Henry Giroux Defends the Faculty Guild

Henry Giroux offers thoughts on the state of American higher education in Counterpunch. The piece is an interview--Mr. Giroux (now living in Canada) is interrogated by a Slovenian academic, Mitja Sardoč.

I think Mr. Giroux is mostly correct on the facts:

[T]hey sought aggressively to restructure its modes of governance, undercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge that was instrumental to the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers, and reduce the function of higher education largely to training students for the global workforce. ... 

Increasingly aligned with market forces, higher education is mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in a neoliberal-based audit culture. Many colleges and universities have been McDonalds-ized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu.

While I'd phrase it very differently, he hasn't said anything I think is wrong. And that's precisely the point--Mr. Giroux and I can look at the same facts and come to completely different conclusions. Our priors diverge, and therefore also our conclusions.

The key to Mr. Giroux's error (in my view) is the meaning of the word "they" at the top of the above quote. "They" refers to "neoliberals," that ill-defined boogeyman of all evil. Mr. Giroux's lede sentence sets the tone.

Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of the times and has established itself as a central feature of politics. Not only does it define itself as a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas.

Then Mr. Giroux starts putting words in my mouth.

Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site of struggle over which there are very high stakes regarding how young people are educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and future should be most valued and privileged.

As an advocate for "neoliberalism" (interpreted as belief in laissez-faire capitalism), that doesn't accurately express my opinion at all. Education may be a "site of struggle," but the stakes are not very high. Indeed, I think academia is gradually rendering itself inconsequential. It's an institution that is increasingly relevant only to Yankee progressives--or about 20% of the population.

Far from influencing society, academia is obsessed with political correctness, which turns it into a laughing-stock. Indeed, it's Trump's response to that trend that helped elect him. Higher ed's opposition to free speech and open inquiry further narrows its reach and influence.

Accordingly, real debate about serious issues is moving off campus, to--among other places--the intellectual dark web, or even to the pages of Counterpunch. No serious conversation about "climate change", evolutionary psychology, gender differences, sociology, or even economics can take place on a college campus. Even new technology increasingly arises off-campus--be it space flight, artificial intelligence, and (most importantly) fracking.

In a word, college is becoming a waste of time and money. It's gradually going the way of Sears, Roebuck & Co--an idea whose time has passed.

Let's consider one of Mr. Giroux's facts. He is indeed correct that colleges increasingly "define students mainly as clients and consumers." Would he have it otherwise? What does he propose instead?

He never really says. The closest he gets is this:

[N]eoliberalism undermines the ability of educators and others to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and the civic courage necessary to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. As an ideology, neoliberalism is at odds with any viable notion of democracy which it sees as the enemy of the market.

Which doesn't really explain anything. It sounds like colleges should proselytize something like a religious faith--hope, as a solution to "desolation and cynicism." Of course colleges used to do that: the original mission of Harvard was to train clergy, and their motto was "For Christ and Church." Mr. Giroux seems animated by that same Yankee spirit, even if the specifics of his religion are different.

Here, as I see it, is the basic rule: Students know more about their own future than anybody else. I was a professor of chemistry, and no doubt I knew more about chemistry than the average 20-year-old. That's why they paid me to teach them. But, facing a class of 100, I knew nearly nothing about them as individuals: not their ambitions, their talents, their interests, nor their circumstances.

I can't even predict the larger future for them. I likely know less about the impact of technology than they do. I don't know who will be president in 2021, much less in 2025. I can't even predict what the stock market is gonna do tomorrow morning!

So I surely have no right to tell students "You need to know some chemistry to be prepared for the future!" My school requires all students to take two science classes on the assumption that the faculty collectively can predict the future--indeed, every student's individual future--better than students can predict it themselves. Of course that's not true. The faculty--collectively or otherwise--are completely clueless.

So I am completely against rigid distribution requirements. Students should be allowed to take what they want, which will be what they're good at, which will likely be most relevant to their future. Perhaps it's appropriate for me to say "Gee, taking a chem class is a good idea. You'll learn about how nature works, and that's useful." I can give them advice--even good advice. But I can't claim any special insight into their future.

My school requires two semesters of foreign language study. For some students that's probably a really good idea. For most it's surely a waste of time and money. Likewise, all students are required to take a class in "diversity," which cynics like me think is a course in brainwashing (and not a very successful one--on net it probably increases Trump's vote total). Again, some students will enjoy a course in "diversity," and they might even vote for Elizabeth Warren. More power to them--I'm not against "diversity" classes. They just shouldn't be required.

Of course students aren't very good at predicting the future, either. Most of them will get it wrong. But surely they're better at predicting their own futures than the faculty are. And therefore students should be treated as customers. The curriculum--the classes they actually take--has to be left up to them. Smart ones will ask for advice--and I'll tell them to take more chemistry. But the decision has to be theirs.

The customer is always right.

If students aren't customers, then, according to Mr. Giroux, the faculty should be in charge.

[F]aculty must reclaim their right to control over the nature of their labor, shape policies of governance, and be given tenure track lines with the guarantee of secure employment and protection for academic freedom and free speech.

That phrase--"shape policies of governance"--is saying that the faculty should control the curriculum. In a narrow sense I agree--the chemistry faculty should decide how chemistry is to be taught. But we have no right to tell students what they need for the future, and therefore we have no legitimate authority to impose course requirements on students (beyond narrow disciplinary prerequisites).

Mr. Giroux is granting the faculty an authority they don't deserve. His claim dates from medieval times when there was very little social change, and the only reason to attend college was to enter the clergy. In those days the faculty was a guild that guarded its privileges as tightly as any other guild.

But the world is not like that anymore. The world is too complicated to be entrusted to a self-interested guild. Mr. Giroux's plea to protect the professoriate needs to be rejected.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect on Radical Professors
• Book Review: An Anxious Age
• Why the Academy Sucks

Socialist Action Goes AWOL

The very first post on this blog was commentary on Socialist Action's (SA) 2012 convention. It's a rather dense dissection of SA's understanding of economics. Everything was new back then--I took great pleasure in the argument.

Two years later I blogged about the 2014 conclave. This covers much the same ground as the 2012 piece. The convention concluded poverty was increasing in Europe--I put that exaggerated claim into perspective.

Then I commented on the 2016 convention, criticizing them for the seeming disconnect between the enormous economic crisis supposedly engulfing the world proletariat, compared to the pathetic response of the Party. The imminent destruction of the planet/immiseration of the working class/irremediable crisis of capitalism--all those challenges were to be met by increased sales of their print newspaper, a $25,000 fundraiser, and the sorriest presidential campaign ever launched in American history.

Finally, in February, 2017, I responded to the Declaration of a Faction Fight within the Fourth International, where SA proclaimed its heroic stand defending a proletarian outlook. I accused SA of setting "the bar for success very low." Definitely an understatement. We have, by the way, heard nothing about the faction fight since.

So now we come to 2018. At some point in October, SA announced that their paper would be taking a short break to allow for a convention later that month. The announcement is no longer on the web, but to the best of my memory the convention was held in the 3rd or 4th week of October. For most previous conventions the event was reported at length within a week or two after the meeting.

This year? Crickets. Not a word so far.

Now maybe it will still come--if so, I'm happy to eat my words--I'd love to find out what SA has planned for the coming period. Nevertheless, I'm getting worried. I'm afraid the Party is crawling into a hole and hiding from the limelight. Why?

One possible reason is that SA has become increasingly incoherent. That certainly seems to be the trend from 2012 to 2016. They've lost their Marxist bearings. They have no unique perspective on world politics. They're lost at sea when it comes to both strategy and tactics--and they're ashamed of themselves.

Or it could be there is a big faction fight in the organization and they haven't figured out what to write yet. I doubt that.

Or they just don't like criticism--not that they get very much of it. As far as I know I'm the only blogger who pays them any attention at all. My reach is pretty small, so it seems a stretch to think they're afraid of me. Yet they surely have gotten very secretive of late--they no longer publish locations or phone numbers of their branches, nor have they said anything about attendance at any of their conventions, and now they don't even want to say what they talked about at their meeting. It looks downright paranoid.

