Jack

The common ground between men and women is eroding, and not just in Silicon Valley.

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The year is 1997.  You visit a lovely rural town in North Dakota.  Population: 3000.  You take a bunch of pictures with your analog camera to treasure the sweet memories.

Twenty years later, you return.  The lovely rural town is now a regional fracking center.  Population: 100,000.  The charm has vanished beneath a tidal wave of new construction - residential, commercial, and industrial.  You take one picture with your smart phone where you shed a tear of sorrow with New Frack City in the background.  Your caption: "Progress?"

From a tourist's point of view, you're clearly right.  Lovely rural towns are much nicer to visit than regional fracking centers.  Almost anyone who saw Before-and-After pictures would agree with you: the town's gotten far worse.

But what's so great about the tourist's point of view anyway?  Tourism is just one tiny industry in a vast economy.  If a billion-dollar fracking industry replaces a ten-million-dollar sight-seeing industry, that's a $990M gain for mankind, not a "tragedy."  The transformation is clearly good for the 97,000 new residents of the town.  It's good for everyone who consumes the new petroleum products.  And while the original inhabitants will probably gripe about all they've lost, they're free to sell at inflated prices and move to one of the many remaining lovely rural towns. 

Why then is the tourist's perspective so compelling?  Let me count the ways.

First: As Bastiat would say, touristic charm is "seen," while industrial output is "unseen."  You pass through a lovely location; you immediately sigh, "Aah."  You pass by a fracking field; you immediately grimace, "Yuck."  To appreciate the wonder of fracking, you have to set aside your gut reaction and visualize the massive and manifold global benefits of cheaper energy.

Second: Tourists hastily impute their initial disgust to locals: "If looking at fracking once makes me feel bad, it must be hell to actually live here."  But this impulsive reaction ignores everything we know about hedonic adaptation.  Once I got a flat tire outside of Sigmaringen, Germany.  When I complimented the guy at the repair shop on his idyllic town, he furrowed his brow and reflected, "Oh, I guess.  We don't really think about it."  The broader lesson: If you live with beauty every day, you largely take it for granted - and the same goes for ugliness.  That's why most people happily live in places most people wouldn't like to visit.

Third: Tourism has high status in our society.  Elites travel widely, and look down on provincial folk who don't.  As a result, many of us tacitly treat touristic beauty as a merit good - and many more pretend to concur in order to bolster our own status.  Could elites be right?  My default is to say, "Yes," but as merit goods go, tourism seems like a pretty arbitrary selection.

This summer, I'm spending a month in France.  It's a lovely country; I'd happily spend a year there, just nosing around.  But that doesn't mean that France is an especially wonderful country overall.  If France had ten times the population with half of France's current per-capita income and none of its famous attractions, I probably wouldn't want to visit it.  But all things considered, why wouldn't that be a huge improvement?

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Two high-quality studies of the disemployment effects of the minimum wage are getting a lot of attention.  The first looks at Seattle.  Punchline:

This paper evaluates the wage, employment, and hours effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016.

The second looks at Denmark.  Punchline:

On average, the hourly wage rate jumps up by 40 percent when individuals turn eighteen years old. Employment (extensive margin) falls by 33 percent and total labor input (extensive and intensive margin) decreases by around 45 percent, leaving the aggregate wage payment nearly unchanged. Data on flows into and out of employment show that the drop in employment is driven almost entirely by job loss when individuals turn 18 years old.

These look like careful studies to me.  But if I were a pro-minimum wage activist, neither would deter me.  As I confessed before the empirics were in:

If I were sympathetic to the minimum wage, I'd insist, "The worst the experiments will show is that high minimum wages hurt employment in individual cities.  That wouldn't be too surprising, because it's easy for firms and workers to move in and out of cities.  The experiments will shed little light on state-level minimum wages, and essentially no light on federal minimum wages."

In other words, I'd channel Ayn Rand villain Ivy Starnes:

She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world - and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it.

The same goes, of course, for a group-specific minimum wage.  If I favored the minimum wage, I'd look at the Danish results and say:

"Fine, high minimum wages hurt employment for workers in the critical age category.  So what?  It only shows that when some workers are poorly protected, firms prefer to hire them.  The experiments shed little light on comprehensive minimum wages that protect everyone.  Plus, Denmark is a small country of 6M people.  If Denmark's minimum wage hurts low-skill Danes, we need a pan-European minimum wage, not deregulation."

What if the studies had come out the other way?  Opponents also have a plausible objection: The studies measure short-run disemployment effects, which we should expect to be mild.  In the long-run, however, employers have far more flexibility.  They can replace labor with capital.  They can replace low-skilled workers with higher-skilled workers.  And they can shed workers the guilt-free way - by attrition.

I'm not an Austrian economist; our profession's shift from pure theory to empirics has been a huge step forward.  But we also need common sense and a broad view of what empirical evidence counts as "relevant."  As I've said before:

In the absence of any specific empirical evidence, I am 99%+ sure that a randomly selected demand curve will have a negative slope.  I hew to this prior even in cases - like demand for illegal drugs or illegal immigration - where a downward-sloping demand curve is ideologically inconvenient for me.  What makes me so sure?  Every purchase I've ever made or considered - and every conversation I've had with other people about every purchase they've ever made or considered.

And:

Research doesn't have to officially be about the minimum wage to be highly relevant to the debate.  All of the following empirical literatures support the orthodox view that the minimum wage has pronounced disemployment effects:

1. The literature on the effect of low-skilled immigration on native wages.  A strong consensus finds that large increases in low-skilled immigration have little effect on low-skilled native wages.  David Card himself is a major contributor here, most famously for his study of the Mariel boatlift.  These results imply a highly elastic demand curve for low-skilled labor, which in turn implies a large disemployment effect of the minimum wage.

This consensus among immigration researchers is so strong that George Borjas titled his dissenting paper "The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping."  If this were a paper on the minimum wage, readers would assume Borjas was arguing that the labor demand curve is downward-sloping rather than vertical.  Since he's writing about immigration, however, he's actually claiming the labor demand curve is downward-sloping rather than horizontal!

2. The literature on the effect of European labor market regulation. Most economists who study European labor markets admit that strict labor market regulations are an important cause of high long-term unemployment.  When I ask random European economists, they tell me, "The economics is clear; the problem is politics," meaning that European governments are afraid to embrace the deregulation they know they need to restore full employment.  To be fair, high minimum wages are only one facet of European labor market regulation.  But if you find that one kind of regulation that raises labor costs reduces employment, the reasonable inference to draw is that any regulation that raises labor costs has similar effects - including, of course, the minimum wage.

3. The literature on the effects of price controls in general.  There are vast empirical literatures studying the effects of price controls of housing (rent control), agriculture (price supports), energy (oil and gas price controls), banking (Regulation Q) etc.  Each of these literatures bolsters the textbook story about the effect of price controls - and therefore ipso facto bolsters the textbook story about the effect of price controls in the labor market. 

