In his latest New York Times column David Brooks speculates that maybe the U. S. economy is working as you would expect it to:

In 2015, median household incomes rose by 5.2 percent. That was the fastest surge in percentage terms since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s. Women living alone saw their incomes rise by 8.7 percent. Median incomes for Hispanics rose by 6.1 percent. Immigrants’ incomes, excluding naturalized citizens, jumped by over 10 percent.

The news was especially good for the poor. The share of overall income that went to the poorest fifth increased by 3 percent, while the share that went to the affluent groups did not change. In that year, the poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1999.

The numbers for 2016 have just been released by the Census Bureau, and the trends are pretty much the same. Median household income rose another 3.2 percent, after inflation, to its highest level ever. The poverty rate fell some more. The share of national income going to labor is now rising, while the share going to capital is falling.

However, this passage jumped out at me:

In a well-functioning economy, workers are rewarded for their productivity. As output, jobs and hours worked rise, so does income. Over the past two years, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.

That’s simply not true. Workers are rewarded based on the productivity of other workers whom they resemble superficially, not on the basis of their own personal productivity. The most productive mail carrier in the U. S. is paid the same as other mail carriers with the same job title and seniority. That’s the way the government and most private sector companies work. Maybe that’s not a “well-functioning economy” but it’s the one we have and we shouldn’t expect anything else to materialize in the foreseeable future.

He continues:

The problem of the middle-class squeeze, in short, may not be with how the fruits of productivity are distributed, but the fact that there isn’t much productivity growth at all. It’s not that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats; it’s that the tide is not rising fast enough.

That’s why I perseverate on deadweight loss. Total government spending is around 36% of GDP. That’s a lot of space for deadweight loss (the difference between the economic activity that would have been realized and the economic activity that was actually realized in the light of government spending) and it wouldn’t take much to boost GDP.

Then Mr. Brooks lurches uncontrollably on to the truth:

If productivity itself is the problem, not distribution, radically different politics is demanded than we’re seeing today. If productivity is the problem, we need more dynamism, not less, more openness, not less, more growth-oriented policies, not more dirigiste and redistributive ones.

Simply discarding the programs that aren’t accomplishing their goals would be a step in the right direction.

At Foreign Policy Elias Groll reports that the Navy is investigating whether the McCain’s collision was the result of a cyberattack:

The military is examining whether compromised computer systems were responsible for one of two U.S. Navy destroyer collisions with merchant vessels that occurred in recent months, Vice Admiral Jan Tighe, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said on Thursday.

Naval investigators are scrambling to determine the causes of the mishaps, including whether hackers infiltrated the computer systems of the USS John S. McCain ahead of the collision on Aug. 21, Tighe said during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Investigators are not, however, considering the possibility that the USS Fitzgerald collision, which took place on June 17, was the result of hacking.

“With the McCain incident happening so close to the Fitzgerald,” questions immediately arose about whether computer manipulation could have been the cause of the crash, Tighe said. The Navy has no indication that a cyberattack was behind either of the incidents, but is dispatching investigators to the McCain to put those questions to rest, she said.

That they’re investigating it doesn’t mean that’s what happened. It just means they’re considering the possibility, for this event and prospective future events. Our military considers all sorts of counter-factuals.

But what if it was a cyberattack? I don’t know that it’s even possible to operate these enormous machines without their computer systems and retrofitting them so that they can be sounds like an expensive and maybe impossible task. Security capable of definitely denying success to cyberattacks has proven elusive to our military, our government, and private sector companies alike. It requires patterns of thought presently foreign to them, completely counter-intuitive, and which limit their freedom of action in ways they presently find intolerable.

At Reason Peter Suderman has unearthed a video clip from 30 years ago of the younger Bernie Sanders telling what is the simple truth: Medicaid for all would bankrupt the United States. Go on over there for the clip.

Note that real per capita health care spending is significantly higher today than it was 30 years ago. Mr. Suderman observes:

Medicaid, notably, is far less generous than Medicare, the health program for seniors that Sanders wants to expand.

