Viva La Resistance

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Effective Resistance

     One of the bigger dangers that Trump poses is that he will create a network of corruption; corporations will *have* to take part in order to survive. There will be strength in numbers--not only will most Americans patronize the businesses that are propping up and dependent on Trump’s kleptocracy, they will also own stock in those companies. It’ll become a Grapes of Wrath-like “who *can* we shoot?” situation. We’ve seen hints of this with Carrier and Boeing before he’s even become President. I suspect it’ll be easier to stop this from happening than it will be to undo.       Just to get this out front: I am usually opposed to “voting with dollars”. I think our economy works best when companies make the stuff they’re good at making, and we buy the stuff that makes us happiest. I go to Chick-fil-A as often as I want, even though many of my liberal friends don’t think I should. But that’s because the economy works roughly as I just outlined. Under Trump, I predict that will no longer be true. Success will come not as much from making good products, but from swearing allegiance to the Trumpire (TM). This is going to be the *main* source of badness that Trump creates, assuming no nuclear war.       This will be a totally different world, though. One of the most important things we can do to preserve freedom, innovation, vitality, and a system where the best ideas, not the most connected people, win out, is to actively support the businesses that stand up to Trump. They’re going to need it. But half of this country absolutely loathes everything he stands for. If there is a ready-made market for corporations, it will be a good strategy. We’ve seen what labeling products “GMO-free” or “organic” allows companies to charge. I hope most Americans will understand that stopping Trump is more important than these other causes.       So what we need is an independent organization that will monitor how much different companies cooperate with the Trump administration. That organization could make a Trump-free logo to place on goods. Obviously any corporation is going to have to live within the rules of the US government, so the organization will have to be savvy in understanding what exactly it means to cooperate with the Trumpire. I feel like this could be a positive step in preserving a free market, though. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Guys, It’s Time For Some Game Theory

     One of the most fascinating things I explicitly learned in my game theory class was that possible paths of play are relevant even if they’re never played. The best example of this is Mutually Assured Destruction: even if the US will never use its nukes, it’s very important that they have them sitting there, because they are the response if someone else does. But someone else never will because of the US’ nukes.       The shocking thing about Trump to me has been that he’s broken norms, meaning he’s deviated from the typical path of play. Now, fifty or a hundred years ago, people had tested out certain norms, and been crushed eventually, and that’s how they became norms. If you don’t do X, you will eventually lose. The problem is that this isn’t a chess game being played by one person; it’s a bunch of constantly-rotating reporters and government officials, and some of them might not quite understand the off-the-path-of-play setup of system.        This dynamic is why I was ok with the Electoral College stopping Trump, and I’m ok with many other unprecedented things in this environment. Trump is the unprecedented one--if you respond with “well we’ve never done this before!” then you misunderstand why we need to do it. Trump is betting, and he’s won so far, that we will either be too timid or too forgetful to use our previously off-the-path-of-play strategies.       What this really reminds me of is chess...I was one of the best players at my school around 6th-9th grades. Once in a while I’d play some “bad” player who did all sorts of ridiculous moves...and once in a while he’d (it was always a he) win. At first I got mad but I realized I should be mad at myself. If I couldn’t come up with a way to exploit the unusual moves he was making, they weren’t bad moves. In fact, in one of my least-favorite scenes of Star Trek:TOS, Spock makes the same fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEnxVwppE9M He claims that Kirk’s “illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion.” But chess is a game of pure logic. If you can only remember the right moves to make on a certain path of play, and don’t remember how to punish players who deviate from that “optimal” path of play, then you’re not really understanding the whole board.       This has gone on too long with Democrats. We love the system too much--we don’t realize that as soon as Republicans broke certain norms, the system was gone. In fact, the best hope for getting back to the system is going to be to punish defectors. It happened with the debt ceiling, with the filibustering of every last bill in the Senate, it happened with the refusal to work with Democrats *out of principle* not because of any policy disagreement. It happened most recently with the SCOTUS seat, and now a new defection is happening every day with Trump.       I think some of the reluctance to respond is a desire to keep clean hands. But no one sees the clean hands. And anyone who would see them at this point, understands what has happened. There’s no point in trying to please right-wing talk radio: in fact, if you listen to them, *THEY* have overplayed their hand. They’ve yelled “socialism”! or other such nonsense so much that their audience is going to ho-hum if the Democrats actually grow a spine and start fighting. We’re never going to win over certain people. We need to stop trying. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Outsmarting Ourselves