If you object, "Evidence on rent control is only relevant for housing markets, not labor markets," I'll retort, "In that case, evidence on the minimum wage in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the 1990s is only relevant for those two states during that decade."  My point: If you can't generalize empirical results from one market to another, you can't generalize empirical results from one state to another, or one era to another.  And if that's what you think, empirical work is a waste of time.

4. The literature on Keynesian macroeconomics.  If you're even mildly Keynesian, you know that downward nominal wage rigidity occasionally leads to lots of involuntary unemployment.  If, like most Keynesians, you think that your view is backed by overwhelming empirical evidence, I have a challenge for you: Explain why market-driven downward nominal wage rigidity leads to unemployment without implying that a government-imposed minimum wage leads to unemployment.  The challenge is tough because the whole point of the minimum wage is to intensify what Keynesians correctly see as the fundamental cause of unemployment: The failure of nominal wages to fall until the market clears.

And don't forget the vast literature on labor demand elasticity...

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Here’s what I said last month:

Trump is like one of those kings/sultans/emperors in the history books who assumed power as a child and had various ministers conduct governance while they spent time in their harem or engaged in falconry.

And here’s Ross Douthat:

There is, as my colleague David Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic childishness to the man who now occupies the presidency. That is the simplest way of understanding what has come tumbling into light in the last few days: The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne. . . .

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

I like “syphilitic emperor” much better—if only I could write like Douthat.

Here’s The Economist:

In their darker moments, though, some grandees on Capitol Hill wonder if what ails this presidency goes beyond unwise tweeting or the lack of a gatekeeper who can shield Mr Trump from what one Republican describes as “people filling his head with stupid”. It has become a commonplace, especially on the right, to accuse the press of exaggerating palace intrigues in Trump World. If only that were true. In fact, powerful folk in Washington routinely describe Mr Trump in shockingly dismissive terms. He is compared to an easily distracted child who must be kept “on task”.

Through no fault of their own, the (TV) news media gives a very misleading picture of Washington DC. Republicans in DC are reluctant to be too critical on camera, but off camera they are utterly contemptuous of Trump.  Trump has almost no supporters in DC, and even the people within the White House are abandoning hope.

For the past 12 months I’ve been accused of Trump derangement syndrome.  If so, virtually every well informed person within 20 miles of the White House has the exact same disease.

Toronto’s King and Queen Streets — where packed streetcars stop and wait behind one left-turning driver or someone taking forever to parallel-park — is one of North America’s greatest monuments to the natural superiority of motorists over everyone else.

These streetcars are all Toronto has in the way of east-west transit through the very core of downtown, yet their operations are routinely strangled by quite small numbers of cars, running as slow as 6 km/hr (4 mi/hr) (!) during the peak in the most critical section. This for a service that carries the overwhelming majority of the people moving down the street.

We’re talking about the middle of downtown Toronto, the city’s densest and fastest densifying area.  For such a place to function, transit just as to succeed.

Since this is Canada, you can be sure these are legacy streetcar lines.  Almost nobody outside the US intentionally builds streetcars in mixed traffic, but many cities have inherited them.  Long ago, they were reliable because there wasn’t much traffic.  But things got worse in the usual boiling-frog manner, and now here we are.

Now, the city is attempting the first step to improve things, by banning through traffic on King Street, one of the two key arteries.  Oliver Moore has the story, which sounds like almost every story about a city trying to pry a little space away from the motorist so that anyone else can move.  In few places, though, are the motorist’s claims to dominion so indefensible.

The key change will be that cars will be forced right at every intersection, and left turns will be banned.  There are still compromises: traffic is still in the streetcar’s lane, and refuges for passengers to board and alight will be marked only with paint.

Yet the plan will still be controversial at Council, with some Councilors arguing that they have a geometrically incoherent “right” or “need” to drive cars anywhere in the city.  This plan is a critical step, and deserves enthusiastic support.

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It's now becoming fashionable to describe America in binary terms, such as red and blue, coastal and middle, affluent and struggling. In my view these generalizations are often misleading.

Let's take the case of income distribution. If you listened to many pundits, you would assume that America is divided into two groups---struggling non-college educated people who shop at Walmart, and affluent professionals who shop at Whole Foods. These articles create an image of a two-class society, that is, an income distribution that looks like the back of a Bactrian camel:

In fact, America's income distribution is one hump not two. The vast majority of people are neither highly affluent nor struggling to survive. Indeed the largest group (of middle aged people) is middle class, people such as teachers and other state and local workers, unionized industrial workers, pharmacists, tax preparers, skilled carpenters, nurses, plumbers, electricians, ordinary office workers, miners, small businesspeople, typical (full time) farmers, long haul truckers, and many others. Here's the actual income distribution---do you see two humps?

Neither do I.

These binary descriptions of America tend to mislead us. The left wonders why inequality is not a bigger issue. Maybe because the huge group in the middle isn't sure whether the Dems want to redistribute money from the rich to them, or from them to the poor.

Interestingly, back in 1970 we did live in a Bactrian camel world:

We moved to a dromedary world when China went from being poor to being middle income:

See that $60,000 figure in the lower right corner? I feel very lucky right now. If you are a typical reader of this blog, you may feel that way too.

Why do pundits mislead us? Perhaps because they like to think about the world in terms of stories. This boring post doesn't have an interesting story to tell.

PS. A comment on the median income in the US---which might seem rather low. That figure includes lots of young people working part time, as well as lots of retired people picking up a few extra bucks. Middle-aged full time workers tend to earn more, and of course family incomes tend to be higher than individual incomes.

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Fill in the blank: “We are sorry for the unfortunate experience our customers had with …” This time it’s Delta Airline’s turn to apologize profusely for a viral video detailing their customer-service experience. Brian and Brittany Shear had paid for a seat used by their toddler on a flight from Hawaii back to California, where they live, when a flight attendant told them they had to give it up, claiming it was overbooked. When the Shears refused to do so, the video shows someone  — it’s still unclear who — threatening them with jail and the loss of their children:

WATCH: Delta apologizes after kicking family off plane for refusing to give up their 2-year-old son's seat: https://t.co/WzSEY1z0F7 pic.twitter.com/PpYpCY2FEb

— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 5, 2017

On the video, Brian Schear can be heard talking with a person off-camera — it is not clear whether that person is a Delta employee, a security officer, or somebody else.

After Schear says that he won’t leave — the airline will have to remove him — the person off-camera replies, “You and your wife will be in jail … it’s a federal offense if you don’t abide” by an airline crew’s order.

“I bought that seat,” Schear protests.

Schear then suggests that his wife could hold one of the toddlers during takeoff and then put the youngster in the car seat. Another person, who appears to be a Delta supervisor, tells him that federal rules require that children under 2 must stay in a parent’s lap throughout the flight.

