The Republican vice-presidential nominee made some remarks a few years ago about non-parents (“We are effectively run in this country . . . by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too . . . It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
As the linked news article points out, Harris has two stepchildren, Buttigieg has two adopted children, and Ocasio-Cortez is only 34, so Vance’s problem isn’t with non-parents so much as with people who do not have biological children at a suitably young age. Donald Trump had his first biological child at age 31 so I guess he’s ok.
Vance’s comments got some attention given the possibility that this sort of attitude, along with his views on abortion and some issues, could annoy some voters.
What they reminded me of was an episode a few years ago involving Niall Ferguson, the respected historian (I mean that in all seriousness) and bumbling political activist (I guess I’m serious about that too) at Stanford University. Back in 2013, Ferguson gave a speech at a conference of financial advisors, where he “explained that Keynes had [no chidren] because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated. . . . Ferguson . . . says it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an ‘effete’ member of society. . . .”
After it was pointed out to him that non-parents can still contribute in useful ways to society—a couple of famous examples from the political realm are George Washington and Jesus—, Ferguson took it all back, saying his remarks were “doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.” My conjecture is this had been a failed attempt by Ferguson at crowd-pleasing. I’m guessing that Vance will issue an apology at some point too, but who knows, maybe he’ll just move on, or maybe he’ll double down and give a major speech on how stepchildren and adopted children aren’t the real thing, and sure, George Washington and Jesus didn’t have any children either but things were different then. It’s hard for me to imagine Vance taking a hardline anti-George-Washington, anti-Jesus take, but I guess all things are possible.
This also all made me wonder what Ferguson thinks of Vance?
On one hand, Vance would seem like the sort of politician who Ferguson would love: an Ivy-educated economic and social conservative, a book author with interests and geopolitics, also with multiple children and a wife who is not a ballerina. Vance shares with Ferguson a concern about deindustrialization, cultural and political crises, the decline of western civilization, and so on. Vance is hard-line anti-abortion and Ferguson appears to hold some anti-abortion views as well.
On the other hand, Ferguson is a strong supporter of Ukraine and an opponent of Putin, whereas Vance takes the Trump line and has said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Also, Ferguson wrote, “I shall never condone Trump’s conduct on January 6 last year, when he incited violent attacks on the Capitol Building,” whereas Vance has promoted election denialism and has said that Mike Pence should not have certified the election results on that day.
So I could see Ferguson going either way on this, depending on the relative weights he puts on various issues such as economic policy, abortion, Ukraine, and certification of elections. From one perspective, it’s all about stopping the West’s long-term economic and moral decline, and the most important thing is that Vance supports lower taxes, less business regulation, restrictions on abortion, and policies to encourage more childbearing. From another perspective, it’s all about the immediate threats of foreign aggression and the loss of democracy at home, in which case Vance’s views on Ukraine and elections would be dealbreakers. It’s a tough call.
The other thing is that Vance is not running in a vacuum. Ferguson could well feel that Trump is so bad that, much as he (Ferguson) likes Vance as a person—they have similar feelings about the qualifications of childless people to make decisions about the future!—he can’t support his candidacy. Or Ferguson could well believe that Kamala Harris’s policies are so bad that he’d be supporting the Republican candidate in any case, just hoping that congressional Democrats will hold the line on Ukraine and elections. It’s completely reasonable to support political candidates while opposing some of their views, especially if you have some confidence that the other party can stop them from implementing policies that you oppose.
I guess the rough equivalent on the left is Paul Krugman, who must feel a twinge every time he endorses the Democratic party’s economic policies but can justify his support given that he thinks the other side is much worse.
P.S. OK, I was wrong in 2011 when I said I was writing my absolutely last Niall Ferguson post ever. The guy just provides too much material for me to quit: he’s right there at the intersection of politics and social science.
P.P.S. Since writing the above, I came across the news that Vance had endorsed an unhinged book by a promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory—no, not this one—, a book that also referred to political activists on the left as “unhuman” manipulators who “simply hate those who are good-looking and successful.”
Where does Ferguson stand on all this? On one hand, from his publicity photos Ferguson seems good-looking, he is successful both academically and financially, and he is a frequent flyer, a member of the global elite (not a criticism! I’m a member of the global elite too, at a much lower level) who seems to enjoy the company of other successful people.
In all seriousness, I think that Ferguson is kinda playing with fire.
Vance exists within some weird political bubble and I can only assume that he actually believes in the nonsensical Pizzagate conspiracy theory, actually believes that Biden lost the election in 2020 despite the lack of any evidence supporting that claim, actually believes that the January 6 insurrection was a false-flag operation, etc. Or, to put it more carefully, there’s no reason for Vance to care about the truth of such claims, as they are politically useful to him. Maybe he also believes that Pete Buttigieg’s kids are fake, kind of like the moon landing or whatever. If Vance’s beliefs don’t matter to him, if they exist only in service to his political views, this frees him up to believe anyone.
Ferguson, though, is in a more difficult position. As a professional historian, he cares about the truth. He’s been known to garble the facts from time to time, but, hey, he’s a busy guy, and he’s effectively just trading off accuracy for speed, in the same way that we learned about in typing class so many years ago. I don’t think Ferguson wants to make errors; I think he wants to write more articles and books (not a bad thing! He has ideas he wants to share with the world) and doesn’t want to slow that output by stopping to check for errors or correct them when they appear.
At first glance it might seem that, for a successful academic historian, the expense of checking for, acknowledging, and correcting errors is small compared to the reputational hit of making these high-profile mistakes. Ferguson could just hire a research assistant, some Stanford student who could check everything he writes and flag the mistaken statistics and erroneous claims. The real cost would not be paying the student, however. Rather, the real cost is that, if Ferguson was restricted to only stating true facts, it would reduce his flexibility in making the larger claims he wants to make. Being willing to stretch the truth—not by flat-out lying, I think, but rather by following a general practice of not checking his statistical and historical claims—gives him extra “researcher degrees of freedom” (in the words of the famous Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn paper) in his theorizing. Fact-checking would reduce Ferguson’s effectiveness as a theorist and as a big-picture historian by constraining the sorts of things he could say.
That all said, I’m pretty sure that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory would be a bridge too far for Ferguson, given that he has already stated his opposition to Trump’s behavior on January 6.
So I’m not really sure what Ferguson’s take would be on this book, which in some ways is directly aimed against people like him—“good-looking and successful” globetrotters—but which in other ways fits in well with his message about the decline of western civilization in a cloud of taxes, regulation, and abortion.
P.P.P.S. I did some more searching, and . . . Ferguson has tried to square the circle! In a column published just a few days ago, he wrote that Vance’s “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other” position is “not isolationist but realist.” Also Ferguson says should chill out about the whole Putin thing because Tucker Carlson is not going to be appointed secretary of defense.
And, as is often the case with Ferguson, he does not let facts get in the way of a good argument. Here he is on the Iraq War:
In the same way, there was a remarkable bipartisan consensus after the 9/11 attacks that military action needed to be taken against not only the government of Afghanistan but also the government of Iraq.
Only when things went wrong in Iraq did leading Democrats distance themselves from the neoconservative project.
I’d say that statement is half true. A quick google takes us to this page on the Iraq war vote in Congress in 2002: 60% of the Democrats in the House and 42% of the Democrats in the Senate opposed it. Joe Biden voted yes, but many leading Democrats voted no, including Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Paul Sarbanes, etc. I think the most accurate summary would be that the Democratic party was split on the issue.
In any case, Ferguson seems to have made his peace with Vance, I guess making the call that opposition to abortion and business regulation and a concern about the decline of the west, is more important than indifference to Ukraine and promotion of nutty conspiracy theories.
Fair enough. No candidate is perfect, and it makes sense that Ferguson went with the guy who shares his strong distaste for childless influencers like Keynes, George Washington, and Jesus.
I think referring to Fergusson as a “well respected” historian overstates things a little. “Pity of War” is, I think, still well respected. It was certainly interesting. As I understand, the counterpoint to his argument that Germany’s surrender was largely down to social forces is that by the closing of the war they were also effectively cut off from international credit markets and simply could not finance their war effort. That is a point I don’t recall him addressing. Still, the impact of social attitudes on the ability to continue was interesting. But he seems to have taken his success as an indication that he can write authoritatively on any subject. My understanding is that his book on colonialism is basically considered trash among actual historians of colonialism. I can say from own knowledge that his book on the history of money was pretty useless. Most of his popular writing just regurgitates conservative-ish economic talking points, e.g. “privatize all the things”. Also he has been totally fine dox-ing people who disagree with him.
“But [every academic] seems to have taken [theys] [momentary] success in [subatomic area of expertise] as an indication that [theys] can write authoritatively on [the future of the universe circa 2500 with absolute moral certainty].
Perhaps arguing over Keynes is a “zombie” by your parlance, but it really is the case that the Bloomsbury group placed philosophical importance on doing things for their own sake rather than as a means to an end, with procreation being an example of the latter. Keynes was an individual not wholly reducible to his membership in that group, and it’s quite likely that he believed different things as a young man vs later. I’m reminded of Willmoore Kendall on Socrates, noting that for all the people holding him up as a martyr today, nobody seems to take seriously what he actually believed and how those beliefs led to him voluntarily drinking hemlock rather than taking the option of exile.
As for Vance, I’m less sure he actually believes the things he’s saying because he wasn’t always a politician. He first rose to public prominence as a critic of Trump who took other positions very different from his current ones. I’ve heard he’s given explanations for how he changed his mind on such things, but if one modeled him as a person saying whatever he needed to for his political advancement, that would also seem to explain the same trajectory.
Has Ferguson written about abortion? I’m unaware of it.
Regarding Jesus, there is the argument (popularized by Gibbon) that he really did undermine Roman civilization. A childless radical indeed! On the other hand, Rodney Stark’s explanation for how Christians took over that civilization was their larger number of surviving children due to avoidance of infanticide (a topic that I don’t know Jesus ever discussed).
Wonks:
It’s hard for me to imagine either Ferguson or Vance taking a hardline anti-Jesus stand, but, who knows, maybe they’ll surprise me!
The infanticide bit is likely true to a degree, but “the reason” seems overstated. There were other factors, and something would have taken over: Rome’s state religion was in decline and lots of religions and new gods from outside Italy were having great success (Isis, Mithraism etc and in later days Manichaeism). Even what Julian “the Apostate” tried to “return” the Empire to was pretty much Neoplatonism or at least heavily Neoplatonic-influenced, not first-century-BC/AD standard polytheism.
(And so that rules out the Gibbon view too, I think: if the decline of the original Roman religion doomed it, it was doomed with or without Christianity. If anything Constantine and Theodosius gave it more of a lease on life, and its worth noting that the East kept going for another thousand years: “Byzantine Empire” is a post-facto term, they were “the Roman Empire” to themselves up till the end.)