Medicaid’s provider networks are narrower, and its benefits are generally more limited. It pays doctors quite a bit less than Medicare, on average, and it costs substantially less per capita. Relative to Medicare, it’s the bargain option.

This is a short clip, and the full version may reveal additional relevant context. But what Sanders is describing in the segment above is the comparatively high cost of health care services in the United States relative to countries like Canada. As the clip ends, Dr. Milton Terris begins to discuss the ways in which other countries limit extra charges and use the power of government monopoly to force down prices.

Forcing health care spending down to the levels seen in other countries would radically upset the system, pushing doctors out of business and likely leaving many hospitals with little choice but to close down or eliminate services. It would, at minimum, be incredibly difficult politically, since it would require decreasing funding to hospitals and other large medical facilities, which would in turn require eliminating jobs or drastically reducing compensation. At the end of every health care spending cut is an individual with a job and a paycheck.

That’s the conclusion I came to as well. How should health care be reformed? Start making the hard choices now rather than handwaving them away, assuming they’ll be made later, or will be unnecessary. Adopt the mindset of using “the power of government monopoly to force down prices”. Government already pays for more than half of all health care. It has influence which it does not presently choose to use.

Stop subsidizing the wealthy and the well-to-do. Help the genuinely needy. Those are the reforms we need.

Neither political party has anything resembling a majority of voters affiliated with them.

Gallup: Democrats 28%/Republicans 28%

Pew: Democrats 44%/Republicans 37%

If you add “leaners”, independents who lean more towards Democrats or lean more towards Republicans, both Gallup and Pew get just about the same results: Democrats 48%/Republicans 44%.

28% is not a majority. Neither is 48%. Americans are pretty darned dissatisfied with both political parties.

Despite the title of this post, in it I’m asking a serious question. There have been a number of news stories in recent months about the suppression of freedom of speech on college campuses. University of Missouri, Evergreen State, Yale, Oberlin, Middlebury College, Berkeley, the list goes on.

I think I can identify three distinct positions on whether this constitutes a problem or not. The first position is that it’s a tempest in a teapot, just a handful of instances so, consequently, not a problem. In the “not a problem” camp, there is also a Marcusist strain that not only says that it’s not a problem but such suppression happens, it’s widespread, and it’s good. I’m discounting that view.

The second position is that the issue is present on most if not all college campuses these days and, consequently, is a grave problem because it flies in the face of the very purpose of higher education.

The third is that there’s just not enough data to tell.

Which if any of these positions is correct? If it’s the third, how many colleges, how many incidents would be required for the claim to achieve critical mass and, in particular, before the burden of proof transfers from those who claim it’s a problem to those who say it isn’t or that they don’t know?

The word “gaggle” is a collective noun, a medieval hunting term. There is no authoritative answer to how many geese make a gaggle but it’s at least three. Three or more geese flocking on the ground is a gaggle; three or more geese flocking in the air are a skein.

Special pleading is the logical fallacy in which on cites something as an exception to a general rule or principle without justifying the exception.

Here’s my question. How do you distinguish between “a poor choice of words” and actual bigotry, as Geoffrey Stone and Eric Seagall do in their defense in the New York Times of Dianne Feinstein’s apparent indictment of Catholics in her questioning of judicial nominee Amy Barrett? Isn’t using the wrong words whatever one’s intent now being proclaimed as wrong? Aren’t they making an exception in the case of Sen. Feinstein? Or Catholics?

The scales have fallen from John Judis’s eyes, as his essay at the New Republic illustrates:

If you take the percentage of Americans that the U.S. census defines as “minorities” and project their past voting habits into the next decade and beyond, you’ll come up with a very sunny version of the Democrats’ prospects. There are only two problems with this line of thinking, but they’re pretty big ones. For starters, the census prediction of a “majority-minority” America—slated to arrive in 2044—is deeply flawed. And so is the notion that ethnic minorities will always and forever continue to back Democrats in Obama-like numbers.