Er … about that …

That is false. The Federal Aviation Administration “strongly urges” that infants be in a car seat, although it permits those under 2 to be held in a parent’s lap. On its website, Delta recommends that parents buy a seat for children under 2 and put them in an approved child-safety seat.

Oopsie! However, there may have been another reason for Delta’s initial demand to have the toddler sit in the father’s lap. The Schears originally bought the seat for their 18-year-old son, but they bought him a separate ticket on an earlier flight in order to be able to use the seat for the toddler in his car seat — as Delta and the FAA recommend. It’s unclear whether the Schears updated the passenger information:

“I bought the seat,” Brian Schear is seen telling the agents in a video of the incident, explaining that he initially purchased the seat for his 18-year-old son but sent the teen home early on another flight so that the toddler would have a seat on the plane. “It’s a red-eye. He won’t sleep unless he’s in his car seat. So, otherwise, he’d be sitting in my wife’s lap, crawling all over the place, and it’s not safe.” …

The issue, it seems, is transferring airline tickets from one passenger to another. Delta Air Lines maintains on its website that “all tickets are nontransferable per the fare rules. Name changes are not permitted.”

Note, however, that is a Delta rule, not an FAA regulation. The FAA allows transfers as long as the names get changed early enough for a TSA check on the new passenger. Regardless, that alone could have been grounds to refuse service, but that’s clearly not the objection raised in this instance. If that was the problem, they would have asked them all to deplane right from the start, and shouldn’t have allowed them on the flight in the first place. Delta wanted the seat for another passenger, despite the fact that the Schears had paid for it, and then kicked them all off the flight for refusing to give it up — even after Brian Schear finally conceded the point and agreed to fly with his son in his lap.

Like American Airlines, Delta learned its lesson from United. When this video began to go viral on Wednesday, they immediately announced an investigation into the incident, then settled up with the Schears, complete with public apologies. It doesn’t matter if an airline can justify its behavior; when grossly poor customer service gets exposed, it’s much better and far less costly to simply apologize and offer a refund-plus to the customers involved. And threatening the loss of custody for parents who just want to fly home after a vacation is a pretty good example of “grossly poor customer service,” regardless of any justification.

After this string of viral videos, two things will happen. First, customers will become a lot more emboldened to stand up to airline employees, especially in overbooking situations, and second, airlines will have to try to eliminate those opportunities as fast as possible. This is a good demonstration of the marketplace at work. We may not need Congressional action on overbooking — airlines now have a strong interest in ending the practice. Markets being what they are, though, expect prices to rise to cover those sunk costs in empty seats, and expect cancellation fees and policies to get a lot tougher, which would have happened whether Congress drove these changes or not.

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Until now, I’ve thought calls for the impeachment of Trump were premature, if not downright silly.  Not any longer:

President Donald Trump opened the door Monday to a future meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, offering unusual praise for the globally ostracized leader at a time of surging nuclear tensions. . . .

“If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it,” Trump told Bloomberg News.

Honored?

Just get rid of him, he’s a disgrace to the United States of America.

PS.  Here’s another reason to impeach him:

The White House is “looking into” ways to potentially change the nation’s libel laws to make it easier to go after reporters whose stories they deem inaccurate.

That’s according to President Trump’s chief spokesman Sean Spicer who told reporters during a Monday briefing that: “that is something that is being looked into, substantively and then both logistically how it would happen.”

Just embarrassing.

PPS.  Here are some facts about the guy that Trump would be “honored” to meet:

A woman who survived one of North Korea’s notorious labor camps said her four children and her parents starved to death in a camp after they were all arrested as group punishment because the woman had “gossiped” about the regime’s former leader, according to a U.N. report out today.

The woman’s testimony was part of a report by the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights, which issued an unusual warning to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that he could be held accountable for crimes against civilians including abduction, torture and mass starvation.

U.N. experts gathered unprecedented detailed accounts of evidence for almost a year. It includes satellite imagery and interviews with more than 80 witnesses who gave gruesome accounts of secret prison camps, starvation, and even deliberate abortions by forcing pregnant prisoners into harsh labor. . . .

In the video, Kim Young-soon said she spent nine years in Yodok prison camp along with her parents and her four children for “gossiping” about an affair her friend had with Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s former ruler and the father of the regime’s current leader.

“The guilt-by-association system applies to the family members. I may be the culprit, but the other six members of my family are forced to go with me to the prison camp without knowing the charge,” she said.

Kim’s parents, 9-year-old daughter, and three sons – ages 7, 4, and 1 – all died from starvation in the camp, she said.

“It is a place that would make your hair stand on end. No words would help you to understand what this place is like,” she said.

Kim Joo-il, a former military officer, talked on camera about mass starvation of the population and graphic details of the end stage of a person starving to death.

Sorry, but that’s the last straw for me.

Did James Comey’s final-fortnight reopening of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal cost her the election? Some polling analysts believe that the data shows evidence that it did, but an investigation by a polling trade group discounts the effects. That lede gets buried somewhat in Politico’s coverage of the conclusions to an American Association for Public Opinion Research study, whose primary purpose was to answer how the polling turned out to be so wrong in 2016:

“The evidence for a meaningful effect on the election from the FBI letter is mixed at best,” the report states, citing polls that showed Clinton’s support beginning to drop in the days leading up to the letter. “October 28th falls at roughly the midpoint (not the start) of the slide in Clinton’s support.”

In fact, while the Comey letter “had an immediate, negative impact for Clinton on the order of 2 percentage points,” the report finds that Clinton’s support recovered “in the days just prior to the election.”

That would have been about the time Comey announced that the probe had been concluded again with no further action taken. Comey explained his reasons for these decisions earlier this week in hearings on Capitol Hill, saying the thought of impacting the election made him “mildly nauseous.” Perhaps this will soothe his stomach, but David Axelrod put it best even before Comey testified to Congress:

“Jim Comey didn’t tell her not to campaign in Wisconsin after the convention. Jim Comey didn’t say, ‘Don’t put any resources into Michigan until the final week of the campaign,'” Axelrod said. “One of the things that hindered her in the campaign was a sense that she never fully was willing to take responsibility for her mistakes, particularly that server.”

Nate Silver, one of the few polling analysts to have given Trump a chance of winning on Election Day, wrote on Wednesday (the day before the study’s release) that the Comey letter did cost Hillary the election. Silver has not yet responded to the study from AAPOR on his blog, but his argument in the post is that he sees a “Little Comey” effect that was nonetheless enough to “probably” cost her the election. Hillary’s defenders are trying to make a “Big Comey” argument that doesn’t really stick, Silver writes:

First, they said the letter’s impact was larger in Midwestern swing states such as Wisconsin because there were large numbers of undecided voters there, especially among white voters without college degrees. And the Clinton campaign claimed that the second Comey letter — which he issued late in the afternoon on Nov. 6 and which announced that the emails on Weiner’s laptop hadn’t turned up anything new — hurt Clinton because it put “FBI,” “Clinton” and “email” back in the headlines. This is hard to test because the second Comey letter came so late in the campaign that there wasn’t time for polls to pick up its effects.

