This post is in response to a recent comment. I’ve sampled and edited a recent and typical New York Times online Opinion Page, breaking the layout down and characterizing the way the columns are divided by content. There are three repeated themes: anti-Trump, anti-Republican, and sexual identity.

I think there are multiple ways of looking at it. One way is that their opinion page reflects the news. I think that’s far-fetched but that’s one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is that it reflects the topics that are important to their readers. I think that’s closer to the mark.

I don’t see any way of looking at it and concluding that the NYT’s emphasis on those topics is a figment of right wing media’s imagination.

One of these days I’ll write a post on how layout affects opinion, the bastard measure, and so on. Another post.

Exercise for the interested student: open the Washington Post’s opinion page and go through the same steps.

At the New York Times in an op-ed on health care reform J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, does a pretty fair job of enunciating the essential problem that Republicans have in “repealing and replacing” the Affordable Care Act or in reforming health care at all:

It is true, as Republicans argue, that health care costs too much. And it is also true that Obamacare has failed to take care of this problem. But if Republicans fail to accept some baseline provision of care, we’ll find ourselves mired in internal contradictions — arguing, for instance, that a bill that cuts subsidies for the poor somehow makes care more accessible. We’ll rail against the way the government has destroyed our health care market in one breath and resist the support offered to the poor and middle class to navigate this brokenness with the other. This is not conservative; it is incoherence masquerading as ideological purity.

Democrats who support maintaining the ACA face issues nearly a mirror image of that. They’re either indifferent to costs or believe without a great deal of support that the ACA will reduce health care costs and all will be well.

That’s if you believe, as I do, that the ACA is not a stalking horse for a single-payer system. I don’t think that policy creation in Washington works that way. I think that the ACA was created by putting together the largest grab bag of buzzwords that had been floating around the Democratic party leadership for some time that they could get enacted.

If you’re looking for a nice, depressing article to read, this one by Robert M. Cassidy at The Globalist on the futility of our war against terrorism should do the trick. Here’s a snippet:

To summarize the problem, there are legions of seasoned tactical professionals who employ the best resources and technology but serve in institutions with cultures that produce Pollyanna junior-general-officer leaders who are seemingly incapable of broaching failure or exhibiting strategic thinking.

These legions are fighting perpetual wars against, as of yet, inexhaustible sources of Islamist militants with the goal of killing all disbelievers. Yet, the Islamists benefit from support and sanctuary from non-state actors and states machinating to the detriment of the West.

So, what is there to do about our Pollyannas and this war without end? Are more tactics and violent actions without strategy rational? Is escalating the violence by firing more missiles, dropping more bombs, and sending more troops with overly optimistic generals, a sane response?

Massive air-burst-ordinance (MOAB) bombs disrupt, they even unhinge, but their effects are fleeting and do not bring about strategic ends.

I actually think it’s pretty simple. We don’t win because we don’t want to win. The psychological, political, and cultural implications of what we’d need to do to win are just too devastating.

If Scott Kennedy’s analysis at RealClearWorld is to be believed, China’s economic revival may be nearing the end of its rope. Here’s the kernel of his piece:

From the late 1970s until 2010 China averaged more than nine percent real growth, but growth has fallen considerably since, coming in at 6.7 percent for all of 2016. More troubling than the country’s dive in growth is its collapse in productivity. All of China’s growth now is achieved through mobilizing more money and labor, not improvements in human capital or technology. It now takes three times as much capital to generate a single unit of economic growth as it did in 2008. The result is an explosion of debt that now accounts for at least 280 percent of GDP, and could break through the 300 percent mark by year’s end.

and that’s if official statistics can be believed. Unofficial direct measurements (things like electricity usage or number of container ships) suggest the real figures could be much worse.

It’s not as though this is a surprise. Nearly 20 years ago I pointed out that China was doing exactly what the Soviets had done before them: moving relatively unproductive labor resources from agriculture to manufacturing. To their credit the Chinese were able to do that without reducing agricultural production as befell the Soviets but that process has just about reached the end of the trail.

This is in response to something said in comments. We should always keep in mind that there are only two known methods for allocating resources: markets and by fiat. Don’t like markets? Fine. You should keep in mind that the alternative is a command economy and command economies always introduce serious inefficiencies. They always produce less economic activity than would otherwise be the case.

My own view is that a mixed economy is both best and inevitable and that government should devote much more attention to promoting markets than it does to restraining them. That requires ongoing prudent stewardship. There is no such thing as a permanently stable equilibrium.

You might be interested in this post at the RAND Blog analyzing how the U. S. benefits from its “overseas security commitments”:

On a crisp January day in 1949, President Harry Truman stood before an inauguration crowd still recovering from want and war and envisioned a “world fabric of international security and growing prosperity.”

