Jack

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Here’s some good news for people who want more rapid transit service in US cities, and soon.

In the US, all passenger rail services that could potentially mix with freight are governed by the regulations of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). This applies not just to Amtrak but also, critically, to “commuter” rail lines, crucial rail transit services that run on freight railways.

If cities wanted to rapidly upgrade their rail transit systems, the cheapest way is often using upgraded commuter rail rather than building new lines.  Many major cities have large networks of radial commuter rail lines [typically originally freight lines] which, if upgraded to run every 15 minutes or better all day, would effectively become metro lines, on the cheap.  You’ll find this level of service in many major metro areas overseas. Toronto’s Smart Track plan is exactly this idea.

The problem, as always, is frequency, which in turn is a problem of operating cost.  Most US commuter rail systems are far too infrequent to be useful for anything but 9-5 commuting, even though many of them run through dense urban fabric where the demand is there for all-day frequent service.

The Obama FRA, responding to several freight rail disasters, had proposed a rule mandating two-person crews, and had quietly inserted language extending this to passenger rail, even though passenger and freight rail present very different safety issues.   Those requirements would have made commuter rail service too expensive to run frequently enough for it to be useful, and would have persisted regardless of whether technological developments improved the safety outcomes of one-person crews.

The Federal Railroad Administration has just announced that it will stop requiring two-person crews and preempt state requirements to do so.  If this were a genuine safety issues, I’d be alarmed, but it really isn’t. The new FRA position liberates transit agencies and other local governments to negotiate the right solution with their unions in the context of what’s technologically possible.

Yes, removing this requirement is a “conservative” idea that would be unlikely to come from a Democratic administration.  But it removes a significant barrier to providing more useful urban public transit, which leads to all kinds of benefits for equity, prosperity, and the environment.

The post One Less Barrier to Expanding US Urban Rail Transit appeared first on Human Transit.

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How important is human capital at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners, this paper finds that entrepreneurs are key for understanding top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private “pass-through” business profit. These profits—which can include labor income disguised for tax reasons—accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Pass-through business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of pass-through profit as human capital income, we find that the typical top earner derives most of his or her income from human capital, not financial capital. Our approach also raises the overall top 1% labor share in 2014 from 45% to 56%. Growth in pass-through profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners.

This is from Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick, “Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century,” NBER Working Paper No. 25442. The NBER paper is gated, but here’s an ungated version.

Why is this important? Because it contradicts the image of the coupon-clipping rentier who doesn’t work for a living.

 

(12 COMMENTS)

The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people.

Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men all look balding, yet dignified. The women all look maternal, yet stylish. Sometimes you will see a knot of foreign-looking people huddled together, their nametags announcing them as the delegation from the Nigerian Psychiatric Association or the Nepalese Psychiatric Association or somewhere else very far away. But however exotic, something about them remains ineffably psychiatrist.

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The second thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that the staircase is shaming you for not knowing enough about Vraylar®.

Seems kind of weird. Maybe I’ll just take the escalator…

…no, the escalator is advertising Latuda®, the “number one branded atypical antipsychotic”. Aaaaaah! Maybe I should just sit down for a second and figure out what to do next…

AAAAH, CAN’T SIT DOWN, VRAYLAR® HAS GOTTEN TO THE BENCHES TOO! Surely there’s a non-Vraylar bench somewhere in this 15,000 person convention center!

…whatever, close enough.

You know how drug companies pay six or seven figures for thirty-second television ads just on the off chance that someone with the relevant condition might be watching? You know how they employ drug reps to flatter, cajole, and even seduce doctors who might prescribe their drug? Well, it turns out that having 15,000 psychiatrists in one building sparks a drug company feeding frenzy that makes piranhas look sedate by comparison. Every flat surface is covered in drug advertisements. And after the flat surfaces are gone, the curved sufaces, and after the curved surfaces, giant rings hanging from the ceiling.

The ads overflow from the convention itself to the city outside. For about two blocks in any direction, normal ads and billboards have been replaced with psychiatry-themed ones, until they finally peter off and segue into the usual startup advertisements around Market Street.

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There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?

No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.

Here are some of the most relevant presentations listed in my Guidebook:

…you get the idea, please don’t make me keep writing these.

Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.

I’m reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.

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The fourth thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is the Scientologists protesting outside.

They don’t tell you they’re Scientologists. But their truck has a link to CCHR.org on it, and Wikipedia confirms them as a Scientology front group. Scientology has a long-standing feud with psychiatry, with the psychiatrists alleging that Scientology is a malicious cult, and the Scientologists alleging that psychiatry is an evil pseudoscience that denies the truth of dianetics. And that psychiatrists helped inspire Hitler. And that the 9/11 was masterminded by Osama bin Laden’s psychiatrist. And that psychiatrists are plotting to institute a one-world government. And that psychiatrists are malevolent aliens from a planet called Farsec. Really they have a lot of allegations.

This particular truck is especially sad, because they’re reinforcing the myths about electroconvulsive therapy. ECT is a very effective treatment for depression. It is essentially always consensual – although most other psychiatric treatments can be administered involuntarily if someone is judged too out-of-touch with reality to make decisions, ECT has a special status as a treatment which can only be given with patient permission. It’s always performed under anaesthesia and muscle relaxants, so patients are not conscious during the procedure and not spasming. And it can be a life-changing option for treatment-resistant depression. See this Scientific American article for more.

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The fifth thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that the CIA has set up a booth.

I was pretty curious about what the CIA wanted from psychiatrists (did they lose the original MKULTRA data? do they need to gather more?), but I was too shy to ask their representative directly. I did take one of their flyers, but it turned out to just be about how woke they were:

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The sixth thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that Vraylar® has built an entire miniature city. The buildings are plastered with pamphlets on Vraylar®. Billboards advertising Vraylar® hang over the streets and bridges. Giant Vraylar balloons hover serenly over everything, looking down with contempt and sorrow upon the non-Vraylar®-prescribing world below.

Occupying pride of place in city center, some sort of Important Vraylar Scientist is constructing the Transamerica Pyramid out of playing cards.

I dunno, if I were working in an area where the research supporting a treatment has a tendency to collapse suddenly and spectacularly, I might want to avoid building an association in people’s minds between my medication and a house of cards. But the ways of Vraylar® are inscrutable to mortal men.

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The seventh thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that many of the new drugs are ridiculous.

It’s hard to blame pharmaceutical companies for this. The return on investment for pharma R&D is rapidly shrinking – drug discovery is too expensive to consistently make money anymore.

Rather than give up and die, pharma is going all in on newer, me-too-er me-too drugs. The current business plan looks kind of like this:

1. Take an popular older drug

2. Re-invent it, either with a minor change to the delivery mechanism, or by finding a similar molecule that works the same way

3. Call this a new drug, advertise the hell out of it, and sell it for 10x – 100x the price of the older drug

4. Profit!

Consider Lucemyra®:

It’s an alpha-2a receptor agonist used to treat acute opiate withdrawal. Alpha-2a receptor agonists are a fine choice for acute opiate withdrawal, but we already have one that works great: clonidine. Clonidine costs $4.84 per month. Lucemyra® costs $1,974.78. Is there any difference at all between the two medications? Some studies suggest maybe lofexedine can cause less hypotension, but realistically we throw random doses of clonidine at ADHD kids all the time, so it’s not like clonidine-induced hypotension is some kind of giant menace which will destroy us all.

I asked the Lucemyra® representative why I might prescribe Lucemyra® instead of clonidine for opiate withdrawal. She said it was because Lucemyra® is FDA-approved for this indication, and clonidine isn’t. This is the same old story as Rozerem® vs. melatonin, Lovaza® vs. fish oil, and Spravato® vs. ketamine. As long as doctors continue to outsource their thinking to the FDA approval process, in a way even the FDA itself doesn’t endorse, pharma companies will be able to inflate the prices of basic medications by a thousand times just by playing games with the bureaucracy.

But also:

Jornay® is a new form of methylphenidate, ie Ritalin. The usual comparison: a month of Ritalin costs $25.19, a month of Jornay® costs $387.48. What’s the difference? You can take Jornay® at night. Why is this interesting? The Jornay® representatives say that maybe people want to have Ritalin in their system as soon as they wake up, rather than having to wait the half-hour or so it usually takes for it to start having an effect. I have to admit, from a scientific perspective Jornay® is kind of cool; I expect the pharmacologists who designed it had a lot of fun. But the oppressed people of the world haven’t exactly been crying out for Dark Ritalin. Nobody has been saying “Help us, pharmaceutical industry, merely having Ritalin®, Concerta®, Metadate®, Focalin®, Daytrana®, Quillivant®, Quillichew®, Aptensio®, Biphentin®, Equasym®, Medikinet®, and Rubifen® just isn’t enough for us! We need more forms of Ritalin, stat!”

My favorite was Subvenite®, which is just lamotrigine in a conveniently-packaged box that tells you how much to take each day. The same amount of normal lamotrigine would cost about $12; it’s hard for me to figure out exactly how much Subvenite® costs, but this site suggests $540. To be fair, lamotrigine is a really inconvenient drug whose dosing schedule often leaves patients confused. To be less fair, seriously, $540 for some better instructions? Get a life.

How do all these people keep doing it? What’s their business plan? Here’s a hint:

This is the brochure for Lucemyra®, the opiate withdrawal medication that costs $1,974.78. No patient is paying $1,974.78 for it. Patients are paying $25. And doctors sure aren’t paying $1,974.78. The way all these companies are getting away with it is because in Healthcaristan SSR, nobody ever pays for their own medication.

To a first approximation, doctors make purchasing decisions, but insurances cough up the money. Insurances have a few weapons to prevent doctors from buying arbitrarily expensive drugs, but they tend to back off in the face of magic words like “I believe this is medically necessary” or “This is the one the FDA approved”. So to fill in the missing pieces of the pharma strategy mentioned above:

1. Take an popular older drug

2. Re-invent it, either with a minor change to the delivery mechanism, or by finding a similar molecule that works the same way

3. Call this a new drug, advertise the hell out of it, and sell it for 10x – 100x the price of the older drug

4. Advertise it to patients (who don’t have to pay for it) and doctors (who definitely don’t have to pay for it), neither of whom care at all what price you’re setting.

5. Make sure doctors know the magic words they need to use to force insurance companies to pay for it.

6. Profit!

This has become so lucrative that pharma companies barely have to do any real research and development at all these days. The only genuinely exciting new drugs at the conference were Ingrezza® and Austedo®, both of which treat tardive dyskinesia – a side effect you get from having been on too many other psychiatric drugs. This is probably a metaphor for something.

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The eighth thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that there’s a presentation called “Yer A Psychiatrist, Harry!”: Learning Psychiatric Concepts Through The Fictional Worlds Of Game Of Thrones And Harry Potter. I didn’t go. I realize I have failed you, my readers, but if I had to listen to ninety minutes of that, all the Vraylar® in the world would not be enough to maintain my sanity.

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The ninth thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that, after winning last place in a head-to-head comparison of various antipsychotics, doing worse than drugs that cost less than 1% as much…

…Fanapt® (iloperidone) has pivoted to a marketing strategy of bribing doctors with free ice cream:

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The tenth thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that all of this has happened before.

This is the 175th anniversary of the APA. It’s been a pretty crazy century-and-three-quarters, no pun intended. Like, seriously, take a look at this guy:

Back when you could still lose your medical license for being gay, he went to the APA meeting in a mask and gave a presentation arguing for gay rights, and the APA de-listed homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder the following year. How amazing is that?