     I’ve posted a similar thing to this before, but I wonder if there’s any element of the Clinton campaign outsmarting themselves. I just saw someone making fun of a critique of the Michigan ground game. The critique was: the Clinton campaign didn’t have any yard signs, because those have been shown to have nothing to do with winning elections. The joke was that “oh yeah because we lost by a tiny margin let’s throw out all this carefully learned knowledge about how to win elections.”        So of course, I would never say we should throw out everything. But we should still question. What if yard signs don’t matter *in certain circumstances*? And we’ve just always had those circumstances? My thought is, maybe yard signs are irrelevant as long as you have, say, 5 per square mile. Any amount over 5 is superfluous. Past campaigns have varied from 15 to 50 per square mile, so the data show that yard signs don’t matter. The real message, though, was that between 15 and 50 yard signs don’t matter. But maybe that knowledge was then extrapolated beyond 15, and the campaign just totally ignored yard signs.       Specifically with yard signs, I can tell all sorts of stories: there was a false perception that Clinton was corrupt, and in some neighborhoods, maybe some trusted neighbors having yard signs out would have made people question that narrative. Who knows? But I think it’s very easy to misuse data, and my brief encounters with politics have taught me that the wrong people’s ideas get used all the time, and even within campaigns, complex ideas are sometimes hard to get people to appreciate. I don’t have confidence that Democrats were grappling with the data with the depth that was required. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Asymmetric Warfare

     It strikes me that, among my smarter Trump supporter friends, the main appeal of Trump was how angry he made liberals. To which I say: guilty as charged. As we deal with the reality of his Presidency, I hope they ask themselves how they got to a place where someone like him didn’t make *them* angry.      There are a couple of dangerous lines of thinking that I think point to how we got here: First, the implicit assumption that there are only two types of policies, conservative and liberal. As we’re seeing with Trump, defining “reasonable” very broadly to include even such things as going into Iraq even though they didn’t have WMDs, there are “reasonable conservative courses of action,” “reasonable liberal courses of action,” and “unreasonable courses of action.” And due MERELY to entropy, 99.99% of all courses of action are “unreasonable.” And then take into account the fact that Trump is actively looking to enrich himself, and he doesn’t even really have that 1/10000 chance of lucking into the reasonable policies.       And then the other side is the asymmetry from conservatives. Maybe things that liberals did and said made conservatives furious. But that wasn’t our intention. Speaking only for myself, and I find myself saying a lot of things that smarter liberals tend to say, I was gazing across the policy landscape and thinking about what might be best. Sure I’m liberal-tilted, but my goal was not to make conservatives angry. 

     And I admit to having some of the baser instincts just like anyone: if I was in an argument, rather than helping the other person to come to my side, my instinct is often to humiliate them for their idiotic line of reasoning, and through humiliation, they will learn not to be so dumb in the future (yes I know that is *never* going to happen...just being honest about what my instincts are). But I would have been *happier* if I never had to deal with that dumb line of reasoning in the first place. I’m not glad that global warming is happening and that we have to collectively curtail our use of fossil fuels in order to make life better for people on this planet. I’m a liberal *because* things like global warming happen and we sometimes need to act collectively and, yes, curtail individual liberty. And I’m certainly not glad that we’re arguing over global warming still. I don’t think most of my liberal friends have a goal of upsetting conservatives. But I do think that the amount by which Trump upset liberals blinded conservatives to the fact that they should be almost as upset by him.       

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Faithless Electors

Here seems to be the structure of what’s happening with the electoral college right now: 1. Hamilton et al: Hmm...wouldn’t want a demagogue or foreign agent to take power...better put a wall of electors between the popular vote and the Presidency. 

2. Over time, the electoral college becomes more and more of a formality.  3. A demagogue and sort-of foreign agent has won the Presidency *because* of the Electoral College, but people are making cute supra-Constitutional arguments about keeping order and not creating a Constitutional crisis.  You can’t say on one hand that the Constitution is sacred and says that we have to use the Electoral College instead of doing what every other civilized country does in elections, and then say that the Electoral College has to be irrelevant in practice.  I understand the people who are saying that in *this* election, the rules were set up beforehand, so Trump wins. But anyone who is saying that the Electors shouldn’t exercise discretion and stop this lunatic from taking power had better be in favor of eliminating the EC for next time around. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Policy Windows

