I encourage you to read Joel Kotkin’s post at The American Mind on our supply chain problems:

The chaos on the ground level may not much hurt the elites of Manhattan or Palo Alto, but inflation, which is now expected to continue apace for at least the next year, has wiped out wage gains in the U.S., the UK, and Germany. Low-income groups are the most threatened, struggling to pay energy costs, surging rents, and higher food prices. All this is also eroding President Biden’s already weak poll numbers.

Our vulnerability to supply chain disruption clearly predates the Biden Administration, forged by the abandonment of the production economy over the past 50 years by American business and government, encouraged and applauded by the clerisy of business consultants. The result has been massive trade deficits that now extend to high-tech products, and even components for military goods, many of which are now produced in China. When companies move production abroad, they often follow up by shifting research and development as well. All we are left with is advertising the products, and ringing up the sales, assuming they arrive.

Unable to stock shelves, procure parts, power your home, or even protect your own country without waiting for your ship to come in, Americans are now unusually vulnerable to shipping rates shooting up to ten times higher than before the pandemic. Not surprisingly, pessimism about America’s direction, after a brief improvement Biden’s election, has risen by 20 points. The shipping crisis is now projected to last through 2023.

The views expressed there closely parallel my own. Follow that up with this post at Doomberg:

We aren’t in the hindsight business at Doomberg, but rather the foresight business. So, here’s our best guess at what is going to transpire after the coming dark storm clouds finish drenching us with their rain of doom:

• The breaking of the European energy markets is just a symptom of a greater disease. It reflects the demise of the just-in-time logistics philosophy at the heart of modern capitalism.
• Companies can no longer delegate their survival to the tight performance of their supplier base in the name of efficiency. This works until it dramatically and disasterously doesn’t.
• There will be a massive build out of raw material and work-in-progress inventory, which will likely further exacerbate ongoing inflationary pressures in the near term.
• There will be a staggering wave of onshoring. Businesses simply can’t rely on unreliable ports, a shortage of longshoremen and truck drivers, or a backup in rail car availability. So, they won’t.

If we’re right, the scale of the upcoming wave of onshoring will likely surpass the flight from the cities we observed after Covid, at least as measured by economic impact. America is going to learn to build stuff again.

We’ve spent the last 30 years doing exactly the wrong things. Rather than encouraging everyone to seek a college education we should have encouraged vocational training right along with it. College just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and that shouldn’t be the expectation. Truly “building back better” means reshoring and nearshoring. Rather than encouraging businesses to move production offshore where it is decorously out of sight, we should have encouraged them to remain in the United States. Rather than encouraging trade with China we should have controlled trade with China very scrupulously, increasing it much more gradually and only as the Chinese authorities made genuine reforms.

And there will be problems in dealing with the BANANA wing of the environmental movement. Not only can we build more here and reduce carbon emissions at the same time, we must reshore and/or nearshore production if we are to reduce carbon emissions.

In a profile of Matt Taibbi by Ross Barkan at New York Magazine, essentially a lament that he’s now training his fire at the major media and progressives rather than reserving it for corporate moguls and Republicans, there’s this nugget:

But what if Trump wasn’t a fascist, after all? What if he was just a lousy, unhinged Republican president? When do journalists slam the emergency button? “During that early Trump period, I felt continually that I was put in the difficult position of having to either co-sign an erroneous piece of anti-Trump propaganda or be accused of being a Trump-lover,” Taibbi said. “I certainly lost a lot of audience during those years, and like Glenn was the subject of a lot of criticism from within the business, for not being sufficiently aggressive in my coverage of Trump. However, that had nothing to do with how I felt about him, and everything to do with an increasing unease with the way he was being covered.”

which encapsulates my view pretty well. I never liked and could never vote for him for any number of reasons not the least being that I am deeply wary of people who grew up rich, have always been rich, and don’t really know anything else. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, the rich are different from you and me. I don’t think he should have been president but I also don’t think that John Kennedy should have been president. The ultra-rich are just too different.