A pair of recent issues indicates the confusion. For starters, there has so far been no analysis of the Yellow Vest protests in France. SA is not alone--so far on my Beat only The Militant has covered the protests (here and here). Part of that is the Trotskyist news cycle is very slow. But I think the Yellow Vest movement must be especially embarrassing for Socialist Action.

The Yellow Vests put paid to the idea of a "Vanguard Party." The movement has no leadership--it is an entirely organic creation of social media. It's not organized around any coherent platform, much less the uniquely correct program sanctified by The Revolutionary Party. As far as I know, no Trotskyist organization of any denomination has played any role in the movement whatsoever. All SA can do is kibbutz from the sidelines.

Then the movement is a "weird" coalition between Left and Right--supported by both the National Front and far-left movements. I say "weird" because it's only weird from a Marxist perspective. Us normal folks see a confluence of interests between far Left and far Right--you both support more government intervention in the economy. In France they call that dirigisme. It's the very opposite of Trumpism.

Finally, and most disturbing for SA, is the movement's anti-environmentalism. The proximate cause of the riots was the imposition of a carbon tax (The Militant calls it a gas tax), ostensibly imposed to prevent global warming. Apparently French workers will have none of this global warming nonsense, especially since "fighting" it involves a severe hit to their standard of living. Can't say as I blame them.

SA, meanwhile, has gone whole hog for the most crackpot version of environmentalism. For example, in a recent article by Marc Rome on the role of the electric utility PG&E in "causing" the wildfires in California. The company is now subject to potentially bankrupting lawsuits from fraudster lawyers trying to make a killing.

SA apparently thinks those lawyers are heroes. After all, forcing the electric company out of business will certainly save on emissions--everybody will be cutting back when their power is turned off. And California has a warm climate, so what do all those people need electricity for anyway? Especially given the catastrophic threat imminent global warming poses.

Like the lawyers, SA is convinced the PG&E caused the fires. Now it may be true that the company caused the spark that lit the fires, but that's hardly the big story. According to Mr. Rome, the real cause is "climate change," that ill-defined, protean boogeyman that's about to destroy us all. SA apparently thinks PG&E singlehandedly caused "climate change," and therefore should pay the full bill.

So let's double or triple everybody's electricity rates. That seems to be SA's solution. Because somebody has to pay all those lawyers, and that somebody is gonna be rate payers. Or taxpayers, which is the government's solution. Mr. Rome's article is entitled California governor signs legislation to bail out utility that sparked deadly fires.

Actually, it's not PG&E that's getting bailed out. It's the shyster lawyers. SA is taking the side of lawyers--that's not very revolutionary of them. Here I thought they were supposed to be defending the interests of the working class?

Further Reading:

• Proyect & Schreiber on the 2018 Election
• Bangladesh Factory Disasters are Good for Capitalism
• New Media: Socialist Action's Second Best Friend

Proyect & Schreiber on 2018 Election

Louis Proyect and Michael Schreiber offer commentaries on the midterm election outcomes, and they both manage to say a bunch of very true things.

Mr. Schreiber provides a very clear, well-written, and accurate summary of the election. His article (in Socialist Action) is well worth reading. This is particularly insightful.

All in all, despite the addition of a few “progressive” Democrats to Congress, the complexion of U.S. politics has changed very little since the election. The policies of the capitalist Democratic Party have not been altered one iota from the pro-corporate, pro-war, anti-environmental ones of the past. 

Mr. Schreiber is quite right--it is moderate Democrats who won the election--not the Progressives.

Photogenic Progressive, as portrayed in Socialist Action

Yes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a young, attractive woman whose picture the media loves to splash on the front page, and there are a few others like her in the far-Left camp. But photogenic and important are two different things. Mr. Schreiber understands the difference.

So does Mr. Proyect, in a piece entitled Why Democrats Are So Okay With Losing--also well worth your time. For him, "losing" means not electing Progressives, and he describes some candidates who did win.

In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve her own and the party’s interests. She told MSNBC: “As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone.”

In Mr. Proyect's opinion military service is immediately suspect, and likely reveals an incipient fascist or something. Yet lots of people in this country have served in the military and they're overwhelmingly proud of their service--despite what they might have thought about the war in Iraq. I think Mr. Proyect is being uncharitable.

What Misters Schreiber and Proyect both can't seem to admit is that Progressives are a small minority in this country. They occupy about 90 seats in the new Congress, or about 20%. I think that exaggerates their actual support in the population. For all the media babble about "polarization" and "excessive partisanship," most Americans are centrists, or perhaps center-right. The far-Left will never win a general election.

Nancy Pelosi realizes that and has promised to work across the aisle if she can (though I won't vouch for her sincerity). And Trump, definitely not an extremist right-winger, has been a Democrat in the past and can become one again in the future.  He could easily work with a Democratic congress if given half a chance.

Mr. Proyect reveals his Trotskyist-totalitarian tendencies in this odd passage.

In some countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973 respectively. ...

Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the “losers” in 2010. Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round, Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP’s claim that seafood in the Gulf of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields. A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul Weyrich.

Does he really think our democracy would be better off if losing political candidates were put up against the wall and shot after an election? Are we actually better served by coups and civil wars? Is Honduran civic life, where "elections have huge consequences," to be emulated in preference to the American? Are the refugees marching in the wrong direction?

Fortunately Mr. Proyect realizes he's in a small minority.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson’s presidency, it is likely that a combination of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.

Thank goodness there will be no such "massive shake-up of American society." Unlike Mr. Proyect, the American people are not pro-poverty. Democrat or Republican, we don't want to go the full Venezuela. We don't want to be ruled by tin-pot dictators. We don't want to forfeit our homes and livelihoods in exchange for "transit-friendly," crime-ridden tenements ruled by government thugs.

If Mr. Proyect accurately describes Trotskyist ambitions, he also correctly understands Trump.

For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. ...

By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover “Starve the Beast” Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al.

So there you have it--Trump is the true anti-fascist. Whereas Trotskyists and Progressives advocate government tyranny, accomplished through coups and civil wars, Trump is shrinking the power of government. He is the true opponent of people like France's Marie Le Pen, Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.

Mr. Schreiber is less explicit about his totalitarian visions, but he alludes to them nonetheless.

[R]eal change will never be achieved from within the Democratic Party. The beginning of a new day for working people in the United States will arrive when they construct their own party, one that operates not only at the ballot box but in workplaces and in the streets, and with a revolutionary program to enable the working class to take political power in its own name and abolish the rule of the capitalists.

"Construct their own party" is code for following the lead of Socialist Action, the self-anointed Vanguard Party. And who is the leading Vanguardist of them all--the very Vanguard of the Vanguard? Why, that's gotta be Jeff Mackler, of course, a man who has proven his stripes during the most unambitious presidential campaign of all time.

Jeff Mackler? Surely they're kidding? No wonder real Progressives flock to the Democratic Party.

Further Reading:

• Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?
• Jeff Mackler on Trade
• The "Bureau" on Immigration

The Militant Visits Manila

For some reason my Trotskyist friends love International Book Fairs. The Militant reports on such events from diverse places like Havana, Tehran, Erbil, London, Sweden, and more. Recently they devoted two articles (dated Nov. 12 and Oct. 29) to a fair in Manila.

I don't know who the intended audience is at a book fair (bookstores? consumers? critics?) but Pathfinder Press was there. 

There was hardly an hour when the Pathfinder booth at the Sept. 12-16 Manila International Book Fair wasn’t packed with fairgoers of all ages browsing the shelves with growing enthusiasm for the books they saw. The crowds kept coming even after a powerful storm sideswiped the city Sept. 15.

The two titles championed that week were Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women (published 1993), and Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution (First edition published in 2006; recently reissued). The hosts at the booth included Ron Poulson from Australia, Janet Roth from New Zealand, and Mary-Alice Waters from New York. They were assisted by "[t]wo young Filipinos active in social and political struggles...". In addition, comrades Poulson and Waters participated in a panel discussion held at the University of the Philippines.