But it’s plausible that Clinton’s underperformance versus the polls on Election Day had something to do with Comey — either lingering effects from his original letter or new effects from his second letter. The “Big Comey” case might attribute a 4-point impact to him nationally — accounting for the swing between Clinton’s 6-point lead on the morning of Oct. 28 and her 2-point popular vote margin on Election Day — and slightly more than that in the swing states.

My personal views are more toward the “Little Comey” side of the spectrum, since I think there would have been a fair amount of mean-reversion even without Comey. That’s because Clinton and Trump had alternated better and worse months in the polls in a way that tracked with the news cycle. Clinton had been in a strong position in the polls in June, August and — until the Comey letter — in October, while Trump had drawn close to her in May, July and September (and therefore might have been “due” for an uptick in November). This pattern may have reflected some sort of complicated feedback loop in media coverage. After some initial stimulus — say, a strong debate — there was a frenzy of favorable coverage for a candidate and negative coverage for her opponent, with news events framed against a backdrop of rising or falling polls. Then after a few weeks, the reporting on the story exhausted itself, the polls stabilized and the press was eager to look for a reversal of momentum. Comey’s letter came at a time when the campaign press may have been itching for a change in the narrative after several tough weeks for Trump. If not for the Comey letter, perhaps some other story would have blown up in Clinton’s face. Still, this theory is speculative, and those other stories might not have had the kryptonite-like effect that email-related stories had on Clinton’s numbers.

One potential problem with the “Little Comey” theory is that it postulates that the state-based polling was accurate. AAPOR’s study found that national polling was largely accurate, and that the results of the election fell pretty much along the projected lines, with Hillary narrowly winning the popular vote. However, polling in critical states turned out to be unreliable, thanks to poor modeling and insufficient data. As NPR reports, the AAPOR found that state polling was “historically bad”:

First off, only some polls were off, and it wasn’t the national polls. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, and polls had her winning the popular vote by an average of 3 points. That’s not much of a gap at all, compared to past presidential polling.

But state polls were off by an average of 5 points, the largest average since 2000. This is where the researchers drilled down into the whys of what went wrong.

And where did it go wrong the most? Back to Politico:

In Ohio — the perennial bellwether Trump won easily — surveys underestimated the Republican by 5.2 points. In Wisconsin — which hadn’t awarded its electoral votes to a Republican since 1984 — the polls underestimated Trump by an even greater margin of 6.5 points.

In Pennsylvania and unexpectedly close Minnesota, the polls underestimated Trump by between 4 and 5 points, while the polls in Michigan were off in the same direction by about 3.5 points.

Small wonder, then, that the media got caught by surprise on Election Night. What happened? State-based polling didn’t accurately capture late deciders, AAPOR concluded:

Altogether, around 13 percent of voters nationally made up their minds in the final week, according to Pew data the researchers reviewed. That’s in line with past elections. However, in the swing states of Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania, those late-deciding voters were far more likely to vote for Trump than Clinton.

Nationwide, 45 percent of the late-deciding voters ended up voting for Trump, compared to 42 percent for Clinton. But in Michigan, for example, it was 50 percent for Trump and 39 percent for Clinton — and that was the smallest margin of these four states. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, it was 59 percent Trump, 30 percent Clinton.

The turnout models didn’t work in these states either, the study argues, and pollsters failed to adjust effectively for education demographics. Whatever happened, the result was that polling was off in the states that turned out to be critical battlegrounds, and as a result most people — with Silver as a notable and derided-at-the-time exception — predicted Hillary would win easily.

Had those state polls been more accurate, the election result would have been far less of a surprise, and the notion that Comey significantly impacted the result would have little traction. The real story of this election is that Hillary Clinton ignored middle-America voters, doubled down on the progressive tilt that had cost Democrats the House, Senate, and massive numbers of state legislature seats, and was in general a terrible candidate. As Axelrod said this week, “It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump, let me tell you.” Let’s give credit for that work where it’s truly due.

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On a United flight from San Fran to Washington Dulles yesterday, I found the flight attendants particularly professional and courteous. When I went to the back to stretch my legs, I did what I often do: asked a flight attendant where she was based. This particular one answered that she's based in San Fran but lives in Miami. So she arranges her schedule so that she is in San Fran for 3 weeks and Miami, with her boyfriend, for 5 weeks. I asked her how that works: where does she stay in San Fran?

Her two word answer: crash pad. I didn't know what that was. She explained that 18 flight attendants share a 3-bedroom apartment near SFO. She said it's illegal, but I don't know whether that means that the local government has a regulation forbidding it or it means that it violates the rental contract. I asked her what the maximum number of people sleeping overnight it is at any one time. The most she's seen is 7: two in each bedroom and one on the couch. Her share of the rent: $420.

I love hearing about the various ways people with unusual schedules adjust to high housing costs in the Bay Area.

On a later stretching-my-legs trip to the back, I asked another flight attendant what she did. She led by saying that she doesn't have a "crash pad." Her familiarity with the term made me think that it must be a common living arrangement. She lives in Fresno and drives to San Fran.

I've categorized this under "Revealed Preference," but it's really about people doing the best they can, given their knowledge, within constraints, in ways that no central planner would be able to figure. So I've also added "Central Planning vs. Local Knowledge."

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Ezra Klein has a good essay on the Singapore health care system. He starts off with the conservative case for the Singapore system, quoting the AEI:

What's the reason for Singapore's success? It's not government spending. The state, using taxes, funds only about one-fourth of Singapore's total health costs. Individuals and their employers pay for the rest. In fact, the latest figures show that Singapore's government spends only $381 (all dollars in this article are U.S.) per capita on health--or one-seventh what the U.S. government spends.

Singapore's system requires individuals to take responsibility for their own health, and for much of their own spending on medical care.

Most of the essay is spent partially (but not completely) debunking the conservative view. For instance:

According to the World Bank, in 2014 Singapore spent $2,752 per person on health care. America spent $9,403. Given this, it's worth asking a few questions about what Singapore's model really has to teach the US.

Are Singaporeans really more exposed to health costs than Americans? The basic argument for the Singaporean system is that Singaporeans, through Medisave and the deductibles in Medishield, pay more of the cost of their care, and so hold costs down. Americans, by contrast, have their care paid for by insurers and employers and the government, and so they have little incentive to act like shoppers and push back on prices. But is that actually true?

I doubt it. The chasm in total spending is the first problem. Health care prices are so much lower in Singapore that Singaporeans would have to pay for three times more of their care to feel as much total expense as Americans do. Given the growing size of deductibles and copays in the US, I doubt that's true now, if it ever was. (It's worth noting that, on average, Singaporeans are richer than Americans, so the issue here is not that we have more money to blow on health care.)

