Jack

With all the negative publicity United Airlines has had lately, I want to share a positive. Yesterday morning, I was flying from Washington Dulles to LAX, with a short time for my connecting flight from LAX to Monterey. We boarded late because one of the runways at LAX was closed for construction and the LAX air traffic controllers were rationing landings. Our pilot explained that to us when we boarded and told us that even though we were not allowed to take off until about 9:50 a.m. (the flight was scheduled to leave the gate at 8:30 a.m.) he was going to go out and hope for a slightly earlier takeoff. We got near the runway and then he announced that we would wait 15 to 20 minutes, the seatbelt light would be turned off, and the flight deck was open for those who wanted to come up. There were about 30 New Zealand boys on the flight from some sports team and I thought there would be a rush to the cockpit. There wasn't. I'm convinced that almost no one listens to announcements any more because so much of it is boilerplate. Somehow I've trained my ear to not listen to boilerplate but to hear the new stuff. I quickly unbuckled my seat belt and headed to the front. I was the first one there. I talked to the pilot and second officer, who were both friendly, and took some pictures. The pilot invited me to sit in his seat and wear his hat. Thus the picture above.

I wanted to make room for other people in line--as it turned out, there was only one--and so after a minute or two, I headed back. I saw almost everyone in first class as I walked back to coach grinning at me and I assumed that they were just enjoying my enjoyment of the opportunity. Wrong. The pilot came on the PA system and announced that his hat was missing. Sheepishly, I walked back and returned it. I'm so used to wearing a Golden State Warriors hat, especially during the playoffs, that I had only minutes earlier taken it off and put it in my backpack. So the hat on my head didn't feel unusual.

We landed at LAX at about 11:45 and I got on my phone and found out that my Monterey gate for my flight leaving at 12:20 was 88, and that the gate we were landing at was 70A. That meant a long walk, but I know the airport well and knew I could do it. The problem: another United flight was at our gate. So we didn't get to the gate until about 12:07 p.m. So when I saw this coming, I asked the flight attendant if she could announce that some people have tight connections so if you don't, please stay seated for a few minutes. She said she would and she did. But notice what I said above: few people listen. So, sure enough, as soon as the seat belt light went off, almost everyone in front of me stood, many in the aisle. I politely explained to those ahead of me that my flight was leaving in 10 minutes (it was now about 12:10) and asked if I could get ahead. One guy got defensive but, because I didn't get angry back, cooperated. I got off the flight at 12:12 p.m. and ran through the airport. The gate agent at 88 was waiting for me and I got on at 12:20 p.m. The big burly guy sitting next to me hogged the arm rest but I didn't care. I would be home by 2 p.m. and have the afternoon with my wife.

When we got off the plane, I thanked the flight attendant and pilot for waiting.

HT to my friend Eric Garris for using photoshop to lighten the picture.

(6 COMMENTS)

Adam Ozimek has written an article on Forbes.com titled "Libertarianism Needs To Become More Realistic." HT to Tyler Cowen. Although authors rarely get to choose their articles' titles, the title does seem consistent with his message. Ozimek is friendly to libertarianism, and so his suggestions should be seen as friendly amendments to the strategies pursued by some libertarians.

Here's his final paragraph:

Instead, people want quality of life, economic growth, and good government. All three of these can be helped on some margins by utilizing market forces, deregulating, and increasing freedom. Libertarianism should focus on these margins, and accept that the all-too-popular vision of radical freedom and minimal government at all costs is not wanted by enough people to actually matter. Realistic libertarianism would unabashedly accept limits of markets, and embrace in rhetoric, theory, and practice the first order importance of quality government, which on many margins trumps small government.

I agree with some of it, and disagree with much of it.

I agree that libertarians are in a minority. He gives strong evidence for this, focusing on a factor that many libertarians, and almost all libertarian economists, would accept: the evidence on voting with one's feet. If libertarianism were really popular, he argues, more people would be moving to New Hampshire and fewer people would be moving to Texas. So, yes, we are in a minority.

But what follows from that? Ozimek thinks we should give up trying to persuade people to be more libertarian.

Consider, though, two historical episodes where libertarians were in the forefront: the decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1970s and the anti-draft movement of the 1960s.

I remember returning to the University of Rochester from the national Libertarian Party convention in 1977, where I had allowed the Gay Caucus of the Libertarian Party to use my room for a cocktail party. When I told some colleagues about it, I got an icy glare. Now, I would bet, the reaction would be much different. What happened to change the landscape? I don't quite know. I do know that we were right to pursue this issue. More important, if Adam Ozimek were writing on this in the 1970s, what advice would he have given? It seems that he would said that we should give up.

Or the take at the anti-draft movement in which Milton Friedman, Walter Oi, and others were leaders in the mid-1960s. My impression is that the majority position was pro-draft. Would Adam Ozimek have counseled us not to pursue this?

I said above that I agree with some of his bottom line. Here's the part I somewhat agree with:

Instead, people want quality of life, economic growth, and good government. All three of these can be helped on some margins by utilizing market forces, deregulating, and increasing freedom. Libertarianism should focus on these margins

It makes sense for some of us to focus on these issues. But it also makes sense for some of us to pursue apparently quixotic causes that turn out to be quite realistic. (12 COMMENTS)

jenningsthecat writes: As reported here back in February, the CBC, (Canada's national broadcaster), revealed DNA test results which indicated the chicken used in Subway Restaurants' sandwiches only contained about 50% chicken. Now, Subway is suing the public broadcaster for $210 million, because "its reputation and brand have taken a hit as a result of the CBC reports." The suit claims that "false statements [...] were published and republished, maliciously and without just cause or excuse, to a global audience, which has resulted in pecuniary loss to the plaintiffs." Personally, my working assumption here is that the CBC report is substantially correct. It will be interesting to see how the case plays out -- but should this have happened at all? Regulatory agencies here in Canada seem to be pretty good when it comes to inspecting meat processing facilities. Should they also be testing the prepared foods served by major restaurant chains to ensure that claims regarding food content are true and accurate?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, Alaska’s Obamacare marketplaces seemed on the verge of implosion. Premiums for individual health insurance plans were set to rise 42 percent. State officials worried that they were on the verge of a “death spiral,” where only the sickest people buy coverage and cause rates to skyrocket year after year.

So the state tried something new and different — and it worked. Lori Wing-Heier, Alaska’s insurance commissioner, put together a plan that had the state pay back insurers for especially high medical claims submitted to Obamacare plans. This lowered premiums for everyone. In the end, the premium increase was a mere 7 percent.

"We knew we were facing a death spiral," says Wing-Heier. "We knew even though it was a federal law, we had to do something."

Now other states are interested in trying Alaska’s idea, especially because Wing-Heier is working with the Trump administration to have the federal government, not the state, cover those costs.

There are rampant concerns about the future of Obamacare right now. We don’t know whether its marketplaces will remain stable in 2018 or, as the president has predicted, explode as premiums rise and insurers drop out. But Alaska’s experiment is a reminder that the future of Obamacare isn’t entirely up to Republicans in Washington. The work happening 3,000 miles away in Alaska shows that states have the ability to fix Obamacare too — and that the Trump administration might even support those policies.

How Alaska prevented an Obamacare horror story — and is trying to make the federal government pay for it

Premiums in the individual market went up a lot last year. The national average was a 25 percent hike. Alaska was bracing for an even higher 42 percent increase from its one remaining Obamacare insurer, Premera Blue Cross.

That’s when Wing-Heier and other Alaska officials had an idea. The state already had a tax on insurance plans (not just health but also life and property insurance). Usually the money goes to a general Alaska budget fund, but the state decided to divert $55 million of the tax revenue into a reinsurance program.

This would give Obamacare insurers — at this point, just Premera — extra money if they had some especially large medical claims. Reinsurance essentially backstops insurers’ losses; it guarantees they won't be on the hook for the bills of a handful of exceptionally sick patients.

The new reinsurance program convinced Premera to only raise rates 7 percent in 2017. Alaska suddenly went from having one of the highest rate increases in the nation to one of the lowest.

This didn't just save customers money. The federal government subsidizes premium costs for 86 percent of Alaska's Obamacare enrollees. With cheaper premiums, the federal government didn’t have to spend as much money. The cost of these subsidies fell by $56 million when Alaska created the reinsurance fund.

This got Wing-Heier thinking: Why shouldn't we get that money back?

"Why shouldn't the money come back to us to fund the reinsurance program?" she recalls thinking. "It was that simple."

Alaska applied for a waiver in late December, asking the federal government to refund its spending. The state got conditional approval in mid-January from former Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell. Current HHS Secretary Tom Price has spoken favorably of the Alaska approach too.

In a letter last month to governors, he described their idea as an example for other states to follow. It was, he said, an "opportunity for states to lower premiums for consumers, improve market stability, and increase consumer choice."

Alaska officials say the Trump administration has so far been easy to work with, helping them make sure the application looks right and moves quickly toward review.

