There is a crucial observation in scholar Jennifer Mercieca’s post at The Conversation:

Without a mutually shared understanding of facts, words and values, a culture cannot endure.

It’s possible that at this moment in history there is little that we all understand in the same way, with the same emotional intensity.

But that’s exactly what you’d expect in a country where people spend an enormous amount of their time sitting in their living rooms, maybe with a family member or two, watching television. If they don’t like what they see, they switch channels. Or in an even more solitary mode, sitting behind a monitor reading Facebook, looking at what you wish to see.

The problem is that we can’t switch channels and have a different country.

Pollster Mark Penn, in an op-ed at The Hill says one thing that’s quite correct:

You don’t need polls to see the America you live in. You need polls to understand the part of America you don’t know, don’t see, and don’t understand.

There is considerable art in crafting polling questions. They can be constructed to reveal, confirm biases, or even conceal. What the polls presently reveal is that President Trump’s approval is holding firm at around 43%, several points above where it stood a year ago while his disapproval rate fluctuates from between 51% and 54%, significantly lower than it was a year ago.

The polls do not reveal Americans’ views on illegal immigration or international trade because the pollsters aren’t asking those questions.

Read this summary of the activities of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by No Labels at RealClearPolicy and decide for yourself whether you think it should be abolished, especially in the absence of an alternative. This observation from President Obama, spoken recently in South Africa and safely out of the hearing of Democrats who think otherwise, is also instructive:

But Mr. Obama, sounding a lot more like Mr. Trump than like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told his South African audience that “it’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter, [that] whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed.” He added that “newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home. Those are legitimate things, and we have to be able to engage people who do feel as if things are not orderly.”

This, too, is instructive:

Since President Trump was inaugurated in 2017, ICE arrests have increased while border arrests have decreased. According to NBCNews.com, the Border Patrol made 311,000 arrests last fiscal year, a decline of 25 percent from 416,000 during the final year of the Obama administration. During that same period, ICE made 143,000 arrests, up 25 percent from the year before.

which, as I have repeatedly pointed out, does not support President Trump’s “border wall” at all. Law that goes unenforced is a wish not a law. The statistics above suggest that the future of immigration enforcement will depend on means other than the Border Patrol, not entirely surprising considering the large number of illegal immigrants who merely overstay their visas, more or less permanently.

I’m gratified that the regular commenters here at The Glittering Eye have deduced where I have been going with several of my posts over the last week or so. I’ll try to knit the various threads together in this post. I won’t include supporting links for what I’m about to say; you can seek them out for yourself.

Over the period of the last 30 years educational policy is what has passed for an industrial policy in the United States. Over that period we have trebled our real spending on education without a great deal to show for it. That has been true under Democratic administrations in Washington as well as Republican.

There is clearly a consensus in Washington to the effect that the economy of the future depends on workers with high levels of cognitive skills. Those are the workers that can benefit from a college education—people with about the top third in skills and habits of work and mind.

The sad fact is that not everybody will be an accountant, engineer, software developer, lawyer, or physician. Some don’t have the interest. Some don’t have the cognitive ability. Many have other personal, work, or social skills people who are accountants, engineers, software developers, lawyers, or physicians probably won’t develop. How many is that? The best guess is that something between 60 and 85% of the population. That being the case there is obviously a grave mismatch between the economy that’s evolving and the population we have. The options for dealing with that are limited.

What we have been doing is trying to change our population to suit our economy—in my opinion perverse in the extreme as well as futile since regardless of how many highly skilled workers we bring into the United States, the old population remains, their wages pressured from the top by the newly-arrived skilled immigrants and from below by illegal immigrants, refugees, and the unskilled sponsorees of the skilled immigrants.

What to do? There are several alternatives: replace the old population with a new one which is pretty monstrous, try to make life better for the large proportion of the population who aren’t going to be accountants, engineers, etc., or change the economy.

Many of the proposals that have been emerging from the progressive end of the Democratic Party have been targeted towards that second goal. A universal basic income is unworkable. For one thing it’s too darned expensive especially since the proposals being put forward don’t “carve out” existing programs but “pile on” top of them. And then there is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s advice from his State of the Union Address in 1935:

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers. The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

It is not merely a question of what it is called. People have a social and psychological need for a job and no UBI check will ever fill.

