. Pres Trump just sent Congress a budget proposal. The only contest will be over who gets the most pork.

Arnold Kling recently posted that there are 13 countries in the world with populations over 100 million. He mentions that all except the U.S. and Japan are "very authoritarian, incompetent, or both."
Both of these countries' treasuries are heavily in debt. What Americans can hope for is to remain the tallest pygmy.

Be careful out there

Watching last night's State of the Union was not easy. With cameras on and the nation watching, preening and pandering were on full display.  That's our democracy (our politics). Some of the post-event talking heads, who were obliged to say something cited perennial stats about the low esteem/low approval that the public accords to "Congress."  But that's a silly view in light of the fact that these guys get re-elected at astoundingly high rates, mostly in the 90-percent range, always over 80-percent, year after year.

It's simple to reconcile the two points. People's view of Congress is almost irrelevant.  But people tend to like "their guy". Or he/she becomes their guy by "bringing home the bacon". After all, incumbents have to make it their business to know their constituents and also what buttons to push. It's a simple point. Consider the players, not the categories.

On a similar theme, a favorite political topic is "worsening" income inequality. But the bulk of the arguments made compare snapshots of different groups over time, not the progress of real people over time. Even better, what is inter- generational mobility? What are the odds that someone born at the bottom can move to the top? Where and when?

Data are great but a some judgment is always essential. Big Data alone cannot do the job.

ADDED

Here is a brief post about the anomaly of people who trust their government less but want it to do more.

The romance and the news

It's election season and we see sides of human nature that are not pretty. Seeking votes, candidates make promises they cannot keep. Voters chose to suspend disbelief. Many seek to be on a winning team.

Americans (and others) enjoy prosperity that is out of all proportion to the other-worldliness of their politics. Davies writes: "People alive today, even the poor, are the luckiest people in human history." This is in spite of what happens in their politics and government. The markets (and the culture that supports them) must be formidable. McCloskey spells it out.

We vote with our wallets, with our feet, with our voices, our ballots, etc. Problems of voting with ballots have been well studied via a considerable body of public choice analysis. Yet, this approach remains beyond "mainstream" economics because it undermines so many "market failure" analyses. How many scholarly papers have posited an implausible model of "perfect" markets, found that perfect ("nirvana economics") is unlikely and proposed a policy fix?

Public choice notes the limitations of voting. Intensities of preference are ignored. Rational ignorance is expected. Voter turnout is low. Interest groups have an advantage and often win. We get large deficits, large bureaucracies, large cronyism, etc. Buchanan famously told reporters that his contribution was all about "politics without romance." Yet, there remain many romantics who expect that voting aggregates and transmits preferences.

Briefly compare voting for President to shopping. You get one vote every four years. You transmit how many personal preferences? Vote or nor? Vote for D or for R? Contribute money or not? Contribute to D or to R? Contribute time or not? Contribute time to D or to R.  I see between one and six choice points.

But how many household shopping trips per week?  This site says about 1.6. How many items purchased per trip? Let's say 10. How many aspects of each purchase matter? Let's s say price and familiarity and quantity/size. Roughly, 2,500 decisions per household per year.  There are probably many more. We're pretty good when thinking fast so all this is easily manageable. Sellers know the story and are incentivized to make it simple and manageable and even appealing. Go to a state liquor store (if you state has them) and quickly see the contrast.

We have a much better chance of making our preferences known (and counted) in the market than in our democracy. Not everyone votes (for obvious reasons) but those who do, enjoy the romance. I get that. But I also see/read the news.