If the waiver does go through — and Wing-Heier says she is "confident" the Trump administration will approve it — Alaska expects that Obamacare rates might actually do something unheard of in 2018: They might decrease. The state estimates that an additional 1,650 people will join the marketplace due to the lower premiums.

Other states want to get that same kind of funding too

Alaska’s marketplace is far from perfect. The state only has one insurance plan selling coverage on its Obamacare marketplace, and doesn’t project any more to join in 2018. Premiums are high in Alaska; the state is large and rural, which means it can be expensive to get patients to a hospital or a specialty doctor. A midlevel plan on the Obamacare marketplace there cost, on average, $904 in 2017.

But even with those problems, Wing-Heier says, it’s still a whole lot better than where the state would have been without this policy change.

"Do I think it's a perfect solution? No, but it works for us," she says. "It's working in the right direction. It did what it was intended. It brought stability to our market, and the waiver is going to bring funding to us."

Alaska’s approach has inspired other states. Minnesota is looking into building a reinsurance fund. At the insurance conference I went to last weekend, regulators from New York were asking lots of questions about Alaska’s approach.

It's easy to see why this is appealing to other states, given the combination of additional federal money and lower Obamacare premiums. Most interesting, though, is that Alaska’s approach is something the Trump and Obama administrations apparently agree on. There aren't many examples of that right now — so the ones that exist are certainly worth watching.

Unlike other organisms, coleoid cephalopods make extensive use of RNA editing, which could slow their evolution but may make their behavior more complex than other invertebrates.

Samsung expects to post stellar earnings for the first quarter of 2017 despite its head honcho's scandal in Korea and the lack of a new flagship phone for the period. The company believes its consolidated operating profit will reach approximately 9.9...

Lifting an earlier moratorium, the agency said the company could report the risks for 10 diseases under certain controls.

After four years underground, Bertha reaches daylight. The post After 4 Years, Seattle's Giant Tunneling Machine Finally Breaks Through appeared first on WIRED.

As the Republican Party struggled and then failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, pulling a wildly unpopular bill from the House without even taking a vote, a flurry of insightful articles helped the public understand what exactly just happened. Robert Draper explained the roles that Stephen Bannon, Paul Ryan, and others played in deciding what agenda items President Trump would pursue in what order. Politico reported on how and why the House Freedom Caucus insisted that the health care bill repeal even relatively popular parts of Obamacare. Lest anyone pin blame for the GOP’s failure on that faction, Reihan Salam argued persuasively that responsibility rests with poor leadership by House Speaker Paul Ryan and a GOP coalition with “policy goals that simply can’t be achieved.”

But dogged, behind-the-scenes reporting and sharp analysis of fissures among policy elites do not capture another important contributor to last week’s failure—one Josh Barro came closest to unpacking in a column titled, “Republicans lied about healthcare for years, and they're about to get the punishment they deserve.”

The article isn’t an attack on conservatives and libertarians.

Plenty of plausible alternatives to Obamacare have been set forth by people who are truthful about the tradeoffs involved. For instance, The Atlantic published a plan in 2009; Ezra Klein and Avik Roy usefully illuminated the disagreements between serious conservative and progressive health-care wonks; and Ross Douthat suggested reforms that borrow heavily from Singapore. Barro is aware of many smart right-leaning critiques of Obamacare and sympathetic to some.

What he points out in his column is that the GOP didn’t honestly acknowledge the hard tradeoffs inherent in health-care policy before making the case for a market-driven system.

Republicans tried to hide the fact of tradeoffs:

For years, Republicans promised lower premiums, lower deductibles, lower co-payments, lower taxes, lower government expenditure, more choice, the restoration of the $700 billion that President Barack Obama heartlessly cut out of Medicare because he hated old people, and (in the particular case of the Republican who recently became president) "insurance for everybody" that is "much less expensive and much better" than what they have today. They were lying. Over and over, Republicans lied to the American public about healthcare. It was impossible to do all of the things they were promising together, and they knew it.

That is basically correct. And it helps explain how Republicans could win a presidential election and lots of congressional elections on the promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare, only to produce bill so wildly unappealing to voters.

Once Republicans commenced governing, the tradeoffs couldn’t be elided any longer.

Still, even the insight that Republicans spent years willfully obscuring the tradeoffs involved in health-care policy doesn’t fully explain the last week. Focusing on GOP officials leaves out yet another important actor in this debacle: the right-wing media. By that, I do not mean every right-leaning writer or publication. Over the last eight years, lots of responsibly written critiques of Obamacare have been published in numerous publications, and folks reading the aforementioned wonks, or Peter Suderman at Reason, or Yuval Levin, or Megan McArdle at Bloomberg, stayed reasonably grounded in actual shortcomings of Obamacare.

In contrast, Fox News viewers who watched entertainers like Glenn Beck, talk-radio listeners who tuned into hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and consumers of web journalism who turned to sites like Breitbart weren’t merely misled about health-care tradeoffs.

They were told a bunch of crazy nonsense.

As I was drafting this article, Ted Koppel made headlines by telling Fox News entertainer Sean Hannity that he is bad for America. This upset some conservatives, who felt it was just another instance of the mainstream media attacking a fellow conservative. I don’t think that conservatives are typically bad for America. But I lament the fact that Hannity is still employed in my industry, in large part because his coverage of subjects like Obamacare is dishonest—and I say that as someone who has preferred a very different health-care policy since 2009.

Back then, my maternal grandmother was still alive, and I remember her listening to Hannity on Fox and getting very angry, upset, and afraid about what would happen next. I do not exaggerate when I say that the Obamacare debate lowered the quality of her last years. But not because she was so opposed to the actual tradeoffs that Obama and the Democrats were proposing that it made her anxious.

She was upset because Hannity said scary things like this:

So it sounds to me like they're actually encouraging seniors in the end, "Well, you may just want to consider packing it all in here. This is—" What other way is there to describe this? So they don't become a financial burden on the Obamacare system? I mean, that's how they intend to cut costs, by cutting down on the amount of health care that we can give and get at the end of our lives and dramatically cutting it down for senior citizens? You know, welcome to the brave new world of Obamacare. We're going to encourage, you know, inconvenient people to consider “alternatives to living.” Well, that just sounds terrific, which by the way is not uncommon and has been a source of deep concern in places like Great Britain. You know, the place where they have a government rationing body that denies women with advanced breast cancer their health care.

She mistook Hannity for a man with integrity, who would never go on national television or nationally syndicated radio and willfully or carelessly mislead millions.

That was a mistake. Had Hannity had been an outlier in this respect, perhaps people like me could have persuaded people like my grandma that whatever the demerits of Obamacare, the bill would not cause a bureaucrat to send Dr. Kevorkian to her bedside, or render her grandchildren servile subjects in a totalitarian dystopia.

Instead, Sarah Palin posted this to her Facebook page:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.

Such a system is downright evil.

Chris Baker said this on Glenn Beck’s radio program:

Sir, you're overweight. What? Yes, sir, you are overweight, we're going to have to require you to lose weight. And if you don't lose weight on your own, we're going to send you to a fat camp and make you lose the weight. And if you still don't lose the weight, then you know, we're just going to have to do surg—we're just going to have to put you in jail. And if you don't lose the weight in jail, sir, I don't know what else to do. Maybe some end-of-life counseling might be good. I mean, I remember a woman that got—that was greased by Dr. Kevorkian because she was fat.

Beck himself warned: “This is the end of prosperity in America forever if this bill passes. This is the end of America as you know it."

Said Rush Limbaugh, “When this passes, they will have even more power, regulating every aspect of our lives, because they believe in their minds and hearts that we have no competence whatsoever to lead our own lives and make our own decisions."

On another occasion Limbaugh added:

It's not going to be a matter of whether you can or cannot pay. It won't be a matter of whether you have coverage or don't have coverage. What'll matter is that all of us will be slaves; we'll become slaves to the arbitrary and inhumane decisions of distant bureaucrats working in Washington where there's no competition, nobody you can go to if you don't like what you hear from the bureaucrats that you have to deal with."

Said Jim Quinn:

Ladies and gentlemen, you have to understand that we are at a critical and pivotal moment in the history of the United States. If they pass health care, government health care, that is the end of the republic. That is the final nail in the coffin of the individual free human being. Once they own your body, they own everything. Once they can withhold health care from you, because you're too old, because you're too sick, or maybe 'cause they just don't like you -- did you ever think about that?

These aren’t just egregious, scare-mongering falsehoods that a few people uttered on a few occasions. They represent the tenor of coverage on right-wing TV and radio across scores of hours of broadcasting. This is the largely forgotten context that helps explain why my colleague David Frum could not have possibly succeeded in persuading elites on the right to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare (rather than guarantee that it would pass without any Republican input).

The coverage offered by right-wing media in those years also helps explain why elected Republicans never developed compelling arguments for why voters should prefer a different set of tradeoffs.

Right from the start, commentators who long ago traded their integrity for ratings spewed falsehoods so wild that anyone on the right could justify outright opposition to the legislation, without having to explain anything. “The Slaughterhouse Three, Obama, Pelosi and Reid, have authored the legislation that will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage,” a commentator at Breitbart declared in 2010. “So how is that Hope and Change working for you now?”