     In economics, there’s a unicorn-style legend of something called a Giffen good. The basics are that there are these things called “inferior goods,” or goods you buy because you’re poor. The “income effect” means that as you get poorer, you tend to buy more inferior goods. There’s also something called a “substitution effect,” which is that if the price of chicken goes up, you buy more beef.       So imagine you have an inferior good, say, Kraft Dinner (without the dijon ketchups), and its price goes up. If you regularly bought this good, when its price went up, you’d essentially be poorer, because your income relative to what you want to buy is lower. So as a poorer person, you’d tend to buy more of the inferior good, including Kraft Dinner. That’s the “income effect”. But since Kraft Dinner now costs more relative to other things, you also tend to substitute away from it; that’s the substitution effect. A “Giffen good” is one where the income effect outweighs the substitution effect. Economists have been searching for these throughout history. The closest they’ve come is that they think that maybe during the Irish Potato famine, potatoes were a Giffen good. But generally to find a Giffen good, you have to have an extreme situation.       This is an introduction to a theoretical situation in politics that I’m starting to formulate in my head, where more liberal policies can be enacted only by the more conservative party (or visa-versa). I suspect this might boil down to “only Nixon could go to China” but I want to try and flesh this idea out. It’s not fully-formed, but I can imagine some parameters we could define: 1. Extreme checks and balances; it’s extremely difficult or impossible for one party to unilaterally enact changes.  2. An objectively correct policy that is substantially more liberal than current policy. You might need some sort of sudden event that changes what the objectively correct policy is (otherwise the system would probably already be doing it).  Specifically I’m thinking of global warming, but substitute in health care reform or anything else you might want. My line of thinking is this: imagine a situation arises that demands a response; a change from current policy. Say current policy is at 0 and the most conservative possible reasonable response is at 5, the most liberal possible reasonable response is at 15, and the median voter supports 10. If liberals are in power, they might go for 15 or 10. But if conservatives can simply stop any response, they can force policy to 0. This is good for them because now policy is far from what the median voter wants, hurting the party in power, and 0 is no further from what Conservatives want (5) than what liberals would probably enact (10 or 15).  I guess the liberal response might be to compromise, and give conservatives something between 5 and 10, which now imposes a policy cost on conservatives: by supporting 0, they’re now further from their desired policy than they would be by compromising. But there’s a countervailing political benefit, which is that 0 is far from what the median voter wants (10). This imposes bigger costs on the party in power than the other party. If the political benefit to the out-party is greater than 5 in this example, there’s no possibility of compromise.  I’m going to have to do another post or add on to this one in which I examine the incentives of the conservative party if it is in power while a sudden shift occurs requiring more liberal policy. But my suspicion is that you’d actually get something done. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

International Leadership

     I’ve never thought the US should be the world’s policeman, but people who know more about international relations than I do have different views--they seem to believe that extending our influence overseas helps us secure all sorts of goodies, such as favorable trade deals and maybe having the dollar be the reserve currency. I don’t really know, but because I don’t know, I’ll take people who know better at their word.       I have mixed feelings about Trump’s apparent intention to make us into Fortress USA, because even though I’m cool with immigrants, I would like it if we stopped spending so much on our military. On the other hand, and I don’t know this, I think there might be a benefit in terms of avoiding wars globally of having one country with a vastly larger military than any other country, as long as that country itself refuses to go on wars of conquest.       The other thing that I think is that the US is a moral leader; as many problems as we have, we at least promote values of liberty and democracy in other nations...there’s something good about the country with the largest army in the world nudging everyone in that direction.       But now I don’t know if we will retain that sort of moral leadership. As we tumble into kleptocracy, the planet loses one of the upsides of the US having the largest military, by far, in the world. So in a way, I think it’s right that we retreat back into our shell, ashamed of what we have become.       Of course, there are arguments about policy, and then there’s what Trump is going to do. I am often horrified by what Republicans say they want to do. But I’ve never doubted that they would accomplish their ends in relatively efficient ways. I think even if you agree with what Trump is pushing towards (and I might), he and the people he’s hiring seem to be pretty incompetent. And when you make mistakes in this arena there are potentially nuclear weapons involved.      I suspect what will really happen from a 50,000 foot level is that we’re currently in some sort of relatively high-cost equilibrium that is maybe not ideal, and the new equilibrium that Trump sees is “low cost but we still keep all of our international influence.” He’ll cut corners and not realize that some of those corners were needed, and we’ll get a massive, difficult-to-reverse reduction in our global influence. This will be unacceptable, and we’ll have to spend a lot of resources to get back to where we were. “A lot of resources” might involve just money, but it also might involve war.  