Wonks –
I’m less sure he actually believes the things he’s saying because he wasn’t always a politician.
i agree. Vance’s position wasn’t that he thinks less of all childless adults. His target was specifically, childless adults that he disagrees with on political issues. For example, he’s political pals with Matt Gaetz, who has no children (although he does live with the young adult brother of an ex-girlfriend, apparently).
IOW, JD is just doing bog standard in-group/out-group signaling and hate-mongering for political gain and personal benefit. Attaching actual beliefs in such situations is precarious.
Niall Ferguson is a “my stuff is terrible but the other stuff is great!” historian. By that, I mean that the military historians say “his military history is terrible but his economic history is fascinating!” and the economic historians say “his economic history is terrible, but his military history is great!”
And so on.
Some of his early stuff was fine, but he rapidly became a British version of Victor Davis Hanson, writing not history but about his view of the current world gussied up with bits of the past.
And no, trading accuracy for speed is never acceptable for a historian. “They write a book a year” is not a compliment in historical circles.
Clifford Stoll: “The astronomers thought I wasn’t that great an astronomer but a great programmer, and the programmers thought I wasn’t a great programmer but a great astronomer.” A more modest take than A. J. Liebling on balancing different talents.
CSTOLL is a clown. I recall walking in on the end of his “The Internet is Useless” talk at the late/lamented CODY’S BOOKS after SILICON SNAKE OIL was published. At “question time”, I asked “You’re being hyperbolic for effect right? Surely there are *some* developments which are clearly a win?” The earlier questions were silly/obsequious/berkeley hippy type Qs. Appealing to what I hoped would be academically inclined audience members, I suggested, “Like say Online Library Catalogs?” … recalling the days when my father had to spend hours coping info off of Doe Library card catalogs index cards.
CSTOLL then went on to say “No, Card Catalogs were great!” … I vaguely remember he detoured into appreciating “the carpentry”, but mostly remember the audience starting to realize he was not a serious person and they were enjoying the “dunking”.
Yeah the most Brain Intensive work in the CUCK EGG story was executed by other people. CS probably did spend “the most calories”.
Vance has some chutzpah criticizing other people’s lifestyles when he himself has some serious couch-related rumors to address.
In defense of Vance and his views of family life, I offer the following two items. The first is by Kerstin Emhoff, the mother of Harris’ stepchildren, Cole and Ella Emhoff:
“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I.”
The second is by Ella Emhoff:
“On Thursday morning, Ella Emhoff chimed in as well: ‘How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I,’”
Of course, such language abuse might be genetic rather than environmental. And so ends my defense of Vance and his cat ladies idiocy.
“First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. ”
I imagine it is true that most people care about future generations whether they have children or not. But there is caring and there is caring. Before I had children, the well being of future generations did figure in my political beliefs and activities, at the intellectual level. But it took on a visceral character after I became a parent.
This became even more the case with age. I am now old enough that, from a purely personal perspective, I could be nearly indifferent about issues with a long term horizon, like climate change. I will surely be dead before the really terrible consequences arrive. But my views on it are very strong because they are explicitly influenced by contemplating my children living in that world. Though I will no longer be playing when the “payoff” arrives, I feel as if I “have skin in the game.”
I’m just an N of 1, of course, and I might be unusual in this regard, but I would be surprised if my experience isn’t common.
Altruistic behavior used to be a puzzle for evolutionary biologists, but then somebody named Hamilton came up with the notion of “inclusive fitness” back in the 60s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness). You care about the future of people who aren’t your children for the same reasons.
“Altruistic behavior used to be a puzzle for evolutionary biologists”
I think you will find that it was evolutionary psychologists who puzzled over this, and to this day it is psychologists talking to each other about things like inclusive fitness. These sorts of ideas don’t help biologists much, and all this stuff is still very much a puzzle.
In a recent thread, a commenter made a statement that psychologists would categorize as “naive group selection theorizing.” Now inclusive fitness theory pops up, which was supposedly the concept that rendered all group selection theorizing as unparsimonious.
But none of this is obviously right, and in particular if you study evolution in plants, all the stuff about selfish genes seems like chauvinism by animals (humans) studying animals. By that I mean that individual level selection is uniquely important in animals but not in plants, and so not likely to be a fundamental aspect of evolution. What is an individual plant? Each bud on a vascular plant can have a unique genome and reproduce that genome in its seeds. That means that Darwinism requires the buds to compete against each other. Sometimes they clearly do!
Monarch butterflies and some salamanders have toxic bodies but can only deliver the toxin by being eaten. This fits into kin selection, since relatives might be nearby. But some ocean plankton are also toxic, and if a baleen whale eats too much of them it gets sick. We casually assume that the toxin is an adaptation. Again the toxin does not benefit the individual, but it also doesn’t benefit the kin because they are likely to be nearby and eaten as well. It helps the competitors a mile away though! It’s not that kin selection looks wrong here, it’s just that it doesn’t explain anything.
The point once again is that this stuff is really messy, intelligent people can disagree about pretty much all of it, and no conclusive statements should be made about causation in evolution, especially the evolution of complex human behavior.
I was a student when Hamilton’s paper came out, so I’m pretty sure that biologists of the time thought it was good, and seems that they are still arguing: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31social.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3
But, yes, simple explanations of human behavior are silly.
Inclusive fitness depends on relatedness, with children being an obvious example. It actually explains WHY parents care so much about their children.
Kin selection depends on relatedness. It is my understanding that William Hamilton described inclusive fitness as the number of offspring that an individual rears, rescues or otherwise supports through its behaviour (regardless of who begets them). I think there is an assumption of community with shared genetics as well.
Maybe kin selection is a special case, when there is a close familial relationship, to the more general one of inclusive fitness.
You, John G. and William Hamilton are ALL correct: Parents love their children so very much because they rear them, care for them, and rejoice in the happiness and success of their progeny.
That’s right, the theory says that parents will care more about the future than people without children. It is also the experience of many people like Clyde above. Vance said this on Tucker Carlson, who might have said something similar himself.
Vance made his comment in July 2021, and Buttigieg adopted twins in Sept. 2021, so Vance was not making a statement about those twins.
The book that Vance blurbed is not on Pizzagate. Vance may not even know what Pizzagate is. Writing a blurb is certainly not an endorsement of every opinion the author has taken.
Roger:
Vance was making a statement about Buttigieg, who was in the process of adopting children. He made a similar statement about Harris, who had two stepchildren. George Washington and Jesus didn’t have any children at all. (Washington married a woman with children, but Washington does not seem to be described as their stepfather.)
Pizzagate is the thing that the author of that book is best known for. It’s not just an opinion that the author has taken. I agree with you, however, on the general point that prominent people often blurb books that are full of crap. This has come up on this blog. I think it was Dan Ariely’s recent book that had various blurbs from celebrity scientists. I don’t know what they were thinking.
This reply is for Roger and Andrew. (The comment nesting has become too deep to accommodate.) You were mentioning blurbs and J.D. Vance and credibility.
As an FYI, please note that the lurid episode referenced by Adede (on 26 July) in a prior comment is untrue. We on Twitter did a word search of ‘Hillbilly Elegy”. There is nothing regarding Vance, couch cushions, and a lewd act. People who should know better, e.g. a PhD psychologist who lives in Manhattan, have been spreading it around without verifying. You know it’s bad if references are being made by Gelman blog readers.
Vance refuses to apologize.
https://www.megynkelly.com/2024/07/26/jd-vance-reacts-to-childless-cat-ladies-comment/
Vance not only didn’t apologize about his childless cat ladies reference, he clarified that he has nothing against cats – so I gather than means he is against childless ladies. I looked at the Project 2025 document (harder to find than the media 2nd hand reports about it) and it does proposed ending Head Start. It is not against childcare – rather it clearly supports “in-home” childcare and policies that would enable that. Like so many things, it is not a simple for or against childcare, but a clear statement about what sort of childcare should be promoted. Project 2025, and I’ll add Vance as a kindred spirit to it, is a clear statement about what sort of Americans it seeks to support and which it does not. Just like what books should be available in libraries and which should not. Or what version of American history should be celebrated and what should not. Or what types of voters should be able to vote and who should not.
I believe both parties support childcare and families. The Democrats, either by design or confusion, don’t express any clear preference for what kind of families they favor. The Republicans seem to have a clear idea of what sort of families are “good” and which are “bad.” And Vance seems to share that clarity. MAGA indeed.
Dale, the current Project 2025 document is here: https://www.project2025.org/policy/
Older versions can be found on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/project2025.org
Vox summarized it a few weeks ago here: https://www.vox.com/politics/360318/project-2025-trump-policies-abortion-divorce
I read this series of questions about a guy who was accepted into the training program to create good little political appointee bureaucrats to replace the existing civil service https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1dt6wvf/i_was_accepted_into_the_project_2025_prospective/
The plan appears to be basically attempt to claim that all of the civil service jobs are under direct political control of the President, and so to kick everyone out and replace them with appointees from a big trained pool. Some of the training appears to include learning how to harass other employees and micromanage them until they quit just in case they can’t be fired. Once the FBI and the DEA and the HHS and the NIH and soforth are completely under the control of bureaucrats chosen by the Heritage foundation, they can just rewrite regulations as they see fit. It’s quite Machiavellian.
Roger:
Regarding Vance’s non-apology that you linked to: I’m thinking that Mito (see comment here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/26/niall-ferguson-and-j-d-vance/#comment-2376330) is on to something, that Vance and Ferguson are flailing around, looking for targets in their culture war. They can say various positive things about marriage and negative things about divorce, but they can’t set divorced people as a target, given that Trump is divorced (as is Ferguson). Going after gay people is tricky, given that most Americans have a close friend or family member who is gay, also Vance’s patron is gay. Going after non-parents is just weird, given the obvious examples of George Washington and Jesus, and it also led to the absurdity of Vance attacking two people as non-parents who actually had (non-biological) children. Vance’s interviews on the topic seem to indicate an essentialist take on the political world, whereby the people he disagrees with on policy issues (abortion, business regulation, taxes, etc.) have to be flawed in some personal sense too. In that way there’s a similarity to Ferguson’s sloppy attack on Keynes. It’s just one little thing, all politicians say stupid stuff all the time—it’s kind of their job—this one was just a little stupider than usual. I do think it’s rude that he didn’t apologize to Harris, Buttigieg, and Ocasio-Cortez, but I guess that politicians don’t apologize much either.
I wasn’t even referring to the cat lady comment! OMG y’all don’t even bother to listen to me or Adele.
