I have just completed my annual review with the employer for whom I started working a year ago. They like me. They really like me.

Since starting I’ve had three title upgrades. In the review my work ethic, flexibility, integrity, and focus on making the company better were all singled out for praise.

Of course, no one in the company has a greater breadth of experience than I. How could they? I’m old enough to be the grandfather of a lot of the people there.

I materially agree with the editors’ of Bloomberg’s remarks on immigration:

(Bloomberg Opinion) — U.S. immigration policies should be guided by two basic principles. The first is that immigrants are indispensable to American innovation and long-term economic growth. The second is that laws to secure the country’s borders must be rigorously enforced.

So far, so good.

Current law is heavily weighted toward immigrants with family ties, who make up nearly 70% of those who receive legal permanent residence. Another 4% come in through the “diversity lottery,” which awards visas to residents of countries with historically low rates of immigration to the U.S. Of the 1 million green cards awarded in the last year before the pandemic, fewer than 15% were for work-based

To correct this imbalance, the U.S. should adopt a points-based immigration system, similar to those in Canada and Australia, and give preferences to high-skilled immigrants. Those with specialized knowledge, outstanding language skills, and entrepreneurial promise, as well as foreign students who earn advanced degrees in the U.S., should receive highest priority.

which approximates what I’ve been saying for decades.

Attempted border crossings have reached record highs under Biden’s watch. To deal with the crisis, the administration has relied on a World War II-era provision called Title 42, which allows the government to curb immigration during a public-health emergency. Since the spring of 2020, when the Trump administration introduced this practice, the U.S. has expelled more than 1 million migrants from the border without allowing them to claim asylum, a callous practice that violates longtime U.S. policy.

Of course, only a tiny fraction are legitimate asylum-seekers. The overwhelming preponderance, as just about everybody understands, are looking for jobs.

As it happens, the administration has a more effective tool for managing this problem. A Trump-era policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols requires those apprehended at the border to remain in Mexico as they go through the asylum process. The program is flawed, with some applicants having to endure unsafe conditions while waiting for hearings. But it grants migrants legal representation and an opportunity to make their case in front of a U.S. immigration official. Bizarrely, rather than fixing this system and expanding it, the administration is trying to rescind it in court while continuing to enforce Title 42. It should be doing the opposite.

The Biden Administration is still harboring the fantasy that the masses of people trying to get into the United States are “yearning to breathe free” rather than “yearning for a raise”. I doubt they’ll embrace the editors’ suggestions. They’d need to admit they were wrong and abandon the promised permanent Democratic majority which it is now clear will not happen anyway.

The only thing missing from the editors’ prescriptions that would make me happy is a greatly expanded guest worker program. That is what is needed and what many of the people coming here want.

In an op-ed at The Hill Joe Concha remarks on the situation facing President Biden:

To be fair, President Trump’s poll numbers were similarly dismal at this stage of his presidency. But there are two major differences:

1) Trump’s polls could be largely explained by a special counsel’s investigation into possible Russia collusion and the 2016 election (which ultimately led nowhere).

2) Trump’s base, those who strongly supported him, was infinitely stronger and more reliable than Biden’s current base, which at just 15 percent strongly approving ain’t much of a base at all.

Meanwhile, a majority of Democrats don’t even want Joe Biden to run again in 2024, with just 48 percent supporting the idea. This is unheard of after just one year.

Two more big numbers to consider: Less than 7-in-10 Black voters (69 percent) support the 46th president. This is significant, because more than 9-in-10 Black voters (92 percent) voted for him in 2020.

So, we’re talking about an almost 25-point drop in a relatively short period of time. Inflation obviously is playing a huge role here, with the Wall Street Journal estimating that the higher price of goods is costing families an extra $276 per month, or an additional $3,300 or so annually. Many poor and middle-income families and single parents and individuals simply cannot afford that while living paycheck-to-paycheck.

It bears repeating: Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination for president because he wasn’t Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and won the general election because he wasn’t Donald Trump.

But his handlers thought he had a big mandate to be the next FDR, to radically change the country by expanding government in ways never seen before. Trillions in new spending have already been signed into law. Trillions more were proposed via Build Back Better, with the administration arguing that such spending would reduce inflation and the deficit, which makes zero sense.

In New York Magazine Eric Levitz elaborates somewhat on that:

Although Biden has lost ground with most every demographic group, he’s suffered especially steep losses with African American voters. In polling from NBC News, Biden’s approval rating among Black voters has fallen from 83 percent last April to 64 percent today. Quinnipiac University’s surveys show a similar trend, with Biden’s Black support dropping from 78 percent to 57 percent over the course of his first year in office.