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Talking About Depression

     I heard a piece on the TED Radio Hour today (note: I viscerally dislike the whole TED organization; the TED Radio Hour is one of my least favorite elements of that organization, but it was that or nonstop Adele/Derulo/Beiber or Sportsyelling...I need to learn how to download podcasts) about depression, and people were asking rhetorically why we don’t talk about depression as if it’s self-evidently silly not to talk about something.       I think it’s pretty obvious why we don’t talk about depression. Compare it to a physical ailment, as the depression community insists we do. If you were in a job that required physical strength, and you learned you had a disease that would reduce your strength by 50% for a long time, possibly forever, but you could hide it by working faster or sloppier, wouldn’t you probably do that? You’d probably resist letting people know about it.       And here’s the important part: you would be smart to. Let’s get back to depression. It’s a real disease. It’s a real, unfortunate disease. It has lots of personal costs. But it also has professional costs. As in, you’re probably going to be a less-productive employee. Even if employers were fully enlightened about what depression is, and that it’s real, you would never put “I suffer from depression” on a job application, and your employer might rationally avoid putting you on important projects if he or she knew that you were likely to have days where getting out of bed was a struggle, or where ordinary everyday tasks were incredibly difficult. Because the rest of the world doesn’t grade on a curve.       This reminds me of a situation where I was (gag) defending Trump a year or so ago. It was breathlessly reported that Trump had *admitted* that he thought pregnancy was an inconvenience for an employer. I asked: well isn’t it? The responses were mostly, in substance “having babies is what keeps our society going, bearing children is incredibly important, that’s sexist, employers are better off when they have happy employees.” None of these are responses to my question. The answer is, obviously, that pregnancy IS an inconvenience for an employer.       Just to put this in context, I don’t think anyone would argue that pregnancy is not inconvenient for a woman. I hear there are all sorts of physical issues associated with it. Imagine if your child said “WHAT! HOW DARE YOU SAY I WAS AN INCONVENIENCE??” when you informed him of this. You’d laugh in his face.       So to say that pregnancy is an inconvenience for an employer is not to say that it’s not outweighed by the benefit to society of creating more humans, or that it’s not outweighed by general positive morale even at an individual company when it doesn’t outlaw procreation. But it is to say that if you have an employee who is going to be unable to fully perform their job for a period of, say, months, that is inconvenient. The benefits of the child are entirely enjoyed by someone other than your company (and the costs are probably partly borne by your company in the form of higher insurance payments, but ignore that for now). We’re not saying that the inconvenience justifies any particular practices either...we just have to recognize that it’s there.       And that’s why, to lump both of these together, we have to be honest about the incentives the world has set up. It might be PC to claim that pregnant women or depressed individuals are just as capable of performing their jobs as anyone else...but the reality is they aren’t. By making the PC claim, we’re pushing the problem underground and it’s causing things like “no one talks about depression” and “women are paid unequally.”       My solution is that if we as a society feel so strongly that being a woman who is pregnant or being an individual who suffers from depression should not negatively impact people as much as they would “naturally” (maybe in some sort of Ayn Rand dystopia), then we should put our money where our mouth is. We should feel free to say point-blank that a company is negatively impacted when one of its employees (I’m imagining professionals here) gets pregnant. Recognize that this might create a chain reaction of problems, all the way back to an interviewer sitting across from a woman in an interview room and subtly discriminating against her because she might get pregnant one day. Ask how we can remedy the situation for the business. One solution I have is to create a paid maternity leave fund, where we offer companies something like 120% of the employee’s salary and benefits in cash for X months, if they offer that employee paid maternity leave. This would compensate the company for both the salary they’re shelling out, and the inconvenience of having to tag someone else in on projects or make another hire.       The other thing we have to do as a society is stop equating value as a human being with “ability to create GDP.” Because if you are depressed, your ability to create GDP goes down, and that’s that. This is why we don’t talk about depression, and it’ll never change until we de-link these two things. Right now the poor are made to feel shame that they’re poor. If you don’t have a job, it is actively stressful. Maybe capitalism needed that back when we were more resource-constrained...but it’s 2016. Maybe we can take our foot off the gas a little. Maybe some people not working, for whatever reason, be it depression or that it’s really fun to play WOW for 12 hours a day, isn’t so bad anymore. This is a mindset that we’re going to have to get used to as the machines do more and more for us humans anyways...why not do it now and fix problems like “no one wants to talk about mental illness”? 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Being Mean

     I particularly bristle at accusations that liberals were mean and caused “conservatives” (I’m going to change this to Fox Newsers for the rest of this piece because I want to be fair to conservatives) to vote for Trump, because I really did go out of my way to avoid lazy thinking. Maybe this is just #notallliberals thinking. But for example, a lot of South Park episodes have been coming to mind over the past few weeks. I remember when I watched them, I actually often didn’t like them because they were too mean and unfair to some of the conservative points of view. But honestly they’ve been sort of validated by Trump’s election. There really are people who think like Cartman does in the episode about the waterpark. Same thing with Star Trek: there were cultures they’d run into that I thought were strawman versions of illiberal thought...but now I see that this is a real argument that people have.       So again, in light of this, if it weren’t for the last 18 months, I’d agree with Fox Newser complaints that Fox Newser viewpoints are often unfairly portrayed in the media. But it turns out that in my liberal bubble, I was actually free to think “well surely they aren’t *that* wrong.” My head is exploding because the reaction to Trump is precisely the opposite one we should be having: pop culture was unfair to the Fox Newsers. They were spot on. If you accept my claim to have been “fair” to Fox Newsers, then I was the one that was wrong, and the shrill, shrieking Jon Stewart audiences were right. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Dirty Faces and Diplomacy