Dale was right. I am a statistician but I don’t belong here. I’m sorry professor Gelman. I’ll stay away for good this time
Ellie:
Just because I don’t respond to a comment, that doesn’t mean I didn’t read it. For better worse (I guess mostly for worse), I think I’m more likely to respond to a comment that I disagree with. Your comments had nothing objectionable and nothing for me to reply to. That happens sometimes.
>“First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. ”
>
Alternatively, “people with children, care about their children” while those without may care more about “future generations”.
The evolutionary discussion is interesting. I’d be fascinated to see Vance’s use of this reasoning to argue that George Washington and Jesus, as childless leaders, did not care about the future. George and Jesus had no skin in the game!
NIall has moved on to debating how close the US today is to the Soviet Union of the 70s-80s.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-we-living-in-late-soviet-america-niall-ferguson/id1570872415?i=1000661884508
And that debate engendered a reply from Kevin Williamson including the following quote:
I do not doubt for one minute that Sir Niall Ferguson knows “ordinary Americans” at least as well as the next Oxford-educated gentleman from Glasgow does, having no doubt encountered oodles of them as a Harvard professor or at the London School of Economics or loitering around the Hoover Institution, Stanford being famously thick with specimens of the ordinary. But it never seems to have occurred to him to consider the possibility that, whatever “ordinary Americans” say about the state of the world, there exists the possibility—however remote!—that those “ordinary Americans” are wrong.
https://thedispatch.com/article/ordinary-americans-can-be-wrong-too/
The thing that gets me is how much Economists seem willing to go the route of “ordinary Americans are wrong” because statistics.
Of course in almost all cases those statistics are means, maybe a few medians. Most economic measures are non-negative (income, educational attainment, number of children, amount of liesure goods and services consumed) and massively right skewed (top 0.1% of income is like 10x median, top 0.01% might be 1000x?)
Something like 38% of the US has no earned income… Zero. Because they are not in the labor force. Median household net worth is something like the same value as the price of a 10 yr old used car.
But people obviously don’t know what’s going on in their personal lives, because look, GDP/capita and unemployment rate and whatever.
Ordinary people can be wrong about a lot of things, but they tend to have a few pretty hard and strong indicators of their own economic conditions… Bank account balances, loan balances, paychecks and monthly bills. We should generally start from a position if believing them if they say they’re struggling.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the vibeflation articles were all bald faced attempts to properly up Biden. I assume now that Harris appears to be running they will go away and be replaced by discussions of all the ways she proposes to address middle class struggles… Fortunately the media will have no shortage of economists willing to support this 180 on the vibecession.
Thanks autocorrect… that’d be “start from a position *of* believing them” and “prop up Biden”
Lots of ordinary Americans have vast experience living in the Soviet Union so they can compare their lives to that of ordinary Soviets, do they?
Oh, and median US net worth, per the ACS, is about 70k which is quite a nice 10 year old used car.
1+ Great post!
Total…
Somewhere in there while writing on my phone I managed to drop the word Black… Median Black family net worth was about the price of a used car last I looked, something along the lines of $6k ish
I’m not really replying to the debate about Soviet Union per se, more the idea of whether individuals actually understand their own economic conditions, a question that has been in the news for months now regarding “vibecession” or “vibeflation”
Excellent post, Daniel. It is very easy for those who are wealthy enough not to be inconvenienced by much higher food, fuel, and housing prices to say that working class Americans are just imagining their worsening economic conditions. That’s the vibecession / vibeflation and you did an excellent job of describing the phenomena.
I don’t know much about Niall Ferguson (he seems compassionate) but I DO know about Kevin Williamson. He’s the notorious writer at National Review who wrote this, about ordinary working-class Americans:
“If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”
Very nice man, eh? Poor communities deserve to die, and so does Edmund Burke. Sheesh. Williamson wrote that in March 2016. I’m not surprised that he still thinks “ordinary Americans” are wrong. He’s the one who is wrong.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016/03/28/father-f-hrer/
Thanks again for your thoughtful comment.
Ellie,
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. Sometimes I feel I’m shouting into the void a bit. Anyway, I know nothing about Williamson, and my general desire is to steel man people’s arguments, so maybe he means that lower economic class white america needs to do something about a backwards looking imaginary “good old days” they’re waiting to have return. If we take that kindest of interpretations, then I can agree with him. But people in the depths of poverty don’t often make it out of that poverty without a system that makes getting out of poverty accessible. We don’t have that system. And my impression is that there’s kind of no-one in American politics who really cares. Take Billionaire dollars from Koch in the GOP, Billionaire dollars from Bloomberg in the Democratic party… and as long as the money flows life is good for the top 600,000 people in the US or so and that’s all that matters.
Born in the USA wasn’t “cheap theatrical crap” it was a *protest song*. It still resonates today. When my sister worked at the VA doing psychiatric care, she said there was absolutely a flood of retirees who had been workaholics their whole lives, doing 12 hour days running a construction business or whatever, so that they never had to think about their friend Jim who stepped on a landmine and was blown into a thousand pieces in front of them in Vietnam in 1968 when they were 19. When they finally retired and didn’t have all that stuff to keep them from thinking about it they had a massive breakdown from the PTSD. OVER, and OVER, and OVER this happened.
That’s not some pull yourselves up by your bootstraps baloney. Maybe those guys children are the ones in trouble in Williamson’s home town, because they grew up with a father with severe PTSD who was never home because if he was working he just didn’t have to think about picking up the pieces of his best friend Jim to put in a box. And maybe that guys son grew up and wanted to be like dad, and signed up after 9/11 to be shipped off to Iraq where his best friend went off on patrol and drove over an improvised explosive device. And then he came back and expected maybe he could get into construction and work 12 hour days so he didn’t have to think about his best friend just like dad did but the construction dried up and the pain from the shrapnel wounds in his legs was a lot, and the Sackler family had a drug they paid tens of billions in marketing to lie to doctors that even though it was basically heroin in a pill it wasn’t actually addictive and you could prescribe them like candy.
We can have zero empathy, or we can realize that a lot of people have been the victims of a lot of bad decisions they didn’t really have much choice about, because those 600,000 elites were the ones in charge of the draft, and of the propaganda machine, and of the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction and the lies about how The Fed is there to keep inflation under control and how if we just drop the rates one more time and pump up the housing one more time bro, just one more time bro…
Ellie, Daniel
I can offer a little bit of perspective based on the places I’ve lived and spent meaningful time, which includes a lot of time in rural central Florida. The pattern here is a lot of ‘boom’ towns that once had a singular industry (e.g. sugarcane pre-mechanization, phosphate mining, etc), or were located on the old highway systems (pre Interstate) and thus had tourist attractions. Some of them still have some version of their economic driver, but the median town is in terminal decline, and has been so visibly for decades. You would think that this situation would leave people looking around and blaming obvious problems/enemies for the “state of things”.
But, there’s a countervailing social dynamic, without which it is impossible to understand most of mid-sized, small town and rural America IMHO. Some people have done quite well, a class of folks Patrick Wyman inimitably called the “American Gentry” (link below). In more agricultural areas, these are folks whose families survived, and *thrived*, in the process of replacing tenant/sharecroppers with mechanization, and during the explicit policy-driven era of upscaling, consolidation and specialization. They now own many 1000s or 10s of 1000s of acres of land, all of which land value has, on average, since the 1970s, outpaced the Nasdaq in speculative return. Farmland prices now have little to nothing to do with profit potential or whatever. In fact, farming is in some places not even taken very seriously *because it’s chief economic value is receiving a tax exemption on a valuable asset*, which amounts to privatizing the ground rent.
These people are not billionaires, they are not coastal elites, but they are rich compared to even those of us in elite labor occupations. Like 10s of millions rich. Members of the family branch out and run the local construction firm, sit on the Chamber of Commerce, populate boards of County Commissioners and Education, etc. The status quo basically works for them.
I live right next to one such family, whose land ownership essentially occupies the entire border between two counties and is distributed across a network of family members and LLCs. They also own a large construction firm coincidentally :)
Until we take seriously Henry George’s observations and insights into the relation between development, rising land values + ground rents, and the resulting drag on both capital and labor, I don’t see a way to efficiently revitalize any of these areas. We also need to understand the social class dynamics that operate, in microcosm, in these communities, and recognize the aggregate power of the ‘American Gentry’ (or the ‘Landed Gentry’) is quite large!
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-gentry
Daniel –
Speaking of JD Vance, and knowing something of your views about economic policy, you might find this interview with one of the architects of policies that Vance supports might be of interest to you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-oren-cass.html?showTranscript=1
It actually made me feel somewhat less pessimistic about a Vance vice-presidency.
And interesting aspect of all of this, is that Vance is effectively arguing for a child tax credit. What’s interesting about that is that in Republicans have in general been in opposition to child tax credits.
“ Somewhere in there while writing on my phone I managed to drop the word Black… Median Black family net worth was about the price of a used car last I looked, something along the lines of $6k ish”
Got it, so the short version of this is “no need to take me seriously.” Makes it easier, thanks.
Daniel,
As Krugman has pointed out ad nauseam, most Americans do _not_ think their personal circumstances have gotten worse. They say, approximately, “My family is doing fine, but the economy sucks for everyone else.”
Take a look at the Federal Reserve’s report “Economic Well-Being of US Households”, May 2024, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2023-report-economic-well-being-us-households-202405.pdf#page=16
The fraction of people saying their own financial well-being is “at least OK” was 72%, just three percentage points down from pre-pandemic; the fraction saying their local economy is “good or excellent” is 42%, down from 63%%; and the fraction saying the national economy is “good or excellent” is only 22%, down from 50% pre-pandemic.
I generally agree with you (Daniel) that we should take people at their word about their own financial circumstances. But I don’t agree that we should take people at their word about the state of _other_ people’s financial circumstances. (I’m not sure whether you would take issue with that statement or not). To the extent that the numbers are incompatible — as they are in this case — I don’t think it makes sense to trust people’s view of the national economy while disbelieving their views of their personal situation. The contrary, in fact.
Phil, good data, very interesting. My only question is, like all polls today, is it problematically biased? Because I’m guessing the guys leaving the heroin needles aren’t answering the phones. I’m guessing all the guys in the streets in Portland living under the bridges that my sister treats for psych issues aren’t answering the polls. I’m guessing the guys in busted up 1974 campers parked on the side of the road in Pacoima aren’t answering the polls. I’m also a bit worried about the skyrocketing credit card debt, and the fact that young adults living at home trended strongly up for two decades
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/rate-of-young-adults-living-at-home/
It’s a pretty common issue right now that parents with children are moving into their parents houses to form multigenerational households. I personally am a fan, but most people doing it are stressed about it and doing it so that they can say they’re doing ok right now… Because they weren’t before.
