I may be one of the few Americans who thinks that both Barack Obama and Donald Trump have mandates. And it’s the same mandate: change.

President Obama’s great mandate was to “save the economy”, i.e. stop the bleeding and restore the economy to robust health. The first was accomplished as much despite him as because of him while the second hasn’t been accomplished at all, as may be concluded from the continuing low rate of economic growth, the phlegmatic growth in employment, and the very low rate of labor force participation.

Unfortunately, he turned his attention from the economy to healthcare and the rest, as they say, is history. After healthcare he turned to re-election and then building a legacy, a legacy which now looks very likely to be completely erased by his successor.

Donald Trump has the clear mandates to kickstart the economy and get our border with Mexico under greater control. Whether either of those are within any president’s power to accomplish let alone his remains to be seen.

Everybody talks about it but no one does anything about it. Do our two major political parties actually have economic policies?

To the best of my ability to discern Democrats’ economic policy consists of

• Infrastructure spending
• Support for higher education

while Republicans’ economic policy consists of

• Cuts in the personal income tax
• Support for higher education
• Repealing Dodd-Frank

It’s a bit early in the day but the early returns suggest that Donald Trump’s preferred economic policy consists of

• Tax cuts
• Infrastructure spending (which Democrats criticize as consisting of backdoor tax cuts).

Far from being revolutionary, to me that looks like splitting the baby.

Anyone who thinks that infrastructure spending will ipso facto spur the economy needs to go back and re-read what Keynes wrote and said. Nine years is more than enough time for structural changes in the economy to have taken place.

Since “the rich” pay most of the income tax which stands to reason since they have the majority of the income, any cut in the personal income tax is likely to be a “tax cut for the rich”. While I think that is likely to result in greater investment and economic growth somewhere, that somewhere won’t necessarily be in the United States. That’s the real meaning of a global economy. Governments in individual countries don’t have as much control over their domestic economies as they used to.

The idea that higher education is a useful economic policy is one of those things about which you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Under that peculiar version of supply side, Field of Dreams, cargo cult thinking, more educated people will naturally result in the creation of more jobs for people with higher education. It hasn’t worked out particularly well so far but who knows?

Its even greater deficiency is that it ignores the two-thirds of the people who won’t pursue higher education or won’t benefit from it if they pursue it. Oddly enough, those people are starting to notice that there’s no place for them in that brave new world. You can fool all of the people some of the time, etc.

Steven Malanga makes an interesting point in his City Journal post on the U. S.’s contradictory, confusing, and counter-productive immigration laws that I hadn’t thought of. More than 85% of legal immigrants are not skilled workers:

About 15 percent of legal immigrants to the United States receive work visas for people with special skills, advanced degrees, or money to invest in job-creating enterprises. The total, about 150,000 people, includes spouses and minor children of these individuals. Another 10 percent of legal immigrants in recent years have been refugees or asylum-seekers. The country also has a so-called diversity visa, which it uses to grant legal status to about 50,000 immigrants annually from countries that haven’t sent the U.S. many immigrants lately. What remains, about 65 percent of legal immigration, is based on family ties—spouses, children, parents, and siblings of adult American citizens, as well as spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents.

Combine that with the observation made by Scott Alexander in his post I linked to last week, something else that hadn’t occurred to me:

In one model, immigration is a right. You need a very strong reason to take it away from anybody, and such decisions should be carefully inspected to make sure no one is losing the right unfairly. It’s like a store: everyone should be allowed to come in and shop and if a manager refused someone entry then they better have a darned good reason.

In another, immigration is a privilege which members of a community extend at their pleasure to other people whom they think would be a good fit for their community. It’s like a home: you can invite your friends to come live with you, but if someone gives you a vague bad feeling or seems like a good person who’s just incompatible with your current lifestyle, you have the right not to invite them and it would be criminal for them to barge in anyway.

I hold more to the second view although I’d characterize it as “instrumental” rather than “privilege”. I think that immigration should serve the present citizenry rather than the other way around and serve the present citizenry much more broadly than just the immigrants’ kin.

The key point is that these two “models”, as he puts it, are not easily reconcilable. For one to prevail the other must be quashed. There’s little middle ground.

If you’re looking for a reason that comprehensive immigration reform has proven elusive, that’s as good as any. And, since the two conflicting models are difficult to reconcile, while it may remain so. That and that the sort of comprehensive immigration reform that appears to be acceptable to most elected officials is completely unacceptable to many of their constituents.