I’m also struck by how many of the people accusing other people of being fascists themselves are fascists by any reasonable definition. It’s a Humpty-Dumpty world. I don’t think that Trump is a fascist; I think he’s a jerk. I don’t think most of his supporters are authoritarians; I think they support him because of his combative style. They’re tired of nice, temperate accommodating Republicans like Mitt Romney, tired of them knuckling under to progressives.

I also think that most people being called socialists these days are probably just about as socialist as the people calling them that. I think that today’s Democratic Party is composed of Fabian socialists, old-fashioned machine Democrats, and a remarkably large number of social conservatives, most of them black and Hispanic while today’s Republican Party is composed of Chamber of Commerce Republicans, anarcho-capitalists, and social conservatives including a handful of white supremacists.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

Rather than citing someone else’s opinion let’s just brainstorm the puzzling decline in the labor force. As I’ve said before I think it’s multi-factorial. Let’s spitball a few of the factors:

1. Early retirement
2. People nervous about going back to work while COVID-19 is still about
3. People who returned home to other countries and haven’t been able to get back
4. It’s an artifact
5. People who feel able to avoid work due to federal, state, or local subsidies
6. People for whom it doesn’t make economic sense to work
7. Skills mismatch

I think that all of those are factors to one degree or another and I can’t even start to provide quantitative estimates on how important they are. A million here and a million there and pretty soon you’re up to 7 million people. I wanted to comment on a couple of those.

People who returned home to other countries and haven’t been able to get back

I think there are quite a few legal and illegal migrant workers who left the United States in 2020 and are unable to return for one reason or another. I know at least two guys who went home to India early in 2020 for visa reasons and got stuck there.

It’s an artifact

Something rarely mentioned is that the “shortfall” is relative to a number which is itself questionable. Let’s say you’re working a minimum (or sub-minimum) wage job. You’re counted as one worker. Let’s say you take another minimum or sub-minimum wage job. Now you’re counted as two workers. If one of those jobs never comes back, you’re only counted as one worker. If a half million people fit that scenario that could account for quite a few of those missing workers.

Skills mismatch

A lot of the jobs that have just gone away were minimum or sub-minimum wage jobs that didn’t require fancy skills. If the number of jobs that require highly desireable skills has increased while the number of jobs that don’t has decreased, that would manifest as shortfall in the labor force.

What other factors are contributing to the gap?

After doing point by point refutations of a half dozen of Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, the editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

This is how it goes for election truthers. First the allegation was ballots marked with Sharpies, then voting machines tied to Venezuela, then more votes than voters. Now Mr. Trump apparently thinks his own Attorney General did an inside job. Electoral fraud does happen: A Pennsylvania man received five years of probation this spring after voting for Mr. Trump on behalf of his dead mother. The price of liberty, as they say, is vigilance. But the evidence doesn’t show anything real that could dent Pennsylvania’s 80,555-vote margin.

Even if it did, Mr. Trump would be two states short of victory. Georgia’s ballots were counted three times and a signature check done. The Arizona audit was a dud. A Michigan inquiry led by a GOP lawmaker ended up keelhauling “willful ignorance” and grifters who use misinformation “to raise money or publicity.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers who made baseless claims have been sued for defamation—twice. They’ve been sanctioned by a federal judge. Does Mr. Trump imagine a conspiracy so deep that practically everybody is in on it?

Mr. Trump is making these claims elsewhere, so we hardly did him a special favor by letting him respond to our editorial. We offer the same courtesy to others we criticize, even when they make allegations we think are false.

Some of this is propelled by characteristic Trump self-delusion. He can’t bring himself to believe that he lost. Some are delighted that Trump and his supporters are keeping this ball up in the air. It keeps them from having to run on their own records. They prefer to run against Trump.

I agree with some of what’s in Josh Hawley’s New York Times op-ed, disagree with other things. Here’s its kernel:

At its core, our crisis of scarcity is a crisis of production, most acutely felt in the goods that we need the most. Whether it be personal protective equipment, pharmaceutical drugs or semiconductors, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a hard truth: The United States — the strongest country in the world — cannot produce an adequate supply of the critical goods it needs.

