Following up on my previous post, one way of ferreting out the likely effectiveness of an infrastructure spending program is to consider the results of previous programs. Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, we have a fairly recent example in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). As you might guess there’s some dispute over just how effective it was.

John Taylor, for example, wrote this for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER):

The implication is not that ARRA has been too small, but rather that it failed to increase government consumption expenditures and infrastructure spending as many had predicted from such a large package. A consideration of the counterfactual event that there had not been an ARRA supports the hypothesis that state and local government borrowing would have been higher and purchases would have been about the same in the absence of ARRA.

or, in other words, it didn’t achieve much at all. Daniel J. Wilson on the other hand, writing for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (PDF) comes to a somewhat different conclusion:

Based on my preferred measure of spending, announced funds, the results imply that its first year ARRA spending yielded about eight jobs per million dollars spent, or about $125,000 per job. Extrapolating from that marginal local effect to the national level, the estimates imply ARRA spending created or saved about 2.1 million jobs, or 1.6 percent of pre-ARRA total nonfarm employment, in that first year.

Some of that priciness might be explained by the significant number of the “jobs saved” having been on jobs in the financial sector, whether private or public. Was saving 800,000 jobs in the financial sector a social good or not? I think not but YMMV. Finally, writing for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (PDF) Gerald A. Carlino arrives at a conclusion closer to my own than either of the foregoing:

Did the Recovery Act work? The evidence suggests the economy did indeed grow more than it would have without the stimulus but likely not as much as it might have with a different type of stimulus. In particular, the evidence suggests that direct measures — tax relief for households and firms, and programs such as Medicaid that target families with low incomes, little wealth, and a limited ability to borrow — have contributed more to GDP growth than direct federal expenditures or project aid to state and local governments. To the extent that the federal government implements its stimulus spending through transfers to state and local governments, perhaps that aid should target lower-income households and states that bear the brunt of the economic downturn.

Just as there’s a difference between the United States of 1935 and that of today, there’s a difference between that of 2010 and that of today and IMO our economy, more dependent if anything on imports than it was then, is likely to benefit less from an infrastructure spending program while our trading partners are likely to benefit more. Unless the construction of the program is very, very deliberate, something in which the Congress has shown little interest.

Although some Americans romanticize the New Deal infrastructure spending programs and their attendant work programs, the WPA and the CCC, the facts of those programs is a bit more problematic, as this article by Allison Schrager at City Journal points out:

Almost 27 percent of New Deal grants went to work programs, specifically for out-of-work Americans, who completed small-scale construction projects at a set wage with limited hours. Another 17.8 percent of spending involved large-scale projects, like roads and dams, that paid market wages and hired from the broader labor market. But the New Deal’s success in these areas was mixed. The public-works projects, for example, had a multiplier of about one—that is, for every $1 the government spent, it translated into about $1 of income. Though New Deal public-works programs did reduce deaths and crime, it’s important to remember that they preexisted large-scale unemployment insurance. So, while they saved people from dire poverty, they’d be less beneficial today because we have a better safety net. Evidence also suggests that the projects didn’t lead to job growth in the private sector and may have hindered it, since the government jobs paid more and were considered more stable.

We have good reason to expect even less success from similar-type efforts today. Economists estimate that states with big New Deal projects didn’t experience much growth because 50 percent of the materials used in construction came from other states. Today, those materials would probably come from abroad and therefore have even less economic benefit to America’s economy (and Buy America provisions won’t help, either). Regulation and red tape have grown substantially since FDR’s time, too, and that would slow the process and make building less efficient. In addition, construction jobs have become more skilled and technical since the Depression era. It’s hard to imagine unemployed hotel concierges making an easy transition to a job building a railway to LaGuardia.

In addition much of the benefit that people attribute through the glow of hindsight to those infrastructure spending programs actually resulted from the increase in savings during World War II:

There are some other factors unmentioned by Dr. Schrager. Our country and economy have changed enormously since the 1930s. Then we were a country in which most people lived in rural areas, many of them farmers, and we didn’t have a nationwide system of highway. Instead we had a patchwork of local roads, subsidized for some of their length by the federal government. Much of the country didn’t have electricity or telephones and the power transmission system was strictly a local affair.

Now those rural areas are underpopulated although that may change soon. If anything we’re overbuilt in roads and bridges. Neither repairing unused roads and bridges nor building new ones are good investments. If they were, state and local governments would be making them. Private companies would be demanding them.