Yet another example of how their are two consensus of opinion on immigration—one among the elite and another among the rest of us. Some time we should make a list of issues of which that’s the case.

I’m glad to see that there’s somebody out there who thinks the same way I do about autonomous vehicles. As it turns out it’s Jeremy Bowman at the Motley Fool:

While the excitement over self-driving cars is clearly palpable, there are a number of reasons the autonomous vehicle revolution may not happen as soon as some think.

There are 253 million cars on American roads today, nearly one for every person in this country. The average age of those vehicles is 11.4 years. While it’s easy enough to envision an urban millennial foregoing car ownership and depending on apps like Uber and Lyft, as many already do, making that system work for the majority of Americans will be much more difficult and slower to take hold.

The average value of a used car is now close to $20,000. Though the average age of a used car sold is just around five years, it helps show the value of the cars on the road today. Even if we assume the average value of a used car is $10,000, that would put the value of all of the cars in the U.S. today at $25.3 billion. After real estate, there is no personal property Americans have more money tied up in than cars, and they aren’t about to abandon that kind of money to take advantage of self-driving vehicles. The added cost of self-driving functionality may also dissuade potential buyers. The need to turn over all of that inventory means that once autonomous vehicles become widely available, it will still take about an additional 15 years for the fleet of cars on the road to turn over. So, even if self-driving cars are in mass production by 2020, the complete shift wouldn’t take place until 2035.

The high-profile fatal accident this summer involving a self-driving Tesla underscored a problem with the transition to autonomous vehicles. Since most auto accidents are caused by human error, autonomous vehicles have the potential to make driving much safer than it it is today, but the technology just isn’t there yet. Deploying it is likely to reveal similar faults to the one that caused that accident this summer, making the transition a tricky one for regulators and insurers.

The Obama administration endorsed autonomous vehicles and issued a set of guidelines surrounding the burgeoning industry, but toeing the line between ensuring public safety and allowing innovation may not be so easy. Though autonomous driving technology is expected to lower insurance rates, the question of who is at fault in an accident in such a vehicle remains an open one. Some have posited that automakers will offer their own insurance to cover the vehicle.

Plenty of questions still need to be answered in the regulatory environment, but an entrenched car culture and the bureaucracy surrounding the auto industry won’t be undone overnight. In the self-driving revolution, the technology may only be the first step since consumer acceptance and inventory replacement will take several years to overcome before autonomous vehicles become mainstream.

The reasons that the adoption of autonomous vehicles is likely to be slower than many think outlined above include reluctance on the part of consumers to destroy their own wealth and regulatory barriers, both of which I’ve mentioned in the past. There are four other reasons you might want to consider: the 90% rule, security, liability, and lack of value.

The 90% rule, well known in development circles, goes something like this. When a development is 90% working, you’ve completed 10% of the effort. All of those concept cars about which you’ve read glowing articles? That’s 90% of the effort. Completing the remaining 10% is likely to take much longer than anybody thinks and possibly much longer than is worth completing.

Security is another big issues. It’s one think when hackers break into your computer. It will be another thing entirely when they break into your car.

The insurance and regulatory issues mentioned above don’t touch on the issue of liability. Once upon a time there was a computer company (Burroughs) that was driven out of business by lawsuits due to bugs in their operating system.

My guess is that there are probably 10,000 lawyers out there ready to go to court to argue that any problems with an autonomous vehicle are failures of workmanship. Another way of saying that is that even Google with its notoriously deep pockets is about one class action lawsuit away from bankruptcy. It’s something they’ve never faced with the search engine and marketing tools that are their core business. They’re smart guys. They probably know it. They want to promote the technology they’ve developed, not put autonomous vehicles on the road.

The final issue is consumer benefit. We know how the technology is supposed to benefit manufacturers. What’s the benefit to consumers? Especially consumers who already own old-fashioned, antiquated non-autonomous vehicles.

Here’s a test case. Fully autonomous vehicles have been practical for decades in one area that is much, much simpler than automobiles: railroad trains. Why aren’t all choo-choos autonomous? I’ve listed the reasons above.

Consequently, I think that we’re going to see crash protection, unassisted parking, and other applications of smart vehicles that haven’t even been thought of yet. But it may be decades before fully autonomous vehicles are widely adopted, if ever.