The failure of the nation’s productive capacity to keep up with its needs was not inevitable. It was a choice. Over the last 30 years, experts and politicians in Washington from both parties helped build a global economic system that prioritized the free flow of capital over the wages of American workers, and the free flow of goods over the resiliency of our nation’s supply chains. We liberalized and expanded trade relations with China under the delusion that it could be influenced into becoming a peace-loving democracy. We ceded more and more of our national sovereignty to multinational organizations like the World Trade Organization, and supported China’s membership to that body.

I would quibble a bit about the wording, for example, “does not” rather than “cannot” but you will undoubtedly note the similarity between that and things I’ve been saying around here for, literally, decades.

Here’s his proposed remedy:

I’m proposing new legislation to take a big first step: the Make in America to Sell in America Act.

Under this plan, officials at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense will identify goods and inputs they determine to be critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base. These goods would then become subject to a new local content requirement: if companies want access to the American market for these critical and essential goods, then over 50 percent of the value of those goods they sell in America must be made in America. Companies will have three years to comply, and can receive targeted, temporary waivers if they need more time to reshore production. In effect, the legislation applies the domestic sourcing principles of the Buy American Act — a law that governs federal government procurement — to the entire commercial market.

When it comes to our most critical goods, this “majority-made” standard is just common sense and harder to game than more complicated rules. And the requirements of this standard will be enforced with a compliance mechanism that closely mirrors one of the nation’s oldest trade remedy regimes: anti-dumping. Under my proposal, domestic producers can petition the U.S. International Trade Commission if they suspect that corporations or importers have violated the local content requirement, and the secretary of commerce can take enforcement actions such as civil penalties following an investigation to ensure the new standards are met.

What I agree with is

• We need to produce more of what we consume
• Certain strategic goods like memories, processors, ICs, some pharmaceuticals, some foods and food additives, etc. must be produced here full stop.

and what I disagree with is

• His criticism of the Biden Administration. I think the present ill-considered emphasis on frugality is just turning necessity into a virtue. I think the Administration has been misled by experts starting with the Federal Reserve governors.
• His failure to recognize just how difficult and expensive what he’s proposing will be. It will take substantial subsidies.
• No matter how subsidized we need to recognize that actual production by the federal government may be required for some goods.
• I don’t think he recognizes the influence of the BANANA faction in the Democratic Party. They will be uncontrovertibly opposed to this.
• I think his approach isn’t granular enough.

While I agree that we need to produce more of what we consume, I also think that some things should be “nearshored”, i.e. produced in Canada, Caribbean, Central or South American countries. That would also take a bit of the pressure off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach which appear to be one component of the bottleneck.

There’s actually something entertaining and even, possibly, marginally useful in David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column. The column considers the gap between a relatively small, highly cohesive group of progressives

who went to the same colleges, live in the same neighborhoods and have trouble seeing beyond their subculture’s point of view

and the rest of the country. He proposes a “Rotten Tomatoes” index:

If you want a simple way to see the gap between this subculture and the rest of the country, look at Rotten Tomatoes. People who write critically about movies and shows often have different tastes than the audiences around them, especially when politics is involved.

“Hillbilly Elegy” was a movie in which the hero was widely known, in real life, to be a Republican. Audiences liked the movie fine. It has an 83 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Culture writers frequently loathed it. It has a 25 percent positive critics’ score. That’s a 58-point gap.

Dave Chappelle recently released a comedy special that took comic potshots at almost everyone. Audiences adored it. It has a 96 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (though admittedly it’s unclear how many of the raters actually watched it). A small group of people found it a moral atrocity and the current critic score is 44 percent positive. That’s a 52-point gap.

There are, of course, multiple ways of looking at that. One could be that the group he’s calling out are out of touch. Yet another way is to wonder whether Internet users are actually representative of the country. The other turns the first explanation around. Most of the people are out of touch with their true best interests and they need the leadership and guidance of that sometimes literally inbred group. That’s the “vanguardism” I have been writing about.