So I'm not interested in book fairs, which in this Amazon-era are a complete waste of time. And I'm not all that interested in the two books highlighted. I read Cosmetics... many years ago, along with author Evelyn Reed's regrettable magnum opus, Woman's Evolution (1975). I've never read Three Generals, and have no intention of doing so.

The fascinating topic for me is the city of Manila and the people who live there. My wife of 32 years was born in the Philippines and lived in Manila as a teenager and young adult. I spent about four weeks in the city, most recently in 1995. I'm due for another visit (perhaps next Spring), but I don't really like traveling there. As Mary-Alice can likely attest, the traffic is simply terrible--it's impossible to get around. And then I am required to spend most of my time listening to my wife talk Tagalog to her myriad friends and relations. It's dull.

Which doesn't mean I'm ignorant. I read a history of the city by Nick Joaquin, Manila, my Manila. It's a wonderful book, but sadly not readily available in the US. Among many other things, I recently read 1493 by Charles Mann--he devotes a long chapter to Manila. Finally, I love maps, and my wife brought me back an excellent one from a recent trip. So while I may not know Manila, I do know Manila geography.

Filipinos love nicknames, and the ones given to women baffle the Militant's authors. For example, the "coordinator of WomanHealth Philippines, convener of the Dignidad electoral coalition, and a leading member of the Philippines-Cuba Cultural and Friendship Association" goes by "Princess." That would shame an comparably well-placed, upper-middle class feminist in the United States.

That's hardly the worst of it. Common nicknames include "Baby," "Precious," "Queenie," and "Inday."  That latter is the Visayan word for "sexy young woman," or, perhaps, "bimbo." Nobody finds these names insulting--quite the contrary, they are proud of them, especially as they get older. (Men have nicknames, too--a common one, for a grown man, is "Boy.")

Two observations seem relevant. First, the Philippines is a remarkably religious country. Eighty percent are Catholic, with the remainder divided between Protestants and Muslims. Whatever their confession, they take religion extremely seriously--to the point of nailing themselves onto a cross on Good Friday. I've never met a Filipino atheist or agnostic.

Catholics (unlike Protestants or Muslims) venerate the Virgin Mary--she of the Immaculate Conception, assumed into heaven as our Blessed Mother. This whole shtick (which people take very seriously) effectively raises the status of women--especially mothers. While young women have difficult lives (as do young men), older women acquire the status of matriarch and head large extended families. The result is that marriage is especially valuable to Filipinas--one can't become a matriarch without a family. It also goes a long way to explaining the relatively high fertility rate.

Second, like women the world over, Filipinas are very fashion-conscious. Unlike what Cosmetics... claims, this is an intramural status competition among women--men are bit players. So this question from the floor is not surprising:

Fredda Ruth Rosete, a young Filipina, asked: “I want to be fashionable and to look attractive to the opposite sex. I’ve been told I’m contributing to my own oppression. Is that true?”

“The answer is no!” Waters replied. “But we have to be conscious of the pressures on us generated by the capitalist system and not let that determine our lives. ..."

Mary-Alice seems to have retreated from the hard-nosed, merciless feminism I recall from my youth. That unadulterated, radical version common in America will not appeal in the Philippines.

Re discrimination against Chinese, Mary-Alice makes the following ridiculous statement.

Waters said, “Cuba is the only country in the world where there is no discrimination against descendants of overseas Chinese. The only one! Before the Cuban Revolution, Chinese there were discriminated against as they are in all other countries where large numbers of Chinese settled.

How could she possibly know that? By what quantitative measure of discrimination against Chinese does Cuba come out identically zero?

Or put another way: Can Mary-Alice please tell us where the best Dim Sum restaurant in Havana is? I'll hazard there aren't any Dim Sum restaurants in Havana--good food is against the law there. In Manila, conversely, good Chinese food is everywhere. I had by a wide margin the best hot & sour soup ever in my entire life there.

Please don't tell me that Chinese aren't discriminated against in Havana.

Her co-panelist, Teresita Ang See (typical Chinese-Filipina name: Catholic given name, Chinese family name) understands the situation better. A little history is helpful.

The Spanish founded Manila, which prior was a swampy river delta, inhabited by fishermen who lived on the few islands. But Manila Bay is a world class harbor, and the Spanish filled in some of the swamp, founding a city at the mouth of the Pasig River. That original city exists now as Intramuros--still today a religious, cultural, and educational center of the country.

The reason for the Spanish settlement was to facilitate trade with China. In exchange for Mexican gold and silver, China sold silks, porcelain, spices, and other manufactures. Junks arrived from China carrying the goods, while galleons came from Acapulco carrying the gold. The ships traded cargoes in Manila and sailed back to where they came from.

Facilitating this trade were a group of Chinese merchants and bankers. The Spanish didn't like commerce and didn't trust the Chinese, so they were restricted to the Parian (today known as Binondo) on the other side of the Pasig. The Chinese got rich. The Spanish built their empire and aggressively practiced their religion. The local Tagalogs got nothing except Catholicism and jobs as stevedores. Or occasionally they were taken as slaves to help sail the boats in one direction or another.

For many centuries Binondo was the commercial center of the Philippines. It is still the heart of Chinatown (though that has expanded into Quiapo). Since Manila was completely leveled during WWII, postwar the commercial center was rebuilt in Makati, where there was more room. But the people who run it are still the same--Filipino-Chinese--who constitute the country's commercial class to this very day. They dominate business life.

Needless to say, all this breeds envy. Anti-Chinese pogroms are a constant throughout Philippine history--Parian itself was destroyed by rampaging mobs on numerous occasions. My wife recalls from her childhood how the Chinese were forcibly run out of her hometown--their stores and property confiscated, Idi Amin style.

Cubans are surely aware of how that works. They didn't just drive their commercial class out of a single town, but rather out of the entire country. Indeed, it's likely that the best Dim Sum restaurant in Havana is actually located in Miami.

Further Reading:

• China & the United States
• Women Are From Venus; Trotskyists Are From Pluto
• The Status of Marxists

How Socialist Action Helps Republicans in 2018

My friends over at Socialist Action (SA) claim to oppose the Democrats, but they sure are good at spouting Dem talking points. Two recent articles on their webpage make the case.

John Leslie pens a piece entitled The rise of right-wing violence in Trump's America. While I'll agree with him that there is right-wing violence, it's not at all clear to me that it's "rising." If anything, it seems to me that racial violence, at least, is declining under Trump. Recall that under Obama we had the Ferguson riots, Dylann Roof's massacre of Black churchgoers, along with the rise of Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Here are the results of a relevant Google search from 2013 - 2016. At the top of the list is a piece by Steve Chapman, written in July, 2016, about how pundits thought race relations had worsened under President Obama. By comparison things seem better today.

Of course Mr. Leslie omits left-wing violence--antifa, BLM-inspired murders of cops, strong-arm tactics on campus to prevent free speech, and left-wing antisemitism, often but not always disguised as a plea for Palestinian rights.

My own view is that violence on both sides--while still existent--has declined under Trump. Obama was infuriatingly preachy, all but daring right-wing fanatics to do something stupid & evil, while at the same time winking at racial violence from the left. Trump is neither preachy nor winking. For him violence comes from both sides in roughly equal measure.

The second Democratic talking point comes from Autumn Rain and Erwin Freed entitled Trump administration attacks trans rights. The article is a mess, claiming that Trump is somehow stepping on fundamental human rights.

The lede sentence:

The New York Times reported on Oct. 21 that the Trump administration is “considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”

I partially agree with Rain and Freed that the new definition is too restrictive--genitalia at birth may not actually be the most relevant criterion. But I strongly object to transgender people becoming a protected class under civil rights law.

For all the initials, LGBTQI, only the first two or three account for any significant portion of the population--perhaps 5%. The remainder comprise much less than 1%--perhaps as few as 0.1%. They are not a big enough community to deserve special civil rights treatment.