I think he's overstating the case here (I find that even many of my small health expenses are heavily subsidized) but there is some truth to what he says here. And I think this points to the necessary first step in health care reform---getting costs down. Indeed Klein's basic argument is that the Singapore system is actually a pretty effective health care regime, but it would be hard to implement in America because the cost of health care is so much higher here.

But this leads to what I see as the one major blind spot in Klein's article:

Singapore's system is probably better designed in terms of how consumers spend their own money. But the lower overall prices make them much less exposed to health costs than both patients and employers inside the American system -- which suggests to me that Americans have at least as much incentive as Singaporeans to try to use their power as consumers to cut costs.

The fact that that hasn't worked is, I think, a reason to believe we've gotten the lesson of Singapore's health system backward. Singapore heavily regulates both the pricing and provision of medical care to keep costs low (as do all other developed countries) and then, working off that baseline of low costs, has Singaporeans pay out of pocket in order to keep them mindful of how much they're spending.

Unless Klein doesn't consider America to be a "developed country", the statement is flat out wrong. In America the government heavily regulates both the pricing and provision of health care to keep costs high. In America:

1. There are massive subsidies to employer provided health insurance. This leads to enormous consumption. My personal lifetime health care consumption has been at least doubled by various subsidies (including tax breaks), and it has not improved my health one iota.

2. There are huge regulatory barriers to the efficient provision of health care, at virtually every level of the system. It's too difficult to become a doctor. Nurses are prevented from doing too many things. There are insurance mandates. There are restrictions against patients signing contracts making it more difficult to sue for malpractice. There are restrictions on importing foreign drugs, even foreign generics. There are barriers to the immigration of foreign doctors and nurses. I could go on and on.

My dream policy would start with massive deregulation, as well as the elimination of all tax deductions for health care, to get costs as low as possible. Then add mandatory health savings accounts to get costs even lower.

Klein also overlooks the fact that the argument he uses against conservative supporters of the Singapore system applies equally well against progressive supporters of the European approach. He argues that since health care in America is so much more expensive than in Singapore, we probably pay almost as much out of pocket as they do, despite paying a lower percentage.

But that's also true of socialized medicine. Thus our government spends about 8% of GDP on health care (out of a total of roughly 18% of GDP), whereas European governments spend about 8% of GDP on health care out of a total of 9% to 10%. So we are already spending roughly as much as in Europe. If a single payer regime were actually feasible in America, then our government should already be able to provide universal coverage out of the already existing health care programs. We should to be able to put all 325 million Americans on Medicare/Medicaid/VA, etc., without spending a dime more. Obviously that won't work.

So our current bloated health care spending levels means that America is not able to choose either the Singapore or the European system, we are stuck with a far worse, system---the American health care system.

But if we insist on dreaming the impossible dream, then why not shoot for the best? And that's clearly Singapore, not Europe. And the first step toward getting there is cutting costs, by doing things like replacing the tax deductibility of health insurance with a lump sum tax credit.

(24 COMMENTS)

"I cannot fail to speak of the grave risks associated with the invasion of the positions of libertarian individualism at high strata of culture and in school and university education," the Pope said in an message sent to members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences meeting in the Vatican and subsequently shared with Breitbart News.

This is from Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D., "Pope Francis Warns Against 'Invasion' of Libertarianism," Brietbart, April 28, 2017.

I'm assuming throughout that Williams is quoting the Pope correctly because I can't find the original source. If not, then much of what I say may not follow.

Which universities is he referring to? Yale? Berkeley? Middlebury? I think the Pope and I are perceiving the world very differently. I don't mean our values are different, although that's probably true too. I mean that what we think is factually true is different. He perceives a university system in which libertarians are becoming important. I perceive one in which the left, with whom he seems often to agree, is dominant. At least one of us is wrong.

Francis said that libertarianism, "which is so fashionable today," is a more radical form of the individualism that asserts that "only the individual gives value to things and to interpersonal relations and therefore only the individual decides what is good and what is evil."

He kind of gets the first part right. We do believe (or, at least, I do) that "only the individual gives value to things and to interpersonal relations." It seems to me that the only alternative is for God to give value to things. That's probably his view. But his "therefore" is a non sequitur. Yes, it's true that each of us needs to decide what is good and what is evil, and maybe some of us will decide by consulting the Bible or the Pope. But I think he's implicitly saying something more. I think he's saying that once we decide good or evil, that's it, and we can do what we want with impunity. That doesn't follow. If I decide that it's right to murder, it doesn't follow that it is right to murder or that I shouldn't be punished for murdering. I think the Pope is coming dangerously close to equating individualism and solipsism.

According to this mentality, all relationships that create ties must be eliminated, the Pope suggested, "since they would limit freedom." In this way, only by living independently of others, of the common good, and even God himself, can a person be free, he said.

I confess, pun intended, that I don't know any libertarian whom this describes.

Here's what I wonder: does the Pope actually know any libertarians at all?

Update: As Luca Mille points out below, Russ Roberts did an EconTalk with economist Robert Whaples on an earlier set of pronouncements from the Pope.

(26 COMMENTS)

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida's longest-serving member of Congress and political godmother to Miami Republicans, is quitting Congress after nearly four decades in office, providing Democrats a prime opportunity to pick up a seat that heavily favors them.

“There was no epiphany. There was no moment, nothing that has happened that I've said, “I've got to move on,’” Ros-Lehtinen told her hometown paper, The Miami Herald. “It was just a realization that I could keep getting elected -- but it's not about getting elected.”

Ros-Lehtinen denied that her retirement had anything to do with her differences with President Donald Trump. She has long opposed Trump's position on illegal immigration, didn't support his recent Obamacare repeal effort and disagreed with his administration's policies on transgender rights. Ros-Lehtinen has a transgender child.

In leaving Florida's newly drawn 27th Congressional District, Ros-Lehtinen almost assured the Democrats will pick up her seat. No Republican-held House district gave Trump a lower share of the vote in 2016 than Ros-Lehtinen’s. Trump got just 39 percent of the vote in the district, while Hillary Clinton got more than 58 percent – more than 5 points better than Barack Obama in 2012, even as Florida shifted into the Republican column in 2016.

Ros-Lehtinen, an icon in Miami, beat challenger Scott Fuhrman by 10 percentage points last year. It was her closest race in decades. Fuhrman is running for the Miami-area seat again, but Ros-Lehtinen said she was sure she'd win again. Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez and Michael Hepburn, both Democrats, also want the seat.

Ros-Lehtinen was the first Hispanic woman and first Cuban American ever elected to Congress and, before that, the Florida state legislature. Always tough on Cuba policy, Ros Lehtinen's blend of social moderation and fiscal conservatism allowed her to consistently win elections in Democrat-leaning seats. She succeeded longtime Congressman Claude Pepper, a Democrat. Jeb Bush managed her campaign, and now-Sen. Marco Rubio interned for her at one point.

