I concur with the editors of the Palm Beach Post:

GThe vice presidential candidate debate was the exchange America wanted. Unlike the presidential debate, this one will not be remembered as a political beatdown. Democrat Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Sen. JD Vance actually talked issues, at times seeming to agree on some of them. The conversation was mostly civil and, more importantly, informative.

and

Both men did their jobs in defending the positions of their running mates. The reality is that the two are running for vice president, not the top job. Nobody, for example, recalls the accomplishments of the Pence administration. The role of the vice president, whoever the voters send to Washington, is to back the president’s policies; they can offer advice, even object, but the final say belongs to the president, not the person who’s a heartbeat away.

Granted, Walz struggled when asked to explain why he has said that he was present in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the bloody 1989 student-led protests. He wasn’t. And Vance mixed in a fair share of historic revisionism, non-answers and at times outright lies when pressed. Former President Trump, for example, didn’t try to save the Affordable Care Act – he worked hard to kill it. And, for the record, Vance has supported a national ban on abortion. The Republican’s failure to respond to whether he believed Trump lost the 2020 election, was, as Walz put it, ” a damning non-answer.”

Still, the debate showed a cordiality, even shared empathy that has been lacking in this presidential election season. The final decision comes next month. The candidates for vice president did their part, and the electorate is better off for it.

Why don’t we get more of that? And, related, whom does the contentious, incoherent appeal to emotions serve? I’m going to speculate. College-educated voters under 35 without the patience or, maybe, the ability to follow the less agonistic style of the vice presidential debate.

Two days after it began the East Coast dockworkers’ strike has ended. Ry Rivard, Nick Niedzwiadek, and Lauren Egan report at Politico:

A dockworkers strike that threatened the U.S. supply chain weeks before an election is over just days after it began — a resolution that White House officials credited to weeks of quiet engagement with both sides, punctuated by President Joe Biden’s public efforts to heighten the pressure on shipping companies to reach a deal.

The union that represents tens of thousands of East Coast dockworkers and the shipping industry announced Thursday evening that they had reached a tentative agreement on wages and are extending an expired contract through Jan. 15. That outcome defuses a political time bomb for Democrats, especially Vice President Kamala Harris, who needs all the union support she can get but could not afford a prolonged strike that would have soured voters on the economy.

“Effective immediately, all current job actions will cease and all work covered by the Master Contract will resume,” the International Longshoremen’s Association and the alliance of shipping companies that employ dockworkers said in a joint statement.

The increase is expected to be around 60 percent over six years, according to a person familiar with the matter. That would be a substantial raise for the union members, some of whom already do well by blue-collar standards, earning six figures a year. The workers load and unload cargo containers at ports along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, a critical conduit for goods including automobiles and bananas.

That outcome should bring the wages of East Coast dockworkers into line with those of West Coast dockworkers which is the outcome that I thought was appropriate. The union’s opposition to automation is deeply troubling and likely to remain a sticking point.

An anecdote from the distant past. My godmother’s husband was a lithographer. Some time back in the 1950s his organization transitioned completely to offset printing and, as part of the settlement with the union on this issue, he effectively retired in his 50s. I suspect some sort of settlement of that sort is what the dockworkers are seeking. The circumstances in the United States are very different than they were 70 years ago. I’m skeptical the dockworkers will get the deal they are seeking. The most they are likely to achieve is to make the U. S. non-competitive.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal econ prof Martin Eichenbaum argues against the idea that we need to do more manufacturing:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing’s share of nonfarm employment declined from roughly 32% in 1947 to approximately 8% at the end of 2023. Yes, there was a slight increase in the rate of decline around 2001, when China entered the World Trade Organization. But you have to stare pretty hard to see the effect. In any event, that effect is trivial compared to the long, slow, inexorable decline in the importance of manufacturing as a source of U.S. jobs.

I found that puzzling. It’s not hard at all:

U. S. Manufacturing Employment

Here’s his conclusion:

I started my career teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. There was real suffering when manufacturing declined in that area. Retraining a 45-year-old steel worker to become a biotech engineer is hard. Proponents of free markets sometimes forget that there are real political consequences of ignoring the human cost of change.

The right answer to the challenge of change involves at least three initiatives. First, the government must materially help the people who are affected and help them find jobs in which they can take pride. Second, parents and educators must provide children with the skills they need to thrive in a constantly changing world. Third, politicians must remove unnecessary regulations and other barriers to growth in emerging sectors of the economy.

The wrong answer is to pine for a mythical golden age that never existed. Pittsburgh is now a thriving center of education, research and health services. It didn’t get there by trying to bring back the 1950s.

He fails to define “thriving”. Pittsburgh’s population in 1950 was 677,000 people. Today it’s 303,000—less than half of that. Most of that decline had been accomplished by 1990, long before trade with China was a factor but it dropped by 1% between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. Pittsburgh’s real per capita income has declined slightly from 1950 to the present (from $44,000 in 1950 to $42,000 now in today’s dollars). That does not sound like thriving to me. It sounds like “declining but not collapsing”.