To take these people at their word was to assume merely repealing Obamacare would leave everyone better off. (Whose lot wouldn’t be improved by avoiding POW status?) Of course, Obamacare passed, and Americans were subject to neither cold storage nor death panels nor the end of individual freedom nor the abolition of all private insurance. Down syndrome kids were just fine. Millions gained coverage.

The right-wing entertainers never corrected bygone falsehoods or erroneous predictions when their fabricated catastrophes failed to unfold. They just shifted to new falsehoods. They are too numerous to detail, so let’s stick with a few more examples from Hannity. Here he is demagoguing a little girl’s lung transplant. Eric Stern re-reported a 2013 Hannity segment on specific Americans allegedly harmed by Obamacare to illustrate how egregiously the show misled viewers. The same year, Politifact explained why Hannity was wrong to make the outlandish claim that Obamacare would cause fully half of Americans to lose health insurance.

The point isn’t that Obamacare was without flaws, or that no one was pointing them out, but that many of the most-watched conservative entertainers were spreading wild falsehoods rather than cogently explaining the bill’s real costs and shortcomings. There were defensible reasons to oppose the law, but many who told pollsters they were against Obamacare had indefensible reasons, in that they were grounded in the wild falsehoods. What’s more, on a cable-news network that bills itself as “fair and balanced,” viewers were seldom given any information about Obamacare’s benefits or exposed to any stories of folks who were helped by it.

At more responsible right-leaning outlets, the right-wing audience still wouldn’t  encounter direct refutations of Hannity or Beck, because most right-leaning journalism outlets pull their punches when it comes to Fox News and its personalities. They want their writers to be invited on the network; journalists who write books want to publicize them there; and they certainly don’t want to anger their core readers by criticizing popular talk-radio hosts.

In the long run, mendacious right-wing health-care coverage had consequences. A significant faction of conservatives felt Obamacare was so dumb and malign that repeal alone would be a tremendous boon to all Americans, imposing significant costs on almost no one.

As Peter Suderman wrote:

Trump spent the last two weeks selling the House plan. He met with specific individuals and with various congressional factions opposed to the bill. He personally called the offices of more than 100 legislators. He has cajoled and threatened, telling those who refused to back the legislation that they would lose their seats. He threw the entire weight of his personality and the office of the president behind the vote, saying that he backed the bill "one-thousand percent." But he never took the time to explain to either the public or congressional Republicans what the bill actually did.

He did not make a case for the bill's policy merits, preferring instead to describe it using generic superlatives. Contrast that with President Obama, who traveled the country making the case for his health care overhaul, and made a major prime time address outlining its provisions. Trump, in contrast, was, by virtually all accounts, indifferent to the policy content of the bill so long as it passed and he could say that he had fulfilled his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

The Republican Party had previously benefited politically from its indifference to substance on health-care reform.

In the end, however, less than 20 percent of U.S. voters favored the passage of the Obamacare repeal bill, because even large swaths of the Republican base eventually discovered that, contrary to everything they’d been led to expect, repeal imposed huge tradeoffs!

There are many people bear responsibility for the GOP’s failure to improve upon Obamacare. But when apportioning blame, the right-wing media should not be forgotten.

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“Venezuela is toast,” Fausta Wertz writes today, but that would only be true if Venezuelans could find bread. As the Maduro government imposes more price controls, bakers have begun to discover that they cannot live by bread alone, and need to produce goods with higher prices to make up for their losses along with the bread that causes them. That has caused massive bread shortages, and now Maduro has to go to the next step in the Socialist-collapse playbook — seizures of the means of production, as the Miami Herald reports:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In order to comply with the rationing imposed by Maduro, 90% of all flour provided to bakeries by the government must be used to make bread, which can then only be sold at artificially capped prices. Predictably, this has led to massive shortages through two different mechanisms.

First, the government controls the production and import of wheat and controls those prices, which means that there won’t be enough to go around in the first place. In 1999, when Hugo Chavez launched his socialist agenda, Venezuelan wheat production per year was consistently just over 517 tons, barely enough for a day’s worth of consumption, but by 2014 even that had dropped to 161 tons. Venezuela has to import almost all of its wheat, but the drop in oil prices and their declining production has cut their ability to get hard currency. As a result, the imports of wheat have declined over the last several years and flour mills have had to shut down for lack of raw material. AFP reported on the crisis thirteen months ago:

Five of Venezuela’s 12 wheat mills, which employ some 12,000 people, have closed, Crespo said. The remaining mills employ another 8,000 people.

An industrialist who requested anonymity said there is currently “only enough wheat for the next 12 days.” …

Jesus Masco, who manages a bakery with 20 employees, says that customers “have no idea” of the difficulties bakers face to remain in business.

He said he used to have a quota of 100 sacks of flour a month.

“But two years ago, the deliveries began to decrease, and now we get 30 sacks if we’re lucky,” he said.

Normally that would lead to wildfire inflation from shortages, which is why the Maduro regime imposed price controls at low levels as a way to maintain their political standing. Thanks to those price controls, the allowed price on the bread doesn’t cover the cost of making it. The only way to stay in operation is to divert some of the flour for specialty items to cover the losses from their staple production.

This puts the Maduro regime in the ridiculous position of having to crack down on the production of brownies and croissants:

The ruling Socialist Party says pro-opposition businessmen are sabotaging the OPEC nation’s economy by hoarding products and hiking prices. Critics say the government is to blame for persisting with failed polices of price and currency controls.

Breadmakers blame the government for a national shortage of wheat, saying 80 percent of establishments have none left in stock.

During this week’s inspections, two men were arrested as their bakery was using too much wheat in sweet bread, ham-filled croissants and other products, the state Superintendency of Fair Prices said in a statement sent to media on Thursday.

Another two were detained for making brownies with out-of-date wheat, the statement added, saying at least one bakery had been temporarily taken over by authorities for 90 days.

Why make brownies with out-of-date wheat? Maybe because (a) that’s all there was, and/or (b) the government didn’t provide it in a timely enough fashion while making decisions about which bakeries would be allowed to operate. That assumes the charges are factual in the first place, of course, and not just some way of getting around the fact that people are being arrested for making brownies rather than the People’s Patriotic Baguettes.

The problem with socialism, as is frequently noted, is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. That leads inexorably to shortage, rationing, lines for consumables, confiscation in the name of the people!!, and horrid poverty for everyone except those in charge of the system. It also leads to absurd outcomes such as governments setting croissant and brownie quotas and accusing those who violate such of sabotage and treason. In the end, political and economic pressures will keep forcing more and more production to close, leading to even more shortages and less hard currency with which to relieve them, and ever-deepening poverty — exactly the kind of dynamic we saw in Russia and eastern Europe between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Chavistas are not just determined to ignore history, but to repeat it too.

Hey, we used to crack down on brownies too, but not because they contained flour. For a lighter exit on this topic, here’s a scene from the 1968 Peter Sellers film I Love You Alice B. Toklas, a square-meets-hippie farce that, er, hasn’t aged well. The scene where hippie Leigh Taylor-Young’s innovative recipe gets unknowingly consumed by the squares is somewhat more sophisticated than Reefer Madness, but not by a lot.

 

Just think: All Trump needs to do is pass a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and legalize 10 million or so illegals and he’ll instantly be the most popular “conservative” president ever.

For years, polls have showed public support for amnesty — so long as it comes with certain conditions. In this case, CNN imagines a bill that would give illegals legal status and an eventual path to citizenship if they’ve been here for several years and have a job and speak English and pay back taxes. In other words, if someone has taken steps to assimilate culturally (at least to the point of learning the language) and they’re paying their own way instead of relying on welfare, then sure, Americans are okay with giving that person a pass. And note: There isn’t much of a partisan gap. If Trump and Ryan want to push a deal like this, Trump’s core base would be pissed off but virtually everyone else would shrug.

87/12 among Republicans is … quite a number. Even more interesting is the trendline: In 2014, when CNN asked this same question, the overall public split 81/17. There’s been a nine-point swing since then, an unusual surge for a policy that already enjoys near-unanimous support. My hunch when I saw that was that there must be a “Trump effect” at work, in which Democrats unify behind a policy even more solidly than they did before purely because they know Trump opposes it. (We’ve seen what appears to be a “Trump effect” show up in polling on the border wall, for instance.) E.g., it may be that only 80 percent or so of Dems supported this sort of amnesty three years ago but now, because they hate Trump and his hawkishness on the border so much, something like 100 percent support it. That would account for the nine-point overall swing.