You know, I’d be a lot more impressed if the head of the PVC manufacturers’ association brought the problems presented by mandatory adoption of PVC pipes to our attention than when the head of the ductile iron pipe manufacturers’ association does.

That’s the problem when these things are decided politically. The interested parties are vitally interested. What is truth?

It seems to me that one argument against mandatory use of PVC pipes is that poly-vinyl chloride is made from oil and we’re importing a lot of that already while ductile iron is mostly made domestically from domestically-sourced materials (there’s a heated argument about the Chinese dumping ductile iron into the U. S. market which they probably are).

I recognize that the new-found love of direct democracy in some circles is simply instrumental in nature. However, I wonder if they’ve thought the implications of electing the president by direct popular vote through.

What happens when the margin of error is greater than the margin of victory? Under such circumstances the winner is indeterminate.

If we were to adopt such a thing, the precise number of legitimate votes cast would become an issue of vital importance. We’d also need to adopt a national mandatory biometric voter ID.

I’ve seen estimates of the error in the popular vote on the order of 3-4% of the total. That includes ineligible voters, illegal multiple voting, outright fraud, tabulation error, etc.

One of the unappreciated effects of our Electoral College system is that the precise number of popular votes cast isn’t nearly as important as it otherwise might be.

Recently I stumbled across this quote of George Orwell (from “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, Polemic, 1946):

It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.

I’m a prisoner in Downton Abbey! Neither my wife nor I watched Downton Abbey while it was in production but my wife is binge-watching it streaming now. I didn’t watch Upstairs Downstairs when it was in production, either, but enjoyed it very much when it was re-broadcast later. I’ve glanced at Downton Abbey. To my eye it appears to be Upstairs Downstairs with higher production values and, by and large, less appealing characters. I’m a republican who self-identifies as Irish (my observation has been that identity tends to run in the maternal line). I find it difficult to sympathize with the problems of the English aristocracy between the wars.

The best thing about the series appears to be Maggie Smith. Either the writers give her all the best lines or they’re the best lines because she delivers them. Something not adequately recognized by its fans: to all appearances Downton Abbey is a comedy portraying itself as a drama. Imagine it with a laugh track.

Some interesting oddities. In the opening credits of the show they pan across a single dinner plate—beaded gold rim, embossed family seal. With the exception of the embossed family seal which I assume to have been hand-applied after firing, the plate appears to be my mother’s china. Also, the rug in Downton Abbey’s front hall is a larger version of the one that’s in my living room.

Donald Trump’s early appointments may provide us with some clues on what the Trump Administration will look like more generally. These appointments include (as I had predicted) Mike Flynn for National Security Advisor, Mike Pompeo as Director of National Intelligence, and Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. None of these appointments are particularly surprising and neither are the reactions from the progressive establishment.

In common is that all three are Trump loyalists. Should we have expected anything else, especially from the early appointments? President-Elect Trump clearly places a high value on personal loyalty, a quality he holds in common with Hillary Clinton and President Obama.

IMO nearly every Southern white male over the age of 60 probably has some racist baggage or at least arguably has some racist baggage and Jeff Sessions is no exception. When his career is viewed in context is he a bigot, a Southerner, a Southern bigot, or a white Southern politician who espoused whatever views were necessary to be re-elected, particularly with respect to same sex marriage? Is there a difference among those things? Are views very similar to those articulated by President Obama five years ago intolerable bigotry now?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. Perhaps we’ll have a better idea after confirmation hearings. Frankly, I doubt it as I expect more heat than light from them.

WRT Gen. Flynn and Rep. Pompeo I think we can reasonably conclude that Donald Trump wasn’t kidding about his foreign policy ideas during the campaign. At first glance Flynn’s and Pompeo’s views are quite similar to those of the President-Elect.

As H. L. Mencken quipped nearly a century ago, there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. Probably our gravest security problem at present is the challenge presented by radical Islamist terrorism.

That some Muslims present particular security problems is not equivalent to saying that Muslims inherently present security problems or that Islam itself is irremediably violent. IMO much more attention should be attached to the sponsorship of terrorism by Muslim states than on ordinary individual Muslims.

A steely-eyed view of what constitutes state sponsorship would help, too. In aristocracies the aristocrats are the state. Our political problem is that too much of our foreign policy establishment just can’t bear the implications of that.