What do you think of President Trump’s threat of last night to impose tariffs on products from Mexico? So far I haven’t found anyone who thinks it’s a good idea and the most common reaction seems to be that it’s “mindbogglingly stupid”.

I think there’s a lot of moving parts here. I think there is, indeed, an obvious crisis at our southern border. It isn’t being created by Mexicans trying to get into this country illegally but Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans making their way through Mexico to the United States to file largely fraudulent asylum claims.

The tariff threat smacks to me of Maslow’s Hammer: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. There are plenty of other strategies that President Trump could use other than tariffs and sweeping tariffs could undermine all sort of other initiatives we have going with Mexico.

I’ve already given my proposal for reducing immigration from Mexico and Central America. I understand the frustration but I don’t think this is a productive way of venting it.

What do you think?

I would have found this article at The Economist funnier if it weren’t so tragic. The gist of it is that workers are ingrates and should be satisfied with what they’re getting, damamit:

Everyone says work is miserable. Today’s workers, if they are lucky enough to escape the gig economy and have a real job, have lost control over their lives. They are underpaid and exploited by unscrupulous bosses. And they face a precarious future, as machines threaten to make them unemployable.

There is just one problem with this bleak picture: it is at odds with reality. As we report this week (see Briefing), most of the rich world is enjoying a jobs boom of unprecedented scope. Not only is work plentiful, but it is also, on average, getting better. Capitalism is improving workers’ lot faster than it has in years, as tight labour markets enhance their bargaining power. The zeitgeist has lost touch with the data.

In America the unemployment rate is only 3.6%, the lowest in half a century. Less appreciated is the abundance of jobs across most of the rich world.

I’ll restrict my comments to the United States. I don’t know enough about England or Germany or Japan to comment on their situations. I’ll leave that to an English, German, or Japanese blogger.

It is not difficult to discern the reasons for the dissatisfaction if you’re willing to look for it. You need go no farther than the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report:

Professional and business services added 76,000 jobs in April. Within the industry, employment gains occurred in administrative and support services (+53,000) and in computer systems design and related services (+14,000). Over the past 12 months, professional and business services has added 535,000 jobs.

In April, construction employment rose by 33,000, with gains in nonresidential specialty trade contractors (+22,000) and in heavy and civil engineering construction (+10,000). Construction has added 256,000 jobs over the past 12 months.

Employment in health care grew by 27,000 in April and 404,000 over the past 12 months. In April, job growth occurred in ambulatory health care services (+17,000), hospitals (+8,000), and community care facilities for the elderly (+7,000).

If we turn to the BLS’s definition of “administrative and support services”, two-thirds of the gains in that segment, are mostly janitors, laborers, and groundskeeping workers. The average hourly wage in the segment provides a lower than median annual income.

Month after month over the period of the last decade the health care sector has accounted for substantial growth in employment but that doesn’t mean that the number of physicians, physician’s assistants, registered nurses, and top-level technicians has been exploding. The jobs being added are overwhelmingly at the low end—PNs, home health care workers, and so on, jobs that typically pay at or near minimum wage.

There is fierce competition for all of those low-skill, low-wage jobs, driven by legal and illegal immigration, and that keeps the wages down.

When you take a view from an altitude lower than the 50,000 feet The Economist is cruising at, the situation doesn’t look nearly as rosy.

Here’s a fascinating observation from Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic. The adoption of cellphones during the 1990s may have been responsible for the drop in crime:

It’s practically an American pastime to blame cellphones for all sorts of societal problems, from distracted parents to faltering democracies. But the devices might have also delivered a social silver lining: a de-escalation of the gang turf wars that tore up cities in the 1980s.

The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales.

Is it also possible that criminal gangs have now learned to use smartphones in their activities and that’s the reason that crime is rising again. What’s the relative role between technology and demographics?

Just as a reminder all executive branch departments derive the entirety of their authority and power from the president. They are in no way independent of the president and do not derive their authority directly from the Congress independent of the president. They do not constitute a separate branch of government.

It is true of the Department of Justice. It is true of the Department of State. It is true of all executive branch departments.

If you don’t like the president, impeach him. If you don’t like that arrangement, amend the Constitution.

There’s an interesting piece by Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic on divorce:

Lange seems to have avoided repeating his parents’ relationship history. But divorce, as a thorough body of research has demonstrated, often perpetuates itself across generations—“children of divorce,” as they’re called, are more likely to get divorced themselves than are people from “intact families.” A parental split, it turns out, can shape the next generation from childhood on.

Researchers have been aware of the connection between a parent’s divorce and a child’s divorce for nearly a century, says Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah. Further, as Wolfinger found after he started studying the subject in the 1990s, people with divorced parents are disproportionately likely to marry other people with divorced parents—and couples in which both partners are children of divorce are more likely to get divorced than couples in which just one person is.