Other proposals include guaranteed jobs programs and wage subsidies. I can’t prove it but I suspect they will all run afoul of the functioning of the market which operates even in the most command economy.

I think we need to change our economy. I think we need more farming, more primary production, and more manufacturing not less. I think we would have more if the web of subsidies and regulations, not just ours but those of our international trading partners, were not so dense.

In an op-ed in the New York Times Kathryn Paige Harden urges progressives to “embrace the genetics of education”:

On Monday, scientists published a study in Nature Genetics that analyzed the genes of 1.1 million people of European ancestry, including over 300,000 23andMe customers. Over 99 percent of our DNA is identical in all humans, but researchers focused on the remaining 1 percent and found thousands of DNA variants that are correlated with educational attainment. This information can be combined into a single number, called a polygenic score. In Americans with European ancestry, just over 10 percent of people with a low polygenic score completed college, compared with 55 percent of people with a high polygenic score. This genetic disparity in college completion is as big as the disparity between rich and poor students in America.

coming dangerously close to one of the genuine third rails in modern discourse. Comments are much as you’d expect, ranging from acceptance, rejection, and everything in between including smug acceptance, particularly among those whom I doubt are progressives, to angry rejection, from those whom I suspect are. Here’s a comment I found especially good:

The bottom line is: do we agree every human being equally deserves a decent life though human beings are not equally endowed with intelligence, drive, physical and mental health, or sociability? If we do, we must decide what the elements of a decent life are and pursue policies that ensure everyone can have them. If we don’t, we let capitalism run amok, let the strong survive and the weak perish.

I agree with that although my notion of a “decent life” and the commenter’s probably differ and, even more importantly, the opinions on the subject undoubtedly vary between those who want to ensure that everyone can lead a decent life and those who want to be ensured to live their decent lives. I’m also curious about what the commenter meant by “every” and “deserves”. Whatever the case our present policies spend hugely more ensuring that those who are tasked with ensuring the decent lives of third parties are paid well enough than actually ensuring those decent lives.

In his column at the Hollywood Reporter Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about the mobs that assemble to punish “social infractions” makes a very sensible observation:

We need to have a rubric to judge social infractions. What exactly was said or done? In what context? What was the intention? Who was offended or hurt? How badly? How long ago did it happen? Is this a first offense? I, too, want to eliminate offensive speech and actions as quickly as possible. I still believe justice delayed is justice denied. But we need to judge the totality of the person, not just a stray utterance. How many of us would survive under that strict litmus test?

One of the things I’ve noticed about the defenestrations of James Gunn, Amy Powell, Roseanne Barr, and John Schnatter is how rarely those leading the charge are those who’ve been injured by the remarks. That suggests to me that an element of opportunism is involved.

That is not to say that there is not a genuine problem as Mr. Abdul-Jabbar concludes:

We must not let these discordant sounds distract us from the deeper injustices. Companies quick to fire seem more interested in promoting a memorial to their virtue than attacking the systemic problems that would address putting more people of color, women and LGBTQ people behind the camera and in executive positions. In the 1,100 top films from 2007 to 2017, only 4 percent of the directors were female. And even if women do direct a successful film, they are rarely hired to direct another of the same level. Over the same span, only 5.2 percent of the 1,223 directors were black, and 3.2 percent were Asian.

although I have a nit to pick with his concluding formulation. How many is the right number? “Asians”, a characterization that itself makes me uncomfortable, comprise 5.6% of the U. S. population. That they are 3.2% of the directors does not sound like a grave injustice to me unless, that is, you believe that 12% of directors should be black, 16% Hispanic, 6% Asian, 1% Native American, and the other 65% white. How is that to be accomplished? Also, check out the roster of those in front of the camera. For many primetime television programs such assignments would mean that more whites would be in the casts rather than fewer.

I also hasten to point out that Hollywood is a business. More women will be directors when women directors make more pictures that lots of people want to see. That time may already be here as the great success of Wonder Woman suggests.

My proposal for handling hurtful utterances would be, in descending order of priority:

1. Do your level best not to intentionally hurt another’s feelings.
2. If you are so sensitive that even an unintentional remark causes you severe distress whether you are the object of the remark or not, seek counseling.
3. Grow a thicker skin.

and that rubric applies to presidents and presidential candidates as well as to bloggers and people who post on Twitter.