We don't accord such privileges to blind or deaf people, even though we try very hard to be accommodating,  They have to fit in with the rest of society as best as possible. Why should trans people be treated any differently?

Rain & Freed make some completely ridiculous claims.

A popular “common sense” notion is that genetics are rigidly sex-specific. Men and women are said to only have XY and XX chromosomes respectively. Over the last couple of years the renowned journal Nature has published many articles that put to bed the idea that human bodies exist as either purely male or female at any level.

Our authors cite no references from Nature, and I seriously doubt the truth of their assertion. It is long known in genetics that the female gamete contains an X chromosome, while the male gamete contains either an X or Y chromosome. Yes, there are times when it goes wrong, e.g., hermaphrodites, or people with XXY chromosomes. But these circumstances are very rare, and to my mind represent a kind of birth defect. Courtesy and accommodation are in order; a complete rearrangement of social customs is not.

Then there's this:

Not only do people come in all different shapes, sizes, and anatomical make-ups but so do their genes! A person who was assigned female at birth, identifies as a woman, and easily is seen as one may have XY chromosomes in her bladder, or even internal testes.

People come in all different shapes and sizes because (in large part) their genes are different. And the number of individuals with XX chromosomes who have XY chromosomes in their bladder must be vanishingly small. Indeed, I doubt such folks exist at all.

For this we're supposed to change English grammar and invent a bunch of new pronouns. Nor is it reason to let men, however disguised, use women's washrooms. Separate toilets protect women (real ones) from male predators. Though I'd change Trump's standard: if you have a penis, you can't use women's lavatories. Doesn't matter what you had at birth.

So why does this auger a Republican victory in 2018?

If SA were simply a voice in the wilderness, a tiny little grouplet with silly ideas all its own, then it would make no difference at all. Unfortunately their opinions reflect the left-wing of the Democratic party. I know they reject that assessment--they think they're "radicals" who advocate something completely different from the Dems.

But they're wrong. Be it on race, class or gender, along with immigration and environmental issues, their opinion dovetails perfectly with progressive Democrats. There is nothing original in anything they write. The problem with this progressive vision of the world is that it appeals only to about 20% of the population--disproportionately from the upper middle class.

The rest of us call it political correctness, a widely unpopular imposition on American discourse. Deviate even slightly from the correct terminology and you're dubbed a racist, sexist, homophobic, white-supremacist. Through the Obama years this trick worked--any slightly contrary opinion was excised from polite society simply because the language wasn't up to snuff.

Trump ran and won on opposing political correctness. For SA and their Democrat friends, this means he must be a racist, sexist, homophobic white supremacist. He's none of those things, however lewd, rude & crude he may be.

Mr. Trump stands on an anti-PC, cultural platform.

• Traditional mores have value, and they should not be overturned on a lark.
• Immigration is fine, but we should only admit people who love us. Which, contrary to SA, is not restricted to white people.
• We do not need to accept large numbers of indigent, illiterate refugees from failed states such as Honduras, however miserable they may be.
• The US does not have to keep the world safe for democracy. Nor (now that we're energy independent) do we have to defend the Persian Gulf or world trade routes.
• We need to reduce our dependence on China, not for economic reasons, but rather for security.
• Progressive values are an attempt to remake society in some idealistic image--call it socialism. This effort will always fail--see Venezuela for a recent example.
• The wolf at our door is not climate change or some other phony-baloney progressive boogeyman. Instead it's poverty. We're not guaranteed to be a rich country. That means we need to let productive people (e.g., frackers) go about their business with as little red tape and taxes as possible.

Political correctness is resoundingly unpopular in this country--opposed by 75% of the population. Socialist Action, by trumpeting the PC banner, helps in its own small way to get Republican voters to the polls.

Thank you!

Further Reading:

• Is a Blue Wave Coming?
• The "Bureau" on Immigration
• Affirmative Action

Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

Trump's response was "Who cares?" Which is roughly what I also think. But there's more to the story, and believe it or not, I don't think Elizabeth Warren cares about her Indian ancestry, either.

For those of you living under a rock (or not from the USA), the president has nicknamed Senator Warren "Pocahontas", after an Indian woman who materially helped the early English colonists at Jamestown back in the 17th Century. Pocahontas is generally regarded as a heroic figure.

Trump, however, is using the name as a synonym for "hypocrite" because Ms. Warren claimed herself to be "Native American" (the PC phrase for Indian), identifying herself as such in a directory list of law professors, among other places. When pressed she could produce no evidence beyond family lore that she had any Indian ancestry at all. Further, she made it look like she'd gotten her job in part because of affirmative action programs for Native Americans.

The label must have stung. She has now responded with a nearly six minute long video supposedly establishing her Indian heritage. She reveals a DNA test suggesting she is somewhere between 0.1% and 2% Native American, assuming you take the results as definitive. 

She can't escape the hypocrisy label, either. Her video presents testimony from several high-ranking academics, claiming they never, ever considered her ethnicity in hiring her--not even a little bit. In this age of affirmative action that's pretty hard to take seriously--unless said professors did not themselves believe Ms. Warren's claim to native ancestry.

So all in all, I think Trump will continue to call her "Pocahontas," or perhaps "the lady who doesn't like being called Pocahontas." Elizabeth Warren is still a hypocrite, and she isn't an Indian.

But she is Scots-Irish. I believe she intended to make precisely that point, and if so the video is a stroke of political genius. Its essential purpose is to win support from her kin.

Ms. Warren grew up in Oklahoma. The state was Indian Territory until 1889--the Cherokees and Choctaws had been exiled there from the southeastern United States. Warren's family was among those early white settlers, and it surely isn't shocking that there'd be some ethnic mixing. Likely most longstanding Oklahoma families can claim Indian blood.

The Scots-Irish (a misnomer since there's nothing Irish about them--they're Lowlander Scots) arrived in North America before the Revolution and settled in the "back country", today known as Appalachia. From there they expanded westward, populating Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and even Southern California. In demographic terms they have been very successful--they are today the largest single ethnic group in the United States, perhaps 60 million strong.

I'm informed on this by three books: J.D. Vance's well-known and excellent book, Hillbilly Elegy (my review here), Colin Woodard's American Nations (review here), and finally, the magisterial Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer.

Senator Warren plays on numerous Scots-Irish themes during the video. For example (according to Mr. Vance), the surest route to a fistfight is to insult a hillbilly's mother. No surprise, then, when Ms. Warren proclaims "Now, the president likes to call my mom a liar," a phrase calculated to win sympathy.

Though sympathy is not exactly what Ms. Warren is after. Scots-Irish (reports Mr. Fischer) raise girls to become strong, self-reliant women, and boys to become warriors. Sarah Palin (another Scots-Irish politician) described herself as "Mama Bear." Ms. Warren shows herself in the same light--she's no victim; instead she's a cow-punchin', pistol-packin' mama. You don't mess with her!

She doesn't want your sympathy. Instead, you'll cheer her on!

Though when push comes to shove a Hillbilly gal can't be expected to go it alone--that's where the warriors come in. Ms. Warren has three older brothers, all of whom spent their youth in the military. You insult a girl's honor and you can expect a posse of brothers, sons, and uncles to start coming after you.  To emphasize the point family photos depict them in uniform and flying fighter jets. And sure enough, the now elderly brothers, despite being Republicans, rise strongly to their sister's defense. Their genuine loyalty surely trumps the fake protestations of academics.

Finally, Scots-Irish--and not just those in Oklahoma--have long claimed Indian blood. They're very proud of it. So the Senator's family lore is hardly surprising or unusual--I doubt Liz is lying about that. For a Scots-Irish audience, impugning Ms. Warren's Native ancestry is indirectly an insult to the whole clan.

So I think the goal of this video was (at least in major part) to rouse support from the Scots-Irish for one of their own daughters. And in that sense it's a smashing success.

