In yet another sign of the apocalypse, I actually agree with E. J. Dionne’s assessment in his recent Washington Post column:

If Trump wasn’t ready to put his business life behind him, he should not have run for president. And if Republicans — after all of their ethical sermons about Clinton — do not now demand that the incoming president unequivocally cut all of his and his family’s ties to his companies, they will be fully implicated in any Trump scandal that results from a shameful and partisan double standard.

I’m still not sure how this issue will be resolved. My guess is that Mr. Trump will attempt to brazen it out. It would be a serious departure from the practices of presidents of the recent past but Trump himself is a serious departure from the presidents of the past let alone the recent past.

Another outside possible alternative is that, faced with the alternatives of becoming president and facing potential financial ruin (from his lofty vantage point) or refusing the presidency and maintaining his business empire, he’ll choose the latter. As I’ve said before that would be a fine kettle of fish.

What tools would be necessary to determine whether there was substantial voter fraud in our elections? I don’t believe that we have the tools at this point.

There are all sorts of different kinds of vote fraud. There are votes cast by people who are ineligible or don’t exist at all. There are votes cast in multiple jurisdictions by the same eligible person. There are votes cast in the name of someone who is eligible to vote by someone other than the voter.

Back when I was an election judge there were many people still on the voter rolls that we knew to be either dead or no longer living in the ward. We dutifully reported their names and addresses to the Board of Elections as we were supposed to. Nothing ever was done about it.

To identify fraud wouldn’t you need a national biometric ID? That would enable you to determine if the voter were the same individual as the one registered to vote, if the voter were eligible, and if the voter were eligible in the jurisdiction in which he or she was voting.

I think that there is unquestionably some level of vote fraud. Without better tools I don’t see any way we could determine whether you’d measure the numbers of fraudulent votes in the hundreds, the thousands, or the millions.

With Republicans soon to be in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, this might be a good time to recall “Jane’s Law”, coined by Megan McArdle, at that time blogging under the name “Jane Galt”:

The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

There is an inevitable tendency on the part of the Democrats or Republicans to view the smugness and arrogance on the one hand and the insanity on the other as permanent qualities of the opposing party rather than just attributes of their relative power.

The rising insanity of “devotees” of the Democrats are already apparent, particularly in the person of Paul Krugman. He has made a series of predictions, nearly all of which have immediately failed, most notably that the stock market would never recover from a post-Trump’s election slump.

It will be entertaining if depressing to see that rising insanity.

Keep your eyes out for increasing signs of smugness and arrogance among the “devotees” of the Republicans. Perhaps they will be kept so off-balance by President Trump, certainly not a Reagan Republican and by some reckonings not a Republican at all, that they won’t be able to bring the smugness and arrogance of their notional ascendancy into full flower.

I won’t keep my hopes up.

At Bloomberg Adam Minter is skeptical about the prospects for Apple’s bringing the production of iPhones to the United States:

Low labor costs and minimal regulation were certainly part of China’s appeal. But the most important factor was its huge and nimble workforce. The main iPhone facility in Zhengzhou now employs 110,000 workers, with other factories employing hundreds of thousands more. China’s 270 million migrant laborers — most of them ambitious and opportunistic — have proven indispensable to a business that prizes flexibility. Last summer, Apple contractors reportedly hired 100,000 workers to ramp up production of the iPhone 6s in advance of its fall release.

Nothing comparable could ever happen in the U.S., no matter what the president wants. A mass mobilization on that scale, and at that speed, likely hasn’t been attempted since World War II. And there’s little reason to think it would be successful or desirable today, even if Apple was willing to try.

Finding enough skilled labor wouldn’t be much easier. Apple CEO Tim Cook told “60 Minutes” last year that, thanks to better vocational education, China now has a more skillful workforce than the U.S. Apple’s executives estimate that they’d need 8,700 industrial engineers to oversee 200,000 assembly line workers, yet only 7,000 students completed university-level industrial-engineering programs in the U.S. in 2014. Shenzhen, by contrast, is home to 240,000 Foxconn employees — and millions of additional engineers and laborers.

He may be overstating the problem a little. I don’t know that anybody is suggesting that all iPhones be made in the U. S. and last year more iPhones were sold in China than in the U. S.

However, if I were in Tim Cook’s shoes I’d be looking around for second sources for iPhone manufacturers, if only for leverage against the Chinese, their notoriously predatory attitude towards intellectual property, and their obvious desire to have Chinese people buy Chinese branded products.

Something else I’ve mentioned frequently is the bipartisan bias in federal policy towards higher education. This article at City Journal documented that bias:

In 1990, more than 53 percent of the federal investment on education went to a combination of elementary, secondary, and vocational schooling. The Clinton-Bush years shifted the balance toward higher education. By 2008, only 38.5 percent of all federal education dollars went to elementary, secondary, and vocational schooling. The early Obama years slowed this trend somewhat, though not in a way that helped vocational training efforts. Obama’s 2009 stimulus package shifted monies back to elementary and secondary schools, in part to protect the jobs of public school teachers. The pro-college bias reasserted itself more recently, and higher education’s spending share has increased steadily. The 2017 budget approaches 2008’s relative high, allocating 57 percent of all such spending to higher education and leaving only 43 percent to be shared among primary, secondary, and vocational efforts.

Note that, since the incomes of the parents of college students are significantly above the median, support for higher education is a middle class subsidy or even subsidizing the rich, not aid to the poor.

I mention things like normal distributions and standard deviations pretty frequently around here so I thought it was about time that I elaborated on it a bit. The graph above illustrates what is known as a “normal distribution”. In a normal distribution the mean, median, and mode are all the same. “Mean” is the average, i.e. the sum of values divided by the number of values. One half of all values are above the “median”, one half below. And the “mode” is the most frequently occurring value.