I suspect he’s making a false analogy. Let’s consider a highly simplified version of what’s happened to agriculture, looking at wheat production only:

Do I need to document that we are producing wheat with a lot fewer farmers than we used to? But:

I think those tell different stories. I wonder what Dr. Eichenbaum thinks?

Rather clearly for the last 25 years we have increasingly been transitioning to a service economy. It’s easy to measure the productivity of wheat farmers or steelworkers. You just divide the amount of steel by the number of workers (or thereabouts). Measuring the productivity of workers in a service economy is considerably more difficult. It’s almost entirely political.

Just to take one controversial example, how do you measure the productivity of physicians? Milton Friedman thought that the productivity of physicians was, essentially, flat. Physicians strenuously object to using any outcome-based measurement which is handy for them. The metric being used is something called “relative value units” (RVUs). There’s a discussion of RVUs here. Basically, you count “procedures” and then adjust that based on the relative values of the procedures. That’s basically circular.

My view is that measuring productivity based on procedures is not only circular but actually perverse. Our rate of iatrogenic morbidity and mortality (i.e. physician-caused) is too high. Just how high is controversial but it’s something between 45,000 and 450,000 deaths per year. IMO one of the factors in that is the predisposition to treat which is encouraged by using procedures performed as a metric for physician performance.

A similar story can be told for every service. How do you measure the productivity of an economics professor? Without such metrics things like “gross domestic product” (GDP) have no validity and formulating policies based on whether GDP is increasing or decreasing is fraught. Trying to measure in dollars leads you to the parable of the three merchants.

I haven’t posted about the dockworkers’ strike on the East Coast for a couple of reasons. First, it’s still early. Second, most of what I’ve read so far is just counting partisan coup. And, finally, I’m of very mixed minds about it.

The strike and the aftermath of the hurricane are a real double whammy for the affected parts. It may be that the strike is opportunistic but it’s certainly heartless. On the other hand the discrepancy between what dockworkers are paid on the West Coast and what they’re paid on the East Coast is enormous. Dockworkers on the West Coast earn about $55 an hour while dockworkers on the East Coast earn about $39 an hour. That’s a substantial gap.

On the third hand I’m not particularly sympathetic with the dockworkers’ opposition to automation. Port automation is the future. Worldwide there are around 70 automated ports and they’re being added every year. The U. S. only has three fully-automated ports and they’re all on the West Coast. The dockworkers’ unions are the main obstacle to their acceptance in the U. S. To the extent that the days of Terry Malloy weren’t over decades ago, they soon will be and the only thing the dockworkers can accomplish is making the U. S. quaint and old-fashioned by world standards.

I wanted to address something that has been claimed from time to time. I have heard people saying that the reason there was no major international conflict involving the U. S. during Trump’s term of office was that he was deterring Russia, Iran, China, etc. I think that’s true but, as the “fact-checkers” put it, it needs context.

I don’t think they were deterred for the reasons usually given but because he was an unknown quantity. They didn’t know what the heck he would do. There are positives and negatives to that. “Strategic ambiguity” is a time-hallowed diplomatic posture. Shooting from the hip, on the other hand, is risky.

I watched last night’s vice presidential debate and I’m glad I did. It demonstrated that it is still possible for two competing candidates from two different political parties to conduct a civil, articulate, and coherent discourse, something that has been in some doubt lately. Short take: I would rather have either of the two candidates I saw last night as president than either of the two at the tops of their respective tickets. Otherwise, I thought the debate was interesting but unlikely to have much impact on the outcome of the election.

I did not think that CBS’s moderators covered themselves in glory, signaling their biases pretty clearly. I’m sure their co-partisans were delighted. Hint to media outlets: “fact checking” candidates on things they are providing correct answers to debases fact checking.

The Politico Staff thought that Vance won:

JD Vance not only was polished, but offered a more cutting critique of Kamala Harris than his running mate, Donald Trump, managed in his own debate with her last month.

Tim Walz, on the other hand, took a while to warm up — and wasn’t that great even when he did.

The debate, light on body blows and heavy on policy, was won by Vance on style points.

The editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s take resembled mine:

The political cliche is that vice-presidential debates don’t matter to the ultimate election result. But even if that turns out to be true about Tuesday’s debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, Americans were at least able to watch a substantive debate that came closer to revealing the election choice than anything their running mates have offered.

Mr. Vance in particular helped the ticket and himself. The sarcastic candidate of “childless cat ladies” fame was nowhere in sight. The Ohio Senator was respectful, well prepared, articulate, and relentless in reminding voters about the flaws of what he called “the Kamala Harris Administration.” This is a case Donald Trump was unable to make in his debate, or for that matter anywhere in the weeks since President Biden left the race.

Mr. Walz was likable and avuncular, though he sometimes seemed frenetic and overstuffed with too many facts and prepared attack lines. On presence and command, Mr. Vance won the debate going away.