At Atlantic Krishnadev Calamur muses over whether President Trump will start a war with Iran and concludes that he won’t:

Ultimately, Iran cannot afford a war with the U.S. It is tied up in Syria, Iraq, and, to a lesser extent, Yemen and Lebanon. It finances Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. All this while its economy is in a moribund state and will almost certainly get worse. What Iran can do, however, is make things difficult for Trump in the region. It has broad political and cultural influence in Iraq, which, despite ongoing protests, is on the cusp of stability after years of conflict; it continues to support the Assad regime in Syria; and it has the potential to sow instability in Afghanistan, with which it shares a border. The U.S. is aware of all this. Even if the more hawkish elements of the Trump administration may favor a conflict with Iran—and there’s no public statement to suggest this is true—the president himself has been known to be averse to U.S. military adventurism. And, as he has said, he is “the only one that matters.”

I certainly hope that’s true. War with Iran would be a mistake and unnecessary. If President Trump actually wants to tighten the screws on Iran, there are plenty of ways to do it, especially by imposing sanctions on countries that trade with Iran in contravention of United Nations Security Council sanctions. That includes most of our largest trading partners.

Meanwhile, I wish the president would put the keyboard down. IMO most of the fulmination against Iran is yet another case of our pursuing other countries’ national interests rather than our own.

There are a couple of things I’d intended to mention about Peter Gunn when I posted on it the other day. The first thing is that although Blake Edwards created, produced, and occasionally wrote for Peter Gunn he’d also written for the old Richard Diamond radio program and I noticed something amusing. Every so often he, er, recycled dialogue from Richard Diamond into Peter Gunn and in at least one instance he reused an entire plot, adapting it for the different characters. I may be the first person to notice that. I’ve certainly never read anyone else commenting on it

There are some notable similarities between Richard Diamond and Peter Gunn other than the obvious, that they’re both private eye programs. They have close, friendly relationships with their local police departments (New York and Los Angeles, respectively). Both have long-suffering steady girlfriends—Helen Asher for Richard Diamond and Edie, the chanteuse at Mother’s, a jazz club, for Peter Gunn.

And both programs feature the performance of a song in nearly every episode. In Richard Diamond it’s sung by Dick Powell, seated at Helen’s piano, and in Peter Gunn it’s sung by Edie.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that in a certain sense Magnum, P. I. is a lampoon of Peter Gunn. Magnum is Peter’s opposite in practically every way. Peter is impeccably and rather formally dressed; Magnum is casual if not a slob. Peter is masterful; Magnum bumbles through most of his cases. Peter is independent to a fault; Magnum is dependent (on Higgins/Robin). Robin’s Ferrari is an important component of the Magnum program; in 50 episodes I don’t think I’ve ever seen Peter Gunn drive, somewhat surprising for a program set in Los Angeles. Peter Gunn maintains a steady and monogamous relationship; Magnum doesn’t. But, importantly, both of their theme songs are riffs.

Now we’re about to see a reboot of Magnum. Maybe it can recapture some of the original’s feeling and popularity, maybe not. I doubt if those involved in the reboot are aware of its pedigree.

In his latest column at the Washington Post Robert Samuelson counsels against “economic nostalgia”:

The change is real. If you examine the basic indicator of the economy’s size — gross domestic product, or GDP — there clearly has been a break from the rapid growth of the early post-World War II decades. From 1950 to 1973, the economy grew at an average annual rate of 4 percent, reports the Congressional Budget Office. More recently, growth from 2008 to 2017 — the Great Recession and the recovery — averaged only 1.5 percent.

When Trump pledges to “make America great again,” he is widely thought to be referring to the 1950s and 1960s. There is an understandable urge to retrieve these decades, but the prospect that this is a cure is a mirage. Much of the postwar boom was driven by three economic advantages for the United States that were fated to fade.

But I had to snicker at this:

And third, economists seemed to have made progress in stabilizing the economy.

Seventy years after WWII, that again seems to be in question. Are economists “stabilizing the economy” or are they ensuring that recoveries are shallower while contractions are deeper? If that’s the case, maybe we could do with a little instability.

I will agree with Mr. Samuelson that if we continue to do what we’ve been doing we’ll continue to obtain the results we’ve been getting. Now if we could just figure out what we’ve been doing…