Trump asks a question that on its face seems reasonable: if everyone knows we’re supplying Taiwan with weapons and we support their independence, why can’t we just say it? This would probably lead to another question, which is, everyone knows that Israel has nukes, so why can’t they just admit it?  We’re coming up to the limits of my knowledge of international affairs, so I’m going to shift the focus to game theory. Specifically a game called “dirty faces.” I don’t know the dynamics of the international situation, but this game provides an example of a case where there’s a big difference between “everyone knowing” something, and “someone saying” something. The setup is that there are a bunch of people in a circle, and they can all see everyone else’s face, but they can’t see their own. The game proceeds in rounds. If you know you have a dirty face, you stand up and announce it at the earliest round you know. The game starts when a soothsayer steps into the middle of the ring and if he sees anyone with a dirty face, he announces “I see a dirty face.”  We’ll see that, weirdly enough, even if there are like 50 people in the ring with 30 of them having dirty faces, and all of them clearly knowing that there is a dirty face, the soothsayer actually is the most important part of the game.  To generate insight, start with one dirty face and two people. One person doesn’t see a dirty face, so when the soothsayer pops in and says his sooth, that person knows the dirty face must be his. He stands up in round 1.  Now let’s move to two people and two dirty faces. The soothsayer says his thing, and seemingly doesn’t give anyone any more information. But what happens in round 1? Each person sees another dirty face, so they can’t know whether their face is dirty or not yet. So no one stands up. But given that no one stood up in round 1, each person knows that the other person sees another dirty face (otherwise they would have stood up in round 1). In round 2, each of the players knows he has a dirty face.  You can continue with this line of reasoning, and if everyone is perfectly logical, if there are X dirty faces in the circle, everyone with a dirty face sees X - 1 dirty faces, and when round X -1 comes and goes with no one standing up, they know that there are X dirty faces, and theirs must be dirty. It turns out that the seed of certainty planted by the soothsayer causes all of this logical chain to unravel: think about the circumstance with two dirty faces...it wasn’t that the soothsayer told anyone that there was a dirty face. But he did make it certain that the *other* person knew there was a dirty face. Once I know that the other person knows that there’s a dirty face, I can infer things from his failure to stand up in round 1. So again, I know nothing about diplomacy/international relations. But it seems to me that there’s this sort of strategic uncertainty that allows people to do what must be done without planting that crystal of certainty around which conflicts can develop. 

This is something I learned about in my game theory class, a class which I would imagine Trump has not taken (even if he understands many concepts from game theory very well). This is something I remembered because I thought it was really really cool, and I am very curious about the world, in particular about things that sort of boggle my mind. That seems to be something Trump is not. There are probably people who have studied international diplomacy who have been taught essentially the dirty faces game, or have grown to implicitly understand it. I could imagine an outsider President coming into office who is humble about the things he doesn’t understand, doing just fine. That is not Trump, so yeah...we might be in big trouble.  

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Why Cry Racism?

As someone who is often a little bit oblivious/too literal when it comes to interpersonal interactions, I’m often faced with the frustrating situation of someone wanting something, not wanting to tell me what it is for whatever reason, and then obliquely trying to get me to give them the something. I will literally comply with request after request because I’m nice, or solve issue after issue...but the underlying request/issue isn’t being solved and it gets very frustrating for both of us. After a while I figure it out, but I think it takes me longer than other people to do this, because I tend to be more straightforward once I’ve decided I’m entitled to ask for something. This may or may not be relevant in the coming piece: I try to advertise my willingness (or unwillingness) to not dismiss concerns as silly, so that people will feel more free to just come out and ask for the underlying thing (or in the negative case, that they’re never going to get me to agree to do their goal, so they shouldn’t waste time coming at it from a bunch of different angles).  That throat-clearing out of the way, more throat-clearing: I very much subscribe to the school of thought that you should be able to make your opponent’s arguments for them. This is to establish first that for the past 8 years, as a vocal liberal, I’ve tried my best to understand the best possible arguments for conservative ideas. I’ll get to the second part later.  So for the last 8 years I’ve seen ridiculous argument after ridiculous argument come up about why we can’t do certain policies, and I’ve tried really hard to understand the thinnest reed of intellectual coherence behind them. I’ve twisted my mind into figuring out how we can achieve what I think is important while also addressing conservatives’ concerns. They always came up with a new objection, though. It started to feel sort of familiar...almost like I was arguing with someone who didn’t really want to say WHY it was they didn’t like my policy ideas. (I’m using “someone” and “my” as a broad stand-in for liberals and conservatives here)  From my point of view, Trump blew up all of those thin intellectual reeds, and then explicitly made the case that this is about resentment of non-white people. It aligned well with the “they’re not really telling us what the problem is” theory. It makes sense: white resentment is sort of not a socially-desirable thing to express, so I understand why the arguments would only be made obliquely.  And this gets to the second reason I brought up that it’s important to understand your opponent’s argument: if the opponent really wants government-backed superiority for white people, it’s not only important to know that for purposes of defeating them, it’s also important to know that in terms of trying to find common ground and compromising. If liberals are going to go out of their way endlessly trying to satisfy demand after demand (incurring real costs), but the little tasks we’re performing are orthogonal to the real issue, we’ll get nowhere in terms of compromise.  I think Hillary’s campaign sort of both ignored and rejected the thought that this was what the election was about. It was one of those “if that’s what it’s about, we don’t want to win that way” issues. A campaign staffer explicitly said so yesterday: “If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” she said. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.” But it makes sense why they weren’t able to get traction: their message of inclusion was explicit, and sort of served as a rallying cry to Trump’s base. In a way, this election *was* about issues, and even though 2% more people agreed with Hillary, it’s disturbing that it was only a 2% margin.  So where do we go from here? Constitutionally, minorities have rights that no majority or plurality or pseudo-plurality-based-on-the-electoral-college can abridge. But it seems like there’s a large group of people in this country who want to limit the rights of minorities to only those guaranteed by the Constitution and go no further. People don’t want to acknowledge this: those who feel this way think that they’ll be castigated for their views. And people who don’t feel this way don’t want to “legitimize” this line of argument. But I don’t think we can deny it any more. This is how a lot of the country feels. In this country if something wins a popular vote, it’s legitimate, unless it conflicts with the Constitution.  I obviously strongly disagree with white nationalism, but I just think we have to acknowledge it if we’re going to argue against it. And I’m tired of going on snipe hunts to find compromise solutions. Maybe if we call racism something else, it’ll encourage people from the other side to engage. I’m fine with “white nationalism” or “racial resentment”. And you can call those euphemisms, but people on both sides know what you’re talking about. I don’t mind having that argument. I think we’ll win. It’s scary that “I think” is in that sentence, and I understand why minorities are terrified that we’re having an argument about their basic rights. But we are whether we like to think about it or not. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Types Of Help

