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
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.
One test for the "not a legitimate candidates" theory is to, you know, ask the people who voted for Biden then flipped whether this was their main reason. Certainly one often can't trust what people tell pollsters, but "not a legit candidate because no primary" is a socially acceptable excuse for doing so because it's not ideological and thus least likely to get one labeled as a bad and disloyal wrongthinker, and so I would expect people to use that explanation in excess of the true amount. Nevertheless, in multiple attempts I've seen to answer this very question, "not a legit candidate" is way down the list. Women, who were expected to vote even more for Harris out of sexual solidarity and enthusiasm, voted for her less than for Biden (by fully five percentage points overall, 17 percentage points for Hispanic women, enough to swing the election) or Hillary, and the surveys say their number 1 issue was "inflation", and number 3 issue was "immigration". This seems plausible to me as anecdotally among my own few neighbors and acquaintances who flipped to Trump this time, those two issues got top mention. I don't think I've seen anyone but Arnold prioritize the candidacy issue. Harris couldn't distance herself from the track record of Biden's term in those issues, and it seems that most swing voters perceived she wasn't even trying to do so. If she was really trying, boy, she didn't do a very good job.
I think it was just Bien's policy failure to act on border security sooner, distance the Admin from woke extremists and not pinning inflation on the Fed as it deserved.
I can find no media outlet confirming any proof to the claim that Beyoncé was paid for her time on stage. That seems improbable to me. If it turns out to be true, it would not disappoint me - I'm not part of the fandom - but I would find it significant.
"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.
Social norms against vices seem to have always been related to religions. The decline of one goes with the decline of the other. A reversal in one will almost certainly require a reversal in the other.
The trouble with vices is the incredible variation in human impact. Some people can be dropped in a candy store and effortlessly stay fit. Others will become morbidly obese diabetics if they even look at a candy bar the wrong way. And the same is true for every possible temptation, vice, substance, pleasure, etc. Cruel Mother Nature has thus simply made it impossible to square the principle of equal application of universal law with that reality without a lot of undershoot and overshoot errors which are experienced as misery or injustice respectively. Without either the ability to fairly apply different rules to people suited to their particular vulnerabilities and track records (once theoretically the case with drivers licenses and insurance premiums) or an ethos of 'noblesse oblige' that helps people privileged with natural resistance feel good about sacrificing the availability of their pleasures for the sake of the less fortunate and society at large, there is just no good answer to the problem.
“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.”
I think we’ll find that, after social norm policing is returned to the community, those norms will become stronger.
"This definitely belongs in the category of “important if 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."
I have been saying this for years. Many in the media, especially on the leftward side, have been citing median wage vs. CPI to show that living standards for the average worker have stagnated since 1980. It seems obvious to me that this is not even close to true. Look at some obvious measures of material standard of living:
- Average house size has increased significantly since 1980
- Number of airplane trips per capita has increased significantly since 1980
- Number of cars per capita has increased significantly since 1980, and the quality is much better
- Closet size in houses and apartments has increased significantly since 1980, implying that people have much more stuff, especially clothes, to put in their closets
- I won't even mention electronics, except to point out that "telephones per capita" was considered a significant measure of economic development back in 1980
- Added to this, look at the growth of luxury brands and their move down-market to the merely affluent, where they were once reserved for the very rich
- Furthermore, look at products like nutritional supplements, which have grown to a $95 billion industry (I can't find statistics for 1980). Whether you think supplements are a great benefit or a gross fleecing of the gullible, people didn't have the money for such things in 1980.
I've had this discussion with my son, who's convinced that his generation is being crushed by burdens unknown to mine - he recognizes that living standards may be higher, but only because younger people have to take on too much debt.
The longer the period, the more incoherent and nonsensical discussion of "THE accumulated inflation rate" becomes. On the other hand, over a short timeline, when there are suddenly big and fast increases in certain nominal prices, the importance of overestimation is overestimated.
Your points are obviously correct, though I wonder if it’s possible to disambiguate between 1980 to 2000-ish, and then until now. The millennials (? - I think that’s what they are called) that were the children of my generation were the right age to inherit the gains from computers, in jobs that are lucrative if not very meaningful - but as far as I can tell the children today are all going to work at McDonald’s.
'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.'
The strong libertarian positions can't be split between social and economic, they don't work piecemeal. Long story short self ownership implies rights and consequences (or rights and responsibilities). Addiction is subsidized through the welfare state- don't show up to work because you are drunk, hungover, high, or lazy? You still get food stamps, subsidized housing. Lose an arm when your injection site gets infected? Qualify for disability payments. OD on bad drugs? ERs are legally obligated to treat you regardless of your ability to pay.
There isn't much reason to think that half of a good sense prescription will work- find healthy foods that taste good to you and build your diet around that doesn't work if you drop the 'healthy' as a qualifier. If you think that 'economically conservative/socially liberal' means 'do what you want with your body, we will do our best to enable it' you have ignored the economic implications to your socially liberal policy.
Not to throw shade at your profession, Arnold, but if there are legitimate questions about whether median wage growth stats are off by 30x...that seems less than ideal.
"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."
#MeToo...but being the fatalist I am, I can only imagine societal catastrophic disaster. IOW, nice idea, but it can't work.
"But I wish that the social norms against the vices were more effective."
Again the fatalist... In the current era, I'm not sure there are social norms anymore. I'm in China (Wuhan) right now. What I think of as vices in America simply don't exist over here. Blame the government, those rotten Commies. Spend a little time over here and the contradictions in my tightly held beliefs become uncomfortable.
Are you really willing to let people suffer for their bad choices?
Do you honestly want to legalize fentanyl, heroine, & prostitution, let corporations runs them, & let users suffer the consequences of their choices without any public help?
"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."
10 million viewers is a good number, but this was for a special event. The regular nightly numbers are much closer to or under 2 million. Chuck Klosterman's book on the 90s is good on this point too. He writes about the most forgettable shows that no one remembers that have probably aged quite poorly being broadcast in the early 90s and getting 10 million viewers a night. Shows that were under this in the 90s would get cancelled and now the nightly number for Fox News and the Simpsons is indistinguishable.
Simply put - the social norms against various vices are a way that people guard themselves against accepting the collateral costs of the behavior. The 'safety net' which hands out assistance to misbehaving self-harming individuals mitigates some of those costs, and so the norms relax, since proximity to the misbehaving individual is no longer as costly to oneself or one's social circle. Eliminate the safety net first - better yet, reinstitute disincentives that make the costs more predictable and visible - and society will stop subsidizing all kinds of self-harm, and collectively reconstitute the norms. Of course, the more of the costs that are legal, the more the drive to self-harm will also fuel criminal behavior. The more of the costs that are 'natural,' the more random and delayed the price paid will be, the more 'unfair' [uneven, unpredictable] and cataclysmic the consequences.
Or, as Steve Sailer has noted with regards to alcohol abuse, let those prone to vice die off and those who survive will breed descendants who can live with ambient drugs, sex, gambling, etc.
Something like drinking and driving is more difficult to get away with than it's ever been. Or the vice of indulging in openly salacious rhetoric aimed at a woman you fancy.
The idea of behaving badly and then turning over a new leaf has gotten much harder. Shit follows you know.
It's not obvious to me that vices *in general* have gotten so much worse. Even pre-marital sex, fewer teens are indulging in it. Or sex at all.
"But I wish that the social norms against the vices were more effective."
Um, what norms? For a moral judgment to be a 'norm' it has to be, you know, 'normal' and 'standard' as in, "a normal distribution with a small standard deviation and low dispersion" - stable, mostly uncontested, widely believed in and adhered to, in a manner with low variance as to the details.
But Americans no longer have any such norms regarding the classical vices, or, practically anything. If a foreigner asked you what the American norm was about X, could you quickly give an accurately simple answer, ever?
That's why, for all its problems, there is no good alternative to using the law to replace the dissolved incentives of formerly effecting social pressures to plug the gap left behind when no one can feel the pressure or stigma of norms they perceive as actually existing in their communities.
Using the law also prevents the other side of the coin in such morally unstable circumstances, which is to set "safe havens" and knowable boundaries and zones of valid behaviors, because otherwise the gap will be filled by bloodthirsty red guards vying with each other to be holier (i.e., more hard core) than thou, which chills action and speech across every domain of human affairs in a reign of terror, because if you cannot look up what the norms are today and can't predict what they'll be tomorrow, then to protect oneself one has no choice but to abstain from any conceivably risky or 'offensive' behavior, and shut oneself off from the vast majority of potentially positive-sum new human interactions and endeavors. It's no mystery why there is so much more friction in mate matching, so much more loneliness, isolation, alienation, retreat to stagnant bubbles of the like-mindeds, and so forth. Such miserable conditions metastatize in every cultural revolution. When the conservative liberalism-critics talk about the way it inevitably undermines itself, it is usually by accurately pointing out that without allowing for either normative law nor institutional moral authority, it can not possibly provide any ideologically coherent answer to this major problem.
Renn: Just tax them it dissuades and signals social disapproval , but avoids some of the downsides of criminalization. Little attempted with gambling and social media
"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'm sure you know that Russ Roberts is a strong proponent of a similar position on inflation and the supposed stagnation of living standards. I know I've heard said that a rather equal numbes of both keysian/monetarist or liberal/conservative economists agree. I'm thinking it was Krugman but don't quote me on that. Maybe someone can confirm it? Anyway, the Boskin report pointed out lots of factors causing over estimation. Some were adjusted but I don't think anyone who has looked at it believes all were corrected. Here's one example.
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.
One test for the "not a legitimate candidates" theory is to, you know, ask the people who voted for Biden then flipped whether this was their main reason. Certainly one often can't trust what people tell pollsters, but "not a legit candidate because no primary" is a socially acceptable excuse for doing so because it's not ideological and thus least likely to get one labeled as a bad and disloyal wrongthinker, and so I would expect people to use that explanation in excess of the true amount. Nevertheless, in multiple attempts I've seen to answer this very question, "not a legit candidate" is way down the list. Women, who were expected to vote even more for Harris out of sexual solidarity and enthusiasm, voted for her less than for Biden (by fully five percentage points overall, 17 percentage points for Hispanic women, enough to swing the election) or Hillary, and the surveys say their number 1 issue was "inflation", and number 3 issue was "immigration". This seems plausible to me as anecdotally among my own few neighbors and acquaintances who flipped to Trump this time, those two issues got top mention. I don't think I've seen anyone but Arnold prioritize the candidacy issue. Harris couldn't distance herself from the track record of Biden's term in those issues, and it seems that most swing voters perceived she wasn't even trying to do so. If she was really trying, boy, she didn't do a very good job.
I think it was just Bien's policy failure to act on border security sooner, distance the Admin from woke extremists and not pinning inflation on the Fed as it deserved.
What is your info source that Harris paid for those appearances?
I can find no media outlet confirming any proof to the claim that Beyoncé was paid for her time on stage. That seems improbable to me. If it turns out to be true, it would not disappoint me - I'm not part of the fandom - but I would find it significant.
"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.
Social norms against vices seem to have always been related to religions. The decline of one goes with the decline of the other. A reversal in one will almost certainly require a reversal in the other.
The trouble with vices is the incredible variation in human impact. Some people can be dropped in a candy store and effortlessly stay fit. Others will become morbidly obese diabetics if they even look at a candy bar the wrong way. And the same is true for every possible temptation, vice, substance, pleasure, etc. Cruel Mother Nature has thus simply made it impossible to square the principle of equal application of universal law with that reality without a lot of undershoot and overshoot errors which are experienced as misery or injustice respectively. Without either the ability to fairly apply different rules to people suited to their particular vulnerabilities and track records (once theoretically the case with drivers licenses and insurance premiums) or an ethos of 'noblesse oblige' that helps people privileged with natural resistance feel good about sacrificing the availability of their pleasures for the sake of the less fortunate and society at large, there is just no good answer to the problem.
“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.”
I think we’ll find that, after social norm policing is returned to the community, those norms will become stronger.
"This definitely belongs in the category of “important if 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."
I have been saying this for years. Many in the media, especially on the leftward side, have been citing median wage vs. CPI to show that living standards for the average worker have stagnated since 1980. It seems obvious to me that this is not even close to true. Look at some obvious measures of material standard of living:
- Average house size has increased significantly since 1980
- Number of airplane trips per capita has increased significantly since 1980
- Number of cars per capita has increased significantly since 1980, and the quality is much better
- Closet size in houses and apartments has increased significantly since 1980, implying that people have much more stuff, especially clothes, to put in their closets
- I won't even mention electronics, except to point out that "telephones per capita" was considered a significant measure of economic development back in 1980
- Added to this, look at the growth of luxury brands and their move down-market to the merely affluent, where they were once reserved for the very rich
- Furthermore, look at products like nutritional supplements, which have grown to a $95 billion industry (I can't find statistics for 1980). Whether you think supplements are a great benefit or a gross fleecing of the gullible, people didn't have the money for such things in 1980.
I've had this discussion with my son, who's convinced that his generation is being crushed by burdens unknown to mine - he recognizes that living standards may be higher, but only because younger people have to take on too much debt.
The longer the period, the more incoherent and nonsensical discussion of "THE accumulated inflation rate" becomes. On the other hand, over a short timeline, when there are suddenly big and fast increases in certain nominal prices, the importance of overestimation is overestimated.
To live the American Lifestyle based on debt it became a necessity for Mom's to work.
Your points are obviously correct, though I wonder if it’s possible to disambiguate between 1980 to 2000-ish, and then until now. The millennials (? - I think that’s what they are called) that were the children of my generation were the right age to inherit the gains from computers, in jobs that are lucrative if not very meaningful - but as far as I can tell the children today are all going to work at McDonald’s.
'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.'
The strong libertarian positions can't be split between social and economic, they don't work piecemeal. Long story short self ownership implies rights and consequences (or rights and responsibilities). Addiction is subsidized through the welfare state- don't show up to work because you are drunk, hungover, high, or lazy? You still get food stamps, subsidized housing. Lose an arm when your injection site gets infected? Qualify for disability payments. OD on bad drugs? ERs are legally obligated to treat you regardless of your ability to pay.
There isn't much reason to think that half of a good sense prescription will work- find healthy foods that taste good to you and build your diet around that doesn't work if you drop the 'healthy' as a qualifier. If you think that 'economically conservative/socially liberal' means 'do what you want with your body, we will do our best to enable it' you have ignored the economic implications to your socially liberal policy.
Not to throw shade at your profession, Arnold, but if there are legitimate questions about whether median wage growth stats are off by 30x...that seems less than ideal.
"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."
#MeToo...but being the fatalist I am, I can only imagine societal catastrophic disaster. IOW, nice idea, but it can't work.
"But I wish that the social norms against the vices were more effective."
Again the fatalist... In the current era, I'm not sure there are social norms anymore. I'm in China (Wuhan) right now. What I think of as vices in America simply don't exist over here. Blame the government, those rotten Commies. Spend a little time over here and the contradictions in my tightly held beliefs become uncomfortable.
Are you really willing to let people suffer for their bad choices?
Do you honestly want to legalize fentanyl, heroine, & prostitution, let corporations runs them, & let users suffer the consequences of their choices without any public help?
"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."
10 million viewers is a good number, but this was for a special event. The regular nightly numbers are much closer to or under 2 million. Chuck Klosterman's book on the 90s is good on this point too. He writes about the most forgettable shows that no one remembers that have probably aged quite poorly being broadcast in the early 90s and getting 10 million viewers a night. Shows that were under this in the 90s would get cancelled and now the nightly number for Fox News and the Simpsons is indistinguishable.
Simply put - the social norms against various vices are a way that people guard themselves against accepting the collateral costs of the behavior. The 'safety net' which hands out assistance to misbehaving self-harming individuals mitigates some of those costs, and so the norms relax, since proximity to the misbehaving individual is no longer as costly to oneself or one's social circle. Eliminate the safety net first - better yet, reinstitute disincentives that make the costs more predictable and visible - and society will stop subsidizing all kinds of self-harm, and collectively reconstitute the norms. Of course, the more of the costs that are legal, the more the drive to self-harm will also fuel criminal behavior. The more of the costs that are 'natural,' the more random and delayed the price paid will be, the more 'unfair' [uneven, unpredictable] and cataclysmic the consequences.
Or, as Steve Sailer has noted with regards to alcohol abuse, let those prone to vice die off and those who survive will breed descendants who can live with ambient drugs, sex, gambling, etc.
Gotta love libertarianism.
Something like drinking and driving is more difficult to get away with than it's ever been. Or the vice of indulging in openly salacious rhetoric aimed at a woman you fancy.
The idea of behaving badly and then turning over a new leaf has gotten much harder. Shit follows you know.
It's not obvious to me that vices *in general* have gotten so much worse. Even pre-marital sex, fewer teens are indulging in it. Or sex at all.
Smart men are the most irreligious group in America, right? And they're breaking for Trump like nobody's business.
"But I wish that the social norms against the vices were more effective."
Um, what norms? For a moral judgment to be a 'norm' it has to be, you know, 'normal' and 'standard' as in, "a normal distribution with a small standard deviation and low dispersion" - stable, mostly uncontested, widely believed in and adhered to, in a manner with low variance as to the details.
But Americans no longer have any such norms regarding the classical vices, or, practically anything. If a foreigner asked you what the American norm was about X, could you quickly give an accurately simple answer, ever?
That's why, for all its problems, there is no good alternative to using the law to replace the dissolved incentives of formerly effecting social pressures to plug the gap left behind when no one can feel the pressure or stigma of norms they perceive as actually existing in their communities.
Using the law also prevents the other side of the coin in such morally unstable circumstances, which is to set "safe havens" and knowable boundaries and zones of valid behaviors, because otherwise the gap will be filled by bloodthirsty red guards vying with each other to be holier (i.e., more hard core) than thou, which chills action and speech across every domain of human affairs in a reign of terror, because if you cannot look up what the norms are today and can't predict what they'll be tomorrow, then to protect oneself one has no choice but to abstain from any conceivably risky or 'offensive' behavior, and shut oneself off from the vast majority of potentially positive-sum new human interactions and endeavors. It's no mystery why there is so much more friction in mate matching, so much more loneliness, isolation, alienation, retreat to stagnant bubbles of the like-mindeds, and so forth. Such miserable conditions metastatize in every cultural revolution. When the conservative liberalism-critics talk about the way it inevitably undermines itself, it is usually by accurately pointing out that without allowing for either normative law nor institutional moral authority, it can not possibly provide any ideologically coherent answer to this major problem.
Renn: Just tax them it dissuades and signals social disapproval , but avoids some of the downsides of criminalization. Little attempted with gambling and social media
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/gambling-away-stability
"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'm sure you know that Russ Roberts is a strong proponent of a similar position on inflation and the supposed stagnation of living standards. I know I've heard said that a rather equal numbes of both keysian/monetarist or liberal/conservative economists agree. I'm thinking it was Krugman but don't quote me on that. Maybe someone can confirm it? Anyway, the Boskin report pointed out lots of factors causing over estimation. Some were adjusted but I don't think anyone who has looked at it believes all were corrected. Here's one example.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w12311