The APA highlighted a bunch of people like this, heroes and trailblazers all. But for every great hero celebrated on posters, there is an embarrassment buried somewhere deep in an archive. My favorite of these is the APA Presidential Address from 1918, the very tail end of WWI. The head of the Association, a very distinguished psychiatrist named Dr. Anglin, gets up in front of the very same conference I attended this week (the 1918 version was held in Chicago) and declared that the greatest problem facing psychiatry was…the dastardly Hun:

The maxim that medical science knows no national boundaries has been rudely shaken by the war. The Fatherland has been preparing for isolation from the medical world without its confines. Just as, years ago, the Kaiser laid his ban on French words in table menus, so, as early as 19 14, German scientists embarked on a campaign against all words which had been borrowed from an enemy country. A purely German medical nomenclature was the end in view. The rest of the world need not grieve much if they show their puerile hate in this way. It will only help to stop the tendency to Pan-Germanism in medicine which has for some years past been gaining headway. ‘

The Germans excel all other nations in their genius for advertising themselves. They have proved true the French proverb that one is given the standing he claims. On a slender basis of achievement they have contrived to impress themselves as the most scientific nation. Never was there greater imposture. They display the same cleverness in foisting on a gullible world their scientific achievements as their shoddy commercial wares. The two are of much the same value, made for show rather than endurance — in short, made in Germany […]

In the earliest months of the war it was pointed out that there are tendencies in the evolution of medicine as a pure science as it is developed in Germany which are contributing to the increase of charlatanism of which we should be warned. A medical school has two duties — one to medical science, the other to the public. The latter function is the greater, for out of every graduating class 90 per cent. are practitioners and less than 10 per cent, are scientists. The conditions in Germany are reversed. There, there were ninety physicians dawdling with science to every ten in practice. Of these 90, fully 75 per cent were wasting their time. In Germany the scientific side is over-done, and they have little to show for it all, while the human side is neglected. Even in their new institutions, splendid as they are in a material sense, it is easily seen that the improved conditions are not for the comfort of the patients.

Out of this war some modicum of good may come if it leads to a revision of the exaggerated estimate that has prevailed in English-speaking countries of the achievements of the Germans in science. We had apparently forgotten the race that had given the world Newton, Faraday, Stephenson, Lister, Hunter, Jenner, Fulton, Morse, Bell, Edison, and others of equal worth. German scientists wait till a Pasteur has made the great discovery, on which it is easy for her trained men to work. She shirks getting for herself a child through the gates of sacrifice and pain ; but steals a babe, and as it grows bigger under her care, boasts herself as more than equal to the mother who bore it. Realising her mental sterility, drunk with self-adoration, she makes insane war on the nations who still have the power of creative thought.

But it is especially in the realm of mental science that the reputation of the Germans is most exalted and is least deserved. For every philosopher of the first rank that Germany has produced, the English can show at least three. And in psychiatry, while we have classical writings in the English tongue, and men of our own gifted with clinical insight, we need seek no foreign guides, and can afford to let the abounding nonsense of Teutonic origin perish from neglect of cultivation.

The Germans are shelling Paris from their Gothas and their new gun. Murdering innocents, to create a panic in the heart of France! With what effect ? The French army cries the louder, “They shall not pass ” ; Paris glows with pride to be sharing the soldiers’ dangers, and increases its output of war material; and the American army sees why it is in France, and is filled with righteous hatred. Panic nowhere. Vengeance everywhere. What does the Hun know of psychology? His most stupid, thick-witted performance was his brutal defiance of the United States with its wealth, resources, and energy. That revealed a mental condition both grotesque and pitiable.

After the war a centre of medical activity will be found on this side the Atlantic, and those who have watched the progress medical science has made in the United States will have no misgivings as to your qualifications for leadership. If we learn to know ourselves, great good will come out of this war.

Anglin does not deny that some may find it inappropriate to discuss politics at a psychiatry conference, but notes that:

If in these introductory remarks I have not been able to detach myself from the world’s most serious business at the present time, perhaps on reflection they may not have gone very far afield from the subject which binds us together in an association. If there is to be a change in the conditions under which we live this must have its effect on the minds of men ; whether for good or ill, I will not stop to speculate. We are intensely concerned with environment. This war itself is entangled with it,

England’s greatness, her devotion to honour, truth, and fidelity, is due to the environment in which her children are trained and grow to manhood. The ivy-grown wall, the vine-clad hills and the rose-covered bowers constitute the birth-place of English character.

Gerard tells us the cause of the war is the uncongenial environment in which the German youth is cradled and reared. The leaden skies for which Prussia is noted, its bleak Baltic winds, the continuous cold, dreary rains, the low-lying land, and the absence of flowers have tended to harden the spirit and rob it of its virtue, produce a sullen and morose character, curdling the milk of human kindness.

He does raise one warning, one problem that risks sabotaging even countries as congenial-climate-having as ourselves and our allies:

The quack medicine vendor is busier than ever. Money is plenty and he wants some of it. He uses mental suggestion and interests us. He is a specialist in distortion who probes into the ordinary sensations of
healthy people and perverts them into symptoms. Every billboard, newspaper, fence-rail, barn and rock thrusts out a suggestion of sickness as never before. The only vulnerable point to attack the vicious traffic is the advertising. If governments forbid that as they should, the next generation will be healthier and richer.

From Dr. Anglin’s address, I gather three things.

First, the billboards we shall always have with us. It’s easy to imagine this a modern problem, but apparently the generation that confronted the Kaiser was confronting annoying psychiatric advertising too. The Kaiser is gone; the annoying psychiatric advertising has proven a tougher foe.

Second, psychiatry has always been the slave of the latest political fad. It is just scientific enough to be worth capturing, but not scientific enough to resist capture. The menace du jour will always be a threat to our mental health; the salient alternative to “just forcing pills down people’s throat” will always be pursuing the social agenda of whoever is in power; you will always be able to find psychiatrists to back you up on this.

But third, science advances anyway. Psychiatry is light-years ahead of where it was a hundred years ago. Since Dr. Anglin’s 1918 address, we’ve discovered psychotherapy and psychopharmacology; come up with deinstitutionalization and destigmatization; and put rights in place to protect psychiatric patients and to protect the general public from being unnecessarily psychiatrized. We’ve even invented Vraylar®.

On my way out of the conference, I encountered this ad:

I don’t think it was even related to the psychiatry conference. I think it was for a nearby art museum. But it struck me. It struck me because it’s the sort of picture psychiatry wants to have of itself, a combination of hard neuroscience and basic human goodness. It struck me because as written, it’s obviously bogus (which Brodmann area is responsible for empathy again? How bright does it have to light up before you start feeling empathic?) in much the same way psychiatry can be obviously bogus (how much Vraylar® does it take before you can “take back control of your life” or “feel better than well”?), but is sort of an exaggerated and slightly-too-literal version of something that could potentially not be bogus. It struck me because, after making fun of it, I had to admit to myself that the thing it was pointing at was good and important and probably exactly what an art museum should be trying to do. And a psychiatrist, for that matter.

The Labor Party has lost the “unloseable” election.

The Australian federal election has delivered a shocking result, with the right-wing Liberal-National government expected to return to power for a third term despite polls and odds having strongly favored the opposition Labor Party.

Votes are still being counted; although no side has a majority, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National coalition (also known simply as the Coalition) is projected to win enough seats in the House of Representatives to form either a majority or minority government. In the case of a minority government, the Coalition would hold fewer than the required 76 seats needed for majority rule, and would have to negotiate with independents for supply and confidence.

At the time of publishing, the ABC has called 77 seats for the Coalition, 66 for Labor, and 6 for independents.

Australia’s favorite election analyst Antony Green gave a tempered projection about the country’s political future as initial results came in, saying, “We can’t see an alternative to a Morrison government in the numbers we’re seeing at the moment.”

Hours after Green made those comments, Labor leader Bill Shorten conceded, telling supporters, “I know that you’re all hurting, and I am too,” after what has been described by the ABC as a “horror night” for Labor.

While the large seat losses predicted for the Coalition did not come to pass, one important symbolic change did occur: Divisive former prime minister Tony Abbott lost his once-safe Sydney seat of Warringah, which he’s held by a large margin since 1994, to independent candidate Zali Steggall, a lawyer and former Olympian who ran on the issue of climate change.

Labor has lost the “unloseable” election

The Labor Party was widely favored to win this election — so much so that popular gambling website Sportsbet opted to pay out to Labor-backers two days early, to the tune of $1.3 million (there was no such luck then or now for the man who placed a record-breaking $1 million bet on Labor on rival site Ladbrokes).

The Liberal-National coalition has trailed in the “two party-preferred” polls for years now, something that — along with the Coalition’s internal division over climate policy — has caused the group to change prime ministers twice in six years (Morrison has only been PM since last August).

The Coalition has grown (or appeared to have grown) increasingly unpopular over its inaction on climate change, an issue of great import to Australians, who now put climate change at the top of the list of threats to the national interest. While Labor’s climate policies are more in line with public opinion, its leader is not. Voters have consistently signaled they prefer whoever leads the Liberal Party to Labor’s unpopular leader Bill Shorten in the preferred prime minister polling, something Morrison tried to capitalize on by turning the parliamentary race into a presidential one.

And while polls had narrowed in recent weeks, Labor remained clearly in front, with some pundits now blaming the “shy Tory factor” (essentially people telling pollsters they plan to vote for more liberal candidates before actually voting for conservative candidates) for this surprise upset. On-air commenters in Australia are questioning whether they can ever really trust polling again, in scenes reminiscent of both the aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election.

What happens now?

Pre-poll votes still need to be counted, and with Australians having cast a record number of early votes, these ballots could affect the results. Green says the early ballots won’t turn the results around, but they could determine whether the Liberal-National coalition wins the 76 seats required for a majority.

If the Coalition doesn’t manage to secure a majority, it will have to negotiate with the independents, who hold a growing influence over Australian politics.

Minority governments were once a rarity in Australian politics, but have become increasingly common in recent years, as voters have grown dissatisfied with the two major parties and the independent vote has risen. Seven key independent candidates released a joint statement earlier this month, declaring action on climate change a major condition for securing their support in the next parliament. It remains to be seen whether the Liberal-National Party will actually require the support of any of those climate-focused independents, or if they can rely on others to form a governing coalition.

A pre-election analysis by former Labor prime minister advisor Sean Kelly predicted that if Labor somehow lost this election, the party’s identity would be up for grabs, and “the idea that Australians have become permanently more progressive will die.”

Current Labor leader Bill Shorten has said he will not seek another term in his party’s top job. Many voters have long wished for one of the more popular leaders from the party’s left-wing, such as deputy leader Tanya Plibersek or infrastructure spokesman Anthony Albanese, to take over as Labor leader. While this could be the chance for more progressive members of the party to assert themselves, after the public’s repudiation of Labor, it remains to be seen whether that is a course of action Labor members have an appetite for.

On the Coalition side, Former Liberal prime minister advisor Niki Savva suggested that in the unlikely event Morrison prevailed, he would have unprecedented authority over the party, having single-handedly dragged the conservatives back from sure electoral defeat.

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There's a lingering sadness that the very things that made me love the series have made a satisfying resolution so very unlikely.

President Donald Trump has raised tariffs on American allies, embroiled the country in a potentially economically destructive trade war with its biggest trading partner, and struggled to sell Congress his proposed rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

But if you're looking for an alternative to Trump's protectionism, you probably won't get it from the Democrats seeking to replace him as president. The Democratic candidates say they are opposed to how Trump has been handling the trade war, but they have struggled to articulate a worldview that sets them apart from the White House's current occupant. Some are even hitting the same protectionist notes as Trump, trying to compete with or outflank him on trade. They might only be hurting themselves in the process.

Take a telling exchange Sunday between one candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), and CNN host Jake Tapper. Tapper noted that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) had tweeted praise for Trump's decision to raise tariffs on about $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. Is Schumer right, Tapper asked, that Trump is doing the right thing?

Harris responded by saying she would prefer to work with allies to confront China rather than going it alone. She also criticized Trump's "irresponsible" preference "for conducting trade policy, economic policy, foreign policy by tweet." So far, so good.

But Tapper pressed on, wanting to know if Harris would disagree with the basic premise underlying Trump's anti-trade views: that American workers have been burned by decades of bad trade deals. And that's all it took to make Kamala Harris sound like Donald Trump.

"I believe that there is no question that, over many decades, the rules have been written in a way that have been to the exclusion of lifting up the middle class and working people in America and working families in America," Harris said. "I believe that we have got to have policy that better protects American workers and American industries."

Harris later added she would not have voted for the original NAFTA deal if she had been in Congress when it was passed in 1994.

It's impossible, of course, to paint a 23-candidate Democratic primary field with a single brush. But Harris' tactic of criticizing the style but not the substance of Trump's trade policies—while simultaneously echoing his argument that trade deals have been bad for Americans—has been common in this early stage of the campaign.

