In response to the comments on my post yesterday about the fallacy of drawing analogies among the politics of various different countries, yes, many Western countries are experiencing the same stresses. My very point is that their responses will be informed by each country’s own history, experience, preferences, social conditions, and so on.

That’s also the fallacy on which the “cafeteria” theory of politics relies. Those who think that we can import government programs from other countries as we would automobiles will be shocked to learn that the political viability of those programs rests on factors which simply don’t exist here—things like social cohesion, greater trust in government, conformity with rules just because they’re rules, and so on.

In case you’re not aware of it, Pew Research has found that a third of Americans rely on Facebook as a primary news source and more than half rely on it at least part of the time. To me that just proves that P. T. Barnum was right.

To be more charitable I think that’s to be expected with the collapse of local reporting. Today newspaper newsrooms employ just about half as many people as they did just 20 years ago and a lot of that decline is in local dailies. Nowadays if you’re looking for local news you may have little choice other than to turn to Facebook.

IMO it also explains the decline in readership of supermarket tabloids. Why check out the National Enquirer for news when you can get the same fake news on Facebook and people won’t look at you funny in the supermarket checkout line for reading it?

You might be interested in this analysis from Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball of the effect of support for “Medicare for All” on House elections. Here’s the conclusion:

An analysis of the impact of Medicare for All on the 2018 House elections indicates that Democratic challengers and open seat candidates in competitive districts who endorsed a version of Medicare for All similar to that proposed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did significantly worse than those who did not. This negative effect, close to five points of margin after controlling for a variety of other factors, was clearly large enough to affect the outcomes of some House contests.

Yet more evidence for my hypothesis that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, about 10% of the electorate, cares more about their ideology than do for the party.

I would be a bit more skeptical about the claims that the demonstrations in Hong Kong are being funded by the U. S. government. I’ve looked into them a bit and to the best of my ability to determine they derive from one of two sources, either a) the Chinese government or b) organizations that genuinely despise the U. S. government. So far I have not seen the claims echoed in anything that resembles a reliable source. My tentative conclusion is that the claims are propaganda, disinformation.

I truly wish that people would not analogize from U. S. politics to British politics and vice versa. The Tories are not the Republicans and Labour is not the Democratic Party. Indeed, from an ideological standpoint both the Democrats and the Republicans would fit handily within the Conservative Party with room to spare. Even with today’s surge in “democratic socialists” among Democrats, they’re more like Tories than they are Labour.

And, for goodness sake, American conservatives should feel no sense of kinship with Likud. Any more than with AfD.

Every country’s politics is uniquely its own. To understand it you need a sophisticated understanding of its history, society, and economy.

That’s why I avoid commenting about other countries’ politics. I don’t know enough and it’s none of my business. Heck, I avoid talking about other states’ politics.

As I read this post by Manhattan Contrarian Francis Merton comparing and contrasting the German and U. S. economic situations, a thought occurred to me. Can oil prices be used as a very much simplified predictor of U. S. recessions? The kind of thing I’m thinking of is “as long as the price of oil stays below X per barrel, the U. S. economic will continue to expand”.

You might find this article by Kevin Kosar at RealClearPolicy on the financial woes of the United States Post Office informative:

About $8.8 billion — that is how much the U.S. Postal Service lost in the past year. That is an eye-popping number. The agency is also carrying $11 billion in debt and has more than $120 billion in funded pension and health liabilities.

To be sure, some of that deficit is due to actuarial factor. For example, USPS’s workers’ compensation charge was $3.5 billion last year — much higher than usual due to a change in the way this expense is computed. But even if one wipes away this expense and other “uncontrollable costs,” the U.S. Postal Service still lost $3.4 billion.

The USPS doesn’t just have one problem it has many. Its former business model is being eroded and, when you’re dealing with an employee list and retired employee list as vast as the USPS’s, even small changes in things you can’t control, like interest rates and health care expenses, can be enormously expensive.

At Forbes Steven Denning has an article on a subject I addressed a week or so ago—that so many of the jobs being produced today are bad:

When U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year low, why do so many people have trouble finding work with decent pay and adequate predictable hours? A new economic indicator—the US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI)—gives the answer: we have lots of jobs, but they are increasingly low-quality jobs.

“The problem is that the quality of the stock of jobs on offer has been deteriorating for the last 30 years,” says Dan Alpert, an investment banker and Cornell Law School professor. The JQI is built and maintained by Alpert and his fellow researchers at Cornell University Law School, the Coalition for a Prosperous America, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. (As to how the JQI is constructed, see the technical note below.)

He asks five questions:

1. If Unemployment Is So Low, Why Don’t Wages Go Up?
2. Why Is Participation In The Workforce So Low?
3. Weren’t Manufacturing Jobs Replaced By Other Jobs?
4. Why Didn’t High Tech Save the U.S. Economy?
5. Why Has U.S. Productivity Stalled?
6. What Do The New Jobs Actually Look Like?

It’s an interesting article and I encourage you to read it.

The one point I would add is that what has happened has not been accidental but the consequence of policy. We have been maximizing the number of minimum wage jobs. The Germans call this “the American employment model”. Its success, such as it is, depends on a continuous flow of unskilled or semi-skilled workers.

Now we’re waiting to see what the House will do with their two articles of impeachment. I presume the House will vote to impeach but you never know. I then presume that the Senate will conduct a trial and then vote to acquit but you never know.

I am neither outraged nor heartened by Time’s naming Greta Thunberg as its Person of the Year. I’m just not that interested in POTY any more.