If we are bound and determined to begin a large infrastructure spending program, by all means let’s do it in areas that will provide the most bang for the buck. Let’s not build roads that will be useless in a few years or high speed rail to airports that will never be used. I’m thinking of things like a more resilient, distributed power system or closing the “digital divide” with a cheaper, better Internet access available to more people (something local and state governments as well as private companies are investing in). And let’s insist on a “Buy American” component to it as well, especially with respect to the raw materials used. More about that later.

Pulitzer Price-winning Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence page is black. Mr. Page collects racist memorabilia. In his latest Trib column after recounting how he began his collection he continues:

At home, I put it on a visible shelf next to my old cast-iron Aunt Jemima penny bank that my parents gave me when I was 4 or 5, to help me start saving money for college. I had one of those mothers who believed that life begins after you finish medical school. (Sorry, Mom. I tried.)

We loved our Aunt Jemima bank, partly because it reminded my mother of her “Aunt Laura,” which quickly became what we called our bank instead of “Aunt Jemima,” which in our community often was denigrated into a slur — like the overly maligned “Uncle Tom” or Uncle Ben, whose rice box image Mars Inc. is dropping.

I later found I was not alone as a collector. As previously whites-only jobs opened up for people of color and the Black middle class doubled in size by the late 1980s, so did the collectors’ market for Black memorabilia, including racially charged memorabilia.

The sheer magnitude of it attests to how ferociously the forces of post-Civil War backlash wanted to put Black men and women back in our “place,” suppress our political power and erase our culture, even as some of them enjoyed our music.

For example, thanks to one friend, I now have a toothpick dispenser shaped like an alligator with a single toothpick in its mouth, which features the head of a horrified minstrel as a handle.

I also have a coin bank figurine of a red-jacketed bellhop with a coin in its outstretched hand that, with a flip of one of its ears, lifts the coin to his opening mouth.

and concludes with this prudent advice:

Today some of these relics, old and new, can be found in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and even more plentifully in the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.

Founder and curator David Pilgrim says he started out much as I did, with one piece of stereotypical coon-show art that revolted him. But he stuck with it as a useful vehicle for public education. We Americans should try to learn from it, I agree, not bury it.

We are at a historical moment of worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, following the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police. In this moment of reckoning, we should appreciate what racial souvenirs tell us about how far we have come, so we have a better idea of where we’re going.

George Santayana was right about the past and there are worse things than being offended by it. Rather than trying to bury the past perhaps those who find our past intolerably painful owe it to themselves to find a country without such a past. If they can find one.

At Vox.com Roge Karma reviews four ideas for “replacing traditional police officers”. The ideas are:

1. Create a distinct unarmed unit for enforcing traffic laws.
2. Use community mediators rather than the police to handle minor disputes.
3. Create a mobile crisis response unit (rather than ordinary police officers—a “Sweeney”).
4. Experiment with community self-policing.

concluding:

There’s no guarantee that any of these suggestions will succeed across the board. When it comes to policing alternatives, even the best existing models haven’t been attempted at scale, and there’s no telling how different communities will respond to them. To implement any idea on this list would mean venturing into relatively uncharted territory.

That means there will be failures. Things will go wrong. Systems will break down. Programs will fall apart. Violence may temporarily increase in some places. Occasionally, a violence interrupter or mobile crisis worker will be seriously injured or killed.

But our current system already represents a kind of profound failure. We live in a country that has built the largest system of human incarceration on earth, where agents of the state kill unarmed members of the communities they are supposed to protect and terrorize those who are still alive. Where peaceful protesters are beaten in the streets.

The question, then, isn’t whether we are willing to live with failure; communities across the country already live with failure every single day. That failure, at least in part, stems from the fact that police officers in the United States are tasked with responsibilities — from traffic patrol to mediation to crisis response — that amplify the risk of unnecessary violence.

I’ve expressed my own views of the deficiencies of modern policing on a number of occasions in the past. For example, active policing does not seem to have a deterrent effect on crime. Chicago, for example, has the largest number of police officers relative to the population of any major city and also the highest rate of violent crime. Whether cause or effect you cannot reasonably conclude that more police means less crime.

I have only two additional observations. We are the largest country in the world with an ethnically, racially, and confessionally diverse population. As such we are bound to have special problems.

I’m also curious about something. If disarming or disbanding the police is such a good idea, why are the bodies that are doing it hiring armed private security guards?

Andrew Sullivan recognizes a “revolutionary moment” when he sees one as he points out in his latest piece for New York Magazine, as well as its attendant excesses. After noting the iconoclasm (as I point out), “confessions of iniquity”, and social policing, features shared by every radical revolution, e.g. the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, he turns to language:

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment. Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality. But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

concluding:

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.