Wolfinger says that researchers have some ideas about why divorce would be heritable. One theory is that many children of divorce don’t learn important lessons about commitment. “All couples fight,” Wolfinger explains. “If your parents stay together, they fight and then you realize these things aren’t fatal to a marriage. If you’re from a divorced family, you don’t learn that message, and [after fights] it seems like things are untenable. And so you bounce.”

One other (albeit minor) factor is genetics. By way of explanation, Wolfinger talked through a hypothetical generation-spanning chain of assholery: “Some people are jerks, and there is some component of being a jerk that appears to be purely genetic. So: You’re a jerk, you get married, you have a kid, you don’t stay married—because you’re a dick—your kid inherits some of the genetic propensity to be a jerk. And so they get divorced.”

I was tremendously fortunate that my parents’ joint response to their awful childhoods was to create the most stable, loving idyllic childhood for me and my siblings that they possibly could.

There’s a considerable body of scholarship suggesting that children do best when reared by their biological parents as well.

Commitment, marriage, stable parental relationships, happy, secure children, secure old ages. These things are all interrelated. That’s how systems work. Traditional values are a system.

If we are to reject traditional values as inadequate to modern needs, we might consider coming up with alternatives that achieve the same or better outcomes. Something to the left of “whoopee”, as Murray in the play A Thousand Clowns put it, is probably inadequate.

Contrary to the way the media have been framing it this morning Robert Mueller hasn’t “pushed” anything to the Congress. Special counsels are not now and never have been the constitutional remedy for wrongdoing by a sitting president. That is and always has been the responsibility of the Congress. Mueller is just suggesting that the Congress put the Jack of Clubs on the Queen of Diamonds.

What we are presently seeing is the Democrats’ establishing the relative importance in priority of their goals and values. I know here I’d put my money.

Otherwise partisan bickering does not interest me.

At Forbes Jude Clemente has a reasonably dispassionate article on the five issues that any Green New Deal must address. They are:

1. Spacing
2. Intermittency
3. Developing Nations
4. Sinking Other Investments
5. Fossil Fuel Inputs

I’ve been pointing out that last one for decades. To accomplish their goals the proponents of any GND must paradoxically be willing to increase carbon emissions in the short term if they are to reduce them in the long term.

There are all sort of article around this morning about the next moves that China might make in the so-called “trade war” with the United States, most of them self-destructive which IMO is why China won’t do them. Niall Ferguson warns of a new Thirty Years War. IMO we’ve been in a new Thirty Years War since the Iranian Revolution but nobody has noticed that’s what it is. What else would you call a war without borders and without end?

You might want to glance at this piece at Bloomberg by David Fickling which explains why blocking exports of rare earths to the U. S. is just about the dumbest thing that the Chinese might do:

As is often pointed out, most rare earths aren’t in fact rare. Lanthanum and cerium are as abundant as copper and lead, and are used in such pedestrian applications as pool cleaner and cigarette-lighter flints. Even the more prized magnetic elements such as neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium and samarium are humdrum enough that Apple Inc. uses rare-earth magnets to make its power cables stick in place. Pottery enthusiasts can pick up neodymium oxide for around $50 a kilogram online to give a blue tint to their glazes; that’s probably a bit more neodymium than you’d find in a typical electric car.

Supply is particularly generous when you set it against the most crucial and alarming segment of demand: military hardware. This amounts to no more than around 500 metric tons a year, according to a U.S. Department of Defense study, equivalent to what you’d get from Lynas’s plant in about 10 days. Solvay SA, a French chemicals company, recently set up a demonstration project to produce nearly 200 tons a year of rare earths just from recycling light bulbs.

In hindsight, the U.S. government might have been wise earlier this decade to provide the loan guarantees to put Mountain Pass on a more solid footing.

It might be worthwhile to consider why the Department of Energy demurred from guaranteeing Molycorp’s loans. It was mostly the Obama Administration’s environmental concerns.

The only dumber thing the Chinese might do would be to dump Treasuries, something that would remind me of nothing so much as that scene in Blazing Saddles in which Cleavon Little held a gun to his own head.

I don’t think that Bruce Jepsen really understands why in his words:

much is to be done to educate the public at large even as single payer supporters like Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris push Medicare for All on the campaign trail.

Read his piece at Forbes. It’s actually a pretty fair survey of some of the plans out there.

The reason is that only having a slogan maximizes support. You don’t need to get into analyzing, producing, or defending the messy details. Once you get into the messy details opposition will mobilize quickly.

That same principle applies to a broad swathe of hot-button political items including the Green New Deal and “comprehensive immigration reform”. Yes, there are plans out there but no omnibus plan, no “real” plan. It’s a nice strategy as long as you can make it work. It also provides the opportunity to draw yourself up to your full height and demand that your political opponents produce their plans. Playing defense is easier than offense.