Much of that erosion has come in just the last few months. A Pew Research survey released this week finds that Biden has bled seven percentage points of support among Black adults since September. Over that same period, the president lost just four points of support from whites, and virtually none from Asian or Hispanic voters.

Mr. Levitz goes on to document the reasons for the declne:

• Vaccine mandates
• Inflation
• Urban crime

Let’s not mince words. Black voters, particularly older black voters are the Democratic base. Not college professors. Not young voters. Older black voters vote. A defection by black voters could result in a debacle for Democrats in the mid-terms. Look at the 2020 margins. It wouldn’t just bring trouble in the “battleground states” (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, etc.) It could even put some “non-battleground states” like Maine, New Mexico, and Virginia in play.

Before I remark on James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column on the challenge that the homeless pose for the people of Los Angeles, let’s reflect on this article by Benjamin Oreskes and David Lauter in the Los Angeles Times from 2019:

As people living in tents, RVs and makeshift shelters become a fact of life in neighborhoods far and wide, homelessness is now an all-consuming issue in Los Angeles County, with 95% of voters calling it a serious or very serious problem, according to a new poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Business Council Institute.

The near-unanimous opinion that homelessness ranks as a top concern marks a sharp change from earlier surveys of Los Angeles voters over the past dozen years, said Fred Yang of Hart Research, the Washington, D.C., polling firm that conducted the survey.

Only traffic congestion and housing affordability — at 88% and 85%, respectively — came close to rivaling the near universal concern over homelessness.

“It’s all over L.A.,” said Justine Marine, a student who participated in a focus group tied to the countywide poll. “You can be in a good neighborhood, and it could be right around the corner. You can’t escape it.”

The methodology of that poll is described here. Angelenos are sympathetic with the homeless; they want those who need treatment to get it. They just don’t want homeless people in front of their houses or in their backyards. They want them discreetly out of sight.

Things have not improved since 2019. If anything they’re worse. I honestly don’t think the people of Los Angeles are quite where they need to be on this issue quite yet.

Now on to James Freeman:

Fleeing Los Angeles residents have lately been willing to acknowledge the expensive dysfunction and lawlessness that’s driving them to relocate. But this week brings hope that even those who remain may finally be willing to turn away from the extremes of progressive governance. Voters who decide not to abandon L.A. before this fall’s elections for mayor and other municipal positions can set a new course toward sanity.

A group of Angelenos recently expressed to Democratic pollsters their frustration with the city’s pandemic of homelessness. Benjamin Oreskes and Doug Smith report in the Los Angeles Times today:

“The degradation of life in L.A. is exponential, and I don’t see an end. The politicians are doofuses,” a white male voter said.
“California is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Why can’t we do anything?” a Black voter wondered.
“I run into one or two every day, and I wonder: This is someone’s son. Did he refuse help? How can you help them? We’re failing them,” a Latino voter remarked.

Sympathy is not enough. Making treatment available is not enough. Making housing available is not enough. Some of the homeless do not want treatment and in fact want to live on the street. I honestly believe that any person who deals with the homeless on a routine basis will tell you: sometimes you’ve got to do what they need rather than what they want.

From the recent LAT report linked above:

Angelenos, the pollsters concluded, are angry over the condition of the streets, disturbed by the human suffering taking place on them and frustrated with the inability of government to do anything about it. They want elected officials to set realistic goals, pursue tough policies and hold themselves accountable.

“You go to the store, you go to school, you go to work, and there they are, they’re everywhere,” Sragow said of the homeless people camped on streets around the county. “They’re just everywhere. And the measure of success will be when they’re not everywhere.”

When the trajectory of the policies that have been tried have failed time and again, you’ve got to change the trajectory of policy.

I think there’s a missing piece, a lapse in understanding in this editorial from the editors of the Washington Post on the failure of President Trump’s strategy with respect to China. Oh, I agree with them that the strategy was not particularly successful.

The results are in: China didn’t buy anything extra from the United States.

The purchases of U.S. exports that China did make in the past two years barely got back to the amount China was purchasing in 2017 — before Mr. Trump started his trade war, according to calculations by Chad P. Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. U.S. exporters will never get back the sales they lost, and few have seen any meaningful growth in their sales to China under the “deal.” “The only undisputed ‘historical’ aspect of that agreement is its failure,” said Mr. Bown.

The main result of Mr. Trump’s bluster on trade was higher costs to the American public. Numerous studies have shown how tariffs were mostly passed along to American consumers, causing prices to rise on thousands of popular everyday items. It was a debacle that was easy to predict. Business leaders, economists and former trade officials from both parties warned the Trump White House repeatedly that the nation would have been better off without the trade war and the tenuous agreement that was ultimately reached with China (and not adhered to).