Perhaps they are waiting to see whether the latest round of tariffs causes more overt economic damage to the country before they take a stand for free trade. Perhaps they are worried about giving Trump an opening to attack them. Perhaps their ties to protectionist labor unions are to blame. But regardless of the reason, many Democrats may be missing a huge opportunity by going soft on Trump and refusing to embrace the benefits of trade.

Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that free trade in general—and NAFTA in particular—have improved both their own lives and the country as a whole.

They probably believe this because it happens to be true. The mere existence of NAFTA boosts the U.S. economy by about 0.5 percent per year, which adds up to quite a lot over more than two decades. The Commerce Department says that more than 11 million American jobs are directly related to foreign investment or the export of American goods. A 2017 analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade policy think tank, shows that international trade boosted Americans' per household income by about $18,000 since 1950—and that the gains flowed disproportionately to lower-income households.

Despite what you might hear at a Trump rally, there is little doubt that trade has made Americans better off. But instead of taking the opportunity to put Trump on the defensive, many frontrunning Democrats keep pandering to the minority of voters who wrongly believe otherwise.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has already published a trade platform that calls for more "Buy America" programs and, as Trump often does, criticizes America's trade deficit. On the campaign trail, Sanders has touted his longstanding opposition to NAFTA and to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an Obama-era trade compact that would have linked the U.S. with a dozen other countries around the Pacific. Trump pulled America out of the TPP negotiations shortly after taking office.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has criticized Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs for not being protectionist enough, and she opposes Trump's NAFTA rewrite for not being protectionist enough. Both Vox and The New Republic have described her strategy as trying to "outflank" Trump on trade.

Sens. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) voted against giving the Obama administration authority to fast-track the TPP negotiations.

Even where Democrats have not sounded protectionist notes, they haven't been vocally pro-trade either. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, tweeted a reminder this week that Trump's tariffs were nothing more than taxes on Americans, but he has otherwise been silent about trade issues. During his unsuccessful 2018 Senate run in Texas, Beto O'Rourke went hard against Trump's trade policies, which he said were imposing direct economic harms on Texan small businesses that depend on trade with Mexico and other nations; in the past he has defended NAFTA's impact on both the country in general and Texas in particular. But he hasn't been pushing that message as hard in the early stages of his presidential run.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters seem to be embracing trade more than ever. Polling by the Pew Research Center shows that 72 percent of Democrats believe NAFTA has been beneficial for the United States. A Hill-Harris poll released earlier this month found 58 percent of Democrats believe Trump's trade negotiations with China would result in fewer jobs and less economic opportunity.

And as Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg has pointed out, Trump's approval rating has been sinking in states where the trade war has been most damaging—electorally important states like Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Some of those numbers probably reflect Democratic voters' antipathy for Trump, not a spontaneous embrace of global trade. Even so, running against Trump's trade policies seems like a no-brainer for any Democrat who wants to win the White House. If an anti-trade candidate emerges from the primary field, Democrats could cede the issue to Trump—and miss a chance to hold him accountable for economic problems caused by his trade war—in a foolish pursuit of a set of blue-collar voters who probably aren't coming back into the fold anyway.

About the only Democrat in the 2020 primary field who seems to be reading those polls is Joe Biden.

Even if Biden wanted to turn against trade now, he couldn't really do it. His political career includes support for NAFTA and for the TPP. During a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Politico reports, he was asked whether it was a mistake to support NAFTA. "No, it wasn't," he replied.

That makes him about as unabashedly pro-trade a politician as you'll find in the current iteration of the Democratic Party. Biden is being attacked by Sanders and others for his trade record, but—what do you know?—he's running away from the field. Even if that's mostly a matter of his high name recognition, Biden's stance on trade almost certainly isn't hurting him.

Voters generally don't think too much about trade when they go to the polls, but that might be starting to change, particularly for Democrats. As Scott Lincicome, a trade attorney and adjunct fellow with the Cato Institute, points out in a recent research paper, surveys of Americans' views on trade "puncture the current conventional wisdom on trade and public opinion—in particular, that Americans have turned en masse against trade and globalization, and that President Donald Trump's economic nationalism reflects the bottom-up policy demands of a silent majority of American voters."

This is not an easy transition to make. Democrats had been skeptical of trade for decades, even though the party started to shift away from that position in the 1990s and continued moving that way as Obama tried to get the TPP deal done. Trump's election has shoved the GOP in the opposite direction, opening up a logical opportunity for Democrats to complete that transition—to be the party that stands for openness and looks outward, in contrast to Trumpist Republicans who want ever more restrictions on the free movement of people and goods.

What are they waiting for?

After the 2016 election, several pundits suggested that the Trump victory reflected frustration with stagnant real wages. Unfortunately, this argument is based on a misconception.

The average hourly earnings series at the FRED data site only goes back 12 years, but real wages were doing well before the 2016 election:

BTW, in nominal terms, average hourly earnings are currently $27.77/hour.

FRED does have a much longer series for average wages earned by production and nonsupervisory employees (which currently stands at $23.31):

I could not find median hourly wages, but they did have data on median weekly wages (currently $905):

There was a period of stagnant real wages, but it ended in the mid-1990s. All of these series show significant growth in real wages since the mid-1990s.  Whatever explains the rise of populism in America, it is not stagnant wages.

BTW, these time series understate the growth in total labor compensation, as the cost of fringe benefits such as health care has risen faster than nominal wage growth.  Alternatively, if you believe that health benefits are nearly worthless (my view), then the nominal wage series should be deflated by a price index that excludes health care.  That would show even more rapid growth in real wages.

PS.  There is one downside to writing a post and then delaying the publication.  Today’s Bloomberg has an article that makes many of the same points, and in some cases more effectively.  But it doesn’t have my graphs.

(15 COMMENTS)

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We’re pretty confident that Jaime is riding toward King’s Landing with a very specific mission in mind.

In the fourth episode of Game of Thrones’ eighth season, one of the most startling moments in an episode full of them came when Jaime Lannister left Brienne to travel to King’s Landing, shortly after the two finally consummated their slow-burning romance.

“The Last of the Starks” saw Jaime initially plan to stay with Brienne in Winterfell — a pretty huge decision for him, considering his not-so-harmonious past relationship with some of Winterfell’s residents. But then Jaime and Tyrion received a visit from their old frenemy Bronn, who showed up to threaten them with a crossbow because Cersei has put a price on both their heads. Bronn negotiated with the pair, agreeing to accept two swank castles in exchange for their lives. And then next thing we knew, Jaime was cruelly leaving Brienne in the dead of night, offering up his own spin on that old breakup classic, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

In their goodbye scene, Jaime explains to Brienne that for most of his life, his primary motivation has been to return to Cersei’s side — and that’s why he’s chosen to leave Brienne now. Even more heartbreakingly, per the episode’s director, David Nutter, Jaime coldly informs Brienne, “I don’t love you anymore,” as the camera focuses on her face, though we don’t hear him say this. Her tearful reaction upon hearing it is what we see onscreen as Jaime rides away.

Setting aside what sounds like a pretty sadistic approach from Nutter in terms of how the scene was filmed, Jaime and Brienne’s exchange contains a lot of implications for Jaime Lannister himself. He tells Brienne raggedly that he has to return to Cersei because “she’s hateful — and so am I.” But what does that mean? Is he going back to join her because he misses her, or because they’re two of a kind? Is he going to try to reason with her before she does anything to hurt his new comrades from the North, who are already traveling south to kill her? Is he going to try to defend Cersei by fighting against them?

When I first viewed this scene, Jaime’s motivation seemed obvious to me: He’s going back to King’s Landing not to reunite with Cersei, but to kill her. However, after talking to other Game of Thrones viewers in the days since the episode aired, I’ve realized there is by no means a general public consensus on what Jaime’s plans are.

With that said, there are plenty of clues we can pick up from Game of Thrones itself about what’s to come. I stan a conflicted, redeemed, self-loathing hero, not an incestuous fuckboi, so for anyone in doubt, here are all the reasons I’m confident that Jaime will try to kill Cersei.

1) Jaime initially left Cersei because he’s seen how sociopathic she’s become

When Jaime left Cersei to ride north in the season seven finale, he did so for a number of legitimate reasons. Not only did Cersei fail to tell him in advance that she was planning to lie about sending support to the north, she also failed to tell him that Euron Greyjoy was in on the plot — and that Euron was still looking to marry her. She also accused Jaime of conspiring against her with Tyrion, and told him he’d be committing treason if he joined the fight against the White Walkers. All of this underlines just how much the couple’s once-solid relationship has deteriorated.

Crucially, right before Jaime left, he pleaded with Cersei to recognize that she’s lost all her allies except for him — but she rejected that idea too. “I’m the only one you have left,” he told her.

“There’s one more yet to come,” she replied, referencing either Euron’s return from Essos or their unborn child, who may or may not exist. Both options would be bad news for Jaime, and it’s clear that Cersei thinks — or is least is acting as if — she no longer needs or wants Jaime in her life.

It’s important to remember just how frustrating that conversation was for Jaime. As it unfolded, we saw him realize just how despotic Cersei had become, and how willing she was to betray or throw over anyone and everyone who might challenge her quest for power. None of his appeals to her humanity caused her to even flinch — not even his reminder that their unborn child could be vulnerable to the then-impending threat of the army of the dead.

While he was trying to get her to care about saving all of civilization, she was thinking about how to take out one of Dany’s dragons. Jaime had hoped that now that Cersei had the throne, they might finally build a happy life together. Instead, she showed him just how thoroughly her entire focus had shifted staying in power.

And delusional, single-minded power grabs? Well, that’s just not something Jaime — the man who killed a king because the king was planning to destroy the whole city — is here for.

2) Hello, he just learned that she hired Bronn to kill him

The scene before Jaime leaves Winterfell involves him finding out that Cersei has sent Bronn to kill both him and Tyrion. Not only does she send Bronn, but she sends him — hilariously — with the same giant crossbow that Tyrion used to kill their father, Tywin, at the end of season four. The message Cersei is sending is that she views both brothers as having betrayed her and the Lannister name.

Cersei couldn’t bring herself to kill Jaime when he left her in King’s Landing in season seven. So somewhere in his mind, up until now, he’s probably been telling himself that she still has at least a smattering of love in her heart for him. But sending Bronn, a man who’s saved both Tyrion and Jaime’s lives repeatedly, with the giant traitor weapon is the kind of gleeful cruelty that Jaime knows Cersei tends to reserve for her worst enemies.

So when he decides directly after his encounter with Bronn to abandon Brienne and the happiness they’ve just found together to ride back into Cersei’s lair, he’s probably not doing it with the expectation that Cersei will welcome him with open arms.

3) Cersei may have nothing left to care about except power — and Jaime may have figured that out

Cersei’s supposed pregnancy has been a source of confusion for many viewers. For starters, at the beginning of season five, we saw young Cersei receiving a prophecy from a witch, who told her she would have only three children, each of whom has already died. Though there’s some indication that the pregnancy, which she learned about at the end of season seven, was a real thing — and that Jaime was the father — season eight has seen her tell Euron the baby is his, while also drinking wine, from which she’d abstained when she appeared to believe she was pregnant.

Whether or not Cersei’s pregnancy is real, all of this spells bad news for Jaime. When he left Cersei to go fight the army of the dead at the end of season seven, Jaime clearly believed Cersei would never kill the father of her unborn son. So when Bronn showed up in “The Last of the Starks” with marching orders (and the promise of cash) from Cersei to off both Tyrion and Jaime, it was probably a clear signal to Jaime that the status of Cersei’s pregnancy has changed. (However, it’s interesting, given the fact that the two brothers were together in this scene, that Tyrion clearly still believed Cersei was pregnant when he pleaded for Missandei’s life.)

From Jaime’s point of view, Cersei hiring Bronn to kill him could mean that she lied about being pregnant to begin with, or that she’s since had a miscarriage. Either way, Jaime understands better than anyone that with no future child in the picture, there really is nothing Cersei cares about at this point except holding on to the throne and striking down all her enemies, which makes her a threat to, well, everyone.

