I found this piece by Peter Zeihan on what he sees as the collapse of the center-left not just here but in Europe as well interesting:

The only significant country where the Left is holding any ground is Germany, a country artificially re-constructed after World War II to have a very specific — and durable — political system. And even there the Social Democrats are on course to lose their fourth consecutive election this fall. (Yes, the center-left actually rules Canada — the only place of note that it still does. but Canada both lives in strategic nirvana and is disastrously complicated from a domestic political organizational point of view so I’d not draw too many lessons from the Great White North.)

What’s left of the economic Left is being subsumed by populism, a movement that broadly speaking is unhappy with the current state of affairs, thinks that everyone is out to get them, wants change, wants it now, and wants to use a mass government overhaul in order to force the issue (in the 1930s we would have called this national-socialism). Populism has managed to capture much of the Left’s thunder in a wide variety of countries including — but hardly limited to — Hungary, Poland, Austria, Finland, Israel, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Yes, Trump is a symptom of the Populist rise. But so too are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (There are many types of populists. None have ever ended up delivering what they promise.)

It is tempting to say that politics is cyclical and the Left will recover, or that it botched the chance to rule in the past two decades and it just needs a little time in the wilderness to reconnect to its roots, or that the Left can embrace other issues like identity politics and social issues to reinvigorate itself. But that misses the point. The economic Left has lost power everywhere. The grab bag that remains is important and will obviously color political and social evolutions, but it cannot define the era. Such awkward coalitions can garner votes, but not in the quantities sufficient to govern. The term “Left” itself may be appropriated by new and varied causes — the most likely is to support the coalition of those devastated by Apple, Amazon, Uber and the rest — but those are not workers, but instead the opposite. The rubric that has defined the Left for nearly two centuries is gone.

One incidental point: both Germany and Canada operate in protective cocoons we’ve devised. Neither is emblematic of anything other than Germany and Canada.

As I’ve said before I think I don’t think we’re seeing a collapse of the Left. I think we’re seeing a much broader political realignment. Yes, progressives in the United States continue to believe, without a great deal of evidence, that bargaining organizations established for craft workers and industrial workers can be expanded to cover unskilled service workers effectively and those will heal a wide variety of ailments. But conservatives have their own articles of faith, for example that tax cuts in the top marginal rates always produce robust economic growth.

I think the realignment has multiple causes including the pace of change in the modern world, China’s entering the global scene, and the failure of the established political parties to see today’s world for what it is. You can’t expect a dichotomy laid out in the 18th century to be relevant forever.

Our problem is that regardless of state of denial or relevancy our political parties continue to hold power. Power without relevancy. There’s an idea to conjure with.

I read hundreds or even thousands of op-eds, editorials, blog posts, and other opinion pieces every week, commenting on only a few. One of the things I’ve noticed is how padded so many of them are. Just as one example I think that Allan Golombek’s RealClearMarkets article on the U. S., China, and free trade can be distilled into just this paragraph:

The first thing to keep in mind is that free trade opponents are not just looking for a fair deal. They’re looking for a mercantilist advantage. But the goal of free trade isn’t to export more than you import; the goal is to facilitate the overall creation of wealth, by fostering competition, opening import alternatives, providing consumer choice, and ensuring conditions the economy needs – secure access, stable relationships, a positive business environment and a large base of workers.

Now focus on just the portion I’ve highlighted above. Is that actually the goal? Or is the goal, rather than “ensuring conditions the economy needs” ensuring conditions that the people of the country need? The two are not synonymous.

Getting to specifics and dealing solely with the U. S.-China relationship, what specific measures that liberalize trade and that can be implemented by the U. S. alone will effect the goal?

I don’t think there are any but the list of reforms that China needs to implement is enormous—everything from instituting a robust system of civil law to allowing wages to grow, expanding the ownership of banks, allowing the yuan to be exchanged freely, ending the subsidies to government-owned enterprises, and import and export quotas, and so on.

There’s a great lesson of which I think that Mr. Golombek should be reminded: some times you must climb a hill to descend into the valley below.