Another one from the department of “it’s always nice to be recognized”. The editors of the Wall Street Journal note the lengths to which Illinois Democrats are going in their gerrymandering of Illinois’s districts:

The main progressive demand for the rewrite was that it carve a new majority-Hispanic district out of the Chicago area. In the reshuffle it also manages to push two Democratic-leaning suburban Chicago districts (the 6th and the 14th) further out of reach for Republicans. The 17th district (across the border from Davenport, Ia.) also becomes less competitive.

The result is to make the proposed 14-seat Democratic majority in the Illinois House delegation more impregnable. The first gerrymander, according to the Princeton analysis, contained three Democratic districts where GOP candidates could be expected to perform at 46.5% or better—and thus win in a good year. But the new map has zero. That means a bigger wave would be needed for Republicans to compete beyond their three safe districts.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has already lost his credibility on district-drawing by promising independent maps in 2018, then signing off on gerrymandered state legislative districts this year. If the Legislature approves the new Congressional map, the Democratic Governor will likely be a rubber stamp. Despite years of hyperbolic moralizing about Republican gerrymandering, Democrats are pursuing the most extreme gerrymanders whenever they can.

Complaining about how undemocratic your political opponents are rings a lot less hollow when you eschew taking undemocratic steps yourself when you have the opportunity. I would also point out that, as FiveThirtyEight learned when they did a nationwide analysis, Democrats actually benefit more from gerrymandering thatn do Republicans.

One thing the editors do not point out is that the proposed legislative map redraw does not merely cut Republicans out of the equation but goes to extraordinary lengths to preserve black incumbents at the expense of Hispanics. I’m not kidding in my prediction that white and Hispanic Chicago voters are more likely to make common cause than black and Hispanic voters.

This is emphatically not a case of “both sides do it” but one of “human beings do it”. Utilizing whatever advantage you have is a completely understandable human behavior not limited to one political party or another.

While I’m on the subject of democracy, when you take a ground-level view of politics, even the reddest or blue-est state is actually purple. Lamenting how terribly undemocratic it is that Democrats don’t hold 51 votes in the Senate when 55% of the votes in the country are cast for Democratic candidates is comparing apples and oranges. If you get rid of the gerrymandering, eliminate the Senate entirely, and make the House much more granular, the likely outcome is electing a smaller percentage of very progressive representatives not more. And, possibly, fewer very conservative representatives as well. The very unrepresentativeness of the House of Representatives and the ever-increasing size of Congressional districts are two of the factors increasing polarization.

Intrigued by the slug in this op-ed by Andrew Selee in the New York Times, “On Migration, Will the Americas Succeed Where Europe Could Not?”, I was saddened but not surprised by Dr. Selee’s definition of success:

The U.S. government might also think about opening up a special parole program — an express legal entry — for a limited number of Haitians who want to move to the United States and reopening the one for Cubans, which has been suspended in practice for four years. If some Haitians living in Chile and Brazil were eligible for entry into the United States under this approach, many would decide to avoid a dangerous journey through the Darién Gap.

Such a program would also make it easier for the U.S. government to negotiate the return of Haitian migrants who reach the border to these countries, where many have lived for years, instead of to Haiti. This is another useful principle: the idea of returning people to countries where they have been settled for many years, rather than back to countries of origin that are in deep crisis.

Another principle might be burden sharing. The United States and Canada have already been trying to expand their resettlement efforts for imperiled Central Americans. Speeding up this process and extending it to Venezuelans and others would provide another important alternative to irregular migration for those in imminent danger.

Several points. First, Haiti has been in “deep crisis” since it became a country. There is no time over the entire 200 years that it has not been in crisis. Second, there’s a dramatic difference between Cuba and Haiti. The Cuban “special parole program” was set up largely for the Cuban middle class who became political refugees after Castro’s revolution in the 1950s. It grew beyond that scope over the years but that’s a different subject. Almost all Haitian migrants are economic migrants.