4) There’s a prophecy in the books — one the show has referenced — that says Cersei will die at the hands of her younger brother

The aforementioned prophecy was given to Cersei by a witch named Maggy the Frog. Maggy the Frog also appears in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, on which the series is based — and in the books, the prophecy is more extensive than what we saw heard of it in season five’s opening episode, “The Wars to Come.”

In Martin’s novel A Feast for Crows, Maggy delivers a prophecy about Cersei becoming queen; she also foretells that Cersei will have three children. That part is repeated practically word for word on the TV show:

But on the show, the scene ends before Maggy’s last sentence in the book, which is, “And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

“Valonqar” is a High Valyrian word meaning “little brother.” Cersei has clearly always interpreted this prophecy to mean that Tyrion will kill her, and it definitely explains her longstanding hatred and mistrust of him. But Jaime is also her younger brother. Though they’re twins, Cersei is the elder — and that means Jaime could also be a candidate for the job. Additionally, Cersei probably isn’t thinking about Jaime as her potential killer, which makes her more likely to fall victim to him, as she would no one else.

So there you have it: a pretty strong case that Jaime riding off not to bask in Cersei’s arms, but to attempt to do what no one else can: remove her from the throne once and for all.

But if you’re anticipating a joyous reunion between Jaime and Brienne after he’s killed Cersei, not so fast.

The fact that Nutter had Jaime tell Brienne he no longer loves her when directing “The Last of the Starks” is a clear indication that Jaime believes he won’t be seeing her again, which means he’s probably anticipating a hell of a fight to get to his sister. (Remember, she’s protected by the Zombie Mountain.) That means that by the time he makes his way to Cersei and is able to deliver the fatal wound, he could well be wounded himself.

You may remember that he once told Bronn (in season five’s fourth episode, “Sons of the Harpy”) that he wished to die “in the arms of the woman I love.” It seems he may, ironically, be getting that wish granted far sooner, and under different circumstances, than he’d hoped.

Over the course of a decade beginning in the mid-1980s, Donald Trump publicly presented himself as a highly successful entrepreneur even as he claimed business losses exceeding $1 billion, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. “Over all,” the newspaper explained, “Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years.”

The scoop reflects poorly on Trump, who willfully misled the public for a decade in hopes of fraudulently representing himself as a man with a Midas touch. But he could not have succeeded without the assistance of many Americans, some mercenary, others over-credulous, who helped to spread the deceit and deception, generating countless newspaper articles, magazine stories, and TV segments that misinformed the public about the publicity hound’s record in business.

New evidence of his staggering losses in that decade therefore provides an apt occasion to reflect on the media’s complicity in Trump’s brazen deceit and deception.

Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who penned The Art of the Deal, has already apologized for falsely portraying the huckster from Queens as “a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business,” telling The New Yorker, “I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”

[Read: What Donald Trump’s books say about winning]

But Schwartz was far from alone in abetting Trump’s lies. Indeed, the television producer Mark Burnett could not have “resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American success” with The Apprentice in the Aughts if not for portrayals of Trump as a thriving tycoon in an era when he was hemorrhaging money.

Here’s a Newsweek cover from 1987:

And a Time cover from 1989:

Neither cover image suggests a man who inherited a fortune from his father only to suffer 10-figure losses during a stretch when he passed himself off as a rainmaker.

Back in 2011, Elspeth Reeve flagged other bygone estimates of Trump’s net worth:

• March 1988: The New York Times says Trump is worth $3 billion when he buys the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan for $390 million.
• October 1988: Trump estimated to be worth $1 billion by Forbes magazine.
• July 1989: Trump’s net worth estimated to be $1.5 billion—an increase of $500 million in 10 months. He makes Forbes’ World Billionaires list for the first time.
• June 1990: Under the headline “As A Laughingstock, Donald Trump Is Paying Big Dividends,” The Philadelphia Inquirer writes that Trump had had a very bad year marked by marital and financial fiasco, including the sting of ex-wife “Ivana’s charge that her estranged hubby is not a billionaire but worth a mere $400 million to $600 million.”
• July 1990: Trump was dropped from Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires after the value of his real estate business plummeted. Forbes estimated he was worth about $500 million that year. Others guessed less.
• January 2000: Trump claims he’s worth $5 billion. But even his closest associates don’t entirely back that up. The Wall Street Journal explained that “several of his billions are based on profits that are far in the future—and far from guaranteed.” Abraham Wallach, executive vice president of Trump Organization, hedged by saying, “Donald exaggerates sometimes. He’s talking about futures.” The newspaper noted that Forbes had listed Trump’s fortune at closer to $1.6 billion, but New York real estate professionals asserted his fortune “falls far short” of even the lower figure.
• April 2000: Wallach quickly got more in line with his boss’s talking points when he spoke with Fortune a few months later. Reporter Jerry Useem recounts that when his magazine was putting together a list of billionaires, “Trump called so many times to haggle over his net worth that an intern was assigned to field his calls.”
• March 2005: Just after the first season of The Apprentice, Forbes put Trump’s worth at $2.6 billion, ranking him in a 15-way tie for 228th richest person in the world.
• October 2005: Timothy O’Brien’s book TrumpNation charges that Trump is worth just $150 million to $250 million. Trump sued for defamation, and lost.
• 2005: Documents from the defamation suit revealed that as it was underwriting a $640 million loan to Trump to build in Chicago, Deutsche Bank estimated Trump’s evaluated his net worth was $788 million. Trump disputed the number.

In the worst cases, media outlets credulously accepted Trump’s claims. He was almost invariably covered as if he was much richer than the most careful estimates available at the time suggested.

[David Frum: The great illusion of ‘The Apprentice]’

He was rarely covered as if he were one of the biggest business failures in America, even in the era when, per the IRS data just reported by The New York Times, “year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer,” and Trump’s “core business losses in 1990 and 1991—more than $250 million each year—were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.”

And no matter how many times he’d been caught being dishonest before, many treated his subsequent claims with the same presumption of legitimacy normally extended to people without a long track record of self-serving mendacity. Archives of media organizations contain countless examples.

To end their grifter-enabling complicity, America’s media institutions should now set the record straight: Each TV station, newspaper, and magazine that broadcast or published ’80s and ’90s coverage of Trump that misled its audience as to his wealth or success should revisit its claims in light of the new information unearthed by The New York Times, publishing updates and corrections. It won’t be easy at these resource-starved institutions, but they owe it to their readers.

And Random House, which published The Art of the Deal, should put out a statement clarifying that the purported author was no great deal maker at the time.

That is how institutions make themselves accountable for spreading untruths, a discipline that can’t help but influence today’s writers and editors to be more careful. Almost no one at the time could’ve anticipated how much misleading claims about Trump, of all people, would matter to the future of the world.

But it all mattered.

[Ben Zimmer: Donald Trump and the art of the ‘con]’

Let that be a lesson for today’s tabloids, gossip columnists, over-credulous or mercenary journalists, and reality-television producers. It might be tempting to salve your conscience as Tucker Carlson told GQ: “There’s this illusion … that everything is meaningful, everything important,” he said. “It’s not.” A more honorable approach, conveyed with nuance in the novel Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, can be distilled as follows: Strive to act as though everything matters––one never knows what will turn out to be world-changing.

For the public at large, Trump’s old tax returns are a reminder, at least for those of a certain age, of how effectively the man’s lies distorted our image of him and the degree of success that he was ostensibly enjoying in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

In truth, he was secretly flailing, piling up debt at properties that he later left bankrupt. Now he brags that he’s doing a bang-up job running America. Don’t get fooled again.

The director of the new documentary says farming is “a really amazing opportunity for a creative brain.”

John and Molly Chester are a young married couple, happily living their lives in Los Angeles. One day they bring home a dog, whom they name Todd. But Todd’s barking irritates their neighbors; eventually, the Chesters are evicted. And instead of moving to another, more dog-friendly apartment, they make a big decision: to leave LA altogether and move to a 200-acre farm in Ventura County.

That sounds like the plot of a quirky indie comedy, but it’s actually a true story, one that’s now told in a documentary called The Biggest Little Farm, which chronicles the first eight years of the Chesters’ new life. Farming is very hard work, especially when you’ve committed to a form of it that aims to capitalize on all the ways earth’s organisms interact — from the ones the Chesters are nurturing on purpose, like sheep and chickens and fruit trees, to the ones they’re much less excited to see, like pests and coyotes and weeds.

Neon

Directed by John Chester, The Biggest Little Farm shows how he and Molly slowly and painstakingly spend those eight years transforming their fallow acreage into a thriving example of the power of regenerative farming, with help from friends and colleagues and, yes, even coyotes. Every creature, they discover, has a purpose — even the ones that seem to be pests. Learning to live in harmony with the cycles of the land and the relationships between creatures brings about thriving, lasting growth.

I spoke with John — who is also an Emmy-winning TV director — by phone about the film, the farm, and the surprising things he learned about himself from making the movie. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Alissa Wilkinson

This is a very earthy film — we’re experiencing the sunshine and the rain, our hands in the dirt. But, of course, we’re not actually doing that; you are. You’re the filmmaker and the farmer. So when you’re filming your own life, how do you make your experience feel really concrete to the audience?

John Chester

Well, at year five, when I knew the film was actually going to be something — that I had something to say and something to show — I wanted a raw, unflinchingly honest look at the range of emotions and events that go along with this life on the farm.

In one day, you can experience something heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and discouraging. Then a few minutes later, you can see something miraculous happen within the farm’s ecosystem that inspires you and makes you feel like you could never do anything but this. Like, this is utter perfection.

I wanted the audience to go on that journey. It is real. It’s what happens on the farm. I could wake up to something that I felt would end the day, then turn around and be incredibly inspired.

Alissa Wilkinson

That’s one thing you really get a sense of while watching: Farming life is so uncertain. You don’t know what the end result will be. And that was true for you as you were making Big Little Farm. Sometimes when we’re watching a finished documentary, we forget that the filmmaker didn’t really know what the end would be when they started shooting. As you were revisiting all of your years of footage, did you find yourself seeing your own story through new eyes?

John Chester

Yeah. Farming has been an immensely humbling process. Finding that humility set me free, in a lot of ways, to embrace and accept my own shortcomings as a person and a farmer.

I did the first pass with an editor in a barn, while still farming. What I realized was that I hadn’t really been honest about the role I was playing [in the farming venture as a whole]. I thought I was super into this whole thing with my wife, that I wanted it to work more than anything.

Neon

But I realized I had been playing a bit of an antagonistic role, where I would question things in a way that Molly wouldn’t. Molly would just move forward. I played the role of the skeptic. And I realized I hadn’t been honest with myself about that as we did the first pass on the film. I realized I wasn’t as brave and courageous and optimistic as I wanted to present myself — I was the one who was the skeptic.

It was kind of hard for my ego. But it was the truth, and I realized that while doing the edit.

I also realized how incredible my wife is! She reminds me now of a hummingbird, constantly being supplied with some form of nectar that I can’t quite get ahold of. [chuckles]

Alissa Wilkinson

I bet metaphors like that occur to you a lot more readily when you’re living in the middle of nature!

John Chester

Yes! It’s poetic justice, watching nature reflect human experience.

Alissa Wilkinson

Obviously, most of the audience isn’t ultimately going to go and do what you did, though I imagine some people will be inspired. But what sorts of lessons are people taking away from the film?

John Chester

Actually, that’s what I’m most excited about. I’ve heard from people who are CEOs, or managers, and they’ve started to look at the complexities of the “ecosystem” of their workplace — that each individual’s talents and challenges are something to be embraced, to try to work with when we can. We all have coyotes in our life that are trying to eat our chickens. But the coyote has a role. That’s one of the things the film really explores.

Neon

The movie might make you question our decision-making at times; we let the coyote run rogue for a while! But I think that [after seeing the film], some people are looking at problems in their own lives a little more optimistically. There’s a comfortable level of disharmony, and that may be good enough. Each of us has a role within the ecosystem that we live in.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think the movie could also make people look differently at whatever they’re growing, even if it’s just on their stoop or in their backyard. It could encourage people to think about living more in harmony with the natural world around us, whatever it is.