In his first book, "An American Son," Rubio recounted how he drank too much vodka on an airplane during the 1996 presidential campaign and vomited on an operative in front of Ros-Lehtinen.

Ros-Lehtinen made light of the story on Twitter.

"Unlike @marcorubio, you don't have 2 throw up in front of me 2 get my attention. Just follow my tweets!," she wrote.

I first noticed this story earlier this week and almost brought it up here before deciding that it really wasn’t all that remarkable. A group of graduate students at Yale went on a hunger strike this week to demand union representation and better benefits from the University. Considering the deal they were already getting it sounded a bit odd, but if you’re willing to starve yourself I guess they must be serious. (Associated Press)

Graduate assistants in eight departments at the Ivy League school voted in February to unionize, and they appeared to be on track to become among the first to do so since the National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that those assisting in teaching and research at private universities have a right to union representation. But Yale is challenging the union strategy of voting by individual departments, as opposed to the graduate school as a whole, and has said the requests by Local 33-UNITE HERE for collective bargaining are premature.

Hundreds of graduate students and their supporters participated in a march Tuesday evening to the home of Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, and demonstrators announced that eight graduate students would begin a fast.

“I’ve been waiting for Yale to negotiate for four years. That doesn’t seem to matter to them,” said Aaron Greenberg, a union chairman who is among the hunger strikers.

These students need to be careful. While hunger strikes have been used in the past by many people seeking to draw attention to their cause and gain some leverage, the effects on the human body can be brutal. Live Science reports that prolonged periods without food can result in severe neurological problems, including cognitive impairment, vision loss and lack of motor skills.

Oh, wait… The Yale students have found a way around these problems. This is a hunger strike where you get to eat if you get too hungry. (Fox News)

As it turns out, the hunger strike might not put anyone’s health in peril. According to a pamphlet posted on Twitter by a former Yale student, the hunger strike is “symbolic” and protesters can leave and get food when they can no longer go on.

So this “hunger strike” is actually a group of people taking up space on the sidewalk when they’re not running out to Burger King for a Whopper. Well played, ladies and gentlemen. But perhaps they won’t have to travel as far for a bite next time. It turns out that the College Republicans decided to set up a tent next to theirs and serve up a barbecue.

The smell of barbecue wasn’t enough to weaken the resolve Friday of eight Yale University graduate student teachers who have not eaten in days.

The students are protesting the university’s unwillingness to negotiate a contract with its recently formed union, Local 33 Unite Here, saying that the school, which is contesting the National Labor Relations Board ruling, is delaying to start the negotiations because they are hoping President Donald Trump will appoint anti-union members to the NLRB.

Friday, just feet away from the tent erected in Beinecke Plaza on Wall Street, where protesters have stayed for the past three days, the Yale College Republicans were serving up a meal of barbecued beef, baked beans and corn to its members and others in the Yale community.

But while we’re on the subject I’d like to ask about two points from the original story which were what made me curious to begin with. First of all, liberal bastions of higher education are supposed to be all in favor of unions, aren’t they? Organized labor, the Fight for 15, collective bargaining to stand up to the man… that’s pretty much their bread an butter, isn’t it? I guess those lofty principles cease to apply when it’s your own people who want to unionize and demand a better deal.

It’s the “deal” in question which brings us to the second point. These graduate students are, according to the university, receiving a $30,000 annual stipend, get 100% free health care and are getting free tuition. Yes… free tuition. To Yale University. I’ll grant you that $30K isn’t going to make you a one percenter or anything, but it’s still more than a lot of hard working people make. Toss in the value of the tuition and the cost of health care benefits and the total compensation package puts them well above the medium income for Americans. And they’re students.

Exactly how much more of a deal are you really expecting before you’ve even begun your career? Try quitting school and going out in the real world without a graduate degree and landing a job. Let us know how that works out for you, snowflakes.

The post The brutal “hunger strike” by Yale graduate students appeared first on Hot Air.

Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate, and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right-wing National Front, will advance to a runoff in the French presidential election after finishing in the top two positions in a first-round vote on Sunday. Macron is an overwhelming favorite to win the runoff on May 7. But we’re likely to hear two weeks of punditry that draws misleading comparisons between Le Pen, President Trump and Brexit — and that exaggerates Le Pen’s chances as a result.

Although vote counts are still being finalized, the first-round result should be a good one for pollsters, which correctly had Macron and Le Pen in the top two positions. In fact, the pre-election polls — which had shown Macron at 24 percent, Le Pen at 22 percent, the center-right François Fillon at 20 percent and the far-left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 19 percent — should come within a percentage point or two of the final result for each of the top four candidates.

The same polls show Macron in a dominant position in the runoff. He leads Le Pen by 26 percentage points in polls testing the two-way matchup, according to data compiled by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab.

And yet, observers of the race seem cautious about Macron’s chances. Betting markets give Le Pen a 13 percent chance — about 1 in 7. Ian Bremmer, a political scientist who runs The Eurasia Group, has given Le Pen a 40 percent chance, meanwhile. (Bremmer’s estimate wasn’t based on any sort of statistical model; he argues that the polls don’t reflect major elements of French politics.) And esteemed publications such as The Guardian are questioning whether the polls can be trusted at all, despite their accuracy on Sunday:

By contrast, polling-based models give Le Pen very little chance. Morris’s model, at The Crosstab, gives Le Pen a 3 percent chance of winning the runoff. And a model designed by The Economist puts Le Pen’s chances at less than 1 percent.

I worry about overconfident models — for a variety of reasons, statistical models can underestimate tail risks if they’re not designed carefully. In the U.S. election, models varied wildly in their estimates of Trump chances, from 29 percent in the FiveThirtyEight “polls-only” model to less than 1 percent according to the Princeton Electoral Consortium. A lot of those differences had to do with how these models analyzed the Electoral College, a complication that models predicting the French election don’t have to contend with. Still, I’m more comfortable with slightly more conservative estimates such as Morris’s than with The Economist’s.

But in my view, the conventional wisdom espoused by analysts such as Bremmer is more likely to be way more out to lunch. Before the U.S. election, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by only about 2 percentage points in the average swing state. In the Brexit vote, the “Remain” campaign’s lead was at least as narrow: about 2 points according to a simple average of polls, or just 0.5 percentage points according to a more complex averaging method. So while Trump’s victory and Brexit were historic events in world history, they were utterly routine occurrences from a polling standpoint; 2- or 3-point polling errors are extremely common.

But while there were plenty of precedents for a polling error large enough to elect Trump, there aren’t all that many examples of a 26-point polling error, which is what Le Pen would need. Pundits and other political observers often have poor intuition when it comes to translating polls into probabilities, leading them to treat narrow, fragile leads the same as double-digit ones. Ironically, the same type of sloppy thinking that led people to underestimate the chances for the Trump and Brexit victories may lead them to overestimate Le Pen’s odds.