Additionally, I would like to hear Dr. Selee’s argument for the U. S.’s acceptance of more Haitian migrants. Just over half of Haitian adults are literate. Those that are literate are, by and large, literate in Haiti’s language—Creole. Only about 5% of Haitians speak French and fewer speak Spanish or English (although more speak Spanish than English). I see little evidence that the U. S. is languishing for lack of illiterate Creole speakers. The slow to no growth in the wages for the lowest quintile of the U. S. population suggests that there is no such demand.

Paradoxically, nearly every Latin American country has a tremendous need for more workers but the workers they need are a) skilled and b) literate in Spanish. That leaves out the Haitian migrants. Wherever they go these migrants inevitably either become dependents of the state or turn to crime. They have little other choice.

My definition of a successful regional strategy would be something like:

1. We should negotiate with other countries in the Americas for them to tighten their own immigration laws and enforcement. The reason that so many Haitian migrants are going to Brazil or Chile is that those countries have loose immigration laws and don’t enforce the laws they have.
2. We should be trying to create conditions in Latin American countries that encourage investment by U. S. companies in them. IMO strong economies will do more to encourage people in Latin America to stay home than any amount of advertising or any wall.
3. Fewer barriers to trade in Latin American countries, particularly trade in services.
4. Less overall migration.

I wish I could figure out a good way of decompressing Thomas B. Edsall’s latest New York Times column. It’s got quite a few things worth considering but they’re arranged a bit haphazardly. I agree with his conclusion:

The forces fracturing the political system are clearly stronger than the forces pushing for consensus.

He opens by talking about the “erosion of public tolerance”. This is interesting and conforms with what I have observed:

In an email, Chong wrote that “the tolerance of white liberals has declined significantly since 1980, and tolerance levels are lowest among the youngest age cohorts.” If, he continued, “we add education to the mix, we find that the most pronounced declines over time have occurred among white, college educated liberals, with the youngest age cohorts again having the lowest tolerance levels.”

In the mid-1960s the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote his most famous work, One-Dimensional Man. In it he asserted that genuine tolerance does not allow for tolerance of “repression”. I and many others think that’s basically throwing Enlightenment values under the bus, especially so when you define repression in purely subjective terms. I would claim that what we’re seeing today is exactly what you would expect from people who’d adopted a Marcusist viewpoint.

He then goes into “moral foundations theory”:

Proponents of what is known as moral foundations theory — formulated in 2004 by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph — argue that across all cultures “several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics’.” The five foundations are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.

What is not acknowledged is that all of these are true in degrees, different people can prioritize these values in different ways, and that’s okay. However, give it a Marcusist spin and those who prioritize care/harm and fairness/cheating (usually progressives) more highly than loyalty/betrayal cannot be tolerant of those who prioritize authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation more highly (usually conservatives). And when you define harm and fairness in completely subjective ways? The standard used to be “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”. When words are deemed as harmful as sticks and stones, mix in a little Wittgenstein, and what emerges are “toxic environments” and “micro-aggressions”.

He then begins a discourse on feminism, “traditional morality”, and “partisan sorting”. TL;DR:

Huddy and Willman found: “In 2004, a strong feminist woman had a .32 chance of being a strong Democrat. This increased slightly to .35 in 2008 and then increased more substantially to .45 in 2012 and .56 in 2016.” In 2004 and 2008, “there was a .21 chance that a strong feminist male was also a strong Democrat. That increased slightly to .25 in 2012 and more dramatically to .42 in 2016.”

then after a brief digression into race he observes:

Their conclusion is that over the past four decades, “the United States experienced the most rapid growth in affective polarization among the twelve O.E.C.D. countries we consider” — the other 11 are France, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland.

In other words, whether we evaluate the current conflict-ridden political climate in terms of moral foundations theory, feminism or the political group conflict hypothesis, the trends are not favorable, especially if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is close.

My own view is that only heightened tolerance will get us out of the hole we are digging for ourselves without bloodshed. The direction now seems to be towards heightened intolerance.