John Chester

Yes, and the direct connection we have. People think, Oh, farms like this exist. If we really believe that regenerative farming is the future, then I can vote for it with my dollar. Ultimately, politicians and industrialized agriculture and [the agribusiness giant] Monsanto will not be stopped with any greater force than a consumer who votes with their dollar, who supports the kind of farms that they want to see.

I think that’s the immediate takeaway for a lot of people: They now have at least a way to ask questions of the farms that they buy from, and the encouragement to go to the farmers market, to grow your own food. Those are powerful choices.

Alissa Wilkinson

Which makes me wonder: Do you see links between filmmaking and farming?

John Chester

Oh, my gosh. Films don’t want to be made. And farms don’t want to interact with nature.

When I started farming, I thought I’d be giving up noodling away on creative things like story structure. But farming is constant observation, followed by creativity, followed by humility — as it is in storytelling. You write an article, you’re super happy with it, you go to bed, you wake up and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever written. And you throw it away. That’s part of the process.

Hold on loosely but don’t let go — all those things apply to farming and storytelling. I think it’s a really amazing opportunity for a creative brain. People who think more visually and creatively make much better farmers, because they can create a four-dimensional map in their brain about how all these things fit together.

Neon

In industrialized agriculture, it’s way more simple. You add fertilizer, then you spray this chemical; it’s all about a war, trying to control nature and put it in a straitjacket. You don’t even want to see it exist in any form other than the one you’re trying to grow. But the integrated philosophy of regenerative farming is endlessly fascinating and deeply complex.

Alissa Wilkinson

One more question: What’s happening on the farm right now?

John Chester

Let’s see. It’s lambing season, so we’ve just had about 30 new baby lambs. Calving season is starting, so we’ve got about five baby calves. Emma the pig is now 650 pounds and in full retirement. She’s a retired pet now. Her pasture is just outside of my office at the barn, so I see her every day.

And it’s spring, and we’ve had 24 inches of rain, which is a record in the 13 years that I’ve lived in California, and in the eight years I’ve been farming, by far. Twenty-some inches of rain is huge for us. The flowers and the fruit this year — it’s going to be incredible.

The Biggest Little Farm opens in theaters on May 10.

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In a live taping of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast in Austin, Texas, the crew debates whether Texas will be a battleground state in 2020. Special guest Ashley Lopez, senior politics reporter at KUT, joins in the debate. The team also faces off with the audience in a round of political trivia and asks why Texas’s presidential contenders aren’t faring better in the Democratic primary so far.

FiveThirtyEight On The Road is brought to you by WeWork. You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN app or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with additional episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

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For more than 30 years, the critic Camille Paglia has taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Now a faction of art-school censors wants her fired for sharing wrong opinions on matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault.

“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” an online petition declares. “If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” Regardless, the students behind the petition want her banned from holding speaking events or selling books on campus. In their telling, her ideas “are not merely ‘controversial,’ they are dangerous.”

Others believe that the student activists are trying to set a dangerous precedent that would undermine freedom of expression and free academic inquiry. “The effort to remove her for expressing her *opinions* strikes me as political correctness run amuck,” a faculty member emailed. “Instead of discussing and debating, they attempt to shame and destroy. This is pure tribalism. It is exactly what Donald Trump does when he encounters something he doesn’t like.” Most at the institution seem to hold positions somewhere in between.

[Read: A violent attack on free speech at Middlebury]

Camille Paglia, who identifies as transgender, joined the University of the Arts in 1984 when older institutions were merging in order to create it. While UArts no longer awards tenure, Paglia is among a few long-serving faculty members grandfathered into a prior system. According to detractors, “Paglia has been teaching at UArts for many years, and has only become more controversial over time.” In fact, she has always been controversial.

In Paglia’s first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, she describes sex and nature as “brutal, daemonic” forces, “criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the causes of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes,” and roots sex differences in biology. Seven publishers rejected the book before Yale University Press bought it in 1990; Sexual Personae was then savaged by feminist critics on the way to becoming an unexpected, 700-page best seller. And it sparked a national debate about art, history, gender, ideas that offend, free inquiry, and political correctness.

The fight over Sexual Personae was especially vicious at Connecticut College, where a student suggested adding the book to the institution’s 1992 summer-reading list. Some professors were so outraged that they tried to block its inclusion.

“During meetings with the committee, professors denounced the work as ‘trash’ and compared it to Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’” the Hartford Courant reported. In the campus newspaper, the head of the women’s-studies program opined, “Whenever we think about freedom of expression, we need to think also about the damage that certain kinds of speech can do. Let’s not be fooled by packaging into mistaking any hate-speech or sexist or racist doctrine for ideas.”

[Read: Camille Paglia doesn’t understand how civilizations commit suicide]

But Claire L. Gaudiani, the president of the college, countered, “It is a bizarre idea to think that by placing a book on a reading list that an academic community is endorsing any book as a community. For those who take offense at the various passages is understandable, but we cannot let that influence the book’s selection.”

Sexual Personae stayed on the list.

The student who originally proposed it commented at the time, “I got angry because I was seeing a great deal of intolerance that I would have sworn a few months ago did not exist at Connecticut College. I fear a little bit for the future of the reading program with people here who might try to stifle the diversity of ideas.”

As incoming freshmen arrived for the fall semester, the controversy was still simmering, according to an account published in August 1992 in The New York Times:

Students interviewed on campus said they were more motivated to read the book because the controversy has provoked so much discussion. “When someone tells you not to read something, I suppose that makes you all the more curious to see what all the fuss is about,” said one incoming freshman woman. “I agreed with some things in the book and disagree with others, but I certainly think I am capable of understanding it and discussing its meaning. It’s pretty condescending for a professor to think that freshmen aren’t capable of that …”

The president of the student government, Colleen Shanley, added: “Now that I’ve started reading the book, I can’t see why people have been opposed to it. But I feel that it’s when people don’t talk about something that it can become really dangerous. I may not agree with the book’s content, but we should not be removing books from reading lists because don’t agree with them.”

In The Washington Post, the columnist Nat Hentoff argued that “the students in particular saved the book––and the intellectual credibility––of Connecticut College,” endorsing the question posed by one among them: “What is more dangerous––to talk about ideas in the open, or to pretend they do not exist? If we cannot discuss controversial ideas here, where can we have open-minded debate?”

Paglia has been outspoken ever since, transgressing against conservative and progressive pieties alike while commenting on matters of art, culture, politics, and identity. Now it is a group of students, rather than professors, who believe it is more dangerous to talk openly about her ideas than to ban them from campus.

[Read: Who’s afraid of free speech?]

Any student, regardless of ideology or personal identity, risks discomfort attending a Paglia lecture, given the pedagogical approach she has described:

The idea that ‘self-esteem’ should be the purpose of education: this is social-welfare propaganda. Development of our intellect and of our abilities has to be the focus … You build identity. Maybe identity comes through conflict. For example, my struggles with gender, my struggles with sexual orientation, my anguish over so many decades produced my work … Sometimes conflict is creative …

If there’s no pressure on you, there’s no pressure to create.

So we have got to stop this idea that we must make life “easy” for people in school … No. Maybe the world is harsh and cruel, and maybe the world of intellect is challenging and confrontational and uncomfortable. Maybe we have to deal with people who hate us, directly, face-to-face. That’s important. You develop your sense of identity by dealing with the things which would obliterate your identity. It does not help you to develop your identity by putting a cushion between yourself and the hateful reality that’s out there.

This month’s protests began when it was announced that Paglia would give a lecture titled “Ambiguous Images:  Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.” According to a letter that two student activists released, “Joseph McAndrew (they/them), a gender non-binary creative writing major, brought this lecture to the student body’s attention through social media and raised their concerns to Title IX and other University administration about the school giving Camille a platform. This led to the University reaching out to ​Deja Lynn Alvarez, a local transgender activist, to facilitate a talk-back after Camille’s lecture. Students were informed the day before the lecture that Camille had no plans to stay for the talk-back.”

It is rare for student activists to argue that a tenured faculty member at their own institution should be denied a platform. Otherwise, the protest tactics on display at UArts fit with standard practice: Activists begin with social-media callouts; they urge authority figures to impose outcomes that they favor, without regard for overall student opinion; they try to marshal antidiscrimination law to limit freedom of expression. David Bernstein described this process in his 2004 book, You Can’t Say That.

To help justify the effort to suppress Paglia’s speech, student activists pointed to an interview posted to YouTube in which she dismissed some allegations of campus sexual assault:

The girls have been coached now to imagine that the world is a dangerous place, but not one that they can control on their own … They expect the omnipresence of authority figures … They’re college students and they expect that a mistake that they might make at a fraternity party and that they may regret six months later or a year later, that somehow this isn’t ridiculous? To me, it is ridiculous that any university ever tolerated a complaint of a girl coming in six months or a year after an event. If a real rape was committed go frigging report it …

A student cited those remarks in an email explaining why she supports the anti-Paglia protests: “As a survivor of sexual assault, I would never feel comfortable taking a class with someone who stated that ‘It’s ridiculous … that any university ever tolerated a complaint of a girl coming in six months or a year after an event,’ or that ‘If a real rape was committed, go friggin’ report it to police.’ Perhaps this is an ‘opinion,’ but it’s a dangerous one, one that propagates rape culture and victim-blaming. For this and other reasons, I find her place as an educator at this university extremely concerning and problematic.”

[Adam Serwer: A nation of snowflakes]

Even if students who feel that way should be able to avoid Paglia’s classes, they should not try to impose their preferences on their peers.

UArts administrators felt similarly, declining to cancel the public lecture that Paglia was scheduled to deliver. The student activists responded by protesting the event. In an open letter, the student Sheridan Merrick described what happened next:

We sat out of the way of the door, simply holding signs and chatting amongst ourselves. When the doors to the event were opened, students had the option of attending the lecture (during which no protest signs would be allowed into the space), or remaining in the lobby. Most students chose to peacefully observe the lecture. As students entered … security guards carefully counted the number of audience members and immediately cut students off at the maximum capacity (180 people), no standing room allowed. All other entrances to the recital hall were locked and blocked by security guards.

Around 30 to 40 minutes into Camille’s talk, the fire alarm went off (rumor has it due to it being pulled by a student in protest, though I have no way of confirming this), and Terra building was evacuated. Students who were in class or rehearsal joined those who had been protesting outside of Terra building, chanting: “We believe survivors, trans lives matter.” There were probably around two hundred students chanting this, but I can’t be sure. I only observed one or two students (cisgender “allies”) become even remotely aggressive in their behavior, and by this I mean shouting curse words.

Two UArts educators who were present described how they experienced the same event in emails to me. One wanted to voice “the frustrations of some of the students in attendance, a number of them trans and queer identifying, who under unthinkable pressures from their peer group to conform to the political agenda du jour, showed up that night not to protest but to listen, presumably out of a belief that the ideas that challenge them are often the ideas most likely to nourish them.” While they might “deplore much of what she has said about trans identity and rape culture,” the educator continued, “they also didn’t assume that Camille’s scholarship was therefore invalid or dangerous or traumatizing. It’s the studiousness, integrity, and (yes) courage like theirs that often goes unremarked upon in coverage of these campus eruptions.”

The other educator pointed out that the person who pulled the fire alarm interfered not only with the educational opportunities of students who chose to attend Paglia’s public lecture, but also everyone else taking classes in the building. This educator noted how much money students spend to attend classes:

I take it, and them, very seriously. In one class the students were to finish projects that they had been working on for weeks, with focused assistance. The fire alarm took them out of class for over an hour while they stood outside to listen to a group screaming “trans lives matter!” at them. What did this produce? Projects weren’t finished, the class wasn’t finished, the students lost out. I don’t care if they were black, trans AND disabled—I was there to help them learn 100 percent. And I was blocked from doing that, that night.

A third educator spoke with students and relayed their perspective. “My students seemed to feel as though they were crossing something of a picket line just to be attending the event without the intent of shouting Camille down,” he emailed. “That an opinion differing from the majority’s, even at a place of supposed open mindedness and tolerance, can so readily be codified as ‘harmful’ and/or ‘violent’ is deeply concerning to me. And that Camille holds her own, perhaps unique, opinions should not automatically make her a threat.”