Ms. Warren wants to be President of the United States. Her current base--progressive liberals--might be large enough to get her into the Senate from Massachusetts, but it's nowhere near a big enough base to win a national election. She needs to expand her base.

Authors Woodard and Hackett describe the peoples that settled colonial America from Britain. In addition to the Scots-Irish, these include the Yankees (about 20 million strong), and the "Midlanders" (aka, "Middle America"), people loosely descended from the Quaker culture in the Delaware Valley.

Obama was a Yankee politician through and through (“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”), but he put together a coalition including Midlanders and African-Americans. His people so despised the Scots-Irish that they took to calling them "deplorables."

Trump's coalition, conversely, has Scots-Irish at its core, but also includes Midlanders (they're the folks who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016). The Yankees and African-Americans were not able to carry the day for the Dems.

Ms. Warren now has the very difficult task of forming a coalition including Yankees and Scots-Irish. If she can pull it off she becomes president in a landslide. But since those two groups royally hate each other, this is not gonna be an easy trick. She'll have to win Scots-Irish votes (by supporting gun rights and opposing immigration), while at the same time winning Progressive votes in the primaries.

That odd coalition is much harder now given the insults they've been throwing at each other. But it was Bill Clinton's coalition, and also that of both presidents Bush. The latter combined a New England, blue-blood family with Texas sensibilities.

If Elizabeth Warren wants to be president, she needs to carry Oklahoma and Texas. That's what her video was all about. It's got nothing to do with Native Americans.

Further Reading:

• Affirmative Action
• Book Review: An Anxious Age
• Trump & Trotsky

Is a Blue Wave Coming?

The commentariat is all atwitter about the impending Blue Wave. FiveThirtyEight, for example, predicts an 80% chance that the Dems will take the house. RealClearPolitics, which averages all recent polls, gives the Dems an edge 206-189, with 40 seats in the toss-up column (all but two with Republican incumbents). With such odds the wave doesn't even need to be all that high--the Dems are odds-on favorites to win a majority in November.

Count me skeptical.

These are the same people that all but assured us of Hillary's victory in 2016. For example, the New York Times' Upshot blog gave her an 85% chance of winning. Others made similar predictions--indeed, a lot of us Republicans expected it to be an early and disappointing night.

But they were wrong in 2016. Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, offered a lengthy postmortem of that election.

Why, then, had so many people who covered the campaign been so confident of Clinton’s chances?...[T]he answers  are potentially a lot more instructive for how to cover Trump’s White House and future elections than the ones you’d get by simply blaming the polls for the failure to foresee the outcome. They also suggest there are real shortcomings in how American politics are covered, including pervasive groupthink among media elites, an unhealthy obsession with the insider’s view of politics, a lack of analytical rigor, a failure to appreciate uncertainty, a sluggishness to self-correct when new evidence contradicts pre-existing beliefs, and a narrow viewpoint that lacks perspective from the longer arc of American history.

This seems true enough. But all the listed sins--groupthink, obsession, sluggishness, and narrow vision--are even more in evidence now than ever. Indeed, not only have the media not taken Mr. Silver's advice, they've fallen into all-out Trump Derangement Syndrome, apparently no longer able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Of course Trump has pwned them relentlessly, inspiring them to ever greater levels of irrationality.

So their predictions of a Blue Wave are likely wishful thinking.

For that matter, there is cause to think we might be on the cusp of a Red Wave. That certainly is the opinion of Newt Gingrich. Let's examine the evidence in favor.

Polling is a difficult business these days. Landlines have all but disappeared, and there's no such thing as a phone book anymore. Even area codes no longer mean anything. And then people are less willing to answer personal questions from strangers.

These problems have been around for awhile, and pollsters have adjusted. Sometimes polls are taken online, which introduces a whole new set of difficulties. The key problem is collecting a random, representative sample. Pollsters weight their samples to ensure that the views of different demographics are fairly represented. The weights are based on past experience.

The problem is that past experience is no longer a reliable guide. Trump--the Great Disrupter--has completely upended the American political scene. Post-Trump, blue-collar workers have become a solid, Republican constituency. Even AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka these days has positive things to say about the president. This is qualitatively different from the past. Yes--we used to talk about Reagan Democrats, but that was a minority of the blue-collar crowd. Unlike Reagan, Trump has completely refashioned the demographics of the Republican Party.

The commentariat recognizes Trump's blue-collar support, but they usually preface it with the word white, as in "white, blue-collar voters." I think this blinds them to the fact that many Latinos and Blacks are also blue-collar, and can vote their class interest along with their ethnic interest. Pollsters, concentrating as they do on ethnicity, also miss the trend.

This is most evidently happening among Latinos. A special election to fill a Texas state senate seat in a majority Latino district led to a Republican winning that seat for the first time in 139 years. (Yes--I know--all special elections are special. In this case there were only 50,000 votes cast in a district with a population of 800,000. But the Dems keep touting their special election victories, so why can't the GOP?)

Republican Will Hurd represents the Rio Grande Valley, an overwhelmingly Hispanic congressional district, and his reelection chances are now nearly assured. Likewise, Democrat Donna Shalala, running in a Miami-based, majority Hispanic, congressional district that Hillary carried by 19 points, now looks to be losing.

I think it's pretty clear why many Latinos like Trump--immigration. After all, that illiterate, traumatized single mother from El Salvador released by ICE pending a court date a year from now, will not be moving to Scarsdale, Berkeley or Ann Arbor. No--she'll settle in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, her children will join an immigrant street gang, and her income will come from tax dollars. Failing that, if she does get a job she's competing against citizens--e.g., citizens from the Rio Grande Valley who have lived here since before the Mayflower.

The Rio Grandians may not like the wall (that goes right through the middle of their neighborhood), but they like foreign immigrants a whole lot less. Of course they'll vote for Trump!

For Blacks it is more speculative. If approximately 30% of Blacks fit the stereotype--living off welfare in the ghetto--that means 70% don't live that way. They've joined the middle class--however tenuously--and moved to the suburbs or down south. From my old haunts in Chicago I know this for a fact. Woodlawn (directly adjacent to my alma mater, the University of Chicago) was a classic Black ghetto like what you now see in movies from the 1970s. Today it's mostly abandoned--civilized people have all moved away.

They moved to get away from the crime and gangs. They moved to a place where they could buy a house, however modest. They moved to a place where their kids could go to school without getting shot. They moved to neighborhoods like where I currently live (majority Black), where there is absolutely zero gangland graffiti.

So Maxine Waters (D-Street Gangs) and Black Lives Matter, who are the political wing of the street gang movement, are not popular among these folks. Waters and BLM speak for the ghetto 30%, not the civilized 70%. Trump and the Republicans are appealing directly to that civilized 70%.

Evidence:

1.  HBCU presidents are remarkably sympathetic toward Trump. 
2. A significant number of Black pastors have come out in favor of Trump. 
3. A few celebrities (e.g., Kanye West) have endorsed Trump. 
4. Blacks are culturally much more conservative than white Democrats. They tend to oppose both abortion and gay marriage. 

OK--so that's much less convincing than the abundant evidence that Latinos are already voting Republican. But it is evidence, and I'll be surprised if the Republicans don't do relatively well among Black voters (outside ghetto neighborhoods) this November.

The commentariat, because of Mr. Silver's list of sins, can't see any of this. They assume Latinos won't vote their economic interest. They assume Black people must love high crime and street gangs. Trump's digs against Maxine Waters may inspire a few white racists, as liberals maintain. But his main audience are Black folks--civilized people--who understand that law & order is important for their well-being.

Further Reading:

• Affirmative Action
• If Everybody is a Racist, Then Nobody is a Racist
• Charlottesville

Book Review: Life After Google

George Gilder's book Life After Google is hot off the press, published earlier this year. It predicts the demise of Google, along with its kindred, cloud-computing competitors such as Facebook and Amazon.

Mr. Gilder is a marvelous writer--I've read much he has written. (My essay on Knowledge & Power is not my best work, but here it is.) I'm deeply sympathetic to Mr. Gilder's argument because he predicts a much more libertarian internet.

