Today at Outside the Beltway Steven Taylor is outraged that minority rule prevails in the United States:

To reiterate: the notion that a system that, on a mass level, provides more power to the minority than to the majority in terms of basic decision rules (like selecting a president) is inherently flawed. It is not democratic. And even if one tries to engage in some convoluted argument that tries to establish that the EC does some amazing magical representation that is superior to a popular vote, all one is doing is rationalizing a failed institution that never even worked as designed.

The situation of a candidate who failed to garner a majority of the popular vote become president is not a new one. Bill Clinton did not receive a majority of the popular vote either time he ran for president and John Kennedy got a minority of the popular vote in 1960. They did, however, win pluralities of the popular vote. Pluralities are still minorities. I can mount the same arguments against plurality rule that Dr. Taylor does against minority rule.

I think our system is facing a crisis of legitimacy which has its roots not in the electoral college but in the failure of elected leaders to implement policies that a majority of Americans support, as I suggested earlier today. Rather than perseverate on the cruel injustice of the electoral college, I’d like to take a different tack. What policies do a majority of Americans support? Let’s consider a number of hot button issues.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that immigration should be decreased or stay the same compared to just over half who think it should be increased or stay the same. Decrease has the most support. I believe that the extremely high rate of illegal immigration sours Americans on immigration more generally.

A narrow majority of Americans believe that some method of regularizing the status of illegal immigrants brought here as children should be implemented.

A majority of Americans believe that health care insurance is the government’s responsibility. That is a recent change. A bare majority supports the Affordable Care Act. A majority of Americans are worried about paying ordinary health care expenses and a supermajority are worried about paying the bills for a serious illness or accident. A majority think that health care is not affordable.

A majority of Americans want a system based on private insurance.

I have no idea how to resolve the contradictions in those positions.

A majority of Americans think that abortion should only be legal under certain circumstances—essentially the status quo. That’s a far higher number than either those who think that abortion should be legal under all circumstances or illegal under all circumstances.

The majority position is the status quo.

Afghanistan

I found it hard to find good polling on this subject but the impression I am left with by what I have found is that a majority of Americans think we should withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.

Just about half of Americans supported our military actions in Syria.

A narrow majority of Americans think we need new laws to ensure the rights of LGBT Americans.

Majorities of Americans think that blacks and whites have equal opportunities for jobs and housing.

A majority of Americans think that “the rich” pay too little in taxes.

As should be obvious from the discrepancy in so many areas between what Americans think and what American political leadership is doing, is it any wonder we have a crisis of political legitimacy in the United States?

Are there any other issues I should address here?

As one final note, if you are strongly committed to democracy, why should we not try direct democracy? If you do not think we should try direct democracy, how do you reconcile that with your support for democracy?

There’s something I have been predicting for some time: that not just the lifecycles of companies from birth to death but the lifecycles of whole industries and business models was accelerating. Blockbuster Video was founded in 1985. By 2013 it was gone. Its business model had collapsed.

Netflix.com was founded in 1997. Keep that in mind as you read these articles at the Washington Post:

Netflix Inc. and the soon-to-come HBO Max app need a little of what each other has. In the meantime, consumers may be the ones who lose out.

If you’re like me, you’ve started to realize that despite a vast number of video-streaming apps, none on its own offers the ideal mix of content best suited to your tastes. And if you’re like me, paying for more than a couple of these subscriptions would feel excessive and expensive. But the media giants behind these products sure aren’t making it an easy choice.

AT&T Inc.’s freshly acquired WarnerMedia division announced on Tuesday that HBO Max, its Netflix copycat, will launch next spring and exclusively feature the hit show “Friends,” which it’s yanking from Netflix. The sitcom hasn’t had new episodes in 15 years, but it’s a large part of Netflix’s lifeblood. Subscribers spend more time watching “Friends” than any other program on the service except “The Office,” according to Nielsen data for 2018. (Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal is taking “The Office” off Netflix, too, in 2021.)