Of course, there are still two weeks to go until the runoff and it’s possible that Le Pen could narrow her deficit. But by the same token, Macron could expand his lead in the final weeks. Fillon, whose voters agree with Le Pen on some issues, has already endorsed Macron. So did Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon. And Le Pen faded down the stretch run of the first-round campaign, having regularly polled in the mid-to-high 20s in February and March before seeing her numbers decline to about 22 percent in the final polls and in the actual vote.

Some of the bullishness about Le Pen’s chances reflects the idea that there’s a lot of hidden support for Le Pen, perhaps among voters who say they are undecided. This is a version of the “shy Trump voter” theory of the American election, which says that people are afraid to tell pollsters that they support “politically incorrect” candidates. In the abstract, this theory could make some sense; pollsters have long worried about the effects of social desirability bias. A voter who held contemptuous views toward a racial minority group might not want to express those views in a phone call with a stranger conducting a poll, for instance.

However, there’s no evidence that candidates such as Le Pen systematically outperform their polls. Across dozens of European elections since 2012, in fact, nationalist and right-wing parties have been as likely to underperform their polls as to overperform them.

I’ve built a database that covers the performance of right-wing parties and candidates, such as Le Pen and the National Front, in European elections since 2012. (More specifically, the parties are those identified by the New York Times as being “right-wing”; they “range across a wide policy spectrum, from populist and nationalist to far-right neofascist.”) I found 47 elections during this period in which one of these parties competed and voters were regularly polled about it before the election. Some of these elections featured multiple right-wing parties or candidates, so there are a total of 66 data points.

On average, the right-wing parties were predicted to win 13.5 percent of the vote in polls conducted at the end of the campaign. And they wound up with an average of … 13.5 percent of the vote. Polls have been just as likely to overestimate nationalists as to underestimate them, in other words.

European right-wing parties don’t really outperform their polls

DATE	COUNTRY	ELECTION	RIGHT-WING PARTY	POLL AVG.	ACTUAL
5/25/14	Hungary	EU parliament	Fidesz	58.7%	51.5%
5/22/16	Austria	Presidential	Freedom Party	51.8	49.7
12/4/16	Austria	Presidential	Freedom Party	50.7	46.2
4/6/14	Hungary	Parliamentary	Fidesz-KDNP	47.8	44.9
10/25/15	Poland	Parliamentary	Law and Justice	36.2	37.6
5/22/14	U.K.	EU parliament	UKIP	29.0	26.6
12/13/15	France	Regional	National Front	28.7	27.1
10/18/15	Switzerland	Federal	Swiss People’s Party	28.3	29.4
5/25/14	Poland	EU parliament	Law and Justice	27.7	31.8
4/24/16	Austria	Presidential	Freedom Party	26.4	35.1
5/25/14	Austria	EU parliament	Freedom Party	24.3	19.7
5/25/14	France	EU parliament	National Front	23.3	24.9
4/23/17	France	Presidential	National Front	22.3	21.7*
5/25/14	Belgium	Federal	New Flemish Alliance	20.2	20.3
9/29/13	Austria	Legislative	Freedom Party	20.1	20.5
4/6/14	Hungary	Parliamentary	Jobbik	19.3	20.2
5/25/14	Belgium	EU parliament	New Flemish Alliance	18.7	16.8
6/18/15	Denmark	General	Danish People’s Party	17.8	21.1
5/25/14	Finland	EU parliament	Finns Party	17.0	12.9
4/19/15	Finland	Parliamentary	Finns Party	16.5	17.7
5/25/14	Hungary	EU parliament	Jobbik	15.9	14.7
4/22/12	France	Presidential	National Front	15.8	17.9
5/22/14	Netherlands	EU parliament	Party for Freedom	15.0	13.3
6/17/12	France	Legislative	National Front	14.9	13.6
3/15/17	Netherlands	General	Party for Freedom	14.6	13.1
11/6/16	Bulgaria	Presidential	IMRO	14.5	15.0
5/7/15	U.K.	General	UKIP	13.0	12.9
9/12/12	Netherlands	General	Party for Freedom	12.3	10.1
9/14/14	Sweden	General	Sweden Democrats	10.6	12.9
4/9/17	Finland	Municipal	Finns Party	10.2	8.8
3/26/17	Bulgaria	Parliamentary	United Patriots	10.2	9.1
5/6/12	Greece	Legislative	Ind. Greeks	9.6	10.6
5/25/14	Greece	EU parliament	Golden Dawn	9.3	9.4
3/5/16	Slovakia	Parliamentary	Slovak National Party	9.1	8.6
5/12/13	Bulgaria	Parliamentary	Attack	7.9	7.3
1/22/12	Finland	Presidential	True Finns	7.4	9.4
9/20/15	Greece	Legislative	Golden Dawn	7.2	7.0
5/25/14	Belgium	EU parliament	Vlaams Belang	7.2	4.3
6/17/12	Greece	Legislative	Ind. Greeks	7.1	7.5
5/25/14	Belgium	Federal	Vlaams Belang	6.8	3.7
5/25/14	Germany	EU parliament	AfD	6.7	7.1
9/29/13	Austria	Legislative	Team Stronach	6.7	5.7
1/25/15	Greece	Legislative	Golden Dawn	6.2	6.3
5/25/14	Italy	EU parliament	Lega Nord	5.4	6.2
10/26/13	Czech Rep.	Legislative	Dawn	5.4	6.9
5/6/12	Greece	Legislative	Golden Dawn	5.4	7.0
6/17/12	Greece	Legislative	Golden Dawn	5.1	6.9
10/5/14	Bulgaria	Parliamentary	IMRO/NFSB	4.9	7.3
3/10/12	Slovakia	Parliamentary	Slovak National Party	4.5	4.6
5/25/14	Bulgaria	EU parliament	Attack	4.1	3.0
5/25/14	Czech Rep.	EU parliament	Dawn	4.0	3.1
5/25/14	Greece	EU parliament	Ind. Greeks	4.0	3.5
9/22/13	Germany	Federal	AfD	4.0	4.7
2/25/13	Italy	General	Lega Nord	3.9	4.1
1/25/15	Greece	Legislative	Ind. Greeks	3.8	4.8
5/25/14	Italy	EU parliament	National Alliance	3.8	3.7
5/6/12	Greece	Legislative	LA.O.S.	3.6	2.9
10/5/14	Bulgaria	Parliamentary	Attack	3.4	4.5
9/20/15	Greece	Legislative	Ind. Greeks	2.9	3.7
9/29/13	Austria	Legislative	BZÖ	2.9	3.5
11/2/14	Romania	Presidential	Greater Romania Party	2.4	3.7
2/25/13	Italy	General	National Alliance	2.1	2.0
3/5/16	Slovakia	Parliamentary	People’s Party	2.0	8.0
12/9/12	Romania	Parliamentary	Greater Romania Party	2.0	1.5
3/10/12	Slovakia	Parliamentary	People’s Party	1.5	0.9
5/25/14	Austria	EU parliament	BZÖ	1.4	0.5
6/17/12	Greece	Legislative	LA.O.S.	1.3	1.6
	Average			13.5	13.5

For European elections with “right-wing” parties since 2012. Le Pen’s vote total reflects a preliminary estimate from Ipsos.