So, for those people doing ok, are they doing ok because they’ve come up with coping strategies for our massive systemic failures, or are they doing ok because they’re thriving?
I don’t see how we can square doing broadly ok with the highest suicide rates ever in the US
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
So, I’m still on board with trusting people when they say how they’re doing, but I’m skeptical of polls ability to get at a broad enough segment of the US due to massive technology shifts. (You can’t get me on the phone unless you’re in my phone book or you email me first for example). And I’m skeptical of any poll that asks how people are doing today as opposed to how things trended over 5-10 years type timespans.
Still, it’s valuable data.
Phil,
I mentioned trusting trends more than current state, and then I looked through the linked PDF, and sure enough there’s a question about how well off people are relative to 12 months earlier, and people have definitely strongly trended towards more and more who were worse off compared to 12 months earlier ever since 2019.
This is interesting in part because it compares whoever answered the polls to themselves earlier, and in doing so it helps deal with the bias in reachability.
So people saying they’re personally ok at the moment, but they’re not as ok as they were a year ago. And more and more of them are not as ok as a year ago… In other words, the economy is getting worse but they haven’t hit a strong pain point yet is how I read that.
Meanwhile they’re loading up on credit card debt.
Daniel
Agreed about the examples you give of probably non-respondents. However, I doubt that the tech billionaire is responding to the polls, or that the middle class boat owner who is at the lake every weekend is responding, or …. In other words, there are selection problems at both ends of the income spectrum. I reserve opinion on the direction or magnitude of the bias that results.
I also have some doubts about taking “people at the word about their own financial circumstances.” I am not confident that they can estimate with any precision the degree to which their food budget has increased in the last few years, or the size of their own retirement accounts. My “evidence” to the contrary is the prevalence of marketing aimed at inducing people to purchase durable on credit with promises such as “0 interest for 2 years” and other assorted misleading and inaccurate practices. I detest these practices but I’m willing to believe that they have some evidence to support their use. It doesn’t speak well to people understanding their own circumstances. Back when cellphone plans had limited number of minutes, estimates were that 90%+ of people subscribed to plans that had far more minutes (with prices to match) than their usage could justify. There is a considerable literature on these choices (some of which I contributed to), attempting to explain why people might do such things (over-subscribing to usage based plans). While there are a number of factors, one is that they misunderstand their own usage patterns. Not exactly the same thing as understanding their financial circumstances, but I think with some common elements. I have little faith in most people’s ability to accurately understand such things.
Dale, you’ve made some good points. In particular, probably upper middle class and middle class people don’t have as tight a view of how well they’re doing compared to the people who look at their checking account balance daily to figure out if they can buy food or have to wait until next week.
Also, people may not have a good view on their credit card balances trending upwards if the monthly payment stays kind of constant.
So it’s entirely plausible that the upper middle class and solid middle class could be doing better or worse and not exactly know it. For example if your checking account balance is $25000 and fluctuates $10k each month as bills go through, but is overall trending up about $1500 a year, and it starts trending up only $1000 a year you might not notice… it’s still going up, you’re not measuring things super precisely and there’s a lot of noise.
So yes, I’d guess it’s more the poorer segment of society that checks their balance often and stretches their paycheck that has the strongest feedback. I admit that’s the population I was thinking of when I imagined people knowing how well they’re doing.
Since I get into moderation for dropping links, I might as well drop a few all at once:
Credit card debt level as fraction of Median Income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIxa
Mortgage debt level as fraction of Median Income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIwW
Median house listing price per square foot times 1500 sqft as fraction of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIxv
Median house sale price as fraction of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIxU
Personal consumption of healthcare as fraction of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIyx
Personal consumption of education services as fraction of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIyN
Personal consumption of higher education specifically as fraction of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qIyZ
I’m not too interested in 2 or 3 year trends, what worries me is 5-10 year or more… and a lot of these expenditures are pretty near their all time high in dimensionless terms (the only terms that matter).
Daniel
There is surely more work to be done – that should be done. But I’m not sure how the awareness of financial circumstances varies by income. Certainly, the poorer you are, the more aware you are of your circumstances. But that does not mean you accurately assess them, only that you feel the pain. I haven’t done an extensive search, but I did find this interesting data about credit card debt in relation to income: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/may/which-us-households-have-credit-card-debt. Every time I’ve seen data like this, I am struck by how many households continue to carry a balance on their credit cards despite the extraordinarily high interest rates. It appears to cover a wide swath of the income distribution. And, as a proportion of income, it seems particularly high at the lowest end of that distribution. I’ll admit that after graduate school I carried credit card debt for a couple of years before I was able to get myself out of it. But it is clearly an indication of poor financial decision making – not just an example of lack of income. Similarly, all those offers for large durables that say 0% interest for x years, and invitations to purchase things that people cannot afford. If behavioral economics has any important contribution to the discipline, it is surely in these areas where people make choices that are not in their own best interest. Isn’t that a form of not accurately assessing their financial circumstances?
Yeah. Common American debt/credit behavior makes it very plausible for many middle class to upper middle class people not to really see it.
Also, I don’t think vs last year is the real point *politically* right now; vs 2019 pre-COVID is the point.
Confused,
The survey evidently asks relative to 12 months ago. But the trend line in this graph suggests that more and more people think they’re worse off relative to 12 months ago ever since 2019. Now, if they’re correct, then this indicates more and more people experiencing a downward movement. One way that could happen is if those who experience it earlier also experience it later… The downward trend over 12 months repeated for more than just the most recent 12 months period.
In general, it’s my belief that the US has been on a overall downward trajectory for availability of goods and services essential to comfortable modern living for 20+ years, and most people are in the cooking the frog situation so they’re not quite realizing how bad it is.
Specifically, housing, healthcare, childcare, higher education, food quality, entertainment (ownership of copyrighted materials) have all gotten more expensive relative to income.
Most people recognize there are some issues here, but it’s not widely recognized that we’ve moved backwards, because naively we’ve consumed more quantity of a lot of these things or substituted for them.
More and more people are going to college for example but the quality of that education has deteriorated (many places teach via adjuncts making hardscrabble wages, many students are unmotivated and learn very little by graduation relative to students in say 1990s and early 2000s). Childcare prices have gone up, but childbearing has gone down. Food prices are up, and also because more and more people are working long hours they rely on poorer quality premade foods. Housing availability is way down per capita after a homebuilding bust in 2008-9 and there’s a more and more trend to multigenerational households. The fact that the US pays more for healthcare and gets much lower life expectancy which has trended downwards is well documented. Chronic illness is also at least not declining, and as far as I know increasing (type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, chronic pain, chronic allergies, sinusitis etc)
If we step away from financial questions, which are made much more tricky by monetary manipulation, and just look at how many people consume how much of what quality of housing, childcare, healthcare, primary and secondary school education, higher Ed, committed relationships, marriage, quality food at home, quality home furnishings and appliances and soforth, my impression is that shits been getting worse for decades coinciding more or less with fallout from dot com and 9/11 where we went off the rails both in financial terms, and in allocation of resources to war and consuming people’s lives leading to suicide rates increases, declines in birthrates, opioid epidemics, etc.
That’s how Trump got elected in the first place, the least economically stable people were feeling that already pretty strongly in 2015.
Trump doesn’t offer us any really path forward but his election was a refutation of the idea that 1995-2015 was some kind of rising tide lifting all boats sort of thing.
Yeah. I think I agree with you on the situation but not entirely on the cause. I’m not at all sure it is all that heavily about policy. One frequently missed point is the rising “Baseline to function in society” which inflation doesn’t capture – in 1995 most households did not have an Internet bill, you could just have a landline rather than a smartphone for every individual, etc. The more suburban sprawl lengthens commutes, the more gas has to be bought (and car maintenance also increases… and modern cars are a lot more high tech thus harder to fix at home…)
It would be hard for policy to change these drivers, IMO.
Tech also may partly explain the recent history of close elections: with instant communication and many media channels (vs a few which tried to keep a center) its easy to see how you are doing and adjust*, and hard to change your platform in different regions.
*Without modern polling, would Biden still be the D candidate?
Confused:
Here are some ways that I believe that policy has made things worse:
1) Tax advantaging internet companies. Remember when sales taxes on internet sales weren’t a thing? That was one of the first factors towards consolidation of industries.
2) FTC/antitrust non-enforcement. Long history of allowing mergers and acquisitions causing oligopolies in many industries.
3) Deficit spending on wars moving production factors away from goods individuals want and towards goods the govt wanted.
4) Anti-Union type policies. Though I’m no big fan of unions, to the extent they might have caused median type households to retain more of productivity they didn’t in the policy situation of 2000-2020.
5) Strengthening “intellectual property” type laws. The reason you rent everything (music, movies, even your iPhone really belongs to Apple since it chooses what apps can be installed) is because the law says these big companies get to run the show. This makes a number of things more expensive through time. Or, it lets large businesses capture more of the efficiencies created by digital entertainment.
6) Fed policy related to providing liquidity after dot-com crash => housing crisis, then providing extreme liquidity after housing crisis => internet company bubble and zombie companies and driving increase of stock prices, increasing inequality, lower fraction of total wealth held by households.
7) Patent law, govt investment in Pharma, poor handling of the opioid situation, high drug prices, generic drugs being “re-patented” for alternative combo uses, etc.
8) SPACs and Private Equity firms consolidating smaller businesses run by boomer generation people into short-term profit extraction and “bust out” schemes that dismember physical capital in favor of , driven by cheap money associated with quantitative easing and such.
9) NSA and CIA involvement in the “surveillance capitalism” schemes. The NSA funded Google in the early days for surveillance purposes, and now purchases their “commercial data” instead of spying directly on people in the US. But in the process, pricing schemes have become more personalized and less consumer surplus is available as everyone uses “surge pricing” or personalized pricing online after heavy surveillance etc.
Just a few things that have gone on in 25 years or so that have shifted vastly more economic power to large business owners and away from everyday consumers.
was supposed to say “in favor of … short term financial gain by the private equity firms”
Oh, I agree with a lot of that (especially re IP laws). I guess I’m not sure enough of your exact position to know if we really disagree: my view though is that while certain policies are clearly making things worse, policy is not the primary driver of these problems, it’s secondary, so policy solutions to these problems will not achieve what their proponents want. Mitigate the problems somewhat yes, fix or reverse them no: and the effect of policy may not even be sufficient for the average citizen to notice (statistically significant doesn’t mean casually noticeable).
I don’t pay much attention to Niall Ferguson; if I were not a big follower of this site, I’d probably not think of him at all. As far as social and political issues, we should quiz Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock since they both were prominently featured at the Republican convention. I do think that Mr. Trump is an interesting example of conventional family values.
One could also say that people who have children shouldn’t vote: they don’t care about improving society, they care about improving their children’s situation at the expense of everyone else.