As services like HBO Max and Walt Disney Co.’s Disney+ hit the market, it’s crucial for Netflix to try to maintain its standing as the necessary “base” streaming package – the minimum that most people need. Without “Friends,” “The Office” and other popular licensed content, Netflix risks becoming an add-on service instead – nice to have but not a requirement. Sure, it’s building a strong franchise in “Stranger Things,” but of Netflix’s top 20 programs last year by time watched, only six were Netflix originals, the Nielsen data show.

and New York Magazine:

Netflix’s main strategy to stay necessary is though its offerings of original content, which can’t be yanked away by a rival studio. But that’s a really expensive business, and Netflix will have to show, in a way it has not to date, how much of its original content is generating a return on investment by driving subscriptions and viewership.

Netflix’s traditional movie studio rivals have been complaining for years that Netflix (and Amazon) have been driving a “bubble” in content production, paying insane prices and inflating the cost for everyone to make movies and television shows. A key question for them is whether Netflix has been using its profitable old-content middleman business to cross-subsidize an unsustainable original-content business. By yanking away their old content, the studios don’t just have an opportunity to keep some of Netflix’s profits for themselves; they can also test their hypothesis that Netflix wouldn’t be such a bothersome competitor in the original-content business if it didn’t have other profits to rely on.

The middleman position that bootstrapped Netflix into existence is a tough business. IMO it’s possible for a company to succeed as a middleman in the streaming business but only by remaining a tech company and having the best streaming service, the best search engine, etc. and remaining very lean.

Netflix has clearly decided that’s not for it. It’s gotten into the content business which is an even tougher business. How do I know it’s tougher? Take Disney (please). Disney has been in the content business for 90 years. How creative are live action versions (or “live action versions”) of fully animated cartoons? Disney’s last real blockbuster was Frozen in 2013 and it’s had several big flops since then. So, Netflix, if Disney, the heavyweight champion of content, is having problems coming up with new ideas, what makes you think you can do it successfully?

As of today President Trump’s job approval rating based on the RCP Average of Polls (sampled above) is 45%. The spread (the difference between approval and disapproval ratings) is 6.6 points, the most favorable since the earliest days of his presidency. The polls included in this RCPPA includes polls taken after the tweets heard ’round the world and incessant charges of racism. Those polls include Rasmussen (50%), Reuters/Ipsos (44%), and Economist/YouGov (46%). An approval rating on election day of 51% is generall considered a lock on re-election.

I don’t know what this improvement in Trump’s approval rating portends for his re-election but I think it’s fair to speculate that he is now immune to charges of racism.

I also think that the mystery of Trump is that a significant number of people vote for him despite their personal disapproval of him. I speculate that there are people who actually support Trump who lie about it to pollsters.

I got as far as this passage in Megan McArdle’s smirking behind her fan Washington Post column, noting the political problems in both the U. S. and U. K.:

There has been a lot of talk lately about the erosion of the long-standing U.S.-British “special relationship.” Yet in one respect the countries are more tightly linked than ever before: Both are enduring a collective nervous breakdown of their political institutions.

It is not just the United States and the United Kingdom. France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Sweden, and who knows how many other countries are also having “collective nervous breakdowns” all at the same time. It makes you wonder if there’s something in the water.

Maybe it’s something inherent in social media. Maybe it’s Russian interference. Maybe it’s the spirit of the times. Maybe mass migration inevitably results in political unrest. But there’s clearly something happening here and what it is ain’t exactly clear.

I think that greed is one of the factors. Greed is a natural human emotion. It cannot be stamped out only controlled. You can have a rapacious elite and a rapacious civil bureaucracy (there is some overlap there) and, in the presence of robust economic growth and prosperity all may still be well.

Here in the United States for the last dozen years or more economic growth and prosperity have been greatly concentrated in just a handful of cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Boulder, Houston, you know the list. It isn’t as pat as “coastal”, “big cities”, or “red” vs. “blue”. Denver and Boulder aren’t coastal or megacities. Chicago is a big city and its economy has languished. I don’t know enough about France or Germany to know whether there have been similarly uneven patterns there.