So it looks like Trump is going to probably repeal Obamacare, or at least try. This has me reflecting on why the working class thinks he’s their friend. And there’s actually an answer: he’s promised to help them in the way they want to be helped. They want to be told that they can make meaningful contributions to society and support themselves, rather than the government doing it.  I’m not going to mince words: in a global economy*, you can’t expect an American standard of living in exchange for the type of work that a lot of these people are able to do right now. Unions and probably even companies themselves have been fighting the tide, but a lot of American humans are being undercut by American machines and foreign workers. This is inevitable.  Liberals like me all sort of recognize the inherent cruelness of capitalism embodied in the last paragraph. I personally also recognize the benefits of capitalism, and think that those benefits outweigh the cruelness--but are unevenly distributed. So, for the people who do well, they will have to pay a lot of tax. And for the people who don’t do well, they get a social safety net. And if you want to go further, job retraining so people who don’t do well can turn themselves into productive citizens and enjoy the dignity of work.  Conservatives have long played a tune that I think they mostly truly believe, but turns out to be incredibly cruel: if you just try, you won’t fail. Let’s take away the social safety net to make sure that people keep trying. So not only do people end up poor and miserable, they’re told that it’s their own fault. Well people don’t like thinking that of themselves, which I think is where Trump comes in.  You’re not a failure: the *liberals* with their regulations and their *favoring* of minorities are to blame! I don’t believe the free market is a myth or an undiscoverable ideal state of the world. It’s carefully defined in econ textbooks, as the basis for why capitalism works. But to most Americans, I think, the free market is whatever you want it to be. Corn subsidies are just helping the small American farmer who is downtrodden by those monsters at Monsanto. Blowing soot over half the country is my god-given right if I want to own a coal power plant! To Trump supporters, he wants to bring back the free market as they define it.  Even if Trump really wanted to (he doesn’t--he’s lying about caring about these ‘ordinary’ Americans), what he’s promising is either impossible or would require a massively authoritarian state to do. Is he going to ban robots in factories? Open up government-run coal-fired power plants? (Note: the decline is coal is at least as much due to the low price of natural gas as it is due to regulations.) But this is the type of help that the white working class wants. And Trump was irresponsible enough to promise it to them. Us coastal elites with our degrees in economics and history and law are screaming at the top of our lungs that it’s impossible, but that’s not a very fun message.  *I won’t take the state of the world as inevitable, but I’ll point out that if we just closed our borders to trade, we would overall be a *lot* poorer as a country. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Voter Fraud

Ironically, after railing against the eleventh-dimensional chess claims, this is a post about some long-term strategy that Trump is starting in on. The last two days, he’s been going on and on about how there were millions of illegal votes cast. Some people say he’s just thin-skinned and can’t stand it that he lost the popular vote. But I think this is maybe one of the key pillars of his Presidency.  People (mostly Trump supporters) talked about how this was the Flight 93 election. Flight 93 was headed, I think, for Washington DC and was going to crash into the White House or something, but the people on board got control of the plane and crashed it instead. What could that possibly mean in terms of an election? To me, it’s clear that it meant that this was the last election where a party based on white resentment of minorities could win. What good is it going to do, to wedge Trump in there one last time? Well, he’s going to appoint at least one Supreme Court justice (Kennedy and RBG, stay healthy!) I imagine the Voting Rights Act might come up again, now that we’ve seen what states do without it. I imagine all sorts of new barriers are going to be pushed in terms of stopping minorities from voting. The equivalent of crashing the plane for Trump supporters is stopping minorities from voting any way they can.  This is something that I would have considered a radical accusation even a year ago, even if I kind of thought it was probably true. But Trump’s re-election campaign starts now, and it’s going to be all about stopping people from voting, not about getting more people to like him. This is actually not too far from what the Republican Party has been doing for the last 8 years anyway. Nice to have some sense of continuity, I guess. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

This Post Is A Distraction!