There are and have been claims that old people shouldn’t vote, or that young people shouldn’t vote, or that women shouldn’t vote, or that voting should be restricted to college graduates or landowners, or that we should weight more the vote of those who have children or own slaves…
So many variations on the “if only everyone voted like me, wouldn’t that be nice” theme.
JD Vance has indeed argued that parents should be able to cast ballots for their kids, which goes in the same direction as people without children not getting to vote.
Not a big fan of voting for candidates chosen by elites (I’ve already mentioned my preferred random selection of a batch of people who vote on issues and select executives from their pool).
But if we’re going to vote, why is it that we don’t give people under 18 **ANY** representation? For example, allow the parents to each get a half-weight vote for each of their children. Seems stupid that people today can choose policies that affect children but those children or a representative for them have zero say.
“at the expensive of everyone else”? Are you unfamiliar with positive-sum interactions? Robert Wright wrote a book about them. Our civilization is based on them as well.
Here is my alternate proposal for voting: use sortition, randomly selecting a small jury of voters. With larger individual impact, each will put more effort into understanding their choice and doing a good job. There’s no requirement that anyone vote “like me”, although I suppose as an individual (a set of size 1), I am closer to a small jury than an entire electorate.
“For example, allow the parents to each get a half-weight vote for each of their children”
Then you’re still not giving the child any representation, you’re just adding to the parent’s power.
Clearly a 3 month old doesn’t have any ability to represent themselves… but still they have interests which the parents might recognize and represent by proxy. As they get older, the parent could explain topics to the child and vote relative to the child’s preferences. There’s nothing perfect, but perfectly zero representation (the current system) seems worse than imperfect partial proxy representation.
Indeed, when the US was founded most people couldn’t vote, but it was still regarded as “representation” for each colony to have representatives it elected. The electoral college is based on the total population, not the population of registered voters (or even eligible ones).
So, yes, you’re conceding the point but hoping the parent manages to handle the responsibility. Uh huh.
How about this: one person, one vote. We can argue when you’re old enough to come into that but how about keeping it simple and straightforward. One person, one vote.
One person one vote would be if we gave children a proxy vote through their parents. One person over 18 one vote is currently the same as one person 0.78 votes currently on average.
I’ve already said I don’t like voting for candidates chosen by elites through party shenanigans so … I’d rather we fix that than the under 18 thing. But I do think there’s plenty of reason to question the idea that 22% of the country just “doesn’t count”.
No, it would not. The child is not voting. The parent is voting twice.
This is entirely impractical.
As just one of many examples – what about the if the parents of four kids are divorced? Does each get two extra votes? Suppose they have 3 kids, does each parent get 1.5 votes (and you chop the kid in half)? What if a single parent of six kids is imprisoned for a mass shooting. Can they still get 7 votes? I’m a member of a (step)grandparent caregiver dyad for a 7 year-old who’s parents aren’t suitable to be primary caregivers. I assume since my partner is the blood-related grandparent she gets the extra vote? What if she predeceases me – do I get Chloe’s vote? Does it transfer back to the parents that aren’t actually capable of providing sufficient care for her? What about kids in foster care? How about orphaned kids? Are they worthy of less representation and their fellow kids who’s parents are alive? Does the owner of an orphanage with 50 kids living there get 50 votes?
No system is perfect. Appealing to the imperfection of any given system doesn’t justify. handwaving at some theoretically better system.
Heh – started out as one example but grew quickly as I thought about it more.
You create “kid ballots” say colored differently, and every legal parent gets one kid ballot for each kid they’re a legal parent of. The kid ballots count for 1/2 weight. Further imperfections are probably in the 1-10% of already 22% of the population, so are at most a 2% kind of error rather than a 22% kind of error.
I don’t see this as impractical at all, totally easy.
Daniel –
It’s not ONLY impractical from a statistical standpoint. It’s impractical for a rationale standpoint.
Why does a kid who’s orphaned not have a proxy representative for their vote. I I take care of 5 kids after a divorce, why does my ex-spouse get 2.5 proxy votes? Suppose I had a kid with a girlfriend and then abandoned them after 5 years of abusing them both. Do I get vote?
for each kid they’re a legal parent of.
I assume there you might mean legal guardian of? Again, similar absurd conditions could come into play.
Further imperfections are probably in the 1-10% of already 22% of the population, so are at most a 2% kind of error rather than a 22% kind of error.
Again, it’s not merely a matter of logistics. It’s a matter of equity, just as equity is an issue in the current system. Switching over to your proposed system doesn’t eliminate the equity problems.
Of course, the 3/5ths compromise was once viewed ethical and we shouldn’t just flat reject adapting our ethics. But I don’t see any structure for dealing with only the small number of problems I described. What you’re talking about at the very base is assigning different power to people currently voting on the basis of merely whether they had children.
Sorry, but I can’t see this is as a serious idea.
Regardless, while I get you’re serious about it, I’m almost certain that for Vance it’s nothing other than a politically expedient gambit. There’s no way this would be implemented under our current system of government policy decision making.
Sorry – that was supposed to be “not only impractical from logistical standpoint. It’s impractical from a rationale standpoint.”
I’m only serious about it as something that should be considered, I’m neither convinced for it or against it. I just don’t think it should be rejected outright the idea that *if we’re going to vote* (which I’m quite serious we shouldn’t and the entirety of the governing body should be chosen at random around N=1000 and then self-organized by score-voting within that body) but if we are going to have popular votes, we should consider strongly whether people under 18 should have some power there.
Joshua, remember that Daniel should not be taken seriously at any point.
Total –
Sorry, but that was a cheap shot. I think Daniel offers useful comments, even when I don’t agree with them.
Daniel –
I’ve got no problem with considering it, but considering it should contend with the likely barriers, imo, and the logistical and rationale problems.
I’ve considered it briefly, and think it’s not a workable idea.
I definitely think there are some major flaws in our current system – as made quite apparent when manifestly ill -suited candjdates are the only candidates with a shot.
I think there are other partial fixes that seem much more feasible such as rank choice voting and parliamentary systems where if you don’t support the leading candidates at least you have a shot at some level of representation in your government.
I think that generally you and I diverge around the question of whether good enough is good enough. I get the impression I’m more likely than you to conclude that significant flaws are likely to be part of any system. Not sure what it mean exactly that we have that difference but just thought I’d add that observation.
well, I do think good enough is good enough, it’s just that todays systems for me are NOWHERE NEAR good enough. My preferences are for fairly strong but minimalist govt run by people who aren’t professional politicians, for policies that lead to Income Gini between about 0.28 and 0.34 (which is correlated with an approximate minimum of sum of homicide and suicide in cross country comparisons), for policies that encourage business competition, allow for freedom of choice in services, yet ensure minimal levels of healthcare, housing, childcare, and food security sufficient to prevent the kind of homelessness, drug addiction, and childlessness through economic inability that we see today. I want a system where policing is minimal and focused on solving violent crimes such as murder, domestic assault, and armed robbery, not pointing rifles at legal protests or arresting people for possession of drugs, revenue maximization through writing speeding and parking tickets or doing civil asset forfeiture, or enforcing private monopoly schemes (FBI warnings on Copyrights and patents etc). I prefer that money creation be by democratic process (ie. by grants to individuals allowing them to decide what to purchase with the newly created money) and that the larger companies get the more of the company is publicly owned and regulated by public utility commissions (such as Comcast, ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile, Amazon, Netflix, IBM, Tesla, GM, GE, Exxon, etc).
We are nowhere close to any of that, so perhaps people think my policy ideas are extreme. Extremely anti-oligarchy, yes.
Daniel –
We probably aren’t very far apart in terms of what we’d want. But I guess where we differ is in the extent we judge good enough relative to what we’d want, with consideration of what the full range of outcomes might be. It would be great to have all of those things but many of them I see as not being remotely plausible (as real world outcomes). So that shrinks the range in which I judge what is good enough.
I compare what is good enough against actually likely outcomes that run in the other direction – like the deportation of some 12 million people and the accompanying labor shortages and huge government costs it would entail. Or 10% tariffs on all imported goods. Or the systematic dismantling of our regulatory infrastructure (not that there shouldn’t be significant improvements). Like the stacking of SCOTUS with even more rightwing and religiously fanatic judges. And so the good enough includes economic policies that bring results far short of what you described because they also are a realistic alternative to outcomes that are far worse. And the more ideal outcomes on the other end are effectively excluded because they’re not realistic
I do think there’s value in judging what’s good enough in the context of what could be in some idealistic sense – if only because you never really know what’s achievable if you don’t try to achieve. I think of the Civil Rights movement when I think of this discussion. Activists were under constant pressure to accept something less than equality as being good enough. And I don’t really think your ideas are that extreme; but I do think that some of them at least, like judging good enough against a politician-less government system are so unrealistic as to be not valuable in the direct assessment. And on top of that, I think such ideas can sound great in an abstract way but the realities can be really tough. I think of friends and family I know who spent a lot of time in consensus-based, communal type living situation. Not a direct analog but maybe somewhat so. On that basis I grade the merits and demerits of representative politicians on a curve. Again, as a general frame – I think the pattern that repeats is that in my view, you advocate for great ideas but in a fashion that’s less focused on the downsides of alternatives than my own approach.
Joshua, we should distinguish between the best available option at the moment, and the point where things are good enough that we no longer think it’s worth advocating for further change. Would you really say “hey, we got Harris instead of Trump and we avoided kids in cages, it’s good enough no need for me to consider any way we could improve things?” I doubt it.
I don’t ever expect to see the policies if like, but I’m not going to stop advocating for them and making people think about the fact that what we have today is a choice that preferences oligarchy and there are reasonable alternatives we could imagine.
To me my role is to be the imagination, since most people don’t think farther than who is for Prez this year or maybe yes vs no on some patched up healthcare bill.
Re consequences: there’s also the questions of a) what policy a candidate would actually attempt to enact once in office [as distinct from their campaign claims] and b) how effective they are likely to be in doing so. The last two administrations, and arguably the last four, suggest IMO a pretty low value for b). It seems to me that what gets done by one side gets a reaction from the other, with little net movement. IME both sides perceive themselves as losing, which is odd…
Joshua said:
“Like the stacking of SCOTUS with even more rightwing and religiously fanatic judges. ”
I love all the “the libz” (as you say I call them) quacking about “fanatic” SCOTUS. As always with “the libz” when they get what they want that’s the normal right way things are supposed to be to them, but when they don’t get what they want, it’s always an illegal conspiracy. :) Democracy for Libz – “our Democracy” according to the mentally staggering POTUS – but not for conservatives, right Joshua?