Sources: New York Times, Wikipedia, europarl.europa.eu

The same has been true in France, where the National Front has variously underperformed and outperformed its polls. In five elections since 2012, the National Front has averaged 21 percent in polls and finished with 21 percent of the vote.

In European elections since Trump’s win, in fact, the trend has been for nationalist candidates to perform disappointingly. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom faded badly down the stretch run in the Dutch general election and then underperformed its polls on election day last month. Meanwhile, Austria’s Norbert Hofer, of the Freedom Party of Austria, considerably underperformed his polls in a presidential re-vote last December. Trump isn’t popular in Europe, and his victory may have done candidates who emulate his rhetoric no favors.

There’s still some uncertainty about the outcome, however. Although the polls haven’t systematically underestimated nationalist and right-wing parties, they also haven’t been all that accurate in pinning down their support, having come in both high and low in different elections. In cases since 2012 where the right-wing party polled at 25 percent or more, the polls missed the party’s actual support by an average of 3.6 percent of the vote. That translates to a true margin of error (or 95 percent confidence interval) of about plus or minus 9 percentage points. And because any vote that Le Pen gets is one that Macron won’t get, the margin of error for the gap between Le Pen and Macron is twice as large, or about 18 percentage points.

An 18-point margin of error is huge! But it still isn’t enough when you’re 26 points behind, as Le Pen is against Macron. If Le Pen can significantly narrow her deficit with Macron over the next two weeks, Macron’s supporters will have reason to worry. If she still trails by something like 26 points on election day, however, a Le Pen victory would be essentially unprecedented. She could beat her polls by as much as Trump and Brexit combined and still lose to Macron by almost 20 points.

The next wave of panicked press stories about President Trump “undoing Barack Obama’s legacy” are emerging this week and it centers on Trump’s plans to review the country’s collection of national monuments. The President is expected to issue another Executive Order tomorrow which will direct the Interior Department to review all of the existing national monuments with an eye toward potentially eliminating some of them or possibly transferring them to the National Park Service where appropriate. (The Hill)

President Trump will sign an executive order on Wednesday instructing the Department of the Interior to review the designations of national monuments by his predecessors, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Trump’s order reportedly will instruct Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to examine those designations to determine whether they were within the scope of a century-old law that allows presidents to set aside federal lands without congressional approval.

The executive order is mainly geared toward reviewing President Obama’s designation of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah in December, according to the Tribune. The 1.35 million acre site was preserved due to its Native American heritage, but critics say Obama’s designation was an overreach of executive power.

This is a sad development, but one which probably couldn’t be avoided. As The Hill points out, one of the key items under scrutiny here is the Bears Ears National Monument, a highly controversial designation made by Barack Obama which locked off more than 1.3 million acres of land centered in southern Utah. The idea that this much land of diverse characteristics could be designated as a single national monument (versus a national park) was, frankly, ridiculous to begin with. Some of the individual prehistoric archeological sites and specific natural features inside of that range certainly might have qualified, but that’s simply too much land to grab in a single, sweeping action by one person.

This system isn’t locked in stone, however, Nothing about the country’s national parks and monuments appears to be permanent, and control of both can theoretically be altered by Congress. And that’s how it should be. National Parks are created or added to by acts of Congress. (You can read more about that process at the National Park Service web site.) But Congress also vested independent authority in the Executive Branch to create National Monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. (Emphasis added)

That the President of the United States is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and may reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to the protected:

The intent of this act sounds clear from the language and it’s equally obvious that Barack Obama went far, far beyond the original intent. Notice that Congress specified that monuments were to be landmarks, structures and objects. These refer to individual features, not vast tracts of wilderness. Congress also went out of their way to specify that the protected lands would be restricted to “the smallest area compatible with .. proper care and management” of the object.

Barack Obama engaged in the same type of massive overreach when he used an obscure provision in another law to effectively ban drilling in offshore regions in perpetuity by declaring them protected sanctuaries. The act was meant to allow the President to identify specific shoals or breeding areas and safeguard them from development, but Obama applied that executive authority to massive stretches of the shelf containing wildly different undersea terrains and habitats.

In the old days, Presidents mostly exercised restraint in the use of these powers and didn’t go for such wildly inappropriate land grabs. That’s all changed now and there’s nothing stopping Donald Trump or any later president from doing the same thing if they wish. That’s why we need congressional action here, not just another Executive Order from Trump. Anything he does in this fashion can once again be undone by the next president with the stroke of a pen. But Congress gave the White House this power and they can take it away. They should also be able to roll back any national monument designations or at least transfer them over to the status of a National Park under the park service’s control. And there’s precedent for that. In 1933 there were 56 National Monuments transferred to the Park Service. Trump could transfer Bear Ears immediately and Congress could then chop it up as needed into bits which actually merit protection, leaving the rest open for development.

And then they could get to work entirely repealing the Antiquities Act of 1906. It’s the right thing to do in this modern era which has become so poisoned by politics. That law has been exploited to an embarrassing degree and will be in the future unless Congress dumps it.

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If you like the jeans, may I interest you in the matching jacket for that all-over “too busy to wash” look? It’ll run you $850 for the whole ensemble but no one ever said looking poor came cheap. Besides, shipping is “free.”

Apparently these have been on sale at Nordstrom for awhile but became famous overnight yesterday when Mike Rowe made them the subject of a blog post. I see them as the logical endpoint of jean fashion. Denim migrated from working-man’s clothes to universal casual wear because people liked the association with rugged blue-collar authenticity. Adding synthetic mud, stylishly applied in just the right places, takes the rugged authenticity factor up to 11 — in theory. In practice, putting fake dirt on clothing is so desperately heavy-handed an attempt at fake authenticity that it blows up the appeal of the clothes entirely. Although I think Nordstrom realizes that. “They’re a costume for wealthy people who see work as ironic – not iconic,” writes Rowe, which is true and which Nordstrom itself probably recognizes. Not even the most pitiful trust-fund poseur would be so lame as to buy these and wear them earnestly, to try to affect a working-class sensibility. You buy these if you’re a hipster who comes from money, for the ironic lulz. Look again at the jacket, with the shoulders inexplicably coated with “mud” and the sleeves inexplicably clean. What sort of work would leave a stain like that? The pattern makes it look as though a toilet was emptied onto the wearer’s head.

Since all cultural critics must connect this up to Larger Trends, I’ll go ahead and call these the Juicero of jeans, a grotesquely expensive, deliberately overcomplicated joke on the upper class’s obsession with all things “natural.” No one would own a Juicero machine except ironically, right?

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