I’m getting *really* tired of the people trying to play 11th-dimensional chess every time Trump does or says something idiotic. Everything he does sparks a flurry of takes “oh he’s doing this on purpose to distract you from this much worse thing!” and then of course the counter “no that thing he did actually reveals something deeply troubling about him, and that’s why we should pay attention to it!”  I don’t think much of what he does is strategic. I think he throws a bunch of shit to the wall and the people who are supporting him lap it up (intentionally mixing metaphors there). He’s the President now, so a bunch more of his stuff is going to work (for him), because he has the power to make it work. But I think we’re psyching ourselves out with the idea that he has some grand plan. It’s all terrible, any one of his terrible things should be disqualifying. That’s all there is to it. I don’t need an ordinal ranking of how disqualifying any of these things are. Also, ME being “distracted” by, say, Hamilton tweets, is useless for his purposes.  To go off on a slightly different tangent, that I’ve alluded to before, the troubling thing here is that his fans don’t care about it. They don’t. They’re getting fleeced and they claim to know it, and they claim to not care. I wonder if there’s a psychological effect at work here of not wanting to be wrong. Like...I don’t know my terms and definitions but is there like Stockholm syndrome here, or like...the thing at play where people who get scammed keep on putting money into it? But anyway, none of them are getting distracted by Hamilton or by his kleptocratic actions. I’m starting to suspect that for a lot of them, the worse he is, the better, because they want a huge middle finger to the system.  As I’ve said before, I really think that his hard-core supporters (maybe 60% of the people who voted for him? maybe more?) are troublingly disconnected from reality. I don’t think they have a role to play in decision-making for society. I’ll make the distinction that they are definitely worthy of consideration when making decisions for what sort of society we want to have, but they don’t get to make any of the decisions. It’s like they’re our friend at a party who’s had WAY too much to drink. We care about him, but his ideas about how he should drive home or we should steal that ATM are just not valid.  And I knew about this over a year ago as Trump’s level of support stuck around. I mentioned to a friend how disturbing it was that 25% of people felt this way, and what are we going to do about them? But now...there were enough of them to elect this maniac President. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Dakota Access Pipeline

I tend to be ambivalent about less-than-ideal solutions to problems. On one hand, my pragmatism tells me “oh just win this one and move on.” But on the other hand, I think that long-term, these sort of solutions are bad for democracy and our country and often the very cause they work towards.  For example, I don’t love minimum wage...the problem is poverty, and we should more directly address that, via something like a UBI or a working tax credit. I generally don’t love running policy through employers. But that said...the UBI and working tax credit don’t seem to be happening...and minimum wage is very popular. So I guess I’ll support increases in the minimum wage, and ultimately in this case my long-term plan is to use that min wage as leverage for negotiating support for UBI or working tax credit with big business.  Another example is the Endangered Species Act. I’m no expert on the environment, or on the specifics of the ESA, but my impression is that environmentalists use the ESA to find some species that is probably not all that important, and then block some major development with it. From the outside, at first glance, it looks like the cost-benefit is all out of wack and these environmentalists are nuts. Take the spotted owl...I bet if we took down the old growth forests and the delicate spotted owl went extinct, other predators would move in and the ecosystem would run along pretty much as it has. At first glance, it looks nuts to care so much about the spotted owl. But what’s really going on, I think, is that environmentalists actually know that the old growth forests are providing LOTS of ecosystem value that we don’t take into account when deciding to allow logging or not. The spotted owl is a flawed means to a proper end.  I’m really torn on this situation. If you lose the old growth forest battle, it’s not like you can get them back after we realize our mistake. So you’d better win however you can. But if you push too hard on the ESA, someone like Donald Trump is going to come along and appeal to 60% of the country by saying “now I love owls, but come on! We’re stopping a $60 billion development project for 1000 owls? This is why we don’t win anymore!” Then goodbye ESA, and goodbye ability to actually protect more important endangered species.  I also sort of have in my mind that instead of leaning on the ESA, environmentalists should be focusing on the actual value of the ecosystem services that old growth forests provide. “The law is on our side” only works as long as the law is on your side...if you fail to use the right arguments that resonate with ordinary people, you eventually lose. I think people DO understand that ecosystems benefit humans in very real ways. Sure there are morons out there, but I’d prefer to see the environmental movement focus on the real benefit to humans rather than either the short-term strategy of “the law says we get to protect the spotted owl” or the religious strategy of “no species should ever be allowed to go extinct for any reason.” The latter is not a view that the majority of Americans share, nor should they!  So that’s my thought process in approaching the DAPL. I’ll have to do a whole other post on the rights of people to live how they want to, and property rights in general, but for now let me say I’m at minimum skeptical of the “you stole our land in 1851″ argument. On top of that, and I know this is a western concept, but I think adverse possession law would have to come into play here.  I’ll also have to do a whole post on my view on climate change and what to do about it, but for now: it’s real, it’s probably the number one problem facing our species, and we should do something comprehensive about it. We also have to recognize that gimmicks like “don’t drive to work” day or “don’t fill up your tank” day do absolutely nothing. Even the people who put effort into changing their lifestyle so they bike/walk instead of drive are doing almost nothing. We need something like a carbon tax or cap and trade, and ideally this would be worldwide. Come to think of it (I hadn’t thought of this before), we could also impose tariffs on goods from other countries in proportion to how much of that country’s energy is “dirty”.  Anyways. We’re not doing that stuff right now. It’s too bad the world is in a situation where Canadian tar sands and fracked oil from North Dakota is being burnt for energy (post on my views on fracking should come soon as well), but it is. If we block the pipeline, we still transport the oil, just via rail. Maybe it’s a smidge more expensive to transport that way (and definitely more dangerous for the environment), but the pipeline is not going to make a difference one way or another when it comes to climate change.  Where I come down on this is that the DAPL protests are essentially a holdout problem that is used to get visibility for various causes...and those causes may be just or not, but let’s skip that argument for now. I don’t think these tactics are beneficial in the long run, because they can be used by both just and unjust causes. Imagine if a group of people were doing this to block a wind or solar farm. Even if you grant that this is sort of an infringement of property rights (which I don’t), blocking this pipeline is equivalent to saving the spotted owl...the spotted owl isn’t really the game, and the end goal (preventing climate change) is efficient. But the fact that the end goal is efficient has no bearing on whether this tactic will be effective. And that worries me, because I do get the sense that we’re developing this sort of tangle of veto points as a society, where the ability to stop something from happening is exercised whether stopping it would be a good idea or not. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Confederate Flags