The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country. It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as “Latino” or “Asian” will continue to claim those identities in future generations. In reality, that’s highly unlikely. History shows that as ethnic groups assimilate into American culture, they increasingly identify themselves as “white.”

which is precisely the point I made back in 2002 when his book first came out.

The thesis is so flawed it’s hard to know where to start. “Whiteness” is malleable. In 1840 my Irish ancestors were not seen as white. Now they would be. As recently as 1920 my wife’s Italian ancestors along with the Jews and many others who had come here were not seen as white. Now they are except by the .02% of the population who will never see anyone who is not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as white.

Today the majority of Mexican-Americans are in fact Mexican citizens. Under the Mexican nationality law people born in Mexico or the foreign-born children of Mexican citizens born in Mexico are Mexican citizens. In 50 years (maybe sooner) the majority of Mexican-Americans won’t be Mexican citizens.

But the notion that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have more interests in common with each other than they do with the balance of the population is itself fundamentally flawed, a product of ignorance. Tell it to the young black man whose main job competition comes from Hispanics. Or the Asian shopkeeper who’s just had a brick thrown through his window by a black or Hispanic neighborhood kid.

The actual consequences as opposed to the imagined consequences of the racial spoils system sort of identity politics is that various racial minorities will squabble over the scraps that fall from the table while the white elite remains firmly in control of the table. If you don’t believe that’s the case, look at the number and roles of blacks and Hispanics in the Congressional Democratic caucus.

He continues to overestimate the proportion of the population who are progressives but that’s another question. IMO it’s more like 15% of the population than 51% but if you torture the definition of “progressive” long enough it will submit. Jacksonians, white, black, or other are the most hidebound of conservatives but they see nothing in conflict between that and taking a government handout.

Something else you might find entertaining comes from James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal:

In August, 36% of respondents said they had a somewhat or very positive view of Mr. Trump, compared to 52% with a somewhat or very negative view. These numbers look terrible, until you see Mrs. Clinton’s. Just 30% of respondents said they had a somewhat or very positive view of her, compared to 53% with a somewhat or very negative view—23 percentage points underwater. This is not quite the worst polling she’s ever had in this survey. Mrs. Clinton did manage to sink to 24 points underwater in April of last year—right after the email scandal broke.

and that’s what happened. Americans have become like the Bourbons, who “learned nothing and forgot nothing”, as Talleyrand put it. More bourbons, less Bourbons!

I think that Amar Bhidé is whistling past a graveyard in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In it he blames the rise of Equifax and other credit-scoring companies on fair lending laws:

Outrage that Equifax exposed more than 143 million credit records to identity thieves misses the point. We really should worry about what makes impersonation so easy—why do lenders know so little about the people to whom they issue credit?

Because laws meant to ensure fair lending also reduce individuals to anonymous credit scores. Regulators enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act and the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act look askance at lenders who rely on judgment instead of scores to screen loan applications.

Even broadly relying on statistical scores doesn’t get lenders off the hook. Regulators also frown on “discretionary overrides,” especially if lenders allow frontline staff to overrule scores instead of having someone at headquarters do it. A branch-based banker in direct contact with customers may be better positioned to determine whether an applicant’s score reflects true creditworthiness. But regulators worry that giving branch staffers this authority may invite discrimination, so it’s a no-no.

Federal fairness examiners also worry about “customized” scoring models that can include variables excluded from credit-bureau records, such as education. It isn’t entirely forbidden, but regulators worry those variables could correlate with factors like race, ethnicity and sex. Lenders often resort to using a “generic” bureau score, popularly called a FICO score, to mitigate regulatory risk.

Everything in our civilization is pushing towards reducing people to numbers. Whether you can buy a house or a car, whether you get that job, whether you get into that school, and, consequently, how much you earn and where and how you live are all governed by numbers. It won’t be reversed.

The drawing at the top of this post is the minor Peanuts character 555 95472. Welcome, fellow numbers!