That idea, that America has an economic interest in promoting a stable and secure world order, has helped guide nearly seven decades of U.S. foreign policy. But a growing debate over America’s role in the world has called into question that basic assumption. Are America’s international security commitments really worth the cost?

Researchers at RAND used decades of economic data and new numbers on U.S. troops and treaties to test that question. They found strong evidence that the economic value of those overseas commitments likely exceeds their costs by billions of dollars every year.

I had several problems with the article. First, from a budgetary standpoint I don’t believe there is such a thing as “overseas security commitments”. I think there are more concrete buckets than that.

That’s called, I believe, a “fallacy of composition”. The more relevant question is whether we could have received as much benefit as we have while spending trillions less on wars in the Middle East.

Second, they ignore opportunity costs. If we had spent those trillions elsewhere, would we have benefited even more? We’ll never know.

This strongly resembles what I would call “directed research”. Somebody set out to prove that our present level of military spending was cost effective so that’s what they did.

I think that the grand strategy I outlined in a previous post is cost effective for reasons much along the lines argued in the RAND piece; I’m not as convinced that individual military expenditures further that grand strategy.

Hey! If this Washington Post article is right, I’m the wave of the future:

Life after 65 is starting to look a lot more like life at … 64. The percentage of Americans working past the traditional retirement age hit new highs in the most recent jobs numbers, according to recent reports, with 19 percent of those 65 and older working at least part-time. And it’s only expected to increase: The over-65 set is expected to be the fastest-growing demographic in the workplace by 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So what are companies doing to respond? A few have redesigned manufacturing plants to adapt. Some lucky employees are getting higher 401(k) matches to help them save. More recently, many companies have launched financial wellness programs to help employees of all ages make sure they’re better prepared to retire on time.

I think that’s wishful thinking. My real estate taxes went up 10% from last year to this. My state income taxes will increase 32%. My income doesn’t rise to make up the difference. It reduces my savings.

How can you plan for retirement these days? I don’t think you can. My retirement plan is not to retire until the last possible minute.

When I read Justin Bachman’s eye-popping imagining of airports in 2040 I was strongly reminded of some pictures. On the left is a photograph of a busy train station circa 1900. Here’s an artist’s conception of the train station of the future, drawn about the same time:

For reference purposes here’s a picture of an actual train station in 2010.

It probably serves the same routes as it did a century ago but more slowly and with fewer passengers.

I don’t know what the airports of 2040 or 2050 or 2100 will be like. I’m pretty confident that they’ll be a lot more like the airports of today than whatever we imagine. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were no airports in 2100 because air travel had become too expensive. Be careful about projecting trends of today in a straight line into the future.

Author Linda Tirado has a good essay at Talk Poverty on the “coastal elite” that I want to commend to your attention:

To be an elite is to be listened to and respected, to have autonomy, to think that your life and your work might be remembered by history. For me, it was obvious when I tipped over that line: I count national politicians in three countries amongst my friends, and if I am curious about something I can simply dial up an expert and know that my call will be taken.

That’s what power looks like now. Power is social capital that I trade on to build the networks that I need to get more social capital that I can trade for more power. That is the nature of the game, and you need an invitation to play.

Progressive circles are still not equipped to wrestle with imbalances of political power. If you ask someone on the left to explain racism or sexism or homophobia, they will be able to expound at length about how we must listen to the people who are impacted, and how those with the upper hand in any given situation must try to identify and mitigate systemic imbalances. Ask about elitism—about inequality in access and cultural power—and people have a harder time articulating it.

Consider it through the lens of the disruption that I had in my life. There are my old friends, the ones I swapped shifts with: low-income, disabled, unemployed, high-school graduates struggling to make ends meet. Then there are my new friends, the ones I made when I was elevated: politicians, household-name pundits and writers, deans of upscale schools, Hollywood stars. For me, the question of social capital is really that stark. There is Before, and After.

When I talk to my old friends about the problems of the nation, it is always personal and immediate. Will needed services like heating assistance or low-income health insurance be cut? Will I be able to keep my job if I don’t have a child care credit? Will we still have the home health nurse that takes care of my mom when I can’t be there? With my new friends, these problems are real but also somehow theoretical. Millions of people are at risk of losing these things, which everyone agrees is awful. We talk about who we might call to lobby, or what organizations are good soldiers in the fight.

It boggles the mind that people cannot see a difference in those two kinds of conversations, even as they bemoan the terrifying increases in inequality in America. I still feel an ancient rage building in my chest when I see someone on TV telling the viewing audience—most of whom will never be invited to be a pundit—that any cultural divide is the sole fault of nefarious right-wing populists.

Her key point is that rejecting the very idea that there is a “coastal elite” is symptomatic of how great the divide. Read the whole thing.

I don’t believe that we live in a democracy today. I think today’s America is an aristocracy but its aristocrats are not distinguished like the aristocracies of days of old by the ownership of land. Mostly, today’s aristocrats know people.