As with prior radical revolutions no good will come of this one. The French who beheaded a king in 1793 accepted an emperor ten years later, setting the stage for a century and half of revolutions and wars in which they were repeatedly humiliated by the Germans.

Today’s would-be revolutionaries, like most of their antecedents, have little sense of irony. They don’t recognize the irony, for example, of a handful of blacks telling all other blacks what they should want or, worse, a handful of whites telling blacks what they should want. That irony was not lost on BET founder Robert Johnson who pointed out how meaningless removing statues of Confederate generals is to black people living in America today.

And Pritzker. From a letter from President Donald Trump to Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot:

Unlike previous Administrations of both parties, I am willing to tackle unsolved challenges. If you are willing to put partisanship aside, we can revitalize distressed neighborhoods in Chicago, together. But to succeed, you must establish law and order. The combination of crime, high State and local taxes, and onerous State and local government regulations have caused thousands of Illinoisans to flee to other States. Between 2010 and 2019, Illinois lost more of its population than any other state in the Nation. If you are interested, I am willing to ask members of my Cabinet to meet with you and help devise a plan to make Chicago safe, since a successful formula has escaped both you and your predecessors. My Administration would also welcome the opportunity to engage with you and your colleagues as you develop bipartisan policy recommendations to improve policing and make our great cities safer for all.

Unfortunately, you continue to put your own political interests ahead of the lives, safety, and fortunes of your own citizens. The people of Chicago deserve better.

Perhaps I’m too cynical but I think that is what is called “trolling”. Ironically, the most likely outcome of the letter will be to strengthen Pritzker and Lightfoot politically.

For additional context you might want to read this old article in Chicago Magazine. Chicago city government is not merely a passive victim of gang violence—it’s up to its hips in it. IMO If Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot were shrewd they’d take the president up on his offer if for no other reason than to be able to criticize it. I’m guessing they’ll just fulminate about the slight and criticize a hypothetical offer they would never accept anyway.

Update

And they’ve responded! From WGN. Mayor Lightfoot:

It is despicable, disgusting and all too typical. Same old tired playbook. How about some leadership not steeped in the divide and conquer tactics?

and Gov. Pritzker:

The people of this state and this nation have unfortunately come to expect his unhinged attempts to politicize tragedy with his predictable and worn out strategy to distract, distract, distract.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Peter Reed, founder and CEO of Reed Teams, declaims:

I’m moving my business headquarters off the West Coast. We tried San Francisco. We tried the Seattle area. Both were wonderful in their own ways, especially in natural beauty and personal friendships. But both have become hostile to the principles and policies that enable people to live abundantly in the broadest sense.

That’s why my company is in the final stages of purchasing office space in Austin, Texas. By the end of the year, I hope to move dozens of employees to the Lone Star State and to be ready to hire hundreds more. While uprooting a big part of a billion-dollar company isn’t easy, the decision to move to Texas wasn’t hard. Our staff and their families will be able to flourish to a much greater extent.

and

I’ve talked with many entrepreneurs in California, Washington and Oregon who have encountered similar issues. Most aren’t sure how to respond. Generally, the amount of tech talent and funding on the coast leads them to conclude that they have no choice but to stay put and stay silent.

I reject that answer. The biggest talent pool in the world doesn’t matter if the ocean that surrounds it is intellectually shallow. If a business is based in a place that expects social and political conformity, then innovation will falter eventually, because it depends on pushing the boundaries. And if our people find it hard to flourish in every aspect of their lives, then the company will struggle in the long run. I think that as the West Coast becomes more insular and exclusive, other parts of the country will become the biggest drivers of tech innovation.

That’s why we’re leaving the West Coast and heading to Texas.

I was reminded of Davy Crockett’s famous snort, “You can all go to Hell and I will go to Texas”. He isn’t alone. In raw numbers Texas and Florida lead the country in net domestic inmigration while in percentage terms Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and South Carolina lead the pack.

It seems that George Will is concerned about the “social justice warriors”, too, if his latest Washington Post column is any gauge:

An admirable intelligentsia, inoculated by education against fashions and fads, would make thoughtful distinctions arising from historically informed empathy. It would be society’s ballast against mob mentalities. Instead, much of America’s intelligentsia has become a mob.

