Links to Consider, 11/14/2024
Aaron Renn rues the election; Ben Glasner and Cardiff Garcia investigate inflation and the election; Scott Winship investigates long-term inflation; the WSJ on new media and the election
The fallout will be pervasive. We see it in how everything you used to have to go to the mafia for is now legal and approved of at some level: drugs, gambling, loan sharking (payday loan stores), and coming soon prostitution (“sex work”). Maybe that’s one reason you don’t hear as much about the American mafia these days. There’s not as much for them to do as there used to be. If Michael Corleone were alive today, he actually would be able to go legit.
Donald Trump’s presidencies are one of the first signs of the social implication of a Negative World, post-Christian America. It’s unlikely to be the last.
Social conservatives are under the bus. Libertarians are under the bus on economic issues, where I most strongly agree, and along for the ride on legalization of vices, where the case is weaker. I still think we should err on the side of letting people make bad choices and live with the consequences rather than have the government act as parent. But I wish that the social norms against the vices were more effective.
Ben Glasner and Cardiff Garcia write,
The voter shift from Democrats to Republicans was largely uniform, uncorrelated with the differing inflation rates from place to place.
I don’t see this shift as uniform. The Republican gains in the Senate were expected, based on the map. The Republican gains in the House were slim. But the revulsion against Ms. Harris was uniform among Swing voters. And as I have written before, I think that this reflected the fact that she did not participate in the normal electoral process, and thus was regarded as illegitimate among Swing voters. People who were not convinced that the Democrats had a genuine candidate either stayed home or voted for Mr. Trump.
This paper summarizes the evidence on these biases and translates it into a new “More Accurate Consumer Price Index” (MACPI). It provides annual index values from 1973 to 2023 and illustrates the importance of bias correction by showing a number of long-term trends in wages, earnings, income, and wealth. While the most widely cited inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) suggests that the average hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory workers rose by 2 percent from 1973 to 2023, and the superior Personal Consumption Expenditures price index (PCEPI) indicates a rise of 30 percent, using the MACPI, wages rose by 61.5 percent. The median wage of prime-age male workers fell by 15 percent using the CPI-U and rose by 9 percent using the PCEPI, but it rose by 35 percent using the MACPI. Other comparisons are similarly striking.
This definitely belongs in the category of “important if true.” And my sense of the topic and of Winship as a researcher is that it is probably true. If inflation over the 50 years from 1973 to 2023 has been overstated that means that productivity growth over that period has been understated. So some of the “great stagnation” is a statistical illusion. I have to reiterate that as the economy has moved away from bushels of wheat or feet of rolled steel, the error bars around measures of inflation and productivity have gotten much wider.
For the WSJ, Isabella Simonetti and Anne Steele write,
TV news remains a massive draw for Americans in the biggest moments. But younger audiences have fled, and there were signs even on election night of an overall erosion in the medium. The main three cable channels were down 32% in viewership collectively compared with 2020, to around 21 million, with CNN losing almost half its audience.
In contrast, podcasts are on the upswing, as Mr. Trump’s successful appearance on Joe Rogan (heard by 50 million) emphasized. The WSJ has a separate story about Mr. Trump’s tactics for connecting with the “manosphere.”
Back to the first story,
Vice President Kamala Harris embraced podcasts as well, sitting down with Brené Brown, whose show is popular among older women. She had a high-profile appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” a show about sex and relationships, which drew an audience of more than eight million across platforms.
Of course, a podcast that connects with older women is going to draw only reliable Harris voters. It is not going to help with turnout and support among other demographics.
On TikTok, many “news influencers,” ordinary people who offer their take on current events, generate more viral posts—those with 25,000 or more views—than such mainstream media outlets as CNN, CBS and NBC, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
Meanwhile, it sounds as though legacy cable networks are on the same demographic death march as newspapers.
The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 70, while Fox News’s is 69 and CNN’s is 68.
On election night,
Fox News drew 10.3 million prime-time viewers, while MSNBC attracted six million viewers, overtaking the No. 2 spot from CNN, which drew 5.1 million.
That does not sound very impressive. When TV emerged in the 1950s, the American media landscape became highly centralized. For better or worse, that has changed.
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Harris spent a billion dollars paying people to appear with her. The podcasts she went on were all paid for. Beyoncé got paid for her five minutes on stage with her.
By contrast Rogan, Lex Friedman, and the rest give their platform away for free based on who they want to talk to. Rogan tried to give it away for free to Harris who refused.
The biggest campaign stunt of the election was probably Trump working the McDonalds fry station for 15 min, something he got for free because someone liked him.
While it’s probable that Harris would not have won the nomination from voters, I think the problem was her as a candidate and not the process by which she was selected.
More broadly, Harris is a very good avatar for the Democratic Party. She is an empty vessel for The Machine, much like Joe Biden was. I think that what people revolted against was The Machine.
"Libertarians are under the bus on economic issues"
I think the way the intellectuals driving the evolution and reformulation of the GOP platform would respond is that the Libertarians threw -Americans- under the bus first. That is, being more politically anti-nationalist than even Yglesias' 8th thesis, "We are equal in the eyes of God, but the American government can and should prioritize the interests of American citizens."
There is hardly a better example of this and the historical intellectual motion on these principles than Bryan Caplan's recent critical posts on Milton Friedman's views on immigration, welfare, and assimilation. When Reagan did not hesitate to include libertarians like Friedman in his Three-Legged Stool 45 years ago, those libertarians were much more likely than their current successors to be pro-American in the sense of being pro-Americans, and as opposed to being increasingly American-indifferent political universalists. He who lives by the bus, dies by the bus.