Mr. Gilder offers a larger philosophical argument beyond simply business and technology. I enjoyed that discussion, but I restrict my comments here to economic issues.

Famously, Google gives most of its content away for free, or (in comments Gilder credits to Tim Cook) if it's free, you're not the customer; you're the product. That's the least of it. Spanish has two words for "free"--gratis and libre. In our context it means gratis.

Let's count the ways gratis benefits Google:

• They are completely immune from any antitrust prosecution and most other regulatory oversight. 
• They can roll out buggy, beta software to consumers and improve it over time. 
• They don't have to take responsibility for security. Unlike a bank, Google is at no risk if somehow your data gets corrupted or stolen. 
• They provide no customer support. 
• Your data doesn't belong to you. Instead it belongs to Google, which can monetize it with the help of AI. 
• You get locked into a Google world, where everything you own is now at their mercy. (I'm in that situation.) Your data is precisely not libre. 

Note that Google didn't even bother to show up at the recent Congressional hearings about "fake news." They consider themselves above the law (or, perhaps more accurately, below the law). They can get away with this because it's free.

There are some disadvantages.

• It's not really free, but instead of paying with money you pay with time. Attention is the basic currency of Google-world. 
• People hate ads. "[O]nly 0.06 percent of smartphone ads were clicked through. Since more than 50 percent of the clicks were by mistake, according to surveys, the intentional response rate was 0.03 percent." This works only for spammers. Ad-blockers are becoming universal.
• Google thinks it can circumvent that by using AI to generate ads that will interest the user. No matter--people still hate them.The result is the value of advertising is declining. Gilder does not believe that AI will ever solve this problem. (I agree with him.) 
• Most important--Google loses any information about how valuable its products are. Airlines, for example, respond sensitively to price signals when determining which routes to fly, what equipment to use, what service levels to provide, etc. Price is the best communication mechanism known for conveying economic information. You immediately know what is valuable to consumers, and what isn't. Google loses all that information by going gratis.
  
  Is Gmail more valuable than Waze? Google has no idea. As a result it has no way of knowing where to invest its money and resources. It's just blindly throwing money at a dartboard.

The above disadvantages are manageable as long as the marginal cost per user is very small. Google invested billions of dollars in huge data farms (Gilder visited the one in The Dalles, OR), located near sources of cheap electricity and cold water (for cooling). Iceland is a prime location for these things. Each center contains thousands of racks of high-end servers connected by millions of miles of fiber-optic cable. This investment has paid off--the marginal cost per search is essentially zero.

But the world is changing fast--according to Gilder the tipping point is the transition from 4G to 5G; from the internet of web pages to the internet of things; from the internet of text and images, to the internet of virtual reality and video rendering; from the internet of computers to the internet of mobile phones, smart watches, and medical devices. To accommodate this new world Google will need to make a massive new investment.

The marginal cost--far from approaching zero--is now becoming near infinite. Without any price information the company has no clue who its most valuable "customers" really are, and cannot determine how best to allocate its resources. Further, the new world opens the door for much nimbler and low-cost competitors. So while Google may be a successful search engine, it will lose its hold over our data. We will own our own data.

Among those nimbler competitors is a Warsaw-based start-up called Golem. Realizing that most CPU clock cycles around the world go unused, the company is trying to tap into that wasted resource. For example, even while I'm busily typing away, my computer's CPU is mostly sitting idle doing nothing. If it were possible for me to rent out those excess clock cycles, then I'd make a little extra cash, and somebody else gets extra computing power they can use.

That's Golem's business model--by installing their software they enable me to rent out my clock cycles in exchange for payment. (In Michael Munger's language Golem is selling a reduction in transaction costs--i.e., making it easier to match my computer resources with somebody who is willing to pay for them.)

Two things need to happen before Golem's business model works. First, my computer needs to be on a 5G network. 5G eliminates the need for fiber-optic cables (at least over the last mile) by enabling high-bandwidth, wireless communication between my computer and the world. Without 5G I can't compete with Google. With 5G, my connection is just as efficient, or--put another way--Google has a few million miles of useless fiber-optic cables on its hands.

Second, Golem needs to handle micropayments--I will be paid pennies per minute of CPU time. The user--who is likely doing a massively parallel calculation--will owe pennies to thousands of computer-owners like me. Golem has got to keep track. The way they do that is through a blockchain currency known as GNT (Golem Network Tokens). The user will buy GNT's from Golem, and use them to pay me and all the others who contribute their clock cycles. As GNT is built on top of bitcoin, at the end of the day I can convert my GNTs to bitcoin, and hence to whatever currency I prefer.

This is more profound than it sounds. In our cloud-centered Google-world, processing and storage have become centralized, as required by fiber-optic technology. But as wireless displaces fiber, then there is no longer a reason for Google's huge data farms--everything can be decentralized. But this new technology requires a new operating system--a different computer architecture. The organizing principle of this new architecture is the blockchain--in all its forms, from distributed ledgers to secure financial transactions.

The blockchain will keep track of who owns what, who is owed what, and how people get paid. A hash of that whole transaction will be embedded in the software as a watermark. My few cents worth of CPU time will be embedded in the output for the ages.

There are currently two competing platforms on top of which the blockchain edifice can be built: bitcoin and ethereum. Bitcoin is very simple and secure--and slow. Ethereum comes with a Turing-complete programming language, in principle making it much easier to use. But it is manifestly less secure.

It turns out Mr. Gilder is agnostic on this choice. That surprises me--from Knowledge & Power I would have expected him to favor the simpler, more reliable bitcoin. Golem, after starting with Ethereum, switched to bitcoin.

I highly recommend reading Life After Google.

Further Reading:

• Crypto as a Global Currency
• Book Review: Gorbachev
• Book Review: Rise & Fall of American Growth

Jeff Mackler on Trade

Jeff Mackler pens a piece in Socialist Action (SA) entitled Inside Trump's trade bluster. It is an opinion which, while I think is mistaken, deserves a serious response.

Regarding Trump's trade policy, Mr. Mackler states:

Obviously, he is an embarrassment to the majority of the ruling-class elite. Virtually every major corporate newspaper and media outlet in the country daily pillories his too overtly right-wing tweets and pronouncements, but the essence of his direction, as opposed to the form, is not too dissimilar from mainstream ruling-class views.

This is unusual for SA--normally they write Trump off as a bone-headed klutz. Now they give him credit for substantial policy, however poorly advertised. I agree with them--the world has changed, and Trump's efforts are redirecting American policy in response to that change. It is not simply random outbursts from a senile old man.

Where Mr. Mackler fails is in identifying what has changed. He quotes Marxist economist Michael Roberts.

"... The Great Recession of 2007-8 and the ensuing Long Depression since 2009 has changed the economic picture.

In a stagnating world capitalist economy, where productivity growth is low, world trade growth has subsided and the profitability of capital has not recovered, cooperation has been replaced by increasingly vicious competition—the thieves have fallen out.”

All of the premises are arguable. Certainly, at least in the US, corporate profits are currently at record highs, so that claim seems undeniably false. The statement about poor productivity growth can be disputed. The slowdown in growth is probably due more to demographic factors--low birth rates and an aging population--than any failure of "capitalism."

By blaming Trump's tantrums on the 2007-8 financial crisis, Mr. Mackler misses the big picture. He doesn't see what is really going on.

Mr. Mackler asserts that, circuses notwithstanding, Trump's policies represent America's ruling class. This is not true. Every business organization--from the Chamber of Commerce to the National Association of Manufacturers, to the car manufacturers, to big and little Ag, and so on down the line--has come out strongly against Trump's tariffs. Whenever he announces them the stock market goes down.

The people who do like the tariffs are the unions. AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka has stated his support. So at least part of Trump's motivation is political--he wants to keep his word to his blue collar constituents. Promises made--promises kept.

The unavoidable fact is that tariffs will hurt the economy. Everybody knows this, barring Mr. Trumka, Pat Buchanan and a few Trotskyists. I think even Trump knows this--otherwise why would he have Larry Kudlow on the White House staff?