But as it turns out, that’s not what happened. Here’s how the parties split on this question in that 2014 poll:

Support among Democrats has indeed increased — but only by eight points, from 88 percent three years ago to 96 percent now. Remarkably, the increase among Republicans (from 72 percent in 2014 to 87 percent now) is nearly twice that amount. It’s GOPers who are driving the greater unanimity on amnesty lately. How does that square with the rise of Trump and his enduring popularity on the right? One possibility is that it’s a simple matter of trust: Republicans never would have trusted President Obama to implement a mass amnesty fairly and responsibly, but President Trump? Sure, they can trust him. The problem with that theory, though, is that support for legalizing illegals who speak English, have a job, etc, had already reached 88 percent in yet another CNN poll taken last September — before Trump became president. Republican support was at 79 percent in that poll, up seven points from 2014. Why GOPers would be getting softer on amnesty as they were coalescing behind the hardliner Trump, I don’t know. It could be that, as the economy improved, their fears of illegal immigration eased a bit. And meanwhile, an anti-Trump backlash on the left was congealing, driving overall support for amnesty ever higher.

Another interesting trendline appears in questions about what the U.S. government’s top priority on immigration should be — deportation, sealing the border, or finding a way to legalize illegals who are already here and have jobs. Looks like Americans have been getting more lenient on this subject too since the rise of Trumpmania in 2015, no?

Once again we have a paradox of the country becoming more open to amnesty as Trump built a populist anti-amnesty movement that carried him to the White House. But wait — go back a bit further in time, to CNN’s 2014 poll, and you’ll see that the trendline hasn’t always moved steadily towards amnesty:

Put those last two tables together and you’ll see that a majority of Americans (54 percent) supported amnesty in 2014 — and then, by September 2015, the number had shrunk to 46 percent. It was still below 50 percent in December of that year before crossing back to majority support in 2016 and rising to the current 60 percent level now. Meanwhile, going all the way back to 2010, a meager 38 percent of Americans supported legalization compared to 60 percent who wanted to either deport those who were here or stop new illegals from entering. What’s happening in these bouncy numbers, I assume, is a combination of economic effects plus reaction on the right to Trump’s rise. In 2010, with the country still struggling with the Great Recession, fewer Americans were willing to tolerate extra competition for jobs from illegals; by 2012-14, with the economy recovering and Obama getting reelected, they were more forgiving. Then in 2015, when Trump caught fire, the right moved in his direction on immigration briefly. And now, with Trump in the White House, good news emerging on job creation, and reports of a falloff in border crossings since January, the right may feel less worried about illegal immigration while the left sees support for amnesty as a way to extend a political middle finger to Trump. Put all of that together and, yeah, no wonder you’re seeing the numbers for an immigration deal climb.

This is the ninth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, they’d shown an almost-even race, and Leave’s narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.

The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot candidates in what party leaders increasingly suggest could be a sweeping victory for Democrats at every level. […]

The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?

This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. And yet the Times, famous for its “to be sure” equivocations, wasn’t even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory.

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

1. Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
2. Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
3. Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
4. Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”

Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to “aggregation,” the broader idea is that there’s some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter.

But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions.

Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much. And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.

The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.

Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.

Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones don’t. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over.

Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.

There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalism’s business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But it’s not clear that’s happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade:

The share of total exposure for the top five news sources climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure, this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the conversation.

All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So … what to do about it, then?

Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they won’t necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers — or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs — would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.

Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots.

That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.

We’re used to talking about how unified Republicans are — they approved President Trump’s Cabinet appointments almost unanimously, for example. But the House’s health care bill, which was unveiled on Monday, mostly seemed to divide them. Members of highly conservative groups in the House, such as the Freedom Caucus and the Republican Study Committee, have already bashed the draft legislation for maintaining too many of the policies and principles of Obamacare and for adopting a tax credit that they say is a “new entitlement.” However, conservative health policy wonks, whose views could be in sync with more mainline factions of the GOP, have critiqued the bill from another direction, saying it would considerably increase the number of uninsured people. Even the White House’s initial reaction was tepid, although Trump called the bill “wonderful” in a tweet on Tuesday morning. I’m not sure how I’d go about forecasting the probability of its passage, but it didn’t have an auspicious debut.

Health care is a notoriously difficult issue to tackle — most presidents have failed in their efforts to make wholesale reforms, or paid a substantial political price for attempting to do so (or both). But it’s worth considering why this is the case. Part of the answer is that in contrast to something like a Cabinet nomination, which is a simple yes-or-no question, health care is much more multifaceted, allowing for a myriad of possible legislative solutions.

Authors of the Affordable Care Act, for example, have sometimes referred to the “three-legged stool,” where the legs can be thought of as affordability (the government helps people pay for their insurance if they can’t afford it on their own), access (people can get health care even if they have a pre-existing condition) and cost control (there’s some mandate or incentive to ensure that healthy people sign up for insurance, avoiding the death spiral that can result when the proportion of sick people in the insurance pool is too high). If one leg of the stool wobbles, the whole thing might collapse; removing the requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, for instance, would reduce access. But if sick people sign up for insurance and healthy people don’t, that could trigger a death spiral.

Depending on how different members of Congress prioritize these objectives, they’ll almost inevitably wind up with multiple, somewhat incompatible ideas for a health care bill, and it can be hard or even impossible for a group to come to a consensus when it has more than two such alternatives. Republicans also face the additional constraint of needing to pass their bill using the reconciliation process — which limits what it can contain — or almost certainly facing a Democratic filibuster.

The other, related factor is that there’s a fair amount of ideological diversity within the GOP, even though that variation can be hidden on most votes. That is to say, Republicans lawmakers range from “conservative” to “very conservative” to “very, very conservative.” That might sound like a joke, but these are actually fairly meaningful differences. The statistical system DW-Nominate rates members of Congress on a scale from negative 1 to positive 1, where negative scores are liberal and positive ones are conservative. It’s fairly well known that Republicans have grown more conservative over the years. But the spread between the most and least conservative Republicans hasn’t narrowed. Moderate Republicans have been replaced by conservatives, but conservative Republicans have been replaced by very, very conservative Republicans.

Where Republicans all line up to one side of an issue — for instance, on tax cuts — these differences don’t matter much. The most fiscally conservative Republicans might want an especially large tax cut, for instance, but they probably wouldn’t oppose a small one. But on health care, to repeat ourselves, there are more than two sides, and every tweak that caters to one group’s preferences probably contradicts someone else’s.

There’s a contrast here to Democrats, who have also lost much of their moderate, centrist wing, but whose most-liberal members aren’t appreciably more liberal than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Their ideological range has narrowed — instead of spanning from “very liberal” to “moderate,” they now range from “very liberal” to “somewhat liberal.” That may make the party more cohesive, perhaps at the cost of other objectives, such as making it more appealing to centrist voters. Democrats also haven’t historically faced the same divisions between “establishment” and “anti-establishment” members of the party that Republicans have (although that may be changing). So just because Democrats were able to pull together enough to pass Obamacare doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will be able to do the same to repeal and replace it. There just might not be any single Republican health care bill that can earn the votes of a majority of the House and Senate.

People in Venezuela have struggled for years to remove the socialist regime that continues to destroy their country. But after years of rallies and protests, some with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, President Maduro and his socialist cronies have maintained their stranglehold on power through a combination of intimidation, abuse of power and control of the media. The Associated Press reports:

As the price of oil has fallen and laid bare years of mismanagement, Maduro’s administration has responded by becoming more repressive. It has purged state institutions of potential traitors, kept out foreign reporters, detained prominent businessmen and declared null all decisions by the opposition-controlled congress…

Protester Marcello Gonzalez, 69, said all his 15 grandkids and seven of his 10 children have left the country.

“There’s a terror campaign here,” he said. “The government is using tear gas and arrests to intimidate the young people and make them stay home. We older people don’t have to worry as much. We know we’re not the target.”

One moment, cited as a kind of last straw for the protest movement, was the failure to oust President Maduro through a legal referendum process. The opposition put all its effort into collecting the millions of signatures needed. Polls showed an overwhelming percentage of Venezuelans were prepared to vote Maduro out of office.  There were massive street protests last September in support of the effort. And then the Maduro government simply declared the process marred by fraud and refused to allow the vote it knew would result in his ouster. It was at this point that President Obama stepped in:

The Obama administration then dispatched a top diplomat to walk back the opposition leaders and tempt them with a Vatican-sponsored dialogue, which has since collapsed. In hindsight, to many it felt like capitulation, with the only result being that Maduro was never punished for trampling on the constitution. Now, there is an effort underway to block opposition parties from competing in future elections altogether.

Venezuelans had been counting on the levers of self-government to save them but the last two years have revealed President Maduro is no longer playing by those rules. He is a dictator who intends to remain in power by any means necessary. There is no peaceful solution to this situation. The only options left for the opposition are to flee or fight.

Food is scarce to the point that people have resorted to eating stray dogs, cats and even pink flamingos to survive. As Jazz pointed out two days ago, 3/4 of the population has lost an average of 19 pounds on the “Maduro diet.” It’s hard to imagine these starving, frightened people having the energy for a rebellion. Venezuelans are living through a socialist nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.

Perhaps the most important lesson, which doesn’t get mentioned by the AP, is that many of the people now suffering in Venezuela voted for this regime.