In a normal distribution 68% of all values are within what’s called a “standard deviation” from the mean. The standard deviation is sometimes represented by the Greek letter sigma (sort of an “o” with a squiggle at the top, “σ”). 95% are within two standard deviations and 99.7% are within three standard deviations.

There are all sort of things that are believed to occur in an approximately normal distribution, e.g. wages, intelligence as measured by IQ scores, the logarithm of stock market indices, measurement errors in the physical sciences, and so on.

The IQs of people in the professions, i.e. doctors, lawyers, etc. tend to be between one standard deviation and two standard deviations above the mean. In general, people with lower IQs can’t hack it and people with higher IQs aren’t interested. There are exceptions at both ends of the spectrum.

The IQs of college students tend to be at the mean or above and that appears to be cross-cultural, i.e. as true in Japan as it is in the United States.

That, for example, is why, when our political leadership points to the importance of higher education, I invariably respond “What do you plan to do with the other half of the people?”

I don’t know how Ryan Cooper can write this in The Week with a straight face:

But more fundamentally, in terms of positive, pro-labor policy, unions have little to show for their loyalty. Since 1976 Democrats have repeatedly sold out the working class with deliberately vicious recessions, trade deals that led to massive outsourcing and job losses, and weak at best domestic policy. In 2009, when Democrats had super-majorities in both chambers of Congress, they barely even tried to pass a card check law which would have made it easier to organize a workplace. Both moderate Democrats and the Obama administration basically gave up on that without a fight.

Consider the following list of wages paid to union bosses in 2014:

Obviously, these are not union leaders of the stamp of Eugene Debs or even Walter Reuther. Many of them have never really worked as rank and file members. They’re professional union organizers, members of the elite. And it’s equally obvious what they’ve received for consistently supporting Democrats.

One of the things that emerged from the last election was the chasm between union leadership and the rank and file. The union leaders uniformly endorsed Hillary Clinton while union members, even members of the Teachers and NEA, voted for Trump.

Democrats are the party of organized labor. They’re just not the party of the laborers. Given a choice between them and the technocrats, they’ve chosen the technocrats. If there’s a way for them to change course towards being a party of the workers rather than the union bosses, I don’t see any way to pull off that maneuver.

Without doubt the news of the day is that long-time Cuban leader Fidel Castro has died. From the New York Times:

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday. He was 90.

His death was announced by Cuban state television.

In declining health for several years, Mr. Castro had orchestrated what he hoped would be the continuation of his Communist revolution, stepping aside in 2006 when he was felled by a serious illness. He provisionally ceded much of his power to his younger brother Raúl, now 85, and two years later formally resigned as president. Raúl Castro, who had fought alongside Fidel Castro from the earliest days of the insurrection and remained minister of defense and his brother’s closest confidant, has ruled Cuba since then, although he has told the Cuban people he intends to resign in 2018.

Fidel Castro probably did as much as anybody to influence U. S. foreign policy. Initially, he cozied up to the United States. When that did not result in U. S. support, he turned his attention to the Soviet Union and Cuba remained a close Soviet ally until the Soviet Union’s collapse.

IMO his ideological views have been much exaggerated, as much by him as by his opponents. I don’t believe that he was ever actually a Marxist. His attentions were focused single-mindedly on concentrating power in his own hands. When being a democrat furthered that end he was a democrat; when being a communist did he was a communist. As Castro biographer Georgie Ann Geyer wrote:

“The Cuban regime turns out to be simply the case of a third-world dictator seizing a useful ideology in order to employ its wealth against his enemies,” wrote the columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, whose critical biography of Mr. Castro was published in 1991.

In this view of Mr. Castro, he was above all an old-style Spanish caudillo, one of a long line of Latin American strongmen who endeared themselves to people searching for leaders. The analyst Alvaro Vargas Llosa of the Independent Institute in Washington called him “the ultimate 20th-century caudillo.”

For reasons that eluded me during the 1960s he was quite a media darling, possibly propelled to stardom by red diaper babies in the U. S. Basically, he was just the dictator of an unimportant Latin American country adjacent to the United States.

Cuban troops, presumably acting as Soviet surrogates, were at one time or another fighting in Congo, Ghana, Bolivia, Algeria, Syria, Ethiopia, Angola, the Sinai (during the Yom Kippur War), Namibia (then Southwest Africa), Grenada, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. That gave credence to the idea of the dangers of worldwide communist revolution, something that drove U. S. foreign policy for a half century and remains influential.

More recently his image, the idea of Castro rather than his actuality, has inspired Chavistas in Venezuela and similarly-minded people in Bolivia. If the list of countries in which Fidel Castro has wielded influence sounds like a trail of woe, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

You might find Uwe Reinhardt’s piece at Vox.com on the iron grip of actuarial mathematics on the fate of healthcare insurance interesting:

The unfolding drama may seem to be driven largely by ideology and partisanship. In the end, however, there is no getting around the actuarial mathematics on which health insurance everywhere in the world rests — public as well as private.

Unless, that is, our government is content to leave millions of Americans without the benefits of health insurance, and the access to essential health care it provides.

The presence of millions of citizens lacking health insurance remains a uniquely American problem.

I’ve mentioned it before but it bears repeating. Trying to fit U. S. policy into a Procrustean bed of policies designed for the ethnic states of Europe will inevitably fail. We are better understood as a European-type developed country that is simultaneously a developing Third World country like Mexico or Brazil.

Heck, don’t be surprised if policies designed for the Sweden, Germany, or France of 40 years ago start collapsing too. It’s a new world.