Seeking to impose on others the conformity it enforces in its ranks, articulate only in a boilerplate of ritualized cant, today’s lumpen intelligentsia consists of persons for whom a little learning is delightful. They consider themselves educated because they are credentialed, stamped with the approval of institutions of higher education that gave them three things: a smattering of historical information just sufficient to make the past seem depraved; a vocabulary of indignation about the failure of all previous historic actors, from Washington to Lincoln to Churchill, to match the virtues of the lumpen intelligentsia; and the belief that America’s grossest injustice is the insufficient obeisance accorded to this intelligentsia.

Its expansion tracks the expansion of colleges and universities — most have, effectively, open admissions — that have become intellectually monochrome purveyors of groupthink. Faculty are outnumbered by administrators, many of whom exist to administer uniformity concerning “sustainability,” “diversity,” “toxic masculinity” and the threat free speech poses to favored groups’ entitlements to serenity.

Today’s cancel culture — erasing history, ending careers — is inflicted by people experiencing an orgy of positive feelings about themselves as they negate others. This culture is a steamy sauna of self-congratulation: “I, an adjunct professor of gender studies, am superior to U.S. Grant, so there.” Grant promptly freed the slave he received from his father-in-law, and went on to pulverize the slavocracy. Nevertheless . . .

The cancelers need just enough learning to know, vaguely, that there was a Lincoln who lived when Americans, sunk in primitivism, thought they were confronted with vexing constitutional constraints and moral ambiguities. The cancel culture depends on not having so much learning that it spoils the statue-toppling fun: Too much learning might immobilize the topplers with doubts about how they would have behaved in the contexts in which the statues’ subjects lived.

The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans.

Aristotle taught that the purpose of education was to cultivate the capacity for rational thinking, form an ethical character, and provide a base of skill and knowledge sufficient to make good decisions. Augustine said Credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order to understand”). Aquinas taught that logic and the methods of the natural sciences, mathematics, and moral philosophy were the foundations of understanding. And John Adams wrote “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”.

Unfortunately, that sort of education, which held pride of place in the Wests for a millennium and produced the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and liberal democratic government, has been abandoned in favor of mere training, job preparation. The demands for “relevance” of 50 years ago were a rejection of that sort of education. Educated people are rare now. What has been produced instead are “expensively schooled versions of…the ‘mass man'”.

Although David Brooks describes his latest New York Times column as analyzing the five crises the United States is in that is actually an exaggeration. The crises are:

• “we are losing the fight against Covid-19”
• “white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day”
• “we’re in the middle of a political realignment”
• “a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions”
• “we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression”

but he devotes most of his column to the fourth. Let’s consider the other four briefly.

Are we actually “losing the fight against Covid-19”? I know that the number of cases in California, Texas, and Florida as well as other Southern and Southwestern states is increasing. Wasn’t that the objective of the lockdowns? I. e. to time-shift the incidence of the cases of COVID-19 until local health care systems were better prepared to handle them? The mortality due to COVID-19 in the named states remains a small fraction of that in New York, New Jersey, and other Northeastern states greatly affected by the disease. So long as that stays the case isn’t the increase in incidence a mark of success rather than failure?

There are bound to be some facilities that will have more cases than they can handle but I would think that is different from a health care system failure. Please correct me on this.

On the second issue maybe I’m inured to this. I spent my first ten years in a neighborhood that was becoming black, I was reared in part by black women, I had black classmates in primary school and high school, worked with a black crew in which I was the only white (I wasn’t the boss but the lowliest of the low), I had black friends and acquaintances in college, black neighbors now. None of “the burdens African-Americans carry every day” is news to me. My own view is that in the 1970s there was a window of opportunity during which we might have healed the wounds created by slavery and Jim Crow but instead we chose to import tens of millions of workers from Mexico and Central America while expanding trade with Japan, South Korea, and China. Now our original sin is intractable. The Hispanic “persons of color” will become white with astonishing swiftness while blacks will remain in the same situation they have been for decades with less power and a weaker argument than ever before.

On the third I think I would say

1. We’re not in the middle. We are nearing the end. The realignment happened while Mr. Brooks was looking the other way.
2. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

while on the fifth I have written at length. I think we have a window of opportunity during which we might correct the mistakes we have been making over the period of the last half century. It’s a shame that there are no political leaders with the vision to seize that opportunity but are much more interested in micromanaging the behavior of their fellow citizens while grabbing as much wealth and power for themselves as they can.

The fourth issue is what has been referred to by some as “social justice warriors”. Contrary to Mr. Brooks, I think they are simple rent-seekers and were described by Tom Wolfe 50 years ago in his essay Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers. Just say “no”.