2012 Colorado Ballot Issues and Election Preview

Colorado State Ballot Issues in 2012

There are three state ballot issues this year in Colorado.

* Vote Yes on Issue S.

Issue S would amend the state constitution to modernize the state civil service system, a measure that made it onto the ballot only because it had bipartisan support and has no organized opposition. It is a carefully drafted good government measure that every voter should support. But, similar efforts have failed to pass in the past.
 
* Vote Yes on Issue 64.

Issue 64 is a carefully and thoughtfully drafted measure that would legalize recreational possession of marijuana for personal consumption at the state level in a taxed and regulated manner by people aged twenty-one and older that is parallel to Colorado's medical marijuana regime. Denver has already taken this step at the local level, and localities would retain considerable regulatory authority of the recreational marijuana industry. Due to the local control elements of Issue 64, the commerical side of the marijuana trade would likely be similar to gambling when the dust settles - it would be legal in perhaps a dozen jurisdictions and the rest would prohibit it out of NIMBY concerns and miss out on the economic benefits of deregulation.

Medical marijuana laws in Colorado which President Obama originally decided not to interfere with and has hence given the go ahead for federal law enforcement agencies to subject to incremental efforts to curb, would remain unchanged and have been a great success overall. Medical marijuana has not increased crime, has made treatments shown to work in published academic studies for certain conditions available to people who benefit from them without criminalizing them, has pushed disputes in the supply chain to the courts rather than the streets, gave the state's commercial landlords a critical boost in the middle of a real estate downturn, has generated considerable tax revenue from people who want to pay taxes and want to be regulated, and almost every single dollar spent on medical marijuana goes straight back into the Colorado economy to pay for labor reducing unemployment and strengthening the local economy. Medical marijuana has not driven up use of other drugs and even I, a strong proponent of it, don't disagree that some of the early prescriptions for it had a very thin medical basis and were basically recreational with a doctor's blessing.

There is no doubt that all of the commerce authorized by Issue 64 would be illegal under federal criminal laws and that federal law pre-empts state law in this instance. There is federal case law directly on point. The President could devote immense resources to having the federal government pick up the state and local slack in marijuana enforcement. But, few other states provide a more likeable test case for ending the drug war at least in part through decriminalization.

Marijuana is substantively less addictive and harmful to the public than alcohol and many other criminalized psychoactive drugs. Marijuana can be home grown preventing it from giving rise to large scale interstate drug trafficing rings. Colorado has a successful recent history and adminstrative skill set for regulating the industry reasonably. And, marijuana prohibition has grown publicly unpopular nationwide and in particular in Colorado. Also, the passage of Issue 64, even if the federal government chooses to enforce marijuana laws in the state leaves the specter of jury nullification as a likely possiblity in every single marijuana prosecution and a few jury nullification acquittals could quickly dampen federal interest in taking a crackdown approach.

Even if all that happens under Issue 64 is that Colorado successfully shifted the budgetary burden of enforcing marijuana prohibition from state and local government to the federal government, this is a win for Colorado taxpayers.

* Vote No on Issue 65.  But, what the voter's decide doesn't really matter.

Issue 65 urges state and federal legislators to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment legalizing campaign finance contribution dollar limitations, something the the Citizens United case, prior cases, and one follow up case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution severely limit.

This measure is mostly irrelevant. It is a preference polls or suggestion that has no binding legal effect. Unlike many ill conceived proposals that Colorado Common Cause has helped to draft, it doesn't have the minutae of details that leave room for mischief. Most people agree with the concept of campaign finance limitations, although the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't been wrong in concluding that there are grave threats to constitutionally important issues of political free speech that are implicated by campaign finance limitations. Drafting a suitably narrow constitutional amendment that has real effect while not closing the door to vigorous democratic debate when ill intentioned politicians implement is a difficult and perhaps insoluable problem.

I personally think that campaign finance contribution limitations are a fundamentally flawed approach to addressing the problems of excessive influence by economically powerful individuals and institutions. Laws requiring transparency in campaign financing, moderate levels of public funding for election campaigns, and improved election laws are much better solutions that are far less prone to being hijacked or gamed. But, because this measure is merely a suggestion and lacks the poor drafting endemic to campaign finance measures, my opposition to Issue 65 is more tepid than almost any other campaign finance reform proposal that I have seen.

In a best case scenario, if Colorado and other states start to pass the measures, the constitutional amendment Colorado's state and federal legislators are urged to adopt never passes, but the U.S. Supreme Court crafts a judicial loophole to its First Amendment case law that provides a workable option for addressing the campaign contribution excesses almost akin to bribery that has undermined the faith that so many people do have in the political system.