I love the idea that justice has a perspective, and therefore it needs people of different colors, shapes, genders and sizes to be meeted out appropriately. Should we do that in science too? Have Indigenous peoples, women, overweight and trans weigh in on whether Newton’s laws of motion apply to them or not?
I also love the idea that you think our “regulatory apparatus” has “some” problems! There are major infrastructure projects that have been delayed for decades and an entire industry of consultants working on inane imbecility like the “view shed” impact of cell phone tower or transmission lines. And Cowen comically wonders aloud why productivity just doesn’t seem to pick up! Why, I just don’t know with tens of thousands of Comrades in the government discussing the social benefits of various pronoun usages!!!
The “Regulatory Apparantus” is just a mini clone of the Trump phenomenon: if “the Libz” hate Trump and everything he stands for, then why don’t they fix “some” problems (in the regulatory apparatus and other parts of the gov) and siphon of the voters that support him? Why? Because they *want* regulatory state has virtually no aboslute rules and allows them to spill cash or take it from whoever they want whenever they want according to the whims of – yeah – fanatic Libz judges, who make the law rather than interpret it, and gazillions of “technical” regulatory managers (aka Libz-appointed extremists), shielded by the warm fuzziness of quack data analysis (e.g., CRT), within the government. The last thing on earth they want is *any* decrease in the anti-productivity regulatory apparatus. So Joshua when you say the regulatory apparatus has “some problems”, surely you mean it’s deficient in the number of half-witted petty quacks and could benefit from a few thousand more.
Chipmunk, I’m not really sure what all you said really. It didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. But I guess I probably agree with you that the regulatory system is very broken. Politicians on both sides tend to write bills that add to the complexity and rarely do they just look for big swaths of law they could cut.
A favorite proposal of mine is to put a hard cap on the gzip compressed US code. This approximates Kolmogorov complexity sufficiently well. I personally would like a code that’s about maybe 500kB compressed or less. If someone knows how to download the US code and can tell me how big it is compressed I’d be interested.
Really focus the efforts on writing clear general laws with wide applicability and no extraneous specialized garbage pandering to some special interest. One of those special interests is the bureaucratic class.
chipmunk
We probably agree more than you think about the problems with regulation and many “libz” (as you put it) policies. But somehow you put all these legitimate gripes into a package that supports Trump. Do you really believe that stuff about clearing the swamp? Trump is a swamp creature and only wants to replace the existing swamp creatures with his own. I believe he will eliminate many regulations – as many as he can (particularly if he has a Republican congress). But that does not make him deregulatory. He will try to replace that hated DEI with his own version of censorship.
You repeatedly make the mistake of only seeing the inefficiencies in the current regulatory system. That is where we agree more than you may think. But I recognize that these regulatory edifices were created for a reason. If you read the Project 2025 document, there are many criticisms that I agree with. But denial of problems (climate change, environmental quality, distributional inequalities, the continuing effects of centuries of discrimination, the effects of unequal and insufficient access to quality health care, ….) does not make them go away. Many regulations were a response to these problems – often a poorly designed or executed response – but they were not invented or imagined problems. It’s time to get out of your imaginary world and think of improving policies addressed at real problems. I’d rather live with poor policies – and try to improve them – than deny that problems exist and pretend that it used to be perfect (MAGA).
Daniel
Chipmunk, I’m not really sure what all you said really.
The convenient thing about Chipmunk’s comments is that you don’t have to read them to know what he’s said because it always just boils down to “nounX verbY, I hate libz and everything bad is their fault.”
Anyway:
We should distinguish between the best available option at the moment, and the point where things are good enough that we no longer think it’s worth advocating for further change. Would you really say “hey, we got Harris instead of Trump and we avoided kids in cages, it’s good enough no need for me to consider any way we could improve things?” I doubt it.”
Sure. I get that. But I remember when the Affordable Care Act was passed and I was pissed because it looked like a sellout to the insurance industry. Now, in retrospect, I consider the millions of people whose lives have been materially improved because of the ACA. So I think that Demz should advocate for some form of nationalized healthcare and I think access to heathcare should be an absolute minimum – but I’m aware that advocating for it could be an anchor that sinks Demz’ electoral chances and the result is Trump and a Republican Congress taking away healthcare for millions of people.
I don’t ever expect to see the policies if like, but I’m not going to stop advocating for them and making people think about the fact that what we have today is a choice that preferences oligarchy and there are reasonable alternatives we could imagine.
To me my role is to be the imagination, since most people don’t think farther than who is for Prez this year or maybe yes vs no on some patched up healthcare bill.
I get that. Just saying it should be viewed in context. Climate change policies are a great example. IMO, there aren’t likely to be really effective policies passed until the magnitude of the change is so great that it unambiguously affects people’s day to day lives (which the science says probably won’t happen for another few decades at least, given the probabilities related to the infrequency of extreme events and the relatively slow rate of global average temperature change). To the extent that some slightly effective policies can be passed, I don’t think it’s likely to occur in response to hardcore advocacy that’s easily targeted by Republicans. But it can likely be affected by populist economic policies that also address emissions. Advocating too strongly for hardcore policies increase the opening for Republican policies that will materially make emissions even worse.
I dunno, we could say that the piecemeal policies aren’t “good enough” in the sense of full on preventing unacceptable risks from climate change. Not preventing them, in a sense, isn’t acceptable. But I think that at this stage, populist economic policies that can have some effect short of that are closer to “good enough” than advocacy that says those piecemeal policies aren’t good enough
confused –
Re consequences: there’s also the questions of a) what policy a candidate would actually attempt to enact once in office [as distinct from their campaign claims] and b) how effective they are likely to be in doing so. The last two administrations, and arguably the last four, suggest IMO a pretty low value for b). It seems to me that what gets done by one side gets a reaction from the other, with little net movement. IME both sides perceive themselves as losing, which is odd…
No doubt. But let’s take the example of mass deportation. Trump didn’t do it last time. And I don’t actually think he’ll do it this time. Ripping 12? million migrants out of communities would have dramatic effects. 20% of construction workers gone? A higher percentage of the agricultural labor force? So many other people who perform critical jobs? The resulting labor shortage? The costs of doing that, with the costs for the logistics and the costs for the legal maneuvering that would be necessary? I think Trump’s political instincts are good enough to know that actually ripping so many people out of communities would take a big chunk out of his popularity with his supporters. Sure, for some who are overtly racist it will make him a god, but I think there’s a lot of empty red meat and fear-mongering going on here that’s bluster for political purposes.
But…how sure of that am I? Not really that sure. I think there’s a meaningful risk it could happen, and that Trump’s failure to do it previously only has limited value in assessing the risk going forward should he get elected.
chipmunk –
As always with “the libz” when they get what they want that’s the normal right way things are supposed to be to them, but when they don’t get what they want, it’s always an illegal conspiracy. :) Democracy for Libz – “our Democracy” according to the mentally staggering POTUS – but not for conservatives, right Joshua?
Unlike my mocking characteristics of what you say – which are based on what you actually say, your mocking characteristics of what I say are based on nothing other than your imagination. There’s the difference. :-)
Of course that dynamic works both ways and I’d never say otherwise. These characteristics are based in basic human cognition and psychology, and they aren’t distributed disproportionately across ideological divides. If you ever think you see me saying otherwise, then what you’re hearing is something you made up in your head.
Damn. Characterizations, not characteristics.
Regarding the points about whether candidate X would actually try to implement policy Y: the fact that many positions candidates take are not meant to be taken seriously (or not likely to be pursued seriously) I do not find comforting. At all. Many people seem to defend Trump’s ridiculous positions in this way – but, to me, they are saying I should ignore what he says (which I mostly do). But, for me, that disqualifies his candidacy. I don’t let Democrats off the hook on this account, but that is part of my dissatisfaction with all politicians – Trump is perhaps the clearest and most egregious example.
After skimming over this thread, I hereby vow to not engage in Chipmunk’s Fox News memes on this blog anymore.
Since I found Andrew’s blog, pretty much every comment here has been worth reading, but not these. It’s the same pointless – and frankly pretty low brow – political back-and-forth that led a lot of sites to abandon taking comments.
@Dale Lehman: I’m not using the consequences argument one-sidedly. Its more a general skepticism about genuine huge changes from top down policy in a highly bureaucratic system like our current one.
I do think that Trump has even less chance of achieving large changes if elected than Harris does if elected, because Trump would be a lame duck from day one whereas Harris is capable of 2 terms. Is that defending him (saying his opponents are wrong about the consequences of electing him) or attacking him (saying he’s incapable of achieving what he claims he’ll achieve)? I guess that depends on perspective.
(And I am neither R or D – I fall pretty much in the middle by the conventional scale*, but that’s misleading because I think both parties are deeply wrong on some major issues and because my scale of which issues are most important isn’t either major party’s.)
*Though depending on whether you believe the RNC 2024 platform is real or just an attempt to win this one election, we may be in a significant realignment of the two major parties.
@Joshua: ” To the extent that some slightly effective policies can be passed, I don’t think it’s likely to occur in response to hardcore advocacy”: I totally agree, and indeed think some of the stronger climate advocacy (everyone should be vegetarian/vegan type stuff) is net negative, turning more people off than it converts.
confused –
I totally agree, and indeed think some of the stronger climate advocacy (everyone should be vegetarian/vegan type stuff) is net negative, turning more people off than it converts.
Been watching the climate wars pretty closely for a lot of years. Here’s my take on that. Most of the people that stronger advocacy turns off, are people who were never going to be “turned on” anyway. They often claim it’s the advocates that turned them off, but when you look at the correlation between political ideology and views on climate change you’ll see that almost invariably you can very precisely predict where someone’s going to come out on climate policy by looking at their ideological orientation. There are some exceptions of course, but I don’t think enough to move the needle either way.
Take “Climategate.” Despite all the hype, and the ubiquitous claims about how it turned people off, research showed that a relatively small number of people really knew what it was about. Of that small number, most who said it caused them to lose faith in climate scientists were RWers or libertarian types. Despite their assignment of causality – I don’t buy it because as a group their reaction was entirely predictable. There was also a group that said it increased their concerns that climate change posed risk; that group was smaller than the first group but not by much. And likewise you could have easily predicted, for the most part, who would fall into that group. The number of people who might have switched views was really very small. Just noise against the signal. These are phenomena well-described in research literature, where people mostly filter whatever kinds of information they get to confirm their biases (in polarized contexts where views are ideologically loaded).
Sure, but I’m not talking about flipping people between “is a real issue”/”isn’t a real issue”. I mean ‘turning off’ in the sense of they acknowledge it’s an issue but don’t do anything about it. Most people won’t make huge, deep, fundamental shifts in everyday life for problems that seem distant; the risk is that if people are convinced that only those huge changes will work, they won’t do anything at all (while still acknowledging the problem exists).