As significant as the protest itself was the response by UArts President David Yager, who released a long statement defending free expression. Its core message:

Across our nation it is all too common that opinions expressed that differ from one another’s––especially those that are controversial––can spark passion and even outrage, often resulting in calls to suppress that speech. That simply cannot be allowed to happen. I firmly believe that limiting the range of voices in society erodes our democracy. Universities, moreover, are at the heart of the revolutionary notion of free expression: promoting the free exchange of ideas is part of the core reason for their existence. That open interchange of opinions and beliefs includes all members of the UArts community: faculty, students and staff, in and out of the classroom. We are dedicated to fostering a climate conducive to respectful intellectual debate that empowers and equips our students to meet the challenges they will face in their futures.

I believe this resolve holds even greater importance at an art school. Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: not now, not at UArts.

Later, when student activists launched their online petition, they included the demand, “Yager must apologize for his wildly ignorant and hypocritical letter.”

In a phone interview, Yager told me that he admires the impulse of today’s students to involve themselves in social-justice causes that are greater than themselves, that freedom of expression is especially sacrosanct at an art college, and that he is attentive to the fact that any impingement on Paglia’s ideas, regardless of the merits of those ideas, would have a chilling effect on all speech.

“I would hate to neuter all faculty,” he said.

Yager’s concerns seem warranted. While reporting on this story, I emailed scores of UArts faculty members to solicit comment. A few were willing to speak on the record. Many more on both sides of the controversy insisted that their comments be kept off the record or anonymous. They feared openly participating in a debate about a major event at their institution––even after their university president put out an uncompromising statement in support of free speech––though none expressed any view that couldn’t be broadcast on NPR.

[Read: The coddling of the American mind]

“I’m a faculty member at UArts,” one wrote. “I received your email and thought it prudent to respond using my personal email address. I very much doubt that the IT dept is currently monitoring email activity. BUT they have the ability AND certainly can look up records without privacy concerns. So this is a bit safer. Especially since if I do speak with you it’d be paramount that I be OFF the record. The university has social media/email policies for their faculty.”

Another educator at the college emailed:

In his response, Pres. Yager notes that universities are “at the heart of the revolutionary notion of free expression,” but it is tenure that is supposed to protect academics and give them this freedom he mentions. The vast majority of UArts’ faculty are adjunct or un-tenured full- and part-time instructors who don’t have the same privileges and platform as Dr. Paglia, which makes the whole scenario unbalanced. UArts’ compensation for adjuncts is below average and adjuncts here are not eligible for healthcare or benefits. Within the liberal arts area, Dr. Paglia may be the only tenured faculty member. I think the ethical and appropriate response to this situation is for UArts to commit to hiring more full-time and tenured faculty.

A third educator wrote, “Please do not include my name in your article. Things are rather tense at UArts and we are living in cancel culture, after all. I am in close emotional proximity to students who have signed and promoted the petition. I am not willing to share my thoughts publicly but will consent to share anonymously.” The view this educator feared sharing:

I do not believe she should be removed as a faculty member but I also believe the school belongs to the students. They do not feel safe and I applaud them for taking action to change their environment. I cannot support their cause, however. I believe Paglia represents intellectual dissent within an institution (academia, at large) that often seeks to maintain the status quo and mediocrity of vision. Her perspective, as historically informed and contextualized, is far more objective than students with a limited and subjective scope of understanding at this point in their lives can intellectually grapple with. I think that if they truly listened, they might hear her voice more clearly as someone who seeks to empower the individual above all else.

“Ultimately,” the faculty member concluded, “it is their loss.”

Something has gone wrong in academia when so many faculty members are unwilling to express common viewpoints under their own names.

To better understand the student-activist perspective, I emailed Sheridan Merrick, who posted the Change.org petition. Paglia has been teaching for at least 35 years, I pointed out. If her ideas are not merely controversial but “dangerous,” that implies they have harmed students. Is that the case?

In reply, Merrick cited statistics about the percentage of transgender adults who report having attempted suicide or suffered hate crimes. From there she reasoned:

Paglia’s comments have echoed the hateful language that pushes so many transgender people to contemplate suicide, and encourage transphobic people to react to transgender people violently. We have been experiencing an interesting phenomenon where Paglia’s supporters have been signing our petition in order to leave dissenting comments (this is especially odd considering they have a counter petition that they are welcome to sign). Some of these comments are extremely concerning and blatantly transphobic.

Just one example: “You are either born male, female, or deformed (physically or mentally). Trans people are mentally diseased and often violent. If they are not able to accept the reality of their disease and cope with it they must be removed from society by any means necessary. Some might argue that the high suicide rate among those suffering from this severe mental disease is nature correcting itself. Camille Paglia is a transgender person who was able to accept and overcome her mental disease. Be like Camille.”

Like it or not, Paglia’s philosophies empower people like this, who would have transgender people “removed from society by any means necessary” (this is a violent threat). This has a lasting, negative impact on the transgender community at UArts––whether it be through the psychological damage that comes with being told that you are deformed and diseased and deserve to die, or whether it be through people like Paglia’s supporters acting on their violent beliefs. To have her spouting these beliefs in the classroom and elsewhere makes life more difficult––and dangerous––for transgender students.

I personally know at least one person who, due to Paglia’s comments, has experienced suicidal thoughts and has considered leaving the University. The comments that many of us have been receiving online have caused public safety at our school to be told to up their security game, in case our (very queer) student body is targeted by angry supporters of hers. This is what we mean when we say that her views are not merely controversial, but dangerous.

That argument—a speaker is responsible for harms that are theoretical, indirect, and so diffuse as to encompass actions of strangers who put themselves on the same side of a controversy —is untenable. Suppressing speech because it might indirectly cause danger depending on how people other than the speaker may react is an authoritarian move. And this approach to speech, applied consistently, would of course impede the actions of the anti-Paglia protesters as well.

After all, Paglia identifies as transgender, making her a member of the group at heightened risk of suicide. She was subjected to angry chants from perhaps 200 students, including two cisgender students who shouted curse words at her, not to mention an ongoing effort to take away her livelihood and force her from her longtime community. Social-media protests and the Change.org petition led to vitriol and threats, as in any major culture-war controversy. So treated, many people would suffer more psychological distress than if they saw a YouTube clip, however odious, that didn’t target them personally.

What’s more, when student activists strategically engage in protests, callouts, and other behavior expressly calculated to “make life more difficult” for others, they could indirectly inspire outside parties to engage in threats or even attacks.

Merrick also offered a more bureaucratic line of argument:

The faculty handbook states the following:

“Gender-based harassment is defined as any unwelcome verbal or non-verbal contact or conduct based upon sex or gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Gender-based harassment need not be sexual in nature to be specifically prohibited by this policy. Gender-based harassment includes, but is not limited to, the following: physical assault or physical interference intended to harass on the basis of gender; inappropriate graphics or other displays of gender degrading materials; sexist jokes, anecdotes, or slurs; and insulting, demeaning or derogatory conduct direct toward a person on the basis of their gender. This policy applies to conduct that occurs:

(1) On University premises or property; and/or

(2) In the context of University employment, education, research, recreational, social or artistic activity, irrespective of the location of the occurrence, if the conduct has or can be reasonably predicted to have a continuing negative effect on the University and its students, faculty, visiting faculty, affiliates, staff, contractors, vendors, visitors or guests.”

It seems to me that referring to transgender students as “sniveling little maniacs” is insulting, demeaning, and derogatory towards people on the basis of gender.

The “sniveling little maniacs” quote comes from an event where Paglia was asked about efforts to oust Jordan Peterson from the University of Toronto, after Peterson said professors should not have to use their students’ preferred pronouns. In context, it is clear that “sniveling little maniacs,” whether objectionable or not, refers to activists who believe they are justified in forcing their pronoun choices on others, not transgender students generally. Here is the clip:

Once again, the student activists wield a double-edged sword. If Paglia’s comments qualify as “insulting, demeaning, and derogatory towards people on the basis of gender,” so does lots of speech that is very common on the academic left. For example, locutions such as mansplaining, man-spreading, white male rage, male privilege, toxic masculinity, male gaze, manterrupting, and bropropriating would all be subject to challenge under similarly broad readings of the very same passages in the faculty handbook.

In contrast, robust speech protections like the ones that permitted the Paglia lecture would enable UArts to host events with speakers like the feminist scholar Suzanna Danuta Walters. “Is it really so illogical to hate men?” she asked in a provocative op-ed in The Washington Post. “For all the power of #MeToo and #TimesUp and the women’s marches, only a relatively few men have been called to task … But we’re not supposed to hate them because … #NotAllMen … when they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts.”

Would progressive student activists at UArts favor the expansive interpretation of antidiscrimination language that they are urging if they understood that it would likely result in the suppression of many voices on the identitarian left? Perhaps they anticipate a different outcome: UArts could employ a double standard, allowing academics to freely criticize members of some identity groups but not others, because men are historically privileged while women, gay people, and people of other gender identities are historically marginalized.

But adopting different standards for different identity groups—which would of course never fly in a legal context—would ultimately hurt historically marginalized groups.

Paglia possesses all sorts of knowledge that any student could benefit from understanding. (Understanding doesn’t imply agreeing.) The identitarian conceit is that trans people and survivors of sexual assault can’t learn from Paglia, because she renders them “unsafe.” Meanwhile, cis white males are acculturated to believe that they can always learn from anyone, even professors overtly hostile to their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. In this way, left-identitarianism encourages historically marginalized groups to believe that they are less resilient and less capable than their white, male classmates. They suggest, falsely, that “harm” is the only possible result of listening to controversial (or even offensive) ideas.

There are, finally, political costs of illiberal activism. By targeting Paglia’s job, student activists may alienate people who are open to substantive critiques of her ideas, yet insistent on the absolute necessity of safeguarding a culture of free speech, regardless of whether the speech in question is “correct” or “incorrect.” They fail to heed Henry Louis Gates’s prescient warning not to divide the liberal civil-rights and civil-liberties communities.

The activists also fail to heed a much older lesson that art students ought to know best: Nothing makes an act of free expression more intriguing than an attempt to censor it.

---

This article originally misstated when Camille Paglia was hired by one year.

(Epistemic status: Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.)

I.

There is a national shortage of buspirone.

Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive, it’s off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years.

Now there’s a national shortage. My patients can’t get it, or have to go hunting from pharmacy to pharmacy until they find one that has it. I’ve told people find a source to stockpile a supply so they don’t run out. It feels like we’re living in the Soviet Union.

How did this happen? The New York Times writes:

The main reason for the buspirone shortage appears to be interrupted production at a Mylan Pharmaceuticals plant in Morgantown, W.Va., which produced about a third of the country’s supply of the drug. The Food and Drug Administration had said the facility was dirty and that the company failed to follow quality control procedures.

So the FDA shut down a major buspirone factory. But government agencies – ones that are a lot less nice than the FDA – shut down methamphetamine factories all the time without creating methamphetamine shortages. Why is the buspirone market so vulnerable? The Times again:

Rock bottom prices for some generic drugs are also contributing to the crisis. Consolidation among wholesalers has led to the creation of three buying consortium behemoths that purchase 90 percent of the generic pharmaceutical products in the United States, said Adam Fein, a consultant and chief executive of Drug Channels Institute. These “monster” buyers have squeezed manufacturers on prices, and “some of those generic manufacturers are deciding the profit is so low they can’t make money, and they’re exiting the category,” Dr. Fein said.

Is this really how economics works? There’s a medicine that millions of people desperately need? But nobody will produce it because they can’t make a profit? Huh? Isn’t the usual solution to just raise the price? And people will buy it at the higher price, because they need it so badly? And then you will make more profit, and can keep on making the medication? Isn’t “nobody will supply this product, it’s too cheap” just the economics version of “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”?

Sure, generic drug manufacturing is pretty consolidated. Most individual generic drugs are now manufactured only by one or two companies. If one of those few companies gets greedy (like Martin Shkreli did with Daraprim), they can increase prices by orders of magnitude without a lot of competitors to push back. And if one of those few companies suffers a shock (like the FDA closing the buspirone factory), it makes sense that there might not be enough competitors to pick up the slack.

But how come this is only happening in pharmaceuticals? How come (in capitalist countries) there are almost never meat shortages, bread shortages, laptop shortages, or chair shortages? Is there something unusual about the pharmaceutical landscape that predisposes it to this sort of thing?