Major Federal Partisan Race Redux

* Vote For Democrats in All Federal Elections

Polling suggests that every bit of campaigning effort in Colorado will matter this year. It is almost impossible for Romney to assemble the necessary 270 electoral votes without taking Colorado, and Colorado is a true swing state this year in which neither candidate has a lead so strong that it can shift hands in a matter of days. Romney needs to win essentially every toss up state and some Democratic leaning states to win the Presidency or tied up the race to throw it to the House of Representative to resolve.

Close Congressional races in the 3rd (Southern and Western Colorado), 6th (South and East suburban Denver and Aurora more or less), and 7th (North and West surburban Denver) all have the potential to go either way and influence which party has a majority in the U.S. House of Representative and by how much. This is the first election cycle after redistricting for these seats, so there is considerable uncertainty regarding how the incumbents will fare in new and less favorable districts (in the 3rd and 6th with Republicans hold) and in a new and somewhat more favorable district in the 7th (which Democrats hold). Odds makers favor the incumbents in all three of these races, but not heavily.

Colorado State Legislative Race Redux

* Vote For Democrats In All State Legislative Elections

Republicans currently hold a one seat majority in the sixty-five member Colorado State House, in which all seats are contested every two years. Since this is the first election cycle after redistricting and the quality of data and analysis at this level is much patchier than at the Congressional district level, more uncertainty is lurking.

Democrats have a more firm hold of the Colorado State Senate going into the election, only half of incumbent state sentators face voters this year, so the election is far less likely to change control of the state senate.

In both cases, the state legislative redistricting maps are widely viewed as favoring Democrats and Democrats are helped by the increased voter turnout in Presidential elections, so the advantage should be with Democrats in state legislative races this year.

Colorado Local Ballot Issues and Local Candidate Races

There are a number of notable local ballot issues and candidate races this year.  Many seek voter authorization for new spending and debt authority for local governments, which TABOR (the taxpayer's bill of rights) obligates governments to obtain before the taxes are levied and the debt is incurred.  Most of the time, I concur with the elected officials proposing these measures that the revenue or debt is needed.  Most voters most of the time agree with me on this point.

A number of District Attorney districts have contested DA races this year, the most interesting of which is the contested seat to fill the seat left open by controversial 18th Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers who is term limited, where the Republican Sheriff of Araphahoe County and a recent former Republican District Attorney have endorsed the Democratic Party candidate in the race.

There are also a variety of other notable ballot issues and candidate races.

These will be discussed in a future post coming soon.

Colorado Judicial Retention Elections

In Colorado, almost all judges are nominated by blue ribbon committees, appointed by the Governor, and then subject to "retention elections" after two years in office and then after a longer period of time based on the particular judgeship in question.  One Colorado Supreme Court Justice (Justice Coats) and a number of Colorado Court of Appeals judges face retention elections this year statewide.  There are also a host of retention elections for the state's general jurisdiction court judges (District Judges), some speciality court judges in Denver, and many limited jurisdiction court judges (County Court Judges).

If a majority of voters casting ballots on retention cast no votes, the judge is not retained, and a vacancy is created for the Governor to fill (there is some slight variation in the pattern in Denver).

A state commission interviews every judge facing a retention election and surveys lawyers, court officials and non-lawyer litigants regarding the judges facing retention elections and reports the results and makes a recommendation.  In all but the most egregious cases, the recommendation is to retain the judge and usually the recommendation is unanimous.  The results are distributed in a pamphlet sent to every voter who votes on the judge in question.  These recommendations generally say almost nothing about the ideology of the candidate except to sometime disclose a perception of a prosecution or defense bias in criminal cases.

Often informal pressure from the commission or decisions not to seek retention or to retire from the judicial ethics body in the state keeps judges who would not receive retention recommendations from facing voter's wrath.  The appointment process also keeps most of the most volatile and unqualified candidates for judicial office who might be elected by voters or appointed by a purely political process in other states from ending up on the bench in the first place.

Judges can also be removed by impeachment in Colorado, but this almost never happens.  It is far more rare even than losing a retention election.

Most non-retention votes are driven by a personal controversy the judge is embroiled in with ethical dimensions, or by a controversial and unpopular decision in a very small number of high profile cases that the judge was involved in (even if the decisions were legally correct), rather than an overall pattern of subpar performance.

I am not a personal fan of the judicial retention election part of Colorado's judicial personnel process, even though I have nothing but praise for the manner in which it appoints its judges and have a guarded but positive view of the judicial discipline process. 