Im not sure how much of our current polarization is due to the media landscape being radically different from even 20 years ago, and how much of it is due to economic & demographic factors.
(For example, re climate change: if the primary oil and ranching industries were located in Democratic leaning states, would the parties’ positions on it be flipped? Or would the general ‘less vs more regulation ‘ dynamic still dominate? Or would the issue kind of fall out of political salience since it didn’t fit easily into the party binary since the ideologies didn’t line up with the economic motivation?
Or, was it inevitable that the parties realign in such a way that the less-economic-regulation side got TX and WY etc.? I don’t know. I can see the argument for that, but the current setup feels pretty contingent to me*… if the civil rights era had gone differently, couldnt we have ended up with a Democratic TX and Deep South and a Republican Northeast?)
* I think this is another, under-discussed driver of polarization: the current party coalitions don’t match the country as they did in the past.
confused –
I mean ‘turning off’ in the sense of they acknowledge it’s an issue but don’t do anything about it.
Ok, mostly agree there.
Most people won’t make huge, deep, fundamental shifts in everyday life for problems that seem distant; the risk is that if people are convinced that only those huge changes will work, they won’t do anything at all (while still acknowledging the problem exists).
With that too. There’s a lot of talk about how apocalyptic messaging is counterproductive, and makes people feel helpless. Advocates think they need to scare people into action, but it has the reverse effect. I’d imagine you’ve heard about the research that suggests “personal narratives” are a more effective messaging vehicle.
Im not sure how much of our current polarization is due to the media landscape being radically different from even 20 years ago, and how much of it is due to economic & demographic factors.
There’s some interesting work that shows changes in attitudes about environmental issues tracks pretty well with economic status – where people are more likely to favor regulations when the economy is better.
I agree with the view that polarization was no less contentious in the past (say the Vietnam era), but that there wasn’t the degree of party alignment as there is now (you’d find more diversity of view within parties). I think the identification with party, as a very pervasive driver, is a critical issue here.
Matt Skaggs:
I don’t watch Fox news or follow Tucker Carlson. Not now. Not ever. Zero. I hear more about Tucker Carlson from you and Joshua than I do from any other source. Tragically for The LiIbz, most Americans think independently. I know, the leftist propaganda machine in the schools has worked so hard to crush independent thought, but tragically some people still engage in it. Isn’t that why the leftist MSM had to shut down comment sections? Free speech led to their stories being exposed as the leftist propaganda that they were. Right? :( Unacceptable!
Whatever the case, the fact that many Americans thinking indepedently come to the same conlcusions as Tucker Carlson should suggest something to you about reality. You might try putting that in your model.
Why should I care what Niall Ferguson think about JD Vance? For that matter, why should I care what anybody thinks about JD Vance? For what its worth, I asked Chat GPT what Niall Ferguson would think about JD Vance and got:
“Niall Ferguson, a historian and commentator known for his work on economic and political history, would likely have a nuanced view of JD Vance. Ferguson often examines the interplay between economic forces, social structures, and political movements, so he might analyze Vance’s rise in the context of these factors.
JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and a U.S. Senator, is known for his exploration of working-class struggles in America and his own personal narrative of overcoming adversity. Ferguson might appreciate Vance’s insights into the socio-economic challenges faced by rural and working-class Americans, as this aligns with Ferguson’s interest in how cultural and economic factors shape political realities.
On the other hand, Ferguson might critique some of Vance’s policy positions or his approach to addressing the issues he highlights. Ferguson often emphasizes the importance of understanding historical context and systemic factors, so he might argue that while Vance’s personal story is compelling, broader systemic issues require more comprehensive solutions than those proposed by Vance.
Overall, Ferguson would likely find Vance’s perspective valuable for understanding contemporary American socio-political dynamics but would also be critical of any oversimplifications or lack of systemic analysis in Vance’s approach.”
For that matter, I asked ChatGPT what it thought about JD Vance (although I believe its training data does not include his vice presidential nomination):
“JD Vance is a complex figure whose impact and perspectives are subject to varied interpretations. As the author of Hillbilly Elegy, he gained prominence for his exploration of the struggles faced by working-class Americans, particularly those in rural and industrial areas. His personal story and insights into social and economic issues have resonated with many people and brought attention to important socio-economic challenges.
On the positive side, Vance’s work has helped highlight the difficulties faced by marginalized communities and has sparked important conversations about social mobility, economic disparity, and cultural disconnection. His ability to articulate the challenges of his upbringing and the broader issues affecting similar communities has provided valuable context for understanding these issues.
However, his transition into politics, particularly as a U.S. Senator, has introduced a different dimension to his public persona. Vance’s political stances and policy positions have generated debate. Some criticize him for the way he has framed certain issues or for perceived inconsistencies between his earlier critiques and his current political actions.
Overall, JD Vance’s contributions are multifaceted, reflecting both the personal and political dimensions of his career. His work raises important questions about American society, but opinions on his effectiveness and the implications of his political views can vary widely.”
But I don’t really care what anybody thinks about JD Vance other than out of morbid curiosity.
And yet you just spent a billion words on it. How about this: if you don’t care, shut the f*#* up about it.
(Just to preempt your immediate comment: no, moronic comments don’t deserve a respectful response)
Let me clarify, because I don’t think my comment was moronic. I know what I think about JD Vance and my interest in what Ferguson, Andrew, or anybody else would come from it telling me something about them. But Andrew’s post sounds like an invitation to speculate about what Ferguson thinks of JD Vance, as if that should carry any weight or interest on its own. I just don’t see that as worthwhile. There are many famous people and they have thoughts about many other famous people, but the only thing I see that is worth finding out has to do with the observer and not the subject of their observation.
From one anonymous coward to another, people who hide behind pseudonyms online shouldn’t get to throw shade on people willing to put their name on their opinions. I don’t know Dale Lehman and don’t always agree with him. But I appreciate his comments on this blog. He contributes to the value of this blog but your comments are about as useful as “I can make $70,000 from my home” messages.
Dale, is that you? Actually, since your comment was under 200 words, it couldn’t have been Dale.
Total:
Let’s keep things polite here, please.
Sorry, let me try that again. Dale, was there a value to you getting AI to create an internet comment post you? What was that value? If so, what does that demonstrate about your own level of intelligence? Could you have written that post yourself? Why didn’t you?
There, how was that?
Dale:
I see your point. Let me expand.
Vance’s views on people with children are of interest in part because he might become president of the United States and in part because his willingness to make those statements indicates an attitude that is present in some corners of elite opinion and the elite media. His statements may sound wacky to you and me, but I assume they are standard views among the groups he hangs out with, to the extent that he’d just say them out loud as if they were normal things to say.
Ferguson’s views on people with children are of interest for the same reason, although they seemed to have a different angle than Vance’s. It’s my impression that Vance is making a political pitch, perhaps out of some blockheaded notion that, because people with children are more likely to vote Republican, that it’s a good idea to insult people without children. In contrast, Ferguson’s statements about Keynes sounded more like a lazy attempt to ingratiate himself with his audience by making fun of gay people—but mixed in with that general attitude that there’s something wrong with people who don’t become biological parents. Again, the most interesting thing here is not that some eccentric Stanford professor takes a break from engaging in student politics to say something stupid in a speech, but rather that he had the impression that these were normal things to say.
Why do I care what Ferguson thinks about Vance? I agree that this is more of a bank-shot question. I’m interested in Ferguson in the same way that I’m interested in Freakonomics, or Krugman, or Nudge, or other social science researchers who move into the field of public communication. They’re kind of like me! The scale is much different: I blog here for 10,000 readers, while Freak/Krug/Nudge have audiences of millions. Ferguson is a bit more obscure but he still regularly writes for mass-circulation outlets and goes on TV (something I never want to do again, not because it’s a bad thing to do, but because I happen to be very bad at it). I don’t want to become these people—when media outlets ask me general political questions on which I have no expertise, I just don’t answer—but I’m interested in their stories, in part because they represent an alternative career that I could’ve had.
Also, writing the above post helped me clarify my own understanding, in particular regarding a question that often comes up, which is why do people not check their facts. See the paragraph in the above post that begins, “At first glance . . .”
Yes, all of the things you mention are interesting. And, if Ferguson actually says what he thinks of Vance, that is potentially interesting. What I didn’t find interesting is speculating about what Ferguson thinks of Vance. It doesn’t tell me anything about Ferguson and very indirectly tells me something about what you and others think about Vance. Indirect speculations are more in line with things I see on Marginal Revolution. I now see that I misstated my original comment – I should have said why should I care about what people think Ferguson would think about Vance? What Ferguson actually thinks about Vance is of some interest (I don’t really follow Ferguson, so not so much for me, but I am interesting in things like what Bryson DeChambeau thinks of Trump). Speculating about what someone might think about someone else is what I was commenting on.
“A quick google takes us to this page on the Iraq war vote in Congress in 2002: 60% of the Democrats in the House and 58% of the Democrats in the Senate opposed it.”
That link says 58% of the Democrats in the Senate *supported* it, you skimmed the senate section too quickly but got the house one right:
Party Yeas Nays
Republican 48 1
Democratic 29 21
Independent 0 1
TOTALS 77 23
29 (58%) of 50 Democratic senators voted for the resolution.
D’oh! I’ll fix.
> but many leading Democrats voted no [on the Iraq war], including Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Paul Sarbanes, etc
You seem to be using a definition of “leading Democrats” that would include most (all) Democratic senators. If not, what definition of leading Democrats are you using. I believe that NF’s definition, with regard to Senators at least, would be “Democrats in senate leadership and/or likely to run for President in the next decade.” Certainly, by that definition, most leading Democrats voted Yes on the war.
Yes, leading Democrats are those Democrats in the Senate. Is this a shock to you?
When most people use a phrase like “leading Democrats” and “leading Republicans” they mean a group much smaller than 50 senators or 250 congress people. They mean a much smaller group, like, say, the 10 or so recent/current party leaders: speaker of the house, senator majority leader, president/vice-president and recent leading candidates for those positions.
‘Vance supports […] policies to encourage more childbearing.’
I am not aware of any policy that actually leads to more childbearing. Unless you mean policies that _promise_ more childbearing, because as far as I know there are no policies that are socially acceptable*, not pay2play**, and work in the long run***. That said, I may not have searched carefully enough, but what kind of ‘raising the birth rate’ policies were you referring to? I found nothing tangible other than articles about his pro-life stance. They may have crowded out articles about his views on other ‘pro-birth rate’ policies.
*A very cheap policy to implement would be to ban contraception. Cheap to the point that someone has to pay for the damage to property and people caused by the riots that are sure to follow the implementation of such a policy.