What percentage of people who are pro-Confederate Flag voted for Trump this past election? If I had to guess, I’d put a floor of 95% on it.  This is a microcosm of the whole “what motivates Trump supporters” issue. To many, it doesn’t pass the laugh test that people who fly the Confederate flag are merely commemorating their brave ancestors’ battle against federal overreach. States’ rights! There’s a house I drive by almost every day that has the trifecta: a confederate flag, a Trump sign, and a Gadsden flag (Don’t Tread On Me).  But everything Trump is going to be, whether implied via his authoritarian posture, or explicit via his promises to take action in areas where states traditionally have power (crime, education), or inevitable via his turning the Federal government into a rent-seeking machine, is the opposite of Don’t Tread On Me. If your Confederate Flag means states’ rights, you didn’t vote for Trump. If it’s not about states’ rights, then we have a problem. 

[johnmaynardgainz-blog]

Education Culture

I again don’t know where this post will take me, but the thoughts in it have percolated to the surface a few times lately, which makes me think it’s worth writing about.  My thought is: what if education is sort of an eraser of culture...or put another way, “educated culture” is a thing? All I can think of is how I have much more in common with the gay black guy from my law school class who grew up 1000 miles from me than I do with my own brother, who didn’t go to college. My experience with people from different ethnic backgrounds has mostly been unremarkable. They might have a different color skin or a slight accent or strange consonant combinations in their name, but besides that they’re pretty much just like me.  Contrast that with my dad, who had a job driving delivery trucks. I don’t consider him a racist, but he would often tell stories that included phrases like “so now this guy, who’s Puerto Rican, and you know how those guys are...” The fact is, the Puerto Ricans he worked with did have a “way they are,” just like white uneducated people have a “way they are”. I wonder if this is a blind spot in race relations: I have the luxury of saying that race and ethnicity doesn’t matter, because I’ve only interacted with people of different races/ethnicities whose racial and ethnic backgrounds have been sandpapered off by education, just like mine has.  And obviously you don’t have to think one culture is superior to another to recognize differences in the way they do things. But personally I prefer my own culture because I’m used to it. The other day I felt super-uncomfortable in a dive bar watching football with people who didn’t understand the difference between making the right decision and getting a good outcome. (I think a team went for it on 4th and short in the red zone and didn’t make it) I can’t imagine anyone other than a condescending tourist who actively likes always being in a place where people do things differently from the way that person does things.  I hope I haven’t said anything controversial here. But I guess I’m seeing where the cost of multiculturalism might be higher for some people than for others. For me, there’s no cost, and probably a benefit: I get awesome restaurants and when a person from another ethnic background starts a company in my country, there are jobs and products and tax revenue. But for people like my dad, he might have had to deal with not speaking the same language as someone he works with, or not being able to discuss the same TV shows or sports or life experiences on a lunch break. Those aren’t fake or imagined. And the people who are in that position just happen to have mostly voted for Trump.