I would favor a process that is more selective in deciding which judges should face retention contests and one with more informed decision makers.  For example, I would prefer a system in which the Colorado Supreme Court, which is most informed about the matter, rather than the general public, made retention decisions regarding Colorado Court of Appeals judges.  Similarly, I would favor a system in which Colorado Court of Appeal judges made retention decisions for District Court judges, and in which District Court judges made retention decisions for County Court judges in their district.  I would leave voters with a say only over Colorado Supreme Court judges and over judges facing retention elections specifically flagged either by recall petitions with thresholds similar to those for DA or statewide or county official as the case might be, or by some threshold of performance set by the judicial retention commission for voter review (perhaps anything other than a unanimous vote to retain).  Thus, rather than having dozens of judicial retention elections on the ballot each year about which few voters know anything, there would be just a handful of the most salient  races statewide every year.

But, while these elections clutter the ballot and rely on usually ill informed opinions, the overall judicial appointment and removal process in Colorado is still one of the best in the nation overall.

In general, my attitude is to set higher standard for judicial retention than the state commission that makes retention election recommendations, and to vote no on retaining a judge whenever there are any signs in the judicial commission report that a significant minority of any class of people do not favor a judge's retention or there are any other material shortcomings in the judge's performance.  I also vote not to retain judges whom I have personal knowledge of any case in which the judge's performance has been questionable.  And, when as this year, I have a Governor I trust to make new appointments wisely, I vote not to retain judges who may be exemplary in the non-partisan components of their jobs but whose judicial ideology I am familiar with and disagree with on the merits. (See also this 2010-2011 summary of Colorado Supreme Court Justice ideologies.)

It is for the last reason that I will be voting not to retain Colorado Supreme Court Justice Coats.  His is by all accounts an ethical and diligent judge.  Unlike Wisconsin where they have had physical brawls in the Court chambers, every member of the Colorado Supreme Court conducts himself or herself in a civilized and professional manner.  Justice Coates also never fails to articulate a basis for his rulings in opinions that are at least par for the course for an appellate judge.  But, I disagree with his judicial ideology and approach to legal interpretation.

The most common split in Colorado Supreme Court is a five to two split with five "moderate liberals" in the majority, and two "conservatives" in the minority (there are plenty of cases that are decided unanimously and all manner of other voting alignments turn up now and then, the divide is not universal or monolithic).  I read a great many Colorado Supreme Court decisions.  With only very rare exceptions, I usually feel that the five judge faction's substantive judicial determination is a better intepretation of the law on the merits than the two judge minority faction.  The judges in that two judge "conservative" faction are Justice Eid and Justice Coats.  Between the two, Justice Eid is a bit sharper in her legal analysis and writing (on the writing score she is the rivial of any U.S. Supreme Court justice in recent memory) but ideologically in about the same place as Justice Coates. 

Both of these Justices, in my opinion, are somewhere to the ideological right U.S. Supreme Court Justices Kennedy and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice O'Connor, and somewhere a bit to the ideological left of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Scalia and Alito.  These two judges are probably the closest match ideologically to Chief Justice of the United States Wiliam Rehnquist.

In my view, it is legitimate to make a judical retention election decision based on on judicial ideology and mode of legal interpretation, even though the commission that makes retention election decisions doesn't consider this factor and even though that commission has unanimously recommended that he be retained and did not receive exceptionally high level of dissent in the surveys regarding his performance.  Indeed, the real reason to have judicial retention elections, in my view, is to allow the public to weigh in on issues of judicial ideology.

It is much harder to weigh Colorado Court of Appeal judges because they write so many opinions, because they set on many varied panels that make their rulings harder to analyze, and because there are so many more of them.  Nothing in the judicial retention commission report suggests that any of them should not be retained, all were unanimously recommended for retention, and at least one of them, Judge Casebolt, I have a personally high opinion of him (I notice his opinions because he was formerly an attorney at a firm were I worked a long time ago).

I may address judicial retention elections for notable trial judges and for other members of the Colorado Court of Appeals, in a future post.
 
Colorado Voter Registration Redux

In early September, Republicans had a 72,585 voter edge in that category - or 4.6 percent. One month later, that edge has shrunk to 30,347 voters - 1.6 percent overall. 

From Fox 31 via Colorado Pols.

The Republican voter edge going into the election is really greater than raw voter registration numbers would suggest, because Republicans vote more reliably than Democrats.  Democratic voter registration gains are a combination of hard work registering voters and the fact that there are more unregistered voters to register.  Overall, there are about 3.6 million registered voters in Colorado.

Despite their voter registration edge, the difficulty that Republicans face going into the election is that independents have in recent years in Colorado, more often ultimately voted for Democrats than for Republicans.