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During the Cold War, the far left would sometimes claim that the problem was caused by the West, which somehow provoked Stalin into his aggressive actions. Today the left has mostly risen above all that nonsense, but a similar fantasy is increasing peddled by the far right.  In this view, the US provoked Putin by expanding NATO into Eastern Europe.  Here’s what actually happened:

When Mr Putin became president in 2000, he showed no overt hostility towards America or the West, despite a recent NATO bombing raid on Belgrade without a UN resolution that had triggered a shrill anti-American response. In his first interview with Britain’s BBC, Mr Putin said: “I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe, so it is hard for me to visualise NATO as an enemy.” Russia, he said, might become a member of NATO if it were treated as an equal partner. Even when the three Baltic states joined NATO in spring 2004, Mr Putin insisted that relations with the defence organisation were “developing positively” and he had “no concerns about the expansion of NATO”.

The breaking-point in Mr Putin’s relationship with the West came towards the end of that year when several seemingly unrelated events coincided. The first was a terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, in the north Causasus, in which 1,200 people, mostly children, were taken hostage. After Russia’s special forces stormed the school, leaving 333 people dead, Mr Putin accused the West of trying to undermine Russia. He cancelled regional elections and handed more powers to the security services.

The press in America focuses on Putin’s murderous foreign policies, or the lies about shooting down a Malaysian airliner.  But these policies reflect a deeper problem in Russia, a lack of liberalism, aka utilitarianism.  This happened today:

Russia’s parliament voted overwhelmingly on Friday to decriminalise domestic violence, a move the Kremlin claims will help support families but critics say will only worsen the problem.

Members of the lower house of parliament voted 380-3 in favour of the bill’s third reading after senior officials spoke in favour of the measure. The bill is expected to be approved by the rubber-stamp upper house before President Vladimir Putin signs it.

Vyacheslav Volodin, who became parliament speaker last year after five years running the Kremlin’s domestic policy, said earlier this week that the measure would strengthen the conservative social values promoted by the government.

The same sort of pattern occurs in the Russian drug war:

In most of the world the threat of HIV/AIDS has receded. The exceptions are eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Russia, which accounts for more than 80% of new infections in the region, 51,000 people were diagnosed in the first five months of this year. In January registered HIV cases there topped one million. Vadim Pokrovsky of Russia’s Federal AIDS Centre reckons the true figure may be 1.4m-1.5m, about 1% of the population; he warns there could be 3m by 2020. In some African countries prevalence can reach 19%, but the epidemic is slowing. In Russia, the infection rate is “getting worse, and at a very fast pace”, says Vinay Saldanha, UNAIDS’ director for eastern Europe and Central Asia. .  .  .

Harsh anti-drug laws keep users in the shadows. Methadone and other forms of non-injected opioid substitution therapy (OST) are illegal; in other post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine, they are legal. (After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, 800 patients found themselves cut off. The UN believes some 10% have died, “mostly of overdose or suicide”.) The World Health Organisation calls methadone “the most promising method of reducing drug dependence”, and HIV-positive addicts who receive OST are 54% more likely to get the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs they need to stay healthy, according to studies.

Russia’s foreign minister has derided OST as a “narcoliberal” idea. . . .

Drug users fear criminal repercussions if they seek help. And Russia’s “anti-gay propaganda” laws make it harder for gay-friendly charities to operate.

Virulent prejudice

Independent NGOs, many staffed by HIV-positive people, play a crucial role in reaching vulnerable groups. But Russia’s “foreign agents” legislation, which places bureaucratic restrictions around groups that accept foreign money, has made funding difficult. Several HIV and drug-policy advocacy groups have been labelled foreign agents this year, including the Andrey Ryklov Foundation, the only group offering free needle exchanges in Moscow. . . .

Russia’s economic crisis has slashed health-care budgets, and more money for AIDS seems unlikely. Even this year’s promised extra federal funds have yet to materialise, says Mr Pokrovsky. Officials, he adds, must abandon the old saying that “what’s good for the German is death for the Russian.” Germany’s population is a bit over half the size of Russia’s, and it has one 25th the number of new HIV cases. “Narcoliberal” ideas save lives.

Unlike utilitarian liberals, populist/nationalist/alt-right types don’t really care about the welfare of people, they focus on narrower values like patriarchy and nationalism and xenophobia.  America’s alt-right likes Putin’s Russia because it secretly shares many of those values.  Because America is more liberal than Russia, they are reluctant to say these things out loud, but you see it all over the internet, where alt-right views can be expressed anonymously.  (Or when caught on tape talking with Billy Bush.)

You don’t want to be a small (or midsize) country on the southern border of one of these populist/nationalistic powers, because the strong bullying the weak is a part of their core ideology.  It’s a sort of high school bully mentality, if not middle school.  Thus it’s not just the women and HIV victims in Russia that suffer, but also people in neighboring countries.  Put simply, the rejection of utilitarian values leads to bad domestic polices and bad foreign policies.  That’s why the problems in Russia matter for the entire world.

If an alt-right leader takes over your country, pray that he’s as weak and clueless as a small child, and must rely on experts.

Now that Trump has decided to save America's rust belt, I thought it would be interesting to look at the issues facing China's rust belt. Here is the Financial Times:

North-eastern China is facing a demographic crisis as educated millennials abandon the industrial heartland, the country's worst-performing region.

Planning officials revealed this month that the economy of Liaoning, one of the three northeastern provinces, had shrunk 2.2 per cent in the first nine months of the year -- the largest regional contraction in China in seven years. , , ,

For younger workers, the slowdown is made worse by the region's extreme reliance on the state. Most new jobs in China are created in private companies but north-eastern China is home to the state-backed heavy industrial companies and state-owned farms that form the Communist party's traditional support base. In some cities, new jobs in government or state-owned enterprises only open when an older worker leaves, leading to a practice whereby parents or other family members will retire to create a slot for a younger relative.

In the 1990s, China's three north-eastern provinces saw net immigration of 360,000 people, but from 2000 to 2010, 2m left. . . .

China's 2010 census showed that the fertility rate of the north-east had dropped to only 0.75, too low to replace an ageing labour pool. More recent mid-cycle census data from 2015 has not yet been released, but is likely to show a further decline.

If that 0.75 fertility rate is accurate, it would be by far the world's lowest rate, for any large region.

Before fixing the problem, let's think about possible causes:

1. Trade: Many people claim America's rust belt has been devastated by imports. But China is the world's largest exporter of goods. It's also the world's largest exporter of steel. So trade does not seem to be the culprit.

2. Environmental regulations: But China has relative weak environmental controls, so that doesn't seem to be the problem either.

3. Neoliberalism: This region is the most state dominated in China, so neoliberalism doesn't seem to be the problem.

4. Declining output: China's steel output has soared in recent decades, rising to roughly 50% of global output:

My conclusion? It seems like the "problem" is automation. China's manufacturing productivity is soaring, and that means that even producing 50% of the world's steel is no longer enough to keep a rust belt prosperous. In China, it is the free market, high tech cities like Shenzhen and Hangzhou that are booming.

How does this apply to the US? First, our steel output is down about 20% since 1970, even as consumption edged up slightly:

So is that why steel employment has fallen? No, it's mostly productivity. Steel employment is not down 20%; it's down closer to 80%:

Are there any lessons here for America? I think there are. People trying to save the rust belt are essentially Luddites. The only way to save those old industrial jobs is though restrictions on productivity growth. Sorry, but there is no other way.

You might think this is all common knowledge among economists. It's not. Every day I read economists talk about how trade has devastated America's rust belt. Nope, it's the productivity, stupid.

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To cleanse the palate, via Jake Tapper, a minor viral video sensation. Sorry for being cryptic in the headline but any clue as to what the ad’s about will spoil it. All I’ll say is that sometimes you need to tip your cap to Team Blue for an advocacy job well done.

You’ll find background about the spot here but don’t click and read until after you’ve watched. For the first minute or so, I thought it was going to end with the teen couple having lunch at McDonald’s or sharing a Coke. If you’d told me it was a PSA, I would have guessed that it would end with a pitch for abstinence. If you’d told me it was a liberal PSA, I would have guessed that it would end with the happy couple skipping away from the local Planned Parenthood eight months later, carefree. Not quite. Not quite.

One thing that frustrates me is that I have to go through life listening to tiresome arguments from the 99.9% of people who are innumerate.  Here are a few recent examples:

1.  “The polls were wrong about the election.”  That’s true of some of the state polls, but the national polls were roughly correct.  They predicted that Hillary would gain about 4.5 million more votes than Trump.  We still don’t know where it will end up (her margin widens daily), but it looks like she’ll end up nearly 3 million ahead. If you had told most pundits that Hillary would have won 3 million more votes than Trump, most would have assumed that she would win the election.  The mistake was not so much the polls, but rather the assumption that a comfortable margin in the popular vote would be enough.  That’s not an unreasonable mistake; in the past 120 years there was only one other split decision (in 2000), and in that case the popular vote was exceedingly close.  It’s like the housing price collapse of 2006-09; we all knew it was theoretically possible for someone with a multi-million popular vote margin to lose the electoral college, but didn’t expect it because we had not seen it in modern times.