The implication of all this is that "Trump's trade bluster" has nothing to do with the economy at all. Instead, it is about geopolitics--an effort to weaken China, who is today America's greatest military competitor. Mr. Mackler alludes to this.

Trump’s denunciation of China for “stealing” U.S. technology was followed by his administration’s widely publicized list of proposed tariffs on Chinese imports. The list includes 1102 categories of goods, all focused on high-tech industries like nuclear reactors, aircraft engine parts, ball bearings, bulldozers, motorcycles, and industrial and agricultural machinery. These are precisely the categories in which China has employed the advanced robotics and related super-modern production technologies—that is, intellectual property rights.

Though he doesn't mention it, the military applications of those technologies are what is most in Trump's mind. The president is willing to take the economic hit now to avoid having a rival superpower in the future. They don't call it a trade "war" for nothing.

So the question is not how tariffs help the economy (they don't) but about how to minimize the blowback they will inevitably cause. And here one can separate the conversation into three topics: China; Fracking; and NAFTA.

China: Mr. Mackler's opinion very much resembles that put forward by Lynn Henderson. I responded to that gentleman here, so no need to repeat it.

Fracking: A milestone was reached in 2010--in that year for the first time in ages the United States exported more oil and gas than it imported. We became energy self-sufficient. Today we import ZERO oil from the Persian Gulf.

This has huge consequences: First, the Straits of Hormuz are no longer a core national security interest of the US. Iran's threat to close them is no longer compelling--we only care about their nukes. That is the essential difference between Europe and the US on the Iran nuclear treaty. Europe is very worried about the Straits of Hormuz, while we are not. Our strategy toward Iran is accordingly much less compromising than the Europeans would like.

Likewise, as Mr. Mackler points out, the US is no longer a reliable defense partner for Europe. If Iran were to close the Straits of Hormuz, it is Europe that will have to send in the cavalry, not the US. That means Germany is going to need a blue water navy--and fast. They're working on it already.

Second, we used to pay for our Persian Gulf oil in dollars, that were then known as petrodollars. But the petrodollars got deposited in dollar accounts in Switzerland, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, and elsewhere offshore, whence they acquired the (misleading) name eurodollars.

Those offshore banks lent out those eurodollars to finance international trade. The abundance and liquidity of eurodollars is what made the dollar the reserve currency, and what enabled the WTO. Since the US ultimately controlled the flow of dollars (euro- or otherwise) around the world (the SWIFT system), the US became the enforcer of WTO rules.

The absence of new petrodollars, along with rising interest rates in the US, means that the supply of eurodollars is drying up--there is now a severe shortage. The liquidity needed for international trade is sharply reduced. This has two big implications.

1. The dollar will cease to be the reserve currency, and there is nothing that in the short term can take its place.
2. The WTO will fall apart--without a reserve currency and without US enforcement, it can't survive.

All of this is a disaster for any country not called the United States.

NAFTA: The new Mexico-US trade agreement will insulate the US from the coming trade disruption. The basic idea is to move manufacturing from China to Mexico. This will be a huge boon to the Mexican economy, which is why they eagerly signed it. It's described very well by Gloria van Rees--here is the money quote.

The big question about the impact will be the economic efficiency of the impact of trade diversion into NAFTA and away from other countries. By this I mean, what will be the impact of buying more parts intra-NAFTA rather than outside NAFTA and layering on top of that the low skill parts outside of NAFTA and the high wage parts intra-NAFTA? Here is what I suspect, and feel free to disagree respectfully of course. Assume there are currently, for simplicity sake, four parts needed to make a car. Each part costs $20, $15, $10, and $5 respectively. For simplicity sake, let’s assume that currently the $20 and $15 parts are made inside NAFTA and the $10 and $5 parts are not. Under the new agreement, I think we can expect the $20 part to remain unchanged, the $15 part rise to a $16 part, the $10 part move to Mexico, and the $5 part stay outside of NAFTA. Again, this is a very simple model, but this would meet the general requirements before and after. What we see primarily is a diversion of trade to Mexico as the primary recipient with some increased work likely going to the US and Canada. However, the major question, which is very difficult to know with good foresight is the impact of trade diversion from the rest of the world to the trade agreement partners.

In summary, Mr. Mackler, for all his facts, misses the elephant in the room. It's fracking. Fracking changes everything.

Further Reading:

• Solidarity on Trump & Trade
• Trade Wars
• Book Review: The Absent Superpower

Book Review: Tomorrow 3.0

Tomorrow 3.0, by Michael Munger, is subtitled Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy. That's actually a much better title--more descriptive of the actual thesis. The "three-point-zero" claim is, in my view, over the top. Version 1.0 was the Neolithic revolution, when hunter-gatherers settled down and became farmers. Version 2.0 was the industrial revolution, when said farmers moved to cities, got "jobs" in our modern sense of the word, and created the consumer cornucopia we enjoy today.

Version 3.0, upon which we are just now embarking, is when workers (most of them, anyway) will lose their jobs because the new economy will not depend on production in the way it has in the past. Instead of finding new and better ways to produce things, entrepreneurs will instead "sell reductions in transaction costs."

The first fruits of this new world are represented by Uber, a company which does not sell taxi services. Instead, taxi services are sold by drivers, for which they are paid by passengers. This exchange is unchanged from the good old days.

What Uber sells instead is a reduction in transaction costs. Consider the bygone era: on a rainy NYC evening after the theater you had to go outside and try to hail a cab. You spend a lot of time waving at yellow cars as they whiz by, already taken. If you're lucky you'll find a taxi within 10 or 20 minutes--or possibly you'll wait an hour.

None of this helps the cabbie. Despite the desperate desire for taxi services, he can't raise his rates by even a penny. He has no incentive to spend his Saturday evening sitting in Broadway traffic in the rain. Better to go someplace else where a passenger can be found with less hassle. (As a former cab driver I am intimately familiar with these sorts of trade-offs.)

So now comes Uber, which solves three problems: triangulation, transfer, and trust. Triangulation is the problem of the driver finding the passenger--the phone tells him exactly where you are. Transfer is the problem of getting you to your destination--the driver already knows where you're going along with the best route to get you there. Finally trust means that you've already given your credit card information--the driver knows he's not gonna get stiffed. And further, the driver has been vetted by all his previous passengers--you are unlikely to be assaulted or robbed.

Beyond which, Uber knows where more cars are needed. No, it doesn't keep track of when the theaters let out, but it realizes that all of a sudden lots of people on Broadway need cabs. So to incentivize the drivers to put up with the traffic, a "surge" is added to the price--which means you'll have your cab within 10 minutes. (Uber now gives you the option to pay a cheaper rate, in exchange for waiting until all the surge payers have already gotten their rides.)

In short, Uber clears the market. It's selling reductions in transactions costs. It saves passengers long waits in the rain, and it compensates drivers for putting up with traffic and hassle. It automates payment, security, and transfer problems, to the advantage of both passenger and driver.

Expand the Uber concept to all sorts of goods and services. Airbnb isn't selling lodging--instead it's selling a reduction in transaction costs for both landlord and tenant. Uber itself is expanding its business in the form of Uber Eats--again not selling take-out food, but instead a reduction in transaction costs.

Mr. Munger argues that this transition from selling products to selling reductions in transaction costs will be as profound a change as the Neolithic and industrial revolutions--Tomorrow 3.0. Somehow I doubt that, but there is no question it will change the way we live.

One implication of the Uber model (especially after robots start doing the driving) is that people won't see any need to buy their own car--they'll just rent a ride when they need one. The result is the automobile market will be far smaller than it is today. So auto workers are gonna be put out of work, and not just because of automation.

Similarly, Airbnb easily puts all hotel front desk and reservations office employees out of a job. Indeed, it likely erases the distinction between a hotel room and an apartment. People--according to Mr. Munger--will be much more likely to rent. (Count me skeptical--most people want to put down roots.) Similarly, take-out food with sharply lower transaction costs competes with the home kitchen--the market for kitchen appliances goes south.