Colorado Election Administration

Ballots will begin to be mailed to non-military voters this Monday, October 15 (at least where I live), and votes will begin to be cast the next day, three weeks before the November 6, 2012 election day. This greatly limits the impact of any "October surprise" on election outcomes in Colorado, but the most fickle voters also tend to be procrastinators, so there is still considerable room for last minute factors to influence voting outcomes.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has been severely criticized for his handling of a variety of election administration issues and of his own financial and ethical dealings with the Colorado Department of State by the state county clerk's assocation (whose executive director is a former Republican Clerk and Secretary of State), and the press, and rightly so.  Most recently, as many as thousands of voters seeking to register to vote may have been denied that opportunity on the October 9, 2012 registration deadline for this year's Presidential election due to entirely foreseeable computer hiccups in his office's voter registration system.

So far as I know, a high profile fight over mailing ballots to inactive voters (a term far to rigorously defined under Colorado election law) remains in play in the courts, just days from the date for mailing ballots.

Gessler's highly hyped claim that there were as many as 11,000 non-citizens on Colorado's voter rolls in the end revealed less than 200 possible non-citizens on the rolls many of whom may be exonorated in uncoming hearings, while harassing thousands of legistimate voters.  Only 35 people over the court of five elections, no more than eight in any one county, were found to have been possible non-citizen voters and these cases again, are instances where hearings have not been held and government paperwork errors could be at fault.  Republican misconduct in the voter registration process in the 2012 election has produced more fraud and that is being prosecuted.

American Flying Saucer Program Declassified

A classified American-Canadian flying saucer military aircraft program that dovetails neatly with the Hollywood stereotypes from the Roswell era and beyond was officially declassified last month.

The Cultural Foundations Of Secular America

As I noted in a post earlier today, secular Americans are most common in the West, then the Northeast, then the Midwest, and then the South. More whites are secular than blacks and Hispanics, although Asian-Americans are more secular.

One of the leading secular organizations in the United States, the American Ethical Union, has its roots in Jews who lived in or derived from New York City Jews. Another, the American Humanist Association, is basically an offshoot of the Unitarian-Universalist movement, two denominations that have their roots in Boston. The Unitarians were derived from the Congregational church which was derived from the establishment Puritan church of New England (the Trinitarian offshoot of the Congregation Church was the United Church of Christ).  Both offshoots emerged as independent denominations in the early 1800s when the Congregational church was disestablished.  The Universalists were a working class white storefront church movement that began at about the same time in Boston. New England Transcendentalists and Revolutionary era deists (mostly, but not entirely from the Northeast) were also important in the legacy of secular America. 

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher whose most important works (e.g. "Why I am not a Christian.") were published in the early 20th century were part of the New York City intellectual scene when he found an appointment as a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York after being discharged from his post at Cambridge and jailed for six months by being an active British Pacifist during World War I.  He would in due course be discharged from his CUNY post in the 1940s in the face of complaints about his undue openness in a philosophical treatment of marital sexuality, his atheism and his pacifism.  Sometime after that point, he returned to his native England, although he would face arrest and be jailed again for anti-war protests as an elderly man.

All of this is somewhat ancient history, however.  The percentage of Americans who identified as not religious was pretty much constant until around 1990, after which it has steadily increased.  The study that produced an academic understanding of the historical roots of the modern secular movement in the United States took place mostly after the people driving that movement  were aware of it and had made their cultural and religious choices in their guts.

Unitarian-Universalism wasn't reformulated as a para-Christian or post-Christian denomination until the 1960s and 1970s, which is also about the time of an important wave of modern East Asian migration, an increasing popularization of Eastern religious ideas, a time when many traditional cultural ideas in the United States and the West were challenged, a time when birth control (a constitutional right to which was established in a Connecticut case) and the feminism more generally upset gender roles, a time when gay rights first emerged (Yankee settled San Francisco and Northeastern New York City were its epicenters), when the Boy Scouts of America began to welcome non-Christians (but not atheists and agnostics) into their ranks, and when advanced in disciplines like physics, genetics, linguistics, paleobotany, historical biblical criticism, and anthropology began to put the nail in the intellectual coffin of a literal reading of the Book of Genesis and the Evangelical Christian world view. More Eastern religious influence followed Southeast Asians who joined American lovers, parents and allies with whom they had made contact during the Vietnam war.

American secularism surged not then, but a generation later, when the children born once this cultural revolution had really embedded itself in their entire lives (and their parents' and teachers' attitudes about raising them), reached adulthood. 

The rise in secularism was also was a reaction to the emergence in the 1980s of the conservative, anti-intellectual, and mostly Southern and rural Evangelical Christian movement as a political force and the face of Christianity (a movement itself energized by political and cultural resistance to a Yankee driven civil rights movement with roots