I am not an expert in this area and may be getting some of it wrong. But from Berndt, Conti, and Murphy (2017) and a Berndt, Conti, and Murphy (2018), I gather that a big part of the story is the Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA) of 2012 and 2017.

The story goes something like this. The FDA demanded that generic drug manufacturers pass FDA inspection before setting up shop. But the FDA didn’t have enough inspectors to review manufacturers in a timely manner. So companies kept asking the FDA for permission to enter the generics market, and the FDA kept telling them there was a several year waiting period. In 2012, Congress recognized the problem. Politicians, FDA officials, and industry leaders agreed on a new policy where generic drug manufacturing companies would pay the FDA lots of money (about $300 million last time anyone checked), and the FDA would use that money to hire inspectors so they could clear their backlog of applications.

The good news is, the FDA hired lots more inspectors and they are now pretty good at responding to generic drug applications in a timely way. The bad news is that the fees to the companies were designed in a way that subtly encouraged monopolies in generic drug markets. I don’t understand all the specifics, but there seem to be two main problems.

First, if you manufacture a drug, the FDA will charge you a fee, but the fee doesn’t scale linearly with how much of the drug you produce. So suppose Martin Shkreli owns a very big Daraprim factory. The FDA might charge him $1 million per year to fund their inspectors. Suppose you are a small businessman who is angry at Martin Shkreli’s fee hike, and you want to open a competing Daraprim factory in your small town, using your small amount of personal savings. Probably your factory will be much smaller than Martin Shkreli’s. But the FDA will still charge you the same $1 million per year. At worst this means you make no profit; even at best, Shkreli’s economy of scale gives him a big advantage over you. So you may decide not to enter the market at all. From the second paper:

President of the Pharma & Biopharma Outsourcing Association, Gil Roth, remarked, ‘We have a single generic client that we do a short run of production for. Why are we charged the same as a Teva facility that pumps out a billion tablets?’ Another commented, ‘At least a flat tax is based on a percentage, either of revenue or profit. This is a flat fee, which makes it a regressive tax on smaller businesses, both contract manufacturers and small generics companies’

I think the fee might even be per factory, which encourages companies to concentrate all their manufacturing at a single site – like the Mylan one that just got shut down, thus affecting the whole country’s buspirone supply.

Second, traditional economics suggests that if some company has a monopoly on a product that people really need (like a medication), they will charge very high prices. But many generic drugs are produced by only one company each – and Shkrelis aside, most of them charge affordable prices. Why? Berndt et al argue it is because of the possibility of competition: if Shkreli raises his prices too high, some other company can move in and undercut him. But FDA licensing procedures make this undercutting harder than it could be: it will take months to years, and thousands to millions of dollars, for the other company to move in (at which point Shkreli can just say “Haha, no” and lower his prices again, meaning the undercutter would lose all the money they put in).

Historically, the system has worked anyway – because lots of companies are sitting on pre-existing FDA approval to make certain drugs. If a company had ever made a drug in the past, they had FDA permission to make it again whenever they wanted. So if Shkreli raises prices on Daraprim, some other company that made Daraprim ten years ago can set up a new factory tomorrow and undercut him. This helped prevent would-be Shkrelis in most markets, and provided a safety valve for shocks like the one creating the buspirone shortage today.

But GDUFA weakened this system by mandating that any company with FDA approval to manufacture a drug pay yearly inspection fees to the FDA, whether or not they were actively manufacturing it. That turned FDA approval for drugs you weren’t actively manufacturing into a liability; you were paying fees, but not making a profit. Companies started voluntarily cancelling their FDA approvals for older drugs so they wouldn’t have to pay the fees. That meant monopolists lost a lot of their potential competition. And that cleared the way for people like Shkreli to hike prices.

You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Unfortunately, the FDA is inadvertently taxing companies for being in the generic drug business. And it’s taxing them more if they’re not a monopolist with economies of scale. That means we get fewer companies in the generics industry, and more monopolists.

So my very tentative guess as to why buspirone is more plagued by shortages than bread or chairs is because number one, the need for FDA approval makes it hard for new companies to enter the buspirone industry, and number two, the FDA’s fee structure favors large-scale monopolies over small-scale competitors.

II.

The price of insulin is much too high. Vox argues that this is because of the “lax regulatory environment” and the “free market approach”, and that if we could just become socialist like all of the cool countries, everything would be fine.

Insulin is off-patent. It was discovered almost a hundred years ago. But somehow, all the insulin sold in the US is brand-name. This is shocking and obviously the root of the problem. What’s going on? Vox links NEJM’s Why Is There No Generic Insulin?, but summarizes it by saying it’s “because companies have made those incremental improvements to insulin products, which has allowed them to keep their formulations under patent” and because “older insulin formulations have fallen out of fashion.”

I am not diabetic. But if I were, I don’t think I would worry that much which kinds of insulin were vs. weren’t fashionable. What’s really going on?

Here my source is partly the NEJM paper above, but also Health Affairs’ Biologics Are Natural Monopolies. Both agree that the key point is insulin’s nature as a “biologic”. It’s not a simple molecule you can make with a chemistry set. It’s a complex peptide hormone of about seven hundred atoms, arranged in a series of helices and threads and tentacles. The only way to manufacture it is to genetically engineer some microorganism to make it for you.

The FDA usually requires generic manufacturers to prove that their drug is identical to the brand name drug they’re copying. But genetic engineering is hard, microorganisms are uncooperative, and insulin is too complicated to say with certainty that any one insulin molecule is “identical” to any other. So the FDA has lowered their standards for biologics to require proof that a generic biological is “similar”.

But even proving biosimilarity is orders of magnitude tougher than anything that small molecules have to go through. From the Health Affairs article, slightly transposed for readability:

The typical [small molecule] generic drug takes firms 1-3 years, $1-$5 million, and no human clinical trials to introduce. [In contrast], the entire biosimilar development process has been projected to span 8-10 years and cost upwards of $100 million. Human clinical trials involving hundreds of patients can cost $20-40 million to simply confirm that the candidate biosimilar generally replicates the reference product’s short-term positive and negative clinical effects.

Brand-name insulin companies make a bad situation worse by patenting their manufacturing techniques, using different patents than the drug patent, which may still be in effect when a generics manufacturer is trying to copy their drug. For example, Sanofi has somehow managed to get 74 different patents on their Insulin Lantus, which this I-MAK report describes as a “patent thicket”. Many of these patents seem to be totally illegal, and exist only so that it would cost a generics company time and money to challenge them in court. Most generics companies look at the process of trying to prove their hideously complex molecule is “biosimilar” to Sanofi’s hideously complex molecule, without using any of the 74 different manufacturing processes Sanofi uses to make it, and decide against entering the market.

Then the FDA mandates that biosimilars have a different name than the product they are replacing (ordinary generic drugs may not use the trade name, but can use the same chemical name). This makes it harder to have prescriptions for one cover the other, and doctors may have too much inertia to switch to a new drug with a new name. This limits potential sales for these products.

So the reason companies aren’t making generic insulin is that the FDA approval process for generic insulin is very onerous, brand name companies have excessive and illegal patents that make the approval process even worse, and companies’ ability to sell what comes out the other end is limited.

I realize my political slant makes me blame poor regulatory choices for these sorts of things pretty often. And the Health Affairs article I’m drawing from makes a different argument than I do, arguing that their biological properties make insulins “natural monopolies” and that policy choices are only secondary to this. You should consider my biases before you necessarily take my words at face value.

But the NEJM article mentions that plenty of poorer countries do have biosimilar generic insulins, including such gleaming-high-tech bastions of cutting-edge pharmaceutical excellence as Peru. Which of the following do you think is true?:

1. Peru has better technology than the US, and so is able to make cheap biosimilar insulin using processes that our own scientists and engineers can’t manage.

2. Peru has a bigger market than the US, so there’s more money in creating generic insulin to sell to Peruvians than there is selling it to Americans.

3. Peru has a better regulatory environment than the US, and this is enough to make producing biosimilar insulins cheap and easy.

Extreme fringe libertarians have a certain way with words. For example, they call taxes “the government stealing money from you at gunpoint”. This is a little melodramatic, but words like “patent loopholes” and “onerous review processes” sound a little bloodless for something that probably kills thousands of diabetics each year. So I would like to take a page from the extreme libertarian lexicon and speculate that the problem with insulin costs is that the government will shoot anyone who tries to make cheap insulin.

And then Vox writes an article saying that the problem is “the free market” and we need more government intervention. Fine, whatever. I have despaired of anyone ever analyzing this topic in any greater depth than that. The drug situation is going to keep getting worse – for small molecules, for biosimilars, for whatever. People are going to keep blaming “the free market” and implementing more poorly-thought-out regulation. And so the cycle will keep going, ad infinitum. Vox will keep writing this article once a year or so, and I’ll keep telling them they are bad and wrong, and we’ll both get some clicks out of it. The system works!

I want to clarify that I’m not criticizing the current FDA administration. The FDA has recently done a great job trying to shift their processes marginally in the direction of approving more medications, approving more companies entering the generic market, promoting more competition, and generally doing everything right. Even the GDUFA was a step in the right direction, in that it was necessary in order to get generics approved at all. This is probably part of why drug prices are starting to drop (note that there’s a complicated debate over how true this is and what statistics to use, but I think even the skeptics agree the trend is positive, and they are rising less quickly than they have in the past). There are probably some small steps they could still make to improve things – I get the impression that having the government pay for FDA inspections using tax dollars instead of having the distortionary GDUFA system would help. And patent reform would be great. But a lot of this is concessions to political reality that are probably outside the FDA’s control.

The current trends are good, and further small fixes could be better, but they probably aren’t enough to make drugs affordable and consistently available to patients. If this is even possible, it’s going to require more dramatic changes – not just having good regulators who try to make the best of the current system, but reforming the system entirely. This is a tough order (and I’ll try to blog later about what might be involved). But it’s the only thing that I can imagine allowing us to eventually catch up to Peru.

Volodymyr Zelensky rode a populist, anti-corruption message straight to the presidency.

Ukrainians on Sunday overwhelmingly voted to make a comedian their next president — ushering in a new era of politics in the struggling country.

Volodymyr Zelensky, a famous comedian who portrayed Ukraine’s head of state for years on a popular comedy show, defeated the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, who had been in power since 2014.

According to exit polls, Zelensky won a staggering 73 percent of the vote. Poroshenko conceded the race not long after polls closed.

It’s all quite the rise for an ordinary guy who, well, played an ordinary guy-turned-president on television.

Zelensky — or “Ze,” as he’s more popularly known — has no prior political experience and hasn’t offered a detailed blueprint for how he would govern. But he struck a populist, anti-corruption message during the campaign that clearly resonated with millions of Ukrainians suffering from poverty and government graft. That, plus his previous celebrity, made him a formidable force during the Eastern European country’s election.

The big question now is if he can follow through on his promises to stamp out undue oligarch influence in Kyiv and turn Ukraine’s economic fortunes around. After all, the comedian has no prior political experience and didn’t offer a detailed governing blueprint during the campaign.

Clearly, though, Ukrainians believe Zelensky embodies the change they hope he can bring to a struggling nation.

“There’s been a desire for a new face for a long time,” Melinda Haring, a Ukraine expert at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told me before the election. “It was clear the people wanted someone without the same baggage and connections to political dinosaurs.”

Ukraine’s struggles led to Zelensky’s rise

Experts say Zelensky’s remarkable story stems from Ukrainians’ dissatisfaction with decades of failed political leadership.

“After almost 30 years of electing to the presidency either relatively pro-Russian or officially pro-Western candidates from the economic and political elite, Ukraine remains one of the poorest nations in Europe,” Andreas Umland, an expert at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, wrote for the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank on April 16.

A World Bank chart below showing Ukraine’s massive dip in gross domestic product per capita starting around 2013 illustrates this point. And while the country has been experiencing a bit of growth lately, Ukraine is still among Europe’s poorest — if not the poorest — countries.

World Bank

The country’s troubles have led millions of Ukrainians to flee in search of a better life.