The smarter move would have been to keep the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the big trade deal with other nations in the Pacific, including Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, Australia and Chile. The whole purpose of the TPP was to boost trade among other nations and lessen reliance on China, which was excluded from the deal. But Mr. Trump pulled out of the TPP in his first week in office, and other nations went ahead and completed the trade pact on their own. In an ironic twist, China is now petitioning to join.

concluding:

The United States has just learned costly lessons about the futility of trade wars and how China can’t be trusted to honor its deals. Now the Biden administration has to figure out how to hold Beijing to account for failing to fulfill its commitments. One conclusion ought to be clear: More tariffs are not the answer.

The missing piece is that I don’t think that the editors understand that the preferred strategy of the Chinese authorities is autarky. They don’t particularly want to buy anything from us they don’t have to or from anybody else for that matter. They’d rather be self-sufficient. They have made that abundantly clear.

Where I think I disagree most with the editors is in the end state. I think the end state is giving the Chinese authorities what they want and not selling anything to China, not buying anything from them, either. Our entire experiment in engagement with China has been a dreadful mistake, eviscerating U. S. productive capacity and strengthening China.

I won’t dwell on President Trump’s mistakes. My hypothesis is that he overestimated his own ability not to mention his energy, preferring bilateral trade agreements over multi-lateral relationships like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. One only has so much time, energy, enthusiasm, and ability. That’s why multi-lateral agreements exist.

This main question at hand is now what? How concerned are South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand about an aggressive, truculent, and hypersensitive China? There is probably an opportunity there for us if we have the wit to exploit it which, if the past is any indication, we don’t.

I found Ezra Klein’s most recent column in the New York Times interesting reading if only because it illustrated for me once again why I’m not a progressive although I share some of their putative aspirations. What concerns me about Ezra is that I get the impression that for him a larger, more assertive federal government is an end rather than just a means to an end. He opens with a shout-out to European socialism c. 1960 or 1970:

If you had to distill the ambitions of the Democratic Party down to a single word, you might well choose “Denmark.” But “France” would also work. Or “Germany.” Any Western European nation, really, with the social insurance options many of us envy: universal health care and affordable child care, to name but a few. Much of modern American liberalism is designed to close those gaps, to build here what already exists there.

France and Denmark’s systems of social services were created in the post-war period, up to about 1970. Germany’s is much older. I always find it entertaining when people point to a country whose entire population is smaller than than of New York City and, when its system of social services was established was 98% ethnic Danes and at least culturally Lutheran. The question is not whether such a system could work for the Danes in 1970. The question is whether such a system would be established now. Based on the rate at which the Nordic countries are retreating from their welfare states as they become more diverse, the evidence would suggest not.

Leave that aside because it’s not what the column’s actually about. What Ezra wants is national industrial planning. He wants the federal government to set the objectives for the entire economy not only to achieve the sort of expansive system of social services the Europeans adopted a half century or more ago but to head off climate change:

Build Back Better is a grab-bag of longstanding Democratic proposals jammed together into a superbill designed to evade the filibuster. Or maybe I should say: That’s what it was. But Build Back Better is, at this point, a dead letter. Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition forced Democrats back to the drawing board. The silver lining is that they now have the opportunity to design something that does have a good organizing principle.

But that will require resolving two fundamental tensions in how Democrats conceive of not just what the economy needs but what the government can do to help, and how to know when what the government is doing has hurt.

Many Democrats still fear the dreaded specter of “industrial policy” — of government picking winners and losers, and wasting money or reputation on bad bets and patronage. That pushes them to extremely general goals: more workers, or more research, or more broadband.

But that fear is now matched by a horror of where markets are leading us — into climate crisis. Here, the Biden administration gets specific. It names the technologies it wants and the kinds of infrastructure we lack: better batteries and more electric car charging stations and cheaper solar panels and next-generation geothermal and nuclear technologies.

It is possible that, had Ezra studied economics rather than political science or, had he been a better student, he might have encountered some notion of the knowledge problem in planned economies. Such systems obscure the very price signals that enable an economy to function optimally. And, if he hopes that self-interest can be purged from politicians and other notional public servants, he’s instantiating another of my pet peeves—the notion that human nature is infinitely malleable. There are some eternal verities and self-interest is one of them.

In his conclusion he manages to tie his opening to his strategy:

If Democrats want to claim a bigger role for government in shaping our future, they need to be the ones who are most outraged when it is government that is holding us back.

But to do that, they need a vision of America’s future that’s not just lifted from Western Europe’s past.

Do you see why that makes my wonder whether a “bigger role for government” is an end or a means for him?