2.  “If elections were determined by popular vote, Trump would have campaigned differently and most likely would have won the popular vote.” Of course that’s theoretically possible, but the odds are overwhelmingly against.  First, because the new strategy for both candidates would have involved more emphasis on getting out the vote in the non-swing states.  But the non-swing states went for Hillary by nearly 4%.  So if increased campaigning had boosted the turnout in places like California, then Hillary would have very likely won by even more.  Thus the big popular vote margin actually understates what that margin would have been in a direct election of the President.  And second, people don’t seem to understand how massive a popular vote margin of nearly 3 million actually is.  It would be extremely hard to generate another 3 million votes for Trump, or more precisely an amount of additional votes that’s 3 million more than the other campaign generated.  Face facts: Hillary didn’t lose because people didn’t like her; she was more popular than Trump on Election Day.  Trump won because the election was rigged by the Founding Fathers.

3.  “Neoliberal economists who promoted free trade are to blame for Trump.”  This is wrong for all sorts of reasons.  First of all, the direct loss of jobs due to imports is largely offset by jobs created in other sectors like exports and construction. Furthermore, automation costs far more jobs than trade.  And finally, the actual loss of jobs due to neoliberal policies like Nafta and GATT are only a tiny fraction of jobs lost to imports in general. Even if we had not liberalized trade in recent decades, we’d still be importing lots of cheap manufactured goods from East Asia and Mexico, and have a huge CA deficit.  If you take 10% of 10% of 10%, you end up with a really tiny number, and yet a commenter recently sent me an article by Notre Dame economist David Ruccio claiming that neoliberal economists were to blame for Trump:

Are mainstream economists responsible for electing Donald Trump?

I think they deserve at least part of the blame. So, as it turns out, does Dani Rodrick. 

My argument is that, when mainstream economists in the United States embraced and celebrated neoliberalism—both the conservative and “left” versions—they created the conditions for Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election.

We are 0.001% to blame, at most.  If economists don’t have a sense about what sort of numerical claims are plausible, who will?

4.  I could cite many other examples.  The claim that greater infrastructure spending would significantly boost US economic growth is absurd.  It might boost it, but the US economy is far too large and diverse for a $550 billion infrastructure package to make much difference, especially during a period of 4.6% unemployment and monetary offset.  Tax reform and deregulation are more promising, but even here the claims of 4% to 6% RGDP growth are ridiculous, at least over an extended period of time (I suppose one or two quarters are possible.) Trend RGDP growth during the 20th century averaged about 3%, under wildly different policy environments.  I’m not saying policy had no impact (I’m a moderate supply-sider), but people tend to overrate the impact.

To give a sense of how hard it is to dramatically impact the macro economy, consider that the Trump people (wrongly) claim their Carrier victory will directly save 1000 jobs.  Obama “created” about 6000 or 7000 jobs every single day over the past 7 years.  A thousand jobs is not a drop in a bucket, it’s a particle of water vapor in a bucket.  If Trump had that sort of “victory” every single day of his 8-year presidency, he’d still probably create far fewer jobs than Obama.  James Pethokoukis had this to say about the banana republic-like Carrier deal:

American Enterprise Institute scholar Jimmy Pethokoukis told CNBC on Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump’s speech about his deal to keep Carrier jobs in the United States was “absolutely the worst speech by an American politician since 1984 when Walter Mondale promised to reverse Reaganomics.”

“The idea that American corporations are going to have to make business decisions, not based on the fact that we’ve created an ideal environment for economic growth in the United States, but out of fear of punitive actions based on who knows what criteria exactly from a presidential administration. I think that’s absolutely chilling,” he said.

He continued: “[Companies should not make decisions] based on fear that there are going to be tariffs, that they are going to have contracts taken away from them, or the president will attack an American corporation for trying to create a valuable product.”

He also suggested that if the Democrats had done something similar, the GOP would have freaked out.  I can imagine Republicans complaining about this being a left-wing anti-business abuse of power, if Obama had done it.

Commenters often wrongly claim that I equated Trump and Hitler.  Now “analysts” are indirectly comparing Trump and Hitler:

A source who has advised Trump’s transition team on security policy told Reuters last week the president-elect would start a “clean slate” with Duterte, and analysts see some similarities in their blunt style. . . .

Sometimes called the “Trump of the East” because of his mercurial ways, Duterte has threatened repeatedly to sever U.S. defense ties, saying he “hates” having foreign soldiers in his country.

Here’s an example of Duterte’s blunt style:

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday compared his campaign to kill criminals to the Holocaust, saying he would like to “slaughter” millions of addicts just like Adolf Hitler “massacred” millions of Jewish people.

“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there are 3 million drug addicts. … I’d be happy to slaughter them,” he told reporters early Friday, according to GMA News.

“You know my victims, I would like to be, all criminals, to finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition,” he said.

No wonder Trump is anxious for Duterte to be one of the first heads of state to visit the White House:

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump invited Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte to the White House next year during a “very engaging, animated” phone conversation, a Duterte aide said on Friday, amid rocky relations between their two countries.

They have so much in common.  Trump likes reading books of Hitler’s speeches and says:

You know I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.

And Duterte sees mass murder as the “final solution” to the drug problem.

PS.  But I’m not equating Trump and Hitler-loving dictators; I leave that to the “analysts”.

PPS.  Last time I mentioned the Duterte quotation, a commenter defended him by pointing to his high approval rating in polls.  And he didn’t seem to be kidding.

The post Unsexy Infrastructure: Lock and Dam appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

» Donald Trump wants to make a big splash by supporting a huge new infrastructure bill. But we don’t want to end up with the construction of massive new highways from coast to coast.

After six years of proposals for significant new transportation funding being proposed by President Obama, and then being shot down immediately by intransigent Republican Congresspeople, infrastructure is suddenly the talk of Washington. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton proposed major infrastructure packages during the campaign, and the Trump transition team includes a proposal for transportation investment as one of its top priorities. As I’ll describe below, this proposal would likely primarily fund transportation projects that exacerbate climate change and encourage exurban sprawl.

The nascent administration has offered few details other than a 10-page fact sheet released by a consultant in October. This proposal would release $137 billion in tax credits over ten years to private companies spending on infrastructure; in exchange, those companies would be expected to raise $167 billion in total equity, supporting a potential $1 trillion in total new construction, amounting to the largest U.S. infrastructure binge since the construction of the Interstate Highway System. In contrast to the vast majority of public works in the U.S. today, projects would have to raise user fees to pay back initial loans and corporate equity contributions.

This proposal, though not fully developed, has been widely critiqued.

Most importantly, perhaps, Ben Fried contends in Streetsblog that supporting any Trump Administration proposal is suspect; “There is no moral basis for collaboration on Trump’s infrastructure agenda—because enabling any aspect of the Trump policy platform will grease the skids for enacting the entire Trump worldview. No piece of infrastructure is worth that risk.” Whatever the benefits of new infrastructure, Fried suggests, the Trump Administration is so problematic that we must fight any of its initiatives.

From a financial perspective, the tax credits would do nothing to support projects that don’t make money, meaning all hope is lost for fixing Flint’s lead-in-water problem through this legislation, for example. The plan would provide automatic 10 percent pretax profits to contractors, just as a matter of general policy. Credits could be distributed even to projects that were already planned, meaning that there is no guarantee that the investment would actually increase investment or produce new jobs. Meanwhile, the proposal provides no source to actually pay for those tax credits, meaning they could be “weaponized” to “justify future cuts in health care, education and social programs,” as Ronald Klein has put it.

Writing in The New York Times, Paul Krugman focuses on the proposal’s secondary effect, which would be shifting infrastructure from public to private hands. This is “not a plan to borrow $1 trillion and spend it on much-needed projects,” he writes. “It is, instead, supposed to involve having private investors do the work both of raising money and building the projects—with the aid of a huge tax credit that gives them back 82 percent of the equity they put in.” Krugman’s point is that the proposed tax credits are, in reality, giveaways to companies that will then own and operate infrastructure permanently at little to no costs to themselves. The plan, in this way, is privatizing future public assets.

These are, undoubtedly, important concerns that put into question not only Mr. Trump’s motivations on the development of this infrastructure bill, but also his policy agenda on several fronts.

Beyond the financial mechanisms and the question of whether to invest in public or private construction, though, the issue of what a new infrastructure bill might fund has been little mentioned in the press. And the reality is that, for the future of the transportation system, the types of projects funded may ultimately have more of an impact than the way they’re funded.

At the heart of the infrastructure proposal is the requirement that new projects built should be self-funding in some form. All the loans that government equity-through-tax-credits are supposed to support will have to be paid back through some sort of user fee. What consequence will this have?

For one, as noted above, many of the projects funded will probably have already been planned, meaning that government funding will replace private-sector investments that would have occurred anyway. Two, this package will massively preference projects that are designed to be profitable—not projects that may serve the greater good. In such, it wouldn’t be particularly surprising for the primary beneficiaries of this legislation to be oil and gas pipelines.