“Ukrainians just want a normal standard of living,” Haring told me, but “Ukraine has gotten poorer as Poroshenko has gotten richer.”

Since Poroshenko, who once led the very successful company Roshen, took power in 2014 corruption only worsened as the government’s ties to oligarchs have strengthened. That made it harder for Ukraine to attract foreign investment and help the country’s economy rebound.

In February, Ukraine’s finance minister said that if the country grows at the same economic rate for 50 years — a big if — Ukraine will have the same economic strength as Poland. That, to put it mildly, isn’t an optimistic outlook it may take a half-century to become a European economic success story.

So while Poroshenko got high marks from many for pushing back against Russia’s invasion of parts of Ukraine’s east and south, a record he touted throughout the election, experts said that counted for very little.

“Poroshenko either misread the voters or thought his campaign themes — army, language, and faith — would carry the day,” Steven Pifer, the US ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, told me on Thursday. “It looks like he greatly misjudged the electorate.”

Voters clearly wanted to hear new ideas for a new Ukraine, and that meant stemming the country’s rampant corruption and kick-starting the nation’s sputtering economy.

Poroshenko was such a symbol for Ukraine’s old ways that it was almost funny. Enter a comedian.

Zelensky represents what Ukraine wants to be

Zelensky, 41, made his name on Servant of the People, a comedy program that you can watch on Netflix in the US. It follows the life of Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko, an everyman schoolteacher who unexpectedly becomes president and takes on the nation’s oligarchs.

The actor wants to do the same thing — but now in real life.

It’s probably not surprising that such an unconventional candidate ran an unconventional campaign. He held few big rallies and rarely spoke to the press. Instead, he mainly toured the country with comedy troupes to perform in skits and make audiences laugh, experts told me. But he leveraged social media to directly connect with voters and make his pitch.

Not much is known about his foreign policy except that he is mainly pro-Western, wants Ukraine to enter the European Union, and would seek NATO membership for his country — all positions that didn’t separate him much from Poroshenko.

There are two big worries Ukrainians still have about Zelensky, however. The first, of course, is his inexperience. But Ukrainians have shrugged that off in the past, though, like when voters in Kyiv voted in 2014 to make former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko their mayor.

The second, and more important, is just how close he is to a Ukrainian oligarch: Igor Kolomoisky.

Zelensky’s show appeared on Kolomoisky’s TV channel, and the billionaire has long been a Poroshenko rival. Some worry that the comedian may simply be a tool of another Ukrainian fat cat trying to wield power, a charge Zelensky denies.

But those concerns didn’t dissuade Ukrainians from choosing Zelensky on Sunday. And so now a Ukrainian comedian who entered an election to take on the entrenched corruption in his country will be the next president. It sounds like a joke, but it’s reality.

St. Jude

• Babies who are born with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (XSCID) don't have disease-fighting immune cells. For them, the outside world is an intensely dangerous place. 
• XSCID was nicknamed "bubble boy" disease because of a young boy named David Vetter, who famously lived his entire life in a protective plastic bubble. Vetter died more than 30 years ago, at age 12, after a failed treatment. 
• St. Jude scientists just announced that they have successfully cured babies with XSCID, using a new experimental gene therapy that targets the disease at the genetic level.  
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories. 

For babies born with the severe genetic condition known as "bubble boy" disease, a run-of-the-mill common cold can be deadly.

Born without crucial disease-fighting immune cells, they must be kept isolated from the outside world for their own protection. Months in the hospital and being treated for severe infections is the norm. Without treatment, most born with the disease die as infants. See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: Sumo wrestlers eat up to 7,000 calories a day, yet don't typically suffer from symptoms of obesity

See Also:

• E-cig company Juul is considering creating a digital health tool for smokers who want to quit
• A top VC who's spent 3 decades investing in healthcare shares her best piece of advice for investors
• A mysterious condition can make marijuana users violently ill, and it reveals a hidden downside to the drug's growing popularity

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Lyft has completed its Initial Public Offering, and at this writing the price has since fallen 35%.  Uber’s IPO is expected soon.  Both will now be publicly traded companies, reliant on many people’s judgments about whether they can be good investments.  Uber loses billions of US dollars every year, while Lyft, which is smaller but growing faster, is getting close to losing $1 billon/year for the first time.

Why invest in these companies?

Anyone who says “Amazon lost money too at first” is just not thinking about transportation.  Amazon can grow more profitable as they grow larger, because they can do things more efficiently at the larger scale.

Uber and Lyft are not like this, because their dominant cost, the driver’s time, is entirely unrelated to the company’s size.   For every customer hour there must be a driver hour.  Prior to automation, this means that no matter how big these companies get, there is no reason to expect improvement on their bottom line.  Any Uber or Lyft driver will tell you that these companies have cut compensation to the bone, and that they already require drivers to pay costs that most other companies would pay themselves, like fuel and maintenance.

If Uber and Lyft could rapidly grow their shared ride products, where your driver picks up other customers while driving you where you’re going, that could change the math.  But shared ride services don’t seem to be taking off.  My Lyft app rarely offers me the option, even when I’m at a huge destination like an airport, and when they do it isn’t much of a savings, which suggests that it’s not really scaling for them.

Of course Uber and Lyft could also go into another business, such as bike and scooter rental, but in doing that they’re entering an already crowded market with no particular advantage apart from capital.  The single-customer ride-hailing is the essence of why these companies exist, and there’s no point in investing in them unless you think that product can succeed.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me the possible universe of reasons someone would invest in these companies is the following:

• Confusion about the basic math of ridehailing, outlined above.  Hand-waving comparisons to Amazon are a good sign that this mistake is being made.
• Extreme optimism about Level 5 automation, which would indeed transform the math by eliminating drivers.  I no longer hear many people saying that commercial rollout of Level 5, in all situations and weathers, is imminent, as many people believed around the time Uber and Lyft were founded.   (And no, it makes no sense to have a huge crew of drivers ready to take the wheel only when the weather looks bad.  Nobody can live on that kind of erratic compensation.)
• A naive belief that if you love a product, or find it essential to your own life, it must therefore be a good investment (a rookie investing mistake).
• A belief that while you don’t believe any of those three things, enough other people do that those people will drive the price up, and you can get out before they discover the truth.  If this goal were intended clearly and honestly, it would be Ponzi scheme.  So surely it can’t be that.

So I must be missing something.  What am I missing?

 

The post Why Invest in Lyft or Uber? What Am I Missing? appeared first on Human Transit.

On Monday night, Fox News aired a town hall with Bernie Sanders, a front-runner in the 2020 Democratic primaries. The self-described “democratic socialist” took a risk appearing on the populist-right network. It paid off.

Overall, the senator from Vermont set forth several of his platform’s most popular planks, avoided gaffes, and answered almost every question to audience applause.

Three moments were especially striking. First, Sanders was touting Medicare for all when the Fox News moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum asked the audience members to raise a hand if they currently receive health insurance from an employer. Many hands went up. And by a show of hands, how many would be willing to switch to the health-care system that Sanders was proposing instead? Almost everyone appeared to raise a hand again—a result that seemed to surprise the moderators, who had already told viewers that the group in the auditorium was ideologically diverse.

[Read: Bernie Sanders just hired his Twitter attack dog]

Second, Sanders used the town hall to address President Donald Trump directly, urging him to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen per a resolution that both houses of Congress have passed. “Sign that resolution,” Sanders challenged. “Saudi Arabia should not be determining the military or foreign policy of this country.”

Third, on a night when the moderators repeatedly challenged Sanders on his statements, raising concerns, there was one big claim they did not even question. “Whether you’re a conservative, a moderate, or a progressive,” Sanders said, “I don’t think the American people are proud that we have a president who is a pathological liar. And it does not give me pleasure to say that.”

Under any previous president, moderators would have expressed shock at such a statement. But it is so obviously true that the sitting president is a pathological liar that even moderators on Fox let the characterization stand. “Trump cannot even tell the truth as to where his father was born,” Sanders said. “It’s really that crazy. His father was born in New York; he claims he was born in Germany. If you can’t even tell the truth about where your father was born, it’s hard to believe anything he says.”

It wasn’t a perfect night.

[Read: Bernie Sanders’s staffers want him to be less grumpy]

Sanders was at his most disappointing when he touted a popular subsidy that would disproportionately benefit relative elites (free college tuition); was vague about how he intends to pay for his agenda; and explained why he has opposed so many free-trade agreements, which is to say, policies that increase the size of the economic pie, helping the United States afford more social-welfare spending. He sometimes impugned the motives of those who challenge the practical viability of his proposals, as if they’re all just bought-off shills.

Still, he stepped into one of the more significant filter bubbles that divide red from blue America. He was decent in his manner, pleading for comity, embracing universalist rather than identitarian language, decrying racial injustice and anti-Muslim demagoguery, and mincing no words in correctly labeling Trump a pathological liar. His strengths outshone his flaws in front of a TV audience that many Democrats have a hard time reaching, having written it off as deplorable, if not irredeemable. He showed other Democratic candidates the way forward and warmed up the Fox audience to left-wing ideas.

For having a constructive discussion despite their significant differences, Sanders and Fox deserve congratulations and that highest form of flattery: imitation.

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George Selgin was interviewed on the BBC today and did an excellent job of explaining the unrealistic assumptions being made by proponents of the Green New Deal (GND). I encourage readers to listen to the interview (which also includes two other pundits.)

Here I’d like to put in my two cents worth, as proponents of this policy often muddle the issues with all sorts of distractions. First I’ll discuss paying for the GND in a financial sense and then in an opportunity cost sense.

In a financial sense, people often talk about paying for government spending with taxes, borrowing or money creation. They might as well talk about taxes, taxes, or taxes. After all, government debt is merely pushing taxes into the future, and money creation (seignorage) is a tax on money holders.

So let’s call seignorage “unconventional taxes” and all other taxes “conventional taxes”. In that case it’s a choice between current conventional taxes, future conventional taxes, and current and/or future unconventional taxes.

As a practical matter we can rule out unconventional taxes as a major source of funds for the GND. In the US we have a 2% inflation target, which doesn’t allow for much seignorage. Even if you doubled it to 4%—probably the highest sustainable rate that is politically feasible these days—the sums would still be far too small to make a difference, far below 1% of GDP.

This simplifies things. When you hear these debates and someone starts talking about the Fed monetizing the debt to pay for something big, you can just cover your ears and ignore everything being said until they get back to reality. That’s not to say the Fed cannot buy up lots of debt with interest bearing reserves. But interest bearing reserves are just another form of government debt, and don’t actually pay for anything. You only get significant seignorage from printing $100 bills—seignorage from the rest of high-powered money is trivial

So almost all of any major new program will be paid for with conventional taxes. A responsible government sets conventional tax rates at a level that minimizes deadweight losses over time. Since we already have a big deficit, and bad demographics will push spending even higher in the future, a responsible government will pay for any new spending program with higher current taxes (to minimize deadweight losses.) That’s not to say an irresponsible government (i.e. Trump) might not decide to pay for it with future taxes. But one way or another, new spending will be paid for with higher conventional taxes.

So what about the opportunity cost of extra spending? Might that be lower than expected due to slack in the economy? Might new spending boost economic growth and pay for itself? Unlikely, for three reasons. First, we are probably very close to the natural rate of output. Thus new spending on government programs will displace private spending (C+I).

Second, even if the economy still has slack, it’s very unlikely that it will still have slack two years from today, which is the soonest that the GND would be implemented. It’s already a decade since the Great Recession and wages and prices have probably adjusted by now. If a little bit of adjustment remains, then it’s likely to occur over the next two years.

And even if I’m wrong on both counts, there would still be very little multiplier effect, as the Fed also believes there is very little slack in the economy. They will offset any fiscal boost with tighter money, preventing any significant stimulative effect. (That’s true even if Moore and Cain are added to the FOMC—they are only 2 votes out of 12. And given their history, will they vote to bail out a bunch of socialists in 2021?)

Bottom line: Forget all the MMT hocus-pocus. Any major new spending program will be paid for with conventional taxes, preferably right now. And the opportunity cost will be lower private spending. That’s not to say that all proposals for new government spending are unjustified. But in the case of global warming we don’t need more spending; we need more carbon taxes. K.I.S.S.