Well, apparently Tom Friedman got quite a lot of response to the column I posted about the other day and the New York Times has published a selection of the comments. If this comment:

Why is it the left’s job to keep in step with the status quo in order to unite the party?

is at all typical it highlights that they just don’t get it. “The left” is, perhaps, an eighth of voters. Far, far more are center-left, moderates, or conservatives. In particular blacks, necessary for Democrats to win elections, are far more conservative than a lot of people seem to believe. Whatever Republicans may think “Democrat” is not synonymous with “the left”.

For “the left” to get even a little of what it wants, they must persuade people not bludgeon (literally) them. I do not believe that in the age of smartphones and the Internet any Democratic presidential candidate, having raised their hand in favor of open borders, will be able to dash back to a more centrist position.

The question that Democrats should be asking is if Barack Obama had staked out the positions in 2008 that he eventually had taken by the end of his presidency, would he have been elected for a first term? I think the answer is “no”.

Historically, the candidate who expresses the most optimistic view of America, its people, and its future has won in the general election and that includes Trump. Maybe it will be different this time but, as Cicero said more than two millennia ago, to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. It’s even worse to think that this time will be different just because you’re around.

Running against two-thirds (or more) of the voters will not be a winning strategy for anybody.

At Vox.com Jared Bernstein has a post on four economic theories that have fallen on hard times that I think is worthy of your consideration. The theories are:

1. Going below the natural rate of unemployment could spark an inflationary spiral
2. Everybody wins with globalization
3. Deep budget deficits will crowd out private investment
4. A higher minimum wage will only hurt workers

The first is the well-known “Phillips Curve”, proposed in 1958 and taught as gospel when I was taking economics classes. Although it seemed to be predictive from the post-war period through the early 1970s, the relationship bwtween unemployment and inflation seems to have stopped working. Milton Friedman thought it only applied over the short run. No one really knows whether that was the case, it was just a fluke, or if circumstances have changed so that it no longer applies. I suspect there’s some relation between sluggish increases in productivity and unemployment which explains why the relationship between inflation and unemployment no longer seems to hold.

The second is the neoliberal theory of international trade that has guided our trade policy for decades. I think that it remains true all other things being equal but that is also possible for a country, particularly a very large country, through careful application of mercantilist policies to arrange for itself to gain while everyone else loses and that the authorities of an unnamed country have succeeded in doing just that.

The third theory that doesn’t seem to be holding true is “crowding out” and it depends on whether credit is a scarce commodity or not. IMO it is possible that there are multiple carrying capacities for credit—personal, local, national, regional, global—and that while the theory may not be working as expected today it may well tomorrow. Feel lucky, punk?

I would never claim that a higher minimum wage only hurts workers and never helps them. I think that I would say that whether it helps, hurts, or both depends on, among other things, the price elasticity of labor. I also think that treating human beings as though they were cogs in a machine is immoral. Helping some workers while throwing others permanently out of work is simply not the right thing to do, particularly when there are other alternatives.

At any rate you may find Mr. Bernstein’s post as interesting as I did. In particular check out the section on the wage effects of loose and tight labor markets.

Perhaps I am being unkind but over the last several years I have seen “artificial intelligence” waved in front of a myriad of questions like a magic talisman. Given my interest in languages, naturally my interest was piqued when I ran across this article at Discovery Magazine on using artificial intelligence to decipher writing that is presently undecipherable. The punch line is here:

Taking on ancient languages with AI does pose some unique problems, though. Machine learning algorithms are usually trained on massive datasets that they mine in order to learn through associations. Most ancient scripts have only a limited number of samples, making it difficult to feed an algorithm enough data for it to learn.