In short, a reduction in transaction costs means that 1) many more items will be rented rather than purchased, implying that 2) less space will be required for storage (you don't need to park your Uber car), and 3) a much smaller market for manufactured goods.

Yesterday we bought personal computers with big hard drives. Today we buy software as a service and store our stuff in the cloud. The size of your computer's hard drive becomes irrelevant. Mr. Munger suggests the same trajectory for many manufactured products--we'll rent them rather than own them, and the need for large garages and extra storage lockers will decline accordingly.  Further, manufacturing firms will also avail themselves of the reduction in transaction costs by sourcing their products from whatever facility in the world is cheapest.

Two things will result from this trend. First, many people, if not completely unemployed, will experience significantly lower wages. And second, prices for manufactured items will decline dramatically. (See my piece, Getting Richer While Feeling Poorer for a description of this trend.)

Mr. Munger describes two phenomena: saltation and separation. The former is a dramatic change in lifestyle because of a disruptive change in technology. Mr. Munger cites a woman named Parisa--a burkha-clad lady from Herat, Afghanistan, not permitted to attend school. But she had a smartphone through which she enrolled in coding class, enabling her to write apps that she posted on Github, for which she was paid in bitcoin. It earns her a first-world income. She's a beneficiary of saltation.

Separation, meanwhile, refers to those who can't adapt to new technology. Consider Parisa's hypothetical cousin (not mentioned by Mr. Munger) who was a seamstress--until the dramatic fall in apparel prices rendered that profession completely obsolete. She wound up unemployed.

The dual trends--saltation and separation--will blur the distinction between the advanced and developing world. The beneficiaries of saltation will get rich, regardless of where they live. Those who are separated, meanwhile, will become poor, again independent of location. Global inequality will grow--not between countries but within countries.

Mr. Munger's solution to a world in which large numbers of people are unemployed is a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), also known as a negative income tax. In his version, BIG will replace all other social welfare spending: food stamps, housing vouchers, education costs, social security, Medicaid, etc.--maybe even Medicare. Everybody (not just poor people), in lieu of the panoply of vouchers will instead get cash--perhaps as much as $20,000/year per person--just for being alive.

I'm not against the idea, though I think it's a political non-starter.

There's lots more in Mr. Munger's book. It's well worth the read.

Further Reading:

• Crypto as a Global Currency
• Arnold Kling's Moonshot
• Book Review: The Complacent Class

Louis Proyect on "Radical Professors"

Louis Proyect pens a piece entitled Radical professors and the hazards of social media that cites four examples of leftist academics who have gotten themselves in trouble by intemperate tweeting: Steven Salaita, George Cicciarello-Maher, Johnny Eric Williams, and James Livingston.

The most egregious case is that of George C-M, a former professor at Drexel University, who was somehow inspired to tweet "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide." Mr. Proyect offers some background. The tweet was

...prompted by the racist backlash against State Farm Insurance for purportedly advancing “white genocide” through a commercial featuring an interracial couple. This trope of “white genocide” is ubiquitous to the alt-right, including the business about white farmers in South Africa being killed off. After the fuckwit Tucker Carlson claimed that this was taking place, Trump followed up with a tweet even though it had no factual basis. Unlike the University of Illinois, Drexel University defended his free speech rights but George resigned eventually because the death threats and other forms of harassment became intolerable. Like Salaita, he was guilty of nothing except using Swiftian satire that might have been acceptable among leftists but not to Fox News’s audience.

Mr. Proyect claims some context of which I was unaware, e.g., that State Farm Insurance somehow advocated "white genocide" in a commercial. I find this hard to believe. He further maintains that we rightists are somehow fixated on said supposed genocide--I, for one, live in no fear of such an event, however disturbing recent events in South Africa might be.

The upshot of this is that we're supposed to excuse George's tweet as "Swiftian satire," i.e., just harmless fun that only a dedicated right-winger could take out of context.

Of course tweets come without context--almost by definition--and if George is foolish enough to proclaim his ardent desire for "white genocide" via that medium, then who am I to disbelieve him? Even after reading Mr. Proyect's explanation, I can't understand the tweet in any way besides literally.

I don't fear "white genocide," but at the same time I don't believe anybody who advocates it deserves to work as a professor. George has, whether purposely or foolishly, disqualified himself from the academic profession.

As an aside, if some right-wing professor (there are a few) had posted a similar tweet about African-Americans or LGBTQ people, the "Swiftian satire" excuse wouldn't have passed the laugh test. Such a person would have been fired before sundown--and rightly so.

As a second aside, the tweet can possibly be interpreted as a threat, in which case it is not protected speech. Of the four cases Mr. Proyect cites, this is the only one where I'm not sure First Amendment rights apply.

Now lets turn to the sorry case of Mr. Salaita, who opined that "At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?" among many other things. Mr. Salaita had been offered a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois, but because of antisemitic tweeting the offer was withdrawn before he could start work. Mr. Proyect writes "It should have been obvious that this was Swiftian satire but the board preferred to placate wealthy Jewish donors rather than uphold academic freedom."

For the life of me I can't see anything satirical in Mr. Salaita's tweets, Swiftian or otherwise. I have no trouble calling him an anti-Semite. That said, he does not directly threaten or libel anybody, so despite being hate speech it is clearly protected under the First Amendment. But he does not have a right to work at the University of Illinois as a professor, and the school was right to rescind the offer.

Mr. Proyect blames "wealthy Jewish donors" for the outcome. I don't know if that's true, but let's suppose it is. The University of Illinois--faculty and students alike--are dependent on donations, especially in Illinois where state funding has been cut to the bone. Mr. Proyect will put that all at risk just so that some clueless little twerp can run off at the mouth with his vile hate speech. Hiring Mr. Salaita would have severely damaged the institution, and the Board had no choice but to let him go.

So why do these people post such career-ending tweets? Are they really that stupid? Well, yes they are, but there is also a larger story to tell. They are all academics and as such they live in an echo chamber. Status in academia is achieved by loudly touting one's anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-misogynist, anti-Israel (Jewish) credentials. It's an arms race--the more and better your virtue-signalling, the higher your status within the community (and the more likely you are to get published, funding, tenure, etc.).

We recently endured such an episode on my campus. A long-time political science professor--often interviewed by The Economist and the New York Times--made the rather obvious observation that the Republican John Faso will likely win the congressional seat over the Democrat Antonio Delgado. He also had the temerity to criticize hip-hop music, leading to a faculty piling-on that lasted for several weeks, ended only by the offending professor's abject apology, though he had said nothing he needed to apologize for.

It's nothing but virtue-signalling all the way down. And sometimes this internecine, academic competition escapes its bounds, leading to tweets that, to people in the real world, are correctly interpreted as hate speech.

That brings us to the sad case of James Livingston, who tweeted

OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am a white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would my dinner, and the place is overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around on the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.

I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know it's about access to my dinner. Fuck you too. 

As Mr. Proyect points out, this isn't even political. It definitely is protected, and further, it's not hate speech, even though it sounds that way. There is no way that Mr. Livingston should lose his job at Rutgers University because of it.

But it is pathetic. This guy is so insecure about his own moral virtue that he has to condemn other restaurant patrons for their lack of "woke-ness." Most people visit restaurants for the food--not to demonstrate their political bonafides. Harlem Shake gets pretty good reviews on Yelp. How would the management and employees feel if all of a sudden white customers stayed away because they weren't "woke" enough?

He's definitely got a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he needs to visit a psychiatrist?

I'll take issue with Mr. Proyect's description of these professors as "radical." A radical implies somebody of independent thought. These people, far from being radical, simply can't control themselves, be it from some psychological defect or too much academic peer pressure. Instead, they are the slaves of a virtue-signalling mob.

Further Reading:

• If Everybody is a Racist, Then Nobody is a Racist
• Sex and the Alpha Male
• Louis "Lyndon LaRouche" Proyect