**The Spanish government introduced a policy of paying for children (‘universal child benefit’) a few years ago. It led to a sudden drop in abortions, was extremely expensive and led to a sharp drop in the birth rate after the policy was withdrawn. There is nothing wrong with government transfers to people who give birth, but we must be aware that this system is akin to ‘buying’ births: The more you want, the more expensive it gets (supply & demand).
***I like the idea of supporting young mothers as an end in itself. But I have my doubts that increasing birth rates with cash transfers will solve the problems of demographic change.
Are you aware that the Project 2025 proposes to ban contraception?Specifically banning any coverage for it in healthcare and banning shipping it across state lines I believe.
I personally don’t think we need to prop up birth rates, but I bet both UBI and another system I support of creating money exclusively through individual accounts with the Fed (established say at 1yo) would likely increase birth rates. There are a lot of 20-35 yo families that aren’t having children because of their economic situation. If the birth of their child would cause that child to receive UBI and M1/capita grant into a Fed account at age 1 they’d likely make different choices.
Prevent the Fed from directly buying bonds and make them adjust interest rates by raising money equally in individual accounts, make banks actually explicitly borrow from their depositors instead of creating money via loans. All money would flow from individuals.
Regarding Project 2025 and contraception… https://www.vox.com/politics/360318/project-2025-trump-policies-abortion-divorce
Having searched the *current* version for “comstock” I can’t find reference to it, so my impression is the stuff about prosecuting people for comstock act violation for shipping abortion pills through the mail is either something outside the document said by promoters of the document (Vance etc), or in an earlier version. Many earlier versions are available on archive.org but I’m not motivated to search through all of them.
Forbes confirms that Vance is promoting the Comstock act strategy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/07/18/jd-vance-and-project-2025-want-to-use-this-19th-century-law-to-ban-abortion-without-congress/
The law needs repealing. As it is, it appears Vance is correct at a legal level that the 1873 law does apply.
Singapore has a long history of (unsuccessfully) trying to increase birth rates (https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2020/03/lessons-from-singapore-on-raising-fertility-rates-tan). Also, if the objective is to address demographic change, then immigration has arguably been more successful than attempts to increase the birth rate – but, of course, is the subject of much controversy. My take on the Project 2025 efforts – and Vance’s positions – is that the goal is to increase the “right” kind of births (or demographic change).
Does *any* developed country in the higher per capita GDP tiers have an above replacement birth rate? I am not actually sure policy can swing this needle, given the radically different cultures involved in the trend, I think most people would say that Japan and South Korea have stronger family structure and tradition than the US, but birthrate is lower there.
32 minutes and 45 seconds into this podcast. He appears to be all in – https://youtu.be/HZPqq-Lwb8U?si=KRXxHMCSkRsz92nq
For an update of Ferguson’s views on Vance etc. I recommend the “Goodfellows” Youtube channel and podcast. Most recently he seems to believe that Trump has been persuaded that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others are acting in collusion. Given Trump’s refusal to see anything other than zero sum games, this makes Trump much more inclined to be for Ukraine and against Russia. In isolation, the Trump package of economic illiteracy on Free Trade coupled with much more palatable and successful views on deregulation is somewhat conflicting to the “Goodfellows”. Given a choice between Trump and Harris, they have no hesitation in choosing Trump.
Ag:
My take is that Ferguson wants to support Trump because of low taxes, less business regulation, and social conservatism, and from that starting point he’d like to minimize the conflicts by trying to explain away Trump’s position on Russia and his attempt to overturn the U.S. election in 2020.
Since Jesus is a myth, I assume you mean he didn’t have any mythical children. I’m not sure how Jesus “contribute[d] in useful ways to society”.
The time horizon of those who are immortal, or consider themselves to be immortal, is infinite. Perhaps you have just rediscovered a potential benefit to others of believing in life after death.
David:
If Jesus didn’t exist, then he didn’t have any real children, either!
I’m not sure what it proves when myths don’t have real children.
“Paul states that he personally got his information through revelation rather than through physical contact”, https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_historical_existence_of_Jesus_Christ
The point about Paul is not where he personally got his information, it’s merely that his letters are evidence that these events were already believed/accepted within 30 years of when they’re said to have occurred. Paul was not the first Christian, though he played a vast role in its geographical spread. He also appeals to the testimony of other apostles still living at that time & the uniformity of his teaching with theirs.
So, Paul set his myth in the recent past. Not sure what that proves.
Historians don’t rely on “revelation” to acquire their facts.
Rationalwiki has a kind of selective skepticism. There is nothing wrong with their skepticism of the Jesus character, but they fail to apply the same rigor to other topics.
Ie, is this proposing these manuscripts supposedly survived 1.5k years of neglect but essentially none of them survived the next 500 years when they were treasured? Or that monasteries would just copy their documents every generation or so with no idea of the contents? Either seems pretty odd to me.
Another possibility is that Poggio Bracciolini et al got paid big bucks for finding these documents, and “interpolated” whatever they couldn’t find.
Also, the role this family had in our conception of history:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Scaliger
So there was a famous guy named Julius Caesar (accused of fabricating his family history) who had a good friend Marc Antony, that helped out his son after his death. That son practiced making up fictional tales involving historical figures every day (declamations), lived during an era where there were huge financial/political incentives to fabricate history, and is considered the “father of chronology”.
Shouldn’t skeptical people have something to say about this? Maybe the names Julius Caesar and Marc Antony were really popular at the time, or something.
P.S.
I don’t see the earliest mundane explanation (at least 200 CE) on that page.
Jesus was a real preacher who was executed for disobeying the authorities. After his death, people kept visiting his grave and trampling the local lettuce farmer’s crops. So he bribed roman guards to move the body then told the followers he was Jesus risen from the dead. Thus they didn’t need to return to that spot anymore.
https://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf03-09.htm#P1011_411386
Even in the bible:
I am not claiming Paul was a historian (he was not and did not claim to be). My point is not about Paul himself but that his letters demonstrate the existence of a Christian community composed of diaspora Jews as well as Gentiles in the 50s.
The Jewish diaspora community of that era would know whether a wildly popular teacher named Yeshua/Joshua/Jesus was executed in Jerusalem for claiming to be king 25ish years before. Sure travel was slow then by modern standards, but the diaspora traveled to Jerusalem for religious services… it was not total isolation.
“Setting a myth in the recent past”… is there any evidence anywhere of anyone else ever doing this “out of whole cloth”, as opposed to *mythologizing* events that did happen?
The Jesus myth idea is not supported by serious historians.
Myths becoming represented as historical people is a thing that happens, either through conscious euhemerism (e.g. Snorri’s Odin as a Trojan refugee and deriving “Aesir” from “Asia”, old Irish gods as High Kings in the distant past) or folklore (the god Llyr – King Lear). But this is always as historical people in the *distant past* (many centuries or millennia). We have Paul of Tarsus writing of Christ crucified and the Last Supper in the 50s – 25 years after the fact. Myths don’t euhemerize that fast. Not even 1/10 that fast. (We also have Tacitus, who was definitely not a Christian and in fact did not seem to really understand it.)
I wonder why the lack of biological children is a key stigmatizing identity in politics these days. Is it because you can look heroic and pass as a genuine conservative by dissing childless individuals while avoiding coming off as prejudiced in conventional senses?
Ferguson on family values.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/niall-ferguson-my-family-values
It seems some people, including Ferguson himself attempt to downplay the stigma once associated with divorce, but I think there have been times when divorce or even widowhood led to a social pariah status.
Mito:
I clicked through to Ferguson’s interview where he writes, “the combination of making TV programmes and teaching at Harvard took me away from my children too much.”
This seems like what Palko calls the “cigarettes and cocaine” argument. Teaching at Harvard is one of the easiest jobs in the world—there’s no reason it should take you away from your children one bit. Indeed, one reason I chose an academic career is because I knew it would be give me the flexibility to be with my kids as much as I wanted. So . . . I think it was the TV, dude.
Ah! I almost fell for the “cigarette and cocaine” trick and thought teaching at Harvard must be quite onerous. As an academic myself, I know the kind of effort most instructors put in teaching and research and I would not trivialize it, but it is true that an academic career gives you a certain kind of freedom and flexibility. Thank you for your insight.
Divorce was a major stigma as recently as the 1960s, at least in some parts of the US. The no fault divorce revolution is basically a 60s thing. That’s not just “there have been times”, it’s the majority of US history (I have no idea how acceptable divorce was at that time in, say, Japan or the Soviet Union.)
@Confused
Thank you for educating me. I did not know much about the history of no-fault divorce.
Divorce was rare in the 1960s in Japan. Being single was also a taboo. One could be turned down for a promotion at work for being in such an anomolous state. Not anymore.
I am not an expert on family, but I have heard some anecdotes over the years. A cat lady bashing has been a thing there as well in different guises.
Actually, it appears it’s even more recent than I thought – mostly 70s, though California 1969.
Daniel Lakeland: via https://uscode.house.gov/, https://uscode.house.gov/download/releasepoints/us/pl/118/70/[email protected] is 182 megabytes (only 102 MB in XML format)
Oooh, thank you so much! So let’s call it 100MB (XML version) which, compared to my preference of something on the order of 500kb is a factor of 200x larger than I’d prefer. That seems not at all surprising to me.
Note that some of the size has to do with sections that have been repealed or are no longer active for various reasons like constitutional amendments. So it’s more like an entire git archive than just the current state of the active code. So if you just looked at the operative components it might be a factor of 2 smaller maybe.
I was going to run through and give some examples about how this is ridiculously larger than it needs to be, but it just becomes unwieldly to even discuss… There are about 10 different kinds of “banks” (4-5 are different agricultural specific organizations, some specific to solar power… it’s insane), there are special offices on “Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction” There’s a whole title on Intoxicating Liquors that’s inactive because of the 21st amendment. There’s all sorts of specialized laws related to coal mining as distinct from metal mining as distinct from gas and oil mining, as distinct from etc etc… All of which could likely be consolidated by a factor of 10.
I’m sure much of the current state comes down to “there’s a crisis … let’s make special laws to deal with it”. Examples would include the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the Savings and Loan debacle, the 9/11 attacks and GWOT, the 2008 financial crisis, etc. Rather than creating laws with general principles, and then maybe writing some simple wording like “savings and loans shall be subject to the general principles of banking in title xyz” instead there’s a whole crapload of stuff they specifically do that is redundant with stuff that regional agricultural credit companies have to do, that is also redundant with what “local agricultural credit companies” do…
By no means any kind of expert on federal law, but if you skim it it’s obviously way way over-bloated. Let’s be kind and say it should only be reduced by a factor of 20. So we imagine an upper limit on the compressed active code of 5MB. Give the congress something useful to do, get it down below that level while retaining the truly important functions.