In the transportation space, as many have noted, profit-motivated investments will mean, overwhelmingly, toll highways. Given that the vast majority of transit lines—perhaps all of them in the U.S.—are deficitary, and the fact that it is inconceivable to imagine developing pedestrian and biking projects that charge customers to use them, a transportation investment structured on these lines seems likely to be very auto-oriented, at least compared to current federal transportation expenditures, which are distributed 1-to-4 transit-to-highways.

But I’ll take a step further. What if, somehow, the infrastructure bill were focused on transportation and required that investments followed a similar modal ratio as they do today? If the bill guaranteed $200 billion in transit investments and $800 billion in highway spending over ten years,* would it be worth it?

I am skeptical. We must remember that the primary goal of transit advocates should not be to simply get projects built. It should be to create more livable, less carbon-intensive cities by shifting the country’s transportation system away from personal automobiles.

At the heart of the issue is that fact that new transit infrastructure is typically only moderately successful in encouraging people to get out of their cars, while new highway infrastructure is usually very good at getting people into their cars. In other words, the net effect of a tripling of the nation’s expenditures on transportation—even if those expenditures were spent in similar proportion as today—would be not a reaffirming of the status quo; it would represent a dramatic incentive to get many more people driving.

Why am I convinced that a massive increase in overall transportation expenditures would do more than just reinforce existing trends? For one, the reality is that exurban or interurban highways are simply much cheaper to build than urban transit. Take Texas’ SH 130, a four-lane toll highway that was extended by 40 miles in 2012 for a cost of a bit more than $1.3 billion.—that’s about $33 million a mile. For comparison, Denver’s 12.1-mile West light rail line, which opened in 2013, cost $707 million, or about $60 million a mile. Minneapolis’ 9.5-mile Green Line light rail, which opened in 2014, cost $957 million, or about $100 million a mile.

In other words, for the same transportation dollar, an investment in new highways can produce dozens of miles of multi-lane, grade-separated highways in rural areas while an investment in urban transit can mean relatively little new capacity.

Two, given the fact that a Trump transportation bill requires projects to contribute user fees, it seems very unlikely to contribute to the reconstruction of the Interstate System, since political and public support for the tolling of existing roads is basically nonexistent. This means funds will go to new projects, not renovations.

What would be the direct consequences of thousands of new miles of grade-separated highways? Massive incentives for increased sprawling, unwalkable development, destruction of greenfield and agricultural land, and disincentives for investment in urban infill. Significantly more vehicular travel generated through induced demand. Massive new carbon emissions.

What would be the direct consequences of hundreds of new miles of new transit investments, funded through the same mechanisms? Potentially significant additional transit ridership—but maybe not; what is more likely in most cases is a redirection of riders from buses to trains. New transit-oriented development might surround many new lines, but given that most public investment is being directed to suburban highways, and the simultaneous political resistance to increased density, there likely wouldn’t be much new development from a relative perspective.**

Where does this leave us? For the good of our environment and for the good of our cities, doing nothing would likely be better than supporting this infrastructure package—even if we ignore the potentially disastrous political and financial concerns about this infrastructure bill noted by others. More transit investment simply isn’t worth it in the context of far more massive new highway spending that would overwhelm any potential benefits being derived from transit projects. Indeed, no new investment of any sort would likely encourage better use of existing infrastructure, thereby improving the performance of existing transit lines and supporting infill development rather than greenfield construction.

Ironically, losing out on the massive stream of potential federal funding doesn’t mean that new transit projects have to grind to a halt. Indeed, the results of local referenda this election reinforced the notion that when presented with a generous transit plan, voters in many cities will jump at the opportunity to tax themselves to pay for it. Indeed, the large majorities that came out to support better transit—and pay for it—in Atlanta, the Bay Area, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Raleigh, and Seattle*** were voting for more livable, less car-dominated communities. Even though each of those plans rely on federal funding to support full implementation, even without support from Washington, much of what they propose can be completed.

Transit agencies will make the reasonable argument that they need funding to bring their systems back to a state of good repair. But this infrastructure bill won’t be of much use to address that problem, since it focuses on expansion projects. And new highways that suck ridership out of the transit system won’t help much, either.

Suggesting that new infrastructure funding isn’t worth it given what will be funded comes close to heretical in a political environment in which such investment has suddenly been identified by politicians on both the right and left as the solution for whatever it is that supposedly ails America. But we need to think long and hard about what kind of society we want before spending billions of dollars for new transportation projects all over the place.

* This would represent roughly a tripling of federal transportation spending, since the U.S. Department of Transportation currently distributes about $50 billion in surface transportation funding annually.
** Of course there are many benefits of investing in public transit projects, and many transit projects will in fact result in many additional riders. But maximizing the benefits of new transit projects—particularly in a short time horizon—is difficult because of the realities of land use.
*** In Atlanta, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, more than 70 percents of voters expressed themselves in favor of the referenda.

Based on what most of us would have thought possible a year or two ago, the election of Donald Trump was one of the most shocking events in American political history. But it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise based on the polls — at least if you were reading FiveThirtyEight. Given the historical accuracy of polling and where each candidate’s support was distributed, the polls showed a race that was both fairly close and highly uncertain.

This isn’t just a case of hindsight bias. It’s tricky to decide what tone to take in an article like this one — after all, we had Hillary Clinton favored. But one of the reasons to build a model — perhaps the most important reason — is to measure uncertainty and to account for risk. If polling were perfect, you wouldn’t need to do this. And we took weeks of abuse from people who thought we overrated Trump’s chances. For most of the presidential campaign, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gave Trump much better odds than other polling-based models. Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent. And betting markets put Trump’s chances at just 18 percent at midnight on Tuesday, when Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, cast its votes.

So why did our model — using basically the same data as everyone else — show such a different result? We’ve covered this question before, but it’s interesting to do so in light of the actual election results. We think the outcome — and particularly the fact that Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — validates important features of our approach. More importantly, it helps to explain why Trump won the presidency.

A small, systematic polling error made a big difference

Clinton was leading in the vast majority of national polls, and in polls of enough states to get her to 270 electoral votes, although her position in New Hampshire was tenuous in the waning days of the campaign. So there wasn’t any reasonable way to construct a polling-based model that showed Trump ahead. Even the Trump campaign itself put their candidate’s chances at 30 percent, right about where FiveThirtyEight had him.

But people mistake having a large volume of polling data for eliminating uncertainty. It doesn’t work that way. Yes, having more polls helps to a degree, by reducing sampling error and by providing for a mix of reasonable methodologies. Therefore, it’s better to be ahead in two polls than ahead in one poll, and in 10 polls than in two polls. Before long, however, you start to encounter diminishing returns. Polls tend to replicate one another’s mistakes: If a particular type of demographic subgroup is hard to reach on the phone, for instance, the polls may try different workarounds but they’re all likely to have problems of some kind or another. The cacophony of headlines about how “CLINTON LEADS IN POLL” neglected the fact that these leads were often quite small and that if one poll missed, the others potentially would also. As I pointed out on Wednesday, if Clinton had done only 2 percentage points better across the board, she would have received 307 electoral votes and the polls would have “called” 49 of 50 states correctly.

FiveThirtyEight’s probabilities are based on the accuracy of polling averages in presidential elections dating back to 1972. That is, our models are based on how accurate polls have or haven’t been historically, instead of making idealized assumptions about them. For instance, national polling averages in the final week of the campaign have missed the actual outcome by an average of about 2 percentage points. That’s larger than you’d expect from sampling error alone and suggests that the polls sometimes suffer from systematic error: Almost all of the them are off in the same direction.

Historically, meanwhile, the error is larger in state polls than in national polls. That’s because there’s less of an opportunity for polling errors to cancel each other out. Suppose, for example, that the polls underestimate Clinton’s performance with Hispanic voters, but overestimate it among white voters without college degrees. In national polls, the overall effect might be relatively neutral. But the state polls will err in opposite directions, overestimating Clinton’s performance in states with lots of noncollege white voters but underestimating it in Hispanic-heavy states.

That’s something like what happened this year. In fact, the error in national polls wasn’t any worse than usual. Clinton was ahead by 3 to 4 percentage points in the final national polls. She already leads in the popular vote, and that lead will expand as mail ballots are counted from California and Washington, probably until she leads in the popular vote by 1 to 2 percentage points overall. That will mean only about a 2-point miss for the national polls. They may easily wind up being more accurate than in 2012, when they missed by 2.7 percentage points.

But what about the state polls? They were all over the place. Clinton actually overperformed FiveThirtyEight’s adjusted polling average in 11 states and the District of Columbia. The problem is that these states were California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington. Since all of these states except for Nevada and perhaps New Mexico were already solidly blue, that only helped Clinton to run up the popular vote margin in states whose electoral votes she was already assured of. That’s especially true of Calfornia, where Clinton both beat her polls by more than 5 percentage points and substantially improved on Barack Obama’s performance from 2012.