My own view is that I think that whether the federal government is too big or too small is a distraction from our actual problem. The federal government is doing the wrong things. I don’t want to minimize government or maximize it. I want to right-size it.

I’ve been musing about the differences among different generations of Americans. As you are presumably aware various generations have been given nicknames: the G. I. generation—born 1901-1927 (Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”); the Silent Generation—1928-1945; the Baby Boomers—1946-1964; Generation X—1965-1980; Millennial Generation—1981-1996; and most recently Generation Z—1997-. That’s not even vaguely scientific and it’s not hard to find exceptions but I think there’s a kernel of truth in the notion. I think you can find characteristic attitudes or attributes in different age cohorts.

IMO these generations are greatly misunderstood, particularly among people who are younger than the generation about which they’re talking. I find that Silent Generation and Baby Boomers are frequently lumped together or mistaken for one another, for example. Or the G. I. generation and the generation that preceded them.

This morning I’ve been thinking about the individuals who might be thought of as the voices of their generations and thought I’d open up that topic for discussion. So, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald was frequently considered the voice of the “Lost Generation”. Here are my first stabs at the voices of their respective generations:

Do “generations” have no meaning? Does “voice of a generation” have no meaning? Any thoughts about my picks.

BTW, most of my colleagues, who tend to be Generation X or Millenials, have no idea of how old I am since I sound quite youthful. They know I’m older than they are since I speak blithely about things that happened before they were born. I get along fine with them. I’m told I’m extremely energizing, conveying enthusiasm which might surprise my readers.

CO:

Dolly Parton, yes, at least for a certain segment. Elvis Presley was an interpreter not a writer. I have no sense for how well Carrie Underwood represents her generation.

My work day is highly eccentric these days. My day typically starts at 6:30am, I have multiple meetings through the day, and I’m done for the day at 2:30pm. Then I take Kara for a walk and watch Jeopardy at 3:30pm. Two or three times a week I’ll have meetings at 5:00am. I’ve put my foot down on meetings earlier than 5:00am—if they must have a meeting earlier, I’ll as that it be recorded for me.

One of the things I’ve noticed while watching Jeopardy is how ignorant so many of the contestants are about American history. When they’re knowledgeable about American history it tends to be a consequence of professional development.

In his Washington Post column David Von Drehle inches towards a conclusions that I reached years ago:

Not so long ago, professors of literature were known to wonder what would happen when the steep decline in church attendance produced a generation of students unfamiliar with the Bible. How would those readers make sense of the Western world’s books and poetry?

The Bible was the lumberyard from which Western writers drew their material. They could discuss Solomonic wisdom or Job-like suffering, write phrases such as “turn the other cheek” or “prodigal son,” or give their books titles such as “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” or “East of Eden” with confidence that these two-by-fours — these lengths of rebar — would bear weight in a reader’s mind.

As it turns out, that rather large question was actually much too small. Yes, the shared biblical framework crumbled, but as part of a broader collapse of all common cultural structure. History will likely conclude that the 20th century was the high-water mark of mass communication.

It made sense to speak of “the audience” for television, for movies, for music. It made sense to measure “audience share.” The television set pulled in maybe half a dozen channels. Everyone watched whatever was showing at whatever time of day the programmers chose to show it. The radio dial was the same in every automobile dashboard.

On Feb. 28, 1983, more than 60 percent of all households with a TV in the United States watched the final episode of the sitcom “M*A*S*H” — all on the same platform, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and all in the same evening. It was a fair bet that everyone you met, young and old, knew what “the Swamp” looked like and what drink was served there. They knew that Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt of Mill Valley, Calif., was named for his parents, Bea and Jay, and that Max Klinger was a fan of the Toledo Mud Hens baseball team.

Today, little remains of that common culture. Only the Super Bowl, played this Sunday in Los Angeles, attracts an audience of comparable proportions. Even the Olympic Games, unfolding on the fake snow of Beijing, cannot compel the American people to sit down and share an experience together.

I don’t watch professional athletics, whether won television or in person and I haven’t watched a second of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Chesterton noted that the United States was a country founded on a creed. It doesn’t have ties of blood or land or ancient history to bind people together. That creed, sort of a secular religion, included the sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence, belief in the benignity of the Founding Fathers, and, admittedly, glossed over lots of darkness and shortcomings. So what? Name for me a country whose mythology doesn’t do the same thing. The difference is that our mythology is all that bound us together.

Now, as Mr. Von Drehle observes, the mythology has eroded and there are no forces with which to build a common culture. I don’t believe the outcome will be as benign as those who laud the abandoning of that common culture seem to believe.