I found Marsha McHardy’s report at Newsweek interesting and informative:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz saw a significant bump in polling after Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate in New York, surpassing Ohio Senator JD Vance in postdebate momentum.

The showdown saw the two candidates largely focus on differences, with Vance repeatedly hitting Vice President Kamala Harris on border security, while Walz lambasted former President Donald Trump on abortion rights. Newsweek has contacted the Vance and Walz campaigns for comment via email.

A flash poll conducted by CNN and SSRS after the debate among 574 registered voters who watched the showdown found that 51 percent of respondents said that Vance came out on top, compared to 49 percent who said the same of Walz. The margin of error was +/- 5.3 points.

A CBS News flash poll performed in conjunction with YouGov also showed Vance winning by a slim margin, with 42 percent of 1,630 respondents saying they thought the Ohio senator won the debate, to Walz’s 41 percent. The margin of error was +/- 2.7 points. Seventeen percent of respondents said the debate was a draw.

In a Politico snap poll of the debate, while voters were split 50-50 on who won, Walz was seen to have won with independents by 58-42. He was also preferred as vice president by 44 percent of independents, with 36 percent choosing Vance.

However, despite Vance’s win, the CNN/SSRS poll also shows that Walz saw a bigger rise in his favorability ratings after the debate than Vance.

According to the poll, the Minnesota governor saw a 23-point boost in his favorability ratings, going up from +14 to +37. Meanwhile, Vance saw a 19-point boost in his favorability ratings, going up from -22 to -3.

So, did last night’s debate make any difference? Or could the election be held today and the results would be little different than waiting until November?

With many roads impassable due to the damage caused by the hurricane, mules are being used to deliver supplies in western North Carolina. Sareen Habeshian reports at Axios:

Mules are helping deliver aid to residents in North Carolina as they grapple with the fallout from the destructive Hurricane Helene.

The big picture: Five Southeastern states are responding to widespread devastation caused from the hurricane that made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm last week, with the death toll surpassing 130.

• Many roads in North Carolina remain impassable due to storm damage. All roads in the Western North Carolina “should be considered closed to all non-emergency travel,” the N.C. Emergency Management Agency said on X Monday.

Zoom in: As government agencies, organizations and businesses haul food, water and other emergency supplies into North Carolina’s mountain towns using semi-trucks, helicopters and military planes, Mountain Mule Packers enlisted its mules to help with the load.

• The pack mule strings can deliver supplies to areas not accessible by vehicle, including hard-to-reach mountainous areas.
  Mountain Mule Packers delivered its first batch of aid Monday with food, water and diapers to the western part of the state, using two fully-loaded trucks and several stock trailers, according to a post on the ranch’s Facebook page.

A video on the Facebook page illustrates how the sure-footed mules are able to cross debris-strewn roads impassable to cars and trucks (from 2016).

I am struggling with myself, trying to determine whether to watch tonight’s Vice Presidential Debate. I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a vice presidential debate before.

Yet another reminder that this is an election like no other in living memory. We have two incumbents running against one another, both running simultaneously on their records and as “outsiders”. That was underscored by Gov. Walz’s recent declamation that “we can’t stand four more years of this”. Historically, vice presidential debates have not been particularly consequential, that despite the ages of the candidates in 2020, but this one might be different.

It should also be entertaining to see whether the debate is actually three against one which is a pretty good guess.

Since I have criticized the Harris campaign as being too thin on policy I thought it only right to read the economic policy briefing put out by the campaign. While I agree with many of the aspirations in the document, I found the proposals alternately puzzling and dismaying. I think it helps if you understand some of the phrases used in it.

For example, “tax cut” seems to mean a transfer payment administered through the tax system. It seems to be an article of faith that price increases are caused by “price gouging”, something never actually defined. Scott Sumner and others have pointed out that the available evidence suggests that price increases have been driven by demand rather than supply shocks.

I’m skeptical that subsidizing down payments for first-time homeowners will actually increase the affordability of homes. Indeed, I think it might do the opposite. When you increase the willingness to pay, prices go up. That is axiomatic.

How can we increase how much we manufacture (not how much it costs: how much we manufacture) in the United States? I think the two greatest barriers are excessive regulation and China. For the last 30 years China has targeted one industry after another, dumping goods made without the environmntal, labor, health, safety, etc. regulations we have here and making it uneconomical to compete against them.

92% of new businesses are retail or services providers. Furthermore, (speaking as a former small business owner who filled out his own tax returns) net revenue tends to be quite small for startups, i.e. their taxes aren’t very high. Reducing paperwork might be a much stronger incentive. I don’t know whether subsidizing startups is actually an investment or not.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are equally skeptical, dubbing Kamalanomics “Bidenomics II”, consisting largely of higher taxes, new and bigger entitlements, transfer payments, subsidies, more student loan forgiveness, more federal control of healthcare, industrial policy, price controls, union gifts, and green energy largesse.