The process of training an algorithm also involves comparing its answers to known values. When a language is entirely undeciphered, however, this is impossible. You can’t tell an algorithm “Yes, that is a bike,” or “No, that word does not mean ‘stop’” if you don’t know what any of it means.

or, said another way, it isn’t particularly helpful. The problem with proto-Elamite, for example, is that it may be what’s called a “language isolate”, a language like Basque with no known related languages. The orthography is likely to be imperfect which makes it quite difficult to identify cognates. The number of samples is rather limited. Much the same is true of the writings of the Indus civilization. We’re not even 100% certain that they’re writings.

By comparison deciphering the Mayan glyphs, something I consider one of the great achievements in translation of the 20th century, was relatively easy. The hardest part was recognizing that they were writings.

However, there’s always hope.

I found this article by Christopher Sims at Modern War Institute very thought-provoking. For example, there’s this:

Given that the average age for enlistment into the United States Army is twenty and the average age of deployed personnel is thirty-three, digital natives are now the primary demographic cohort that will be charged with training for and fighting wars on behalf of the nation-state.

What that tells us is that the U. S. military is making an historic transition in age cohorts. Due to the mandatory retirement age, there is necessarily a transition from the Baby Boomers who have led our military for some time to members of the Generation X cohort. I do not know what the implications of that may be.

I find the author’s use of the word “nation-state” problematic. My understanding is that a nation-state is a country in which ethnicity and citizenship are identical. Hungary is a nation-state. The United States is not and never has been. China is presently a multi-ethnic empire that, apparently, aspires to be a nation-state. Russia is not.

I’m also not sure what he means by “legitimacy”:

Many challenges digital natives face will diminish the legitimacy of the state.

I don’t think he means “legitimacy”. I think he means authenticity. I do not know what the background of the author is but he sounds like a Brit. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland isn’t a nation-state, either, as any Scot or Welshman would tell you. Any crisis of legitimacy it faces is more due to the disdain the elected leaders there rather obviously have for the people who elected them than to a generational shift from non-“digital natives” to “digital natives”.

He certainly succeeds in shaking any confidence I had in the fundamental competence of “digital natives”. Isn’t the lesson of the example he cites that being highly connected may also render you irrationally apprehensive?

Read the whole thing.

At the Financial Times Martin Wolf makes a hoarse-throated argument in favor of globalization:

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.” (I am a human being. I consider nothing human foreign to me.) These words by Terence, a second century BC Roman playwright, make a noble motto for our time. They define a position condemned by many, including the president of the US, as “globalism”. Yet that should mean more than economic — or, as some call it, “neoliberal” — globalisation. It should mean that humanity has global obligations and interests. To meet the former and promote the latter, the nation state is the start. But we must also think and act far beyond it.

I agree with that as far as it goes. Now reconcile that with China’s actions.

• China has never lived up to the commitments it made in joining the World Trade Organization.
• Its banks are opaque and largely organs of the state.
• Its currency remains nonconvertible.
• A very large proportion of its economy remains state-owned and is subsidized by the Chinese state.
• It has an active program of industrial and military espionage against the U. S. and, presumably, other countries.
• It routinely violates the intellectual property rights of foreign companies.
• Its imports are declining much faster than its exports, marking a return to a sort of one-way autarky.
• Its lack of a robust system of civil law makes it impossible for foreign companies to seek remedies in its courts.
• As I have documented it violates trade agreements more than any country other than Russia, even when taking the volume of its trade into account.
• It is using strongarm tactics to seize control of the South China Sea.
• It is a scofflaw on the UNCLOS. Example: a Chinese trawler rammed and sank a Filipino fishing boat. The trawler did not offer assistance to the survivors in contravention of international law. The captain of the trawler was not disciplined by the Chinese government as is required under international law.
• China supports the most reprehensible regimes on the planet, e.g. North Korea.
• China is polluting the environment at a ferocious rate, faster than any other country by far.
• China is essentially a free rider on the peaceful global system maintained by the U. S.

Is globalization possible without China? Is it possible with the China described above?