VIDEO: Nate Silver discusses the method to our forecast

Clinton collapsed in the Midwest, destroying her Electoral College chances

Conversely, Clinton underperformed her polls significantly throughout the Midwest and the Rust Belt: by 4 points in Michigan and Minnesota, by 5 points in Pennsylvania and by 6 points in Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin. Clinton just narrowly held on to win Minnesota, and she hadn’t been favored in Iowa or Ohio to begin with. But Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania flipped to Trump and cost her the election. (Otherwise, she’d have wound up with 278 electoral votes.)

FiveThirtyEight’s models consider possibilities such as these. In addition to a systematic national polling error, we also simulate potential errors across regional or demographic lines — for instance, Clinton might underperform in the Midwest in one simulation, or there might be a huge surge of support among white evangelicals for Trump in another simulation. These simulations test how robust a candidate’s lead is to various types of polling errors.

In fact, Clinton’s Electoral College leads weren’t very robust. And the single biggest reason was because of her relatively weak polling in the Midwest, especially as compared to President Obama four years ago. Because the outcomes in these Midwestern states were highly correlated, having problems in any one of them would mean that Clinton was probably having trouble in the others, as well.

There just aren’t enough electoral votes in swing states elsewhere in the country for a Democrat to survive a Midwestern collapse. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa and Pennsylvania (which is not a part of the geographic Midwest, but which functions like a Midwestern state politically) together have 80 electoral votes. Lose all of those states, and a Democrat would still lose even with Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia in her column.

Eventually, Democrats will find new battleground states. Clinton came closer to winning Arizona and Georgia than she did to winning Ohio, and closer to winning Texas than she did to winning Iowa. By 2024 or 2028, these may all have become purple states. In the interim, the Electoral College could get awkward for Democrats, with states such as Pennsylvania having gone from bluish to reddish, and states like Arizona and Georgia becoming more purple, but taking their time to get there. The Electoral College was already pretty awkward for them this year, obviously, which is why our model showed more than a 10 percent chance of a popular vote/Electoral College split in Trump’s favor.

Undecideds and late deciders broke for Trump

The single most important reason that our model gave Trump a better chance than others is because of our assumption that polling errors are correlated. No matter how many polls you have in a state, it’s often the case that all or most of them miss in the same direction. Furthermore, if the polls miss in one direction in one state, they often also miss in the same direction in other states, especially if those states are similar demographically.

There were some other factors too, however, that helped Trump’s chances in our forecast. One is that our model considers the number of undecided and third-party voters when evaluating the uncertainty in the race. There were far more of these voters than in recent, past elections: About 12 percent of the electorate wasn’t committed to either Trump or Clinton in final national polls, as compared with just 3 percent in 2012. That’s a big part of the reason our model was quite confident about Obama’s chances in 2012, but not all that confident about Clinton’s chances this year.

Indeed, late-deciding voters broke toward Trump, according to exit polls of most swing states. Or at least, that was the case in states where Trump outperformed his polls, such as in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It wasn’t as true in states such as Nevada and Virginia, where Clinton matched or exceeded her polls:

Voters who decided in the final week went strongly for Trump

	VOTE SHARE OF THOSE WHO DECIDED THE WEEK BEFORE THE ELECTION
STATE	CLINTON	TRUMP
Wisconsin	30%	59%
Minnesota	31	53
Utah	19	41
Iowa	34	54
Pennsylvania	37	54
Florida	38	55
Maine	33	49
New Hampshire	37	52
Michigan	39	50
North Carolina	41	49
New Mexico	41	46
Ohio	43	46
Virginia	45	42
Nevada	45	40
Georgia	52	42

The exit poll did not provide a breakout of voters who decided in the last week in Colorado or Arizona, because the sample size was too small.

Source: National Exit Poll

Pollsters simply can’t do much about voters who make up their minds only after the survey is completed. (And making inferences is a guessing game: It’s sometimes said that undecideds tend to break to the challenger, but the empirical evidence on this is mixed. Obama won late-deciding votes in 2012, for example.) But modelers can do something about it, by allowing for more uncertainty in the forecast when there are more undecideds. If only 3 percent of the electorate is undecided, then winning undecideds 3-2 — as Trump did in several swing states — will shift the overall outcome by less than 1 percentage point. But if 12 percent of the electorate is undecided, winning them by that ratio will produce a net swing of 2 to 3 points toward a candidate, potentially letting him overtake the front-runner.

Trump was also gaining ground on Clinton over the final two weeks of the campaign (although with a slight rebound for Clinton in the last 48 hours or so). There’s a lot of room to debate how much a model should chase down a polling swing when one occurs in, say, July or August. FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only model is notoriously aggressive about trying to reflect the public polls as they appear on the day of the forecast, even if it makes for a swingier result. Our polls-plus model, and most other forecasts, are more conservative and have various techniques for discounting polling swings. But as Election Day approaches, we think models ought to be fairly aggressive about detecting polling movement. (Polls-plus stops discounting polling swings by the end of the campaign). If there’s a late-breaking news event, such as FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress on Oct. 28, even a “temporary” effect may still weigh on voters at the time they cast their ballot.

A failure of conventional wisdom more than a failure of polling

It’s one thing to criticize pollsters — or polling-based forecasts — if your personal prediction came closer to getting the outcome right. But I’d assert that most mainstream journalists would have given Trump much lower odds than the 30 percent chance that FiveThirtyEight gave him, and that most campaign coverage was premised on the idea that Clinton was all but certain to become the next president. Both reporters and pundits criticized FiveThirtyEight and other polling sites for not accounting for early voting data, for example, on the idea that it portended good news for Clinton that our model ignored. As we’ve discovered in the past, however, it’s hard to make inferences from early voting and attempts to do have a fairly bad track record — as they did this year.

We also received a lot of criticism from Democratic partisans in the closing weeks of the campaign — more than we did from Trump supporters — because they thought we didn’t have Clinton as a heavy enough favorite. That’s unusual. We’ve forecasted enough races over the years to have taken criticism from almost every side. But in the past, it’s always been the trailing candidate’s supporters who gave us more grief.

In this respect, there’s another parallel between Trump’s victory on Tuesday, and the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in June. Brexit polls showed the race almost tied, with “Remain” leading by perhaps half a percentage point. In fact, “Leave” won by about 4 percentage points. The polls took a lot of criticism even though they’d shown “Leave” at almost even-money, whereas betting markets — and the conventional wisdom from London-based reporters — had “Remain” heavily favored to prevail. Londoners may have interpreted the data in selective ways because of the “unthinkability” of Britain’s leaving the EU to people in their social circles.

Tuesday’s results were similar. We strongly disagree with the idea that there was a massive polling error. Instead, there was a modest polling error, well in line with historical polling errors, but even a modest error was enough to provide for plenty of paths to victory for Trump. We think people should have been better prepared for it. There was widespread complacency about Clinton’s chances in a way that wasn’t justified by a careful analysis of the data and the uncertainties surrounding it.

Before starting this post (which won’t interest most people) let me just reiterate that the big question going forward is whether Trump will govern as a populist or a GOP supply-sider.  The markets clearly expect the latter–they think he conned the blue-collar workers to get their votes.  Since I’ve been wrong about Trump before, I won’t offer an opinion—just wait and see.  Perhaps the funniest and most clueless headline I saw today is that markets are rising because they expect “infrastructure”.  Will Keynesians ever give up?  Like infrastructure is going to drive biotech 10% higher in 2 days.  And that’s not even accounting for monetary offset.

The “Wisconsin Idea” is a progressive strand of politics that is usually attributed to immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia.  Wisconsin was deeply involved in the progressive movement of the early 20th century (La Follette, etc.), and pioneered legislation like unemployment insurance. We abolished the death penalty 100 years before less civilized places like Britain and France.  But in recent years the Wisconsin idea has been fading, and now I think it’s effectively gone.  This election was the final nail in the coffin.

The story can be told in maps.  Four years ago I did a post on the “Driftless Area”, where Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota all meet up.  It was the one white, rural agricultural area of the country that stayed blue, as other rural regions went for Romney:

Brian Donohue sent me a map showing counties that switched from blue to red in this election:

You can see that the Driftless Area stands out as moving to the GOP, delivering states like Iowa and Wisconsin to Trump.

BTW, don’t be fooled by the other blue rural areas on the first map, they are generally special cases, reflecting Indian reservations in the southwest, Hispanic areas on the Texas/Mexico border, the black belt along the ancient SE coastline of America, and the mining belt of northern Minnesota, etc.

The transformation of the GOP into the rural party and the Dems into the urban party is now almost complete.  The suburbs are split, with suburbs in the more highly educated areas trending blue, and working class suburbs moving red.

Thomas Frank should write a book “What’s the Matter with White America”, as both the rich and poor (white) regions seem to be voting against their interests.  (I’m not convinced by that hypothesis, I’m just saying that if you believe it, it applies to far more than Kansas.)

FYI, here is a map of the Driftless Area: