Category: Current Affairs
The health care public option in Washington state
This excellent Sarah Kliff NYT article is from a few weeks ago, but I missed it the first time around. Here is the clincher:
“The whole debate was about the rate mechanism,” said Mr. Frockt, the state senator. “With the original bill, with Medicare rates [for the state’s public option], there was strong opposition from all quarters. The insurers, the hospitals, the doctors, everybody.”
Mr. Frockt and his colleagues ultimately raised the fees for the public option up to 160 percent of Medicare rates.
“I don’t think the bill would have passed at Medicare rates,” Mr. Frockt said. “I think having the Medicare-plus rates was crucial to getting the final few votes.”
Nonetheless the piece is interesting throughout, and illustrates some basic dilemmas with health care reform and public options in particular, especially when a sector is controlled by powerful lobbies.
William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton advising the Democratic Party
Here is the opening of a Jacob M. Schlesinger Wall Street Journal piece:
For decades, William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton toiled in obscurity. They criticized mainstream economists and politicians for failing to address racial inequality, and touted more radical remedies of their own.
Now, with the 2020 presidential campaign under way and liberal Democrats ascendant, the two economists are in the spotlight, thrust into the middle of an intraparty debate over how much to embrace big government and a race-oriented message.
Their signature ideas—guaranteed jobs for all adult Americans seeking them, government-backed trust funds for American babies and reparations for slave descendants—are being talked about on the campaign trail and, in the case of reparations, during a raucous congressional hearing in June.
The two African-American economists’ theories on “stratification economics,” which focuses on economic gaps between whites and blacks, have helped shape the rhetoric and platforms of several candidates.
At a conference earlier this year for liberal activists, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker told Mr. Hamilton he had “laid the foundation for a lot of things that we’re doing,” including “baby bonds.” Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke name-checks Mr. Hamilton in television interviews, calling him an “extraordinary economist” who “talks about a more conscious capitalism.”
Mr. Hamilton, an Ohio State University professor, has advised the campaigns of California Sen. Kamala Harris on middle-class tax cuts, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on job guarantees and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren on student-debt relief.
And this section:
They have teamed up to write more than 50 articles for academic and popular journals and books, and pioneered what they consider a new field of scholarship they branded stratification economics. They contend that mainstream economists tend to regard racial discrimination as a short-term market glitch that market forces will correct eventually. That logic, they say, leads to the conclusion that persistent African-American woes result mainly from their own failings, such as inadequate education or poor financial choices.
Policy makers, they contend, focus too much on employment, income and education and not enough on family wealth across generations. They say wealth is a better measure of household economic security—the ability to weather emergencies, pay for education, afford homes in good neighborhoods and take risks.
I hope you subscribe or can get through the gate, as there are many meaty sections. One interesting angle, of course, is whether their claims and theories are true. But most of all this piece, and their role as advisers, marks the end of an era, namely that of mainstream consensus technocracy. The range of ideas being considered in politics today is remarkably wider than just a few years ago, for better or worse. And, whether we like to admit it or not, the academic world also will follow rather than just lead this process. If a plausible candidate pops up and starts making claims, especially on the Democratic side, the academic research supporting those claims will rise in status.
Fasten your seatbelts.
Addendum: Here are links for Darity, here are links for Hamilton.
Han Kuo-yu has won the Kuomintang primary in Taiwan
So yes, Taiwan does have the weirdest politics in the world right now. Here is a reprise from my Bloomberg column last week:
Another candidate vying for the KMT nomination is Han Kuo-yu, mayor of Kaohsiung and a blunt-speaking outsider populist. He has called for closer ties with China and is believed to be China’s favored candidate, calling China and Taiwan “two individuals madly in love.” It is believed that Chinese cyber-operatives have been working to promote his candidacy. He might be more interesting yet.
What if Han wins the general election and calls for “peaceful reunification” of the two Chinas, based on “one country, two systems”? Solve for the equilibrium! I see the following options:
1. They go ahead with the deal, and voila, one China!
2. The system as a whole knows in advance if this is going to happen, and if it will another candidate runs in the general election, splitting the KMT-friendly vote, and Han never wins.
2b. Han just doesn’t win anyway, even though his margin in the primary was considerable and larger than expected.
3. The current president Tsai Ing-wen learns from Taiwanese intelligence that there are Chinese agents in the KMT and she suspends the general election and calls a kind of lukewarm martial law.
4. Han calls for reunification and is deposed by his own military, or a civil war within the government ensues.
5. Han foresees 2-4 and never calls for reunification in the first place.
Well people, which of these would it be? Here is general background (NYT) on the new primary results.
Some points from Peter Thiel (?)
Second-hand reporting, to be clear, here is the tweet storm from Peter’s latest talk.
And from Bonnie Kavoussi here are systematic notes on the talk, recommended.
Does Taiwan have the weirdest politics in the world?
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column earlier in the week, here is one excerpt:
Chiang Kai-shek, the first leader of the island, was part of a generation of Asian visionary leaders which is perhaps without parallel. It includes Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Park Chung-Hee in South Korea, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in China, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Whether you admire these figures or not, theirs was an unparalleled time for nation building and at a much swifter pace than in European history.
And there is no successful polity that has so many apparently insoluble problems:
Taiwan is also inextricably linked to the economy of the mainland. By one estimate, over 10% of the Taiwanese population lives or works in mainland China, including many of the most ambitious Taiwanese, and China is by far the number one counterparty for trade and investment. Taiwanese real wages stagnated from 2000-2016, in large part because it was more profitable for Taiwanese investors to send their capital to the mainland. The Taiwanese birth rate has plummeted to 1.2 per woman, possibly the lowest in the world.
The Chinese also wish to take them over, by the way. Finally, I close with some remarks on the forthcoming election.
Should the citizenship question be put on the Census?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is one excerpt:
Unlike many of those who push for the question, I would like to boost the flow of legal immigration by a factor or two or three. Nonetheless, are we supposed to let foreigners in (which I favor), and give them a rapid path to citizenship (which I also favor), but somehow we are not allowed to ask them if they are citizens? To me this boggles the mind.
The real point is that the Democratic Party has talked itself into an untenable and indeed politically losing rhetorical stance on immigration (did you watch the debates? decriminalize illegal migration? health care benefits for illegal immigrants?), and the Census battle is another example of that. It is no surprise that Trump wishes to keep it alive as a political issue:
Do you really wish for your view to be so closely affiliated with the attitude that citizenship is a thing to hide? I would be embarrassed if my own political strategy implied that I take a firm view — backed by strong moralizing — that we not ask individuals about their citizenship on the Census form. I would think somehow I was, if only in the longer run, making a huge political blunder to so rest the fate of my party on insisting on not asking people about their citizenship.
Not asking about citizenship seems to signify an attitude toward immigrants something like this: Get them in and across the border, their status may be mixed and their existence may be furtive, and let’s not talk too openly about what is going on, and later we will try to get all of them citizenship. Given the current disagreement between the two parties on immigration questions, that may well be the only way of getting more immigrants into the U.S., which I hold to be a desirable goal. But that is a dangerous choice of political turf, and it may not help the pro-immigration cause in the longer run.
Finally:
Countries that do let in especially high percentages of legal immigrants, such as Canada and Australia, take pretty tough stances in controlling their borders. Both of those countries ask about citizenship on their censuses. When citizens feel in control of the process, they may be more generous in terms of opening the border.
If you can’t ask about citizenship on your census, as indeed Canada and Australia do, it is a sign that your broader approach to immigration is broken. I know this is a hard one to back out of, but if your response is to attack the motives of the Republicans, or simply reiterate the technocratic value of a more accurate Census, it is a sign of not yet being “woke” on this issue. America desperately needs more legal immigration.
Why is the United States behind on 5G?
No American company makes the devices that transmit high-speed wireless signals. Huawei is the clear leader in the field; the Swedish company Ericsson is a distant second; and the Finnish company Nokia is third.
It is almost surprising that the Defense Department allowed the report to be published at all, given the board’s remarkably blunt assessment of the nation’s lack of innovation and what it said was one of the biggest impediments to rolling out 5G in the United States: the Pentagon itself.
The board said the broadband spectrum needed to create a successful network was reserved not for commercial purposes but for the military.
To work best, 5G needs what’s called low-band spectrum, because it allows signals to travel farther than high-band spectrum. The farther the signal can travel, the less infrastructure has to be deployed.
In China and even in Europe, governments have reserved low-band spectrum for 5G, making it efficient and less costly to blanket their countries with high-speed wireless connectivity. In the United States, the low-band spectrum is reserved for the military.
The difference this makes is stark. Google conducted an experiment for the board, placing 5G transmitters on 72,735 towers and rooftops. Using high-band spectrum, the transmitters covered only 11.6 percent of the United States population at a speed of 100 megabits per second and only 3.9 percent at 1 gigabit per second. If the same transmitters could use low-band spectrum, 57.4 percent of the population would be covered at 100 megabits per second and 21.2 percent at 1 gigabit per second.
In other words, the spectrum that has been allotted in the United States for commercial 5G communications makes 5G significantly slower and more expensive to roll out than just about anywhere else.
That is a commercial disincentive and puts the United States at a distinct disadvantage.
Here is more from Andrew Ross Sorkin (NYT).
My Conversation with Eric Kaufmann
Interesting and excellent throughout, here is the audio and transcript. Eric is political scientist at Birkbeck College in London and the author of the recent Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Here is part of the opening summary:
Kauffman’s latest book Whiteshift, which examines how declining white ethnic majorities will respond to these changes, is on Tyler’s list as one of the best books of the year. The two discuss the book and more, including Orangeism in Northern Ireland, Switzerland’s secret for stability, what Tocqueville got most wrong about America, predictions on Brexit’s final form, why Portugal seems immune from populism, how Notre Dame should be rebuilt, whether the Amish — or Mormons — will take over the world, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Do conservative Muslims also have a much higher fertility rate?
KAUFMANN: The gradient between very conservative and sort of secular and liberal is not as strong in Islam as it is in Judaism or Christianity, but it’s about a twice higher fertility for women who are most in favor of Sharia compared to those who are most opposed to Sharia, in the cities. So I do think there is also this dynamic within Islam, yes.
COWEN: If we look at a country such as Iran, which now has a very low total fertility rate, is that a sign they’re not actually very religious? Or there’s something unusual about religion in Iran? What accounts for that?
And:
COWEN: Which group of French Muslims has assimilated most successfully and why?
KAUFMANN: Well, the outmarriage rate is almost 50 percent for French Algerian men, but even across the Franco-Algerian community, I think it’s in the 40 to 50 percent outmarriage —
COWEN: And they’re marrying ethnically white French women?
KAUFMANN: Right, or men. I think part of this stems from Algeria in its history. You have a large Berber population in Algeria, many of whom are anti the regime. They’re anti the Arab-Islamist regime. So they’re actually quite secular in many ways.
That’s part of it, but even amongst the Moroccans in France, there’s quite a high outmarriage rate of like 40 percent. So yeah, the French Muslims do seem to be melting in better than Muslims even of the same ethnicity. Compared to Moroccans in the Netherlands, for example, there’s a much higher outmarriage in France.
COWEN: And that’s the Berber factor, in your view?
KAUFMANN: I think it is the Berber factor. I don’t think there’s anything magical that the French are doing that the Dutch are not in terms of integration policy. I think too much is made of that.
And:
COWEN: What’s the most plausible scenario for Irish reunification?
KAUFMANN: I think the most plausible scenario is that Northern Ireland Protestants don’t have the same hostility to the Republic that they have traditionally had, so maybe a kind of charm offensive.
In a way, the unionist population is the one they have to win over. They are kind of foursquare against reunification. Somehow, the Irish Republic has to find a way to reassure them. That’s going to be the ticket to reunification, but it’ll never really happen just through economic integration. I think there’s got to be something symbolic that will win over the unionists.
Finally:
COWEN: So there’ll be more of a turn against immigration?
KAUFMANN: Yeah.
COWEN: In Canada.
KAUFMANN: Yes, and immigration attitudes are now very different, depending if you’re a Conservative or a Liberal voter. That didn’t use to be the case even five years ago, so there is more of a politicization of that issue now.
Recommended, and I found all of Eric’s books very interesting as well.
Housing zoning reform in Oregon
After a dramatic false start, the Oregon Senate on Sunday gave final legislative approval to a bill that would effectively eliminate single-family zoning in large Oregon cities.
House Bill 2001 passed in a 17-9 vote. It now heads to Gov. Kate Brown desk to be signed into law.
It will allow duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and “cottage clusters” on land previously reserved for single family houses in cities with more than 25,000 residents, as well as smaller cities in the Portland metro area. Cities with at least 10,000 residents would be required to allow duplexes in single-family zones.
Here is more by Elliott Njus, via Jan Fure and several other MR readers. Next up perhaps is this…
What is the Probability of a Nuclear War?
I agree with Tyler who wrote recently that “the risk of nuclear war remains the world’s No. 1 problem, even if that risk does not seem so pressing on any particular day.”
The probability of a nuclear war is inherently difficult to predict but what strikes me in this careful survey by Luisa Rodriguez for the Effective Altruism Forum is how much higher all the expert predictions and model forecasts are compared to what we would like them to be. Keep in mind that the following are annualized probabilities. For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75). At an annualized probability of .009 which is the probability from accident analysis it’s approximately 50%. See Rodriguez and also Shlosser’s Command and Control on the frightening number of near misses including one nuclear weapon dropped on North Carolina.
These lifetime numbers don’t strike me as crazy, just crazy high. Here is Rodriguez summarizing:
If we aggregate historical evidence, the views of experts and predictions made by forecasters, we can start to get a rough picture of how probable a nuclear war might be.[8] We shouldn’t put too much weight on these estimates, as each of the data points feeding into those estimates come with serious limitations. But based on the evidence presented above, we might think that there’s about a 1.17% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.39% per year.
Addendum: A number of people in the comments mention that the probabilities are not independent. Of course, but that doesn’t make the total probability calculation smaller, it could be larger.
Mormon no more?
The church’s longtime website, LDS.org, now redirects to ChurchofJesusChrist.org, and Mormon.org will soon switch over, too. In May, the church stopped posting on its @MormonChannel Instagram feed and encouraged followers to move to @ChurchofJesusChrist instead.
The church-affiliated publishing house, Deseret Book, has been phasing out or renaming titles that used the word Mormon, prompting authors to scramble to rename their books and figure out new marketing plans — ones that don’t require the use of internet search terms that are 11 syllables long.
The shift became impossible to ignore when the church’s iconic musical organization announced in October that it would no longer be known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.
All of this has left adherents with a bit of whiplash, especially following the church’s 2011 “I’m a Mormon” advertising campaign, in which leaders went all in by placing ads on buses and billboards in New York’s Times Square and plastering the internet with profiles of tens of thousands of Mormons.
Some members have felt relief and a new optimism about broader inclusion in American society.
Viewing this strictly as an outsider, I see a benefit in keeping American religions as relatively distinct, rather than more coordinated. The distinctly LDS approaches to poverty and missions, might have been less likely to evolve had the Church been closer to mainstream American Protestantism in earlier times. Here is the full NYT story.
My contrarian, eccentric take on the Democratic debates
Do read the whole thing, that is my Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt of relevance:
My biggest impression is simply how much the dominant candidates agree in terms of basic values…
I don’t regard that as entirely healthy by any means, and I suspect most Democrats, especially of the relatively intellectual stripe, just don’t notice how much this stands out. Now to move to a specific or two:
Finally, there is Marianne Williamson. When she first began to speak, I googled her, as I suspect did many other Americans. Her eccentric manner can be distracting, but I recommend instead focusing on her values. Her performance suggests that Democrats need to take a broader, deeper set of values into account: sometimes love and New Agey spiritual values, other times historical values. Her answer about making America the finest country for a child to grow up in was perhaps the best single moment of either debate, and that too stemmed from her understanding of values.
I don’t think she has much of a chance to win. But she is the external voice that the rest of the Democrats need to shake them out of their conformity. At first I thought it was crazy that she was included in the debates. In retrospect, I now see it as brilliant.
Kamala Harris and Marianne Williamson were the most memorable candidates on the stage, and they were also the two most in tune with the importance of values. The other candidates would do well to heed this lesson.
There is much more at the link, including some observations on some of the other candidates.
Is free college a good idea?
C’mon people, this one should be a no-brainer, can’t you at least call upon your craven loyalty to the higher education lobby to reject the free tuition proposals from Warren and Sanders?:
Just three German universities placed in the top 100 world institutions in rankings compiled by Quacquarelli Symonds, a British education consultancy…
In Germany, public funds covered $14,092 per student in 2015, the latest year for which the OECD has compiled numbers. In the United States, public funds covered $10,563 per student. But once private money was taken into account, U.S. university spending was far higher: $30,003 per student, compared with $17,036 in Germany…
“The best German universities look a lot like the University of Colorado. It’s not going to be like the top privates. It’s not even going to be like the top publics,” said Alex Usher, a Canadian education consultant who has studied how countries fund their university systems. “They’re perfectly good schools. They churn out good graduates. They’re not as focused on creating an elite. And in many ways that’s what the top systems in the United States are trying to do.”
The German system is entirely defensible if you believe that higher education is largely a matter of wasteful signaling; that is not my view, but believe it or not I know a few people who hold it.
The simple reality is that when it comes to higher education policy, President Trump is much better than the Democratic Party thought leaders.
#thegreatforgetting
Prisoners
New Yorker: On May 13, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The Allies suddenly found themselves saddled with nearly three hundred thousand prisoners of war, including the bulk of General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Unable to feed or house their share, the British asked their American comrades to relieve them of the burden. And so, by the tens of thousands, German soldiers were loaded aboard Liberty Ships, which had carried American troops across the Atlantic. Eventually, some five hundred P.O.W. camps, scattered across forty-five of the forty-eight United States, housed some four hundred thousand men. In every one of those camps, the Geneva conventions were adhered to so scrupulously that, after the war, not a few of the inmates decided to stick around and become Americans themselves. That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style.
That’s the opening to a piece by Hendrik Hertzberg from 2011 and thus the piece is motivated neither by President Trump nor about separating children from their parents on the border. For that reason it is perhaps more relevant to these issues than otherwise. We can and have been worse but let no one say that we have not and cannot be better.
Hat tip: Jason Kuznicki.
The politics of order in informal markets: Evidence from Lagos
That is the title of a new paper by Shelby Grossman, here is the abstract:
Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Using survey data collected from 1,179 randomly sampled traders across 199 markets in Lagos, I find that markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather in response to active government interference. I argue that associations develop pro-trade institutions when threatened by politicians they perceive to be predatory, and when the organization can respond with threats of its own; the latter is easier when traders are not competing with each other. In order to maintain this balance of power, the association will not extort because it needs trader support to maintain the credibility of its threats to mobilize against predatory politicians.
Via Henry Farrell, that abstract reminds me of my earlier essay, and critique of libertarian anarchy, “Law as a Public Good,” shorter version of the argument here.