The American Prospect wants to spend a lot more money “fixing” school buildings:

Public school facilities—mostly ignored in discussions of the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges, ports, and highways—face an urgent infrastructure crisis of their own. Indeed, it has been getting worse for decades: In 1995, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report estimating that $112 billion was needed to repair and modernize the nation’s school facilities, and that as many as 28 million students attended schools deemed unhealthy, uncomfortable, and unsafe. The problem was most acute for poor students and racial minorities. In 1997, President Bill Clinton declared: “We cannot expect our children to raise themselves up in schools that are literally falling down. With the student population at an all-time high, and record numbers of school buildings falling into disrepair, this has now become a serious national concern.”

But little progress was made, and inequities between rich and poor school districts grew wider. By 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave public school facilities a “D+” grade on its national report card. The group found that school construction had diminished to approximately half the level spent before the Great Recession, even as public school enrollment continued to grow. By one 2016 estimate, it would take $145 billion a year to properly repair and maintain the nation’s school buildings.

Once again the civil engineers’ professional organization is mute on which schools should be repaired. It merely quotes figures on the expense of repairing existing facilities.

Last year the enrollment in Chicago’s public schools decreased by more than 11,000 students and that’s been going on for decades. The graph at the top of the page illustrates the decline in Chicago public school enrollment over time.

Should Chicago’s decrepit schools be refurbished? Or should they be consolidated and torn down? Now repeat that exercise for hundreds of medium sized and large cities in the Northeast and Midwest.

You know what the civil engineers’ report doesn’t show? The number of schools being built and where.

In his Wall Street Journal column, a paean to immigration, James Freeman repeats a frequently-cited statistic (quoting Guyuanese immigrant Mohamed Ali):

Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Intel founder Andy Grove was a refugee from communist Hungary. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is the son of Abdulfattah Jandali, an immigrant from Syria. Today, the trend continues. A recent study of billion-dollar startups found more than half were founded by immigrants. Our next generation of great companies, too, will depend on immigrants — as will the American economy as a whole.

I think there’s a better statistic. How many Fortune 500 companies or unicorns were started by illegal immigrants? I suspect it’s much, much smaller than 40% and smaller than the percentage of the population they represent.

The discussion of immigration is overly populated by strawmen arguments. Although I’m confident that some of those who oppose immigration to the United States do so for, frankly, racist reasons not all do. Some, like me, think that the present citizenry has a right to pick who is admitted into the country.

That most expansive of documents the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not recognize a right of immigration. Neither to the best of my knowledge does any country in the world. Most countries impose restrictions on immigration and some, like Canada and Australia, impose significantly more stringent restrictions than we do.

The evidence that there is a growing need for workers who don’t have even a high school education and who don’t speak English is meager. If there were such a need, you’d expect the wages for such workers to be growing. They aren’t.

Although the effects of immigration on wages are controversial, most of the studies have found that immigration by workers without high school educations pushes the wages of those who also fit that profile down, as you would expect. Many of those workers are members of the immediately previous cohort of immigrants.

That’s why I support a serious regime of workplace-based enforcement of immigration.

If he does indeed prove to have been the perpetrator of the mass murder in Manchester, Salman Abedi fits a familiar profile. Consider:

• He was born in the country that he attacked.
• He was a Muslim.
• His parents were immigrants, in his case from Libya.
• He had shown signs of radicalization which went largely unremarked upon.

Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood), the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston), Rizwan Farook (San Bernardino), and Omar Mateen (Orlando) all fit similar profiles. I think that the pressures of being in an immigrant family both from the society at large and from within the family can be just too much for some people to handle.

My conclusion is not that we should ban immigration, the immigration of Muslims, or the immigration of Muslims from certain countries. I think we should recognize the pattern, consider it a cost of immigration, and engage in early interventions to head off future problems.

This is an analysis blog not a news blog. That’s why I’m not writing about the atrocity at a music concert in Manchester, England other than to take note of it, offer condolences to the survivors, their families, and those of the slain, and to sit in silence until there’s something to analyze.

In the Wall Street Journal historian Walter Russell Mead curtly summarizes the state of American foreign policy:

North Korea threatens to take America hostage. The Middle East burns. Venezuela descends into chaos. Jihadist groups develop new capacities. A failing Russia lashes out. The European Union risks breaking apart. China presses toward regional hegemony. Trade liberalization grinds to a halt. Turkey turns away from democracy. And the U.S. still lacks a strong consensus on what its foreign policy should be.

Washington’s foreign policy needs more than grudging acquiescence from the American people if it is to succeed. How to build broad support? First, the Trump administration should embrace a new national strategy that is more realistic than the end-of-history fantasies that came at the Cold War’s conclusion. The case for international engagement should be grounded in the actual priorities of American citizens. Second, Mr. Trump and other political leaders must make the case for strategic global engagement to a rightfully skeptical public.

It might be helpful if those who advocate an assertive, activist, interventionist foreign policy for the United States actually had some skin in the game. As long as bearing the financial costs of that policy is somebody else’s responsibility and somebody else’s children are the ones who’ll be sent to war, it’s hard to see how the case for “strategic global engagement” will be made.

As you may have heard, Ford Motor Company has fired its CEO. As reported at Atlantic:

Ford Motor Company is expected Monday to replace Mark Shields, its CEO, with Jim Hackett, the head of its autonomous-driving unit, several news organizations are reporting.

Ford’s stock has declined more than 30 percent since Fields became CEO in July 2014. Last week the company announced it was cutting 1,400 jobs, about 10 percent of its salaried workforce, mostly through buyouts. The move was an attempt to assuage shareholders angry about the direction of the company, which has been buffeted by poor sales, lower-than- expected profits, and declining stock value.

Under the move being announced Monday, Fields, 56, will retire from the company he joined in 1989 and be replaced by Hackett, 62, the head of Ford’s Smart Mobility unit. Hackett served as CEO of Steelcase, the maker of office furniture, from 1994 and 2014, and, Bloomberg adds, “his promotion indicates Ford is looking to seize on that expertise as consumer demands change.”

That last sentence took me aback. Are consumers really demanding autonomous vehicles? Or do software companies and manufacturers see them as a marketing ploy to spur lagging sales?

Over the last last ten years the length of time that Americans keep their cars has doubled. That’s bad news especially considering that worldwide productive capacity for automobiles, already much greater than the number of vehicles sold, continues to grow rapidly.

How to change that picture? Make the old cars obsolete!

Can someone articulate the economic case for autonomous vehicles? I understand the business case, i.e. why car companies would want to sell them. I don’t know why people would want to buy them.

The hype behind autonomous vehicles has always puzzled me. There’s a use case that’s much better suited to autonomous operation than personal vehicles: freight trains. It’s a much easier problem to solve and there’s a substantial body of law that could be extended to govern the liability issues. Autonomous choo-choos have been within our technological grasp for decades and yet somehow they’ve never been adopted. Why? I think it’s because they don’t make economic sense.

The United States is the most obese country in the world, according to an OECD study, remarked on by MarketWatch:

The obesity rate for American adults (aged 15 and over) came in at a whopping 38.2%, which puts the birthplace of the hamburger and the Cronut at the top of the heftiest-nations-in-the-world rankings, according to an updated survey from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Not unrelated I think is this:

Running at a not-too-close second is border pal Mexico, with 32.4% of population considered obese, followed by New Zealand, Hungary and Australia (the U.K. comes in at No. 6).

For a more detailed analysis this report from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the U. S. Department of Health is helpful and this diagram is interesting:

Grey indicates extreme obesity, dark green indicates obesity, light green overweight. This graph is interesting, too:

Offhand, I’d attribute our increasing obesity to a combination of diet, sedentary habit, age, genetics, and misuse of antibiotics, particularly in the 1950s. If you’ve got an explanation for the bump in the late 70s other than demographic change, I’d be interested in hearing it.

I’m no sylph but I’m thinner than my parents were at my age but that’s because I’m extremely disciplined. I must be the exception.

Update

I’ve come up with another potential explanation: the Egg McMuffin, i.e. the availability of fast foods all day long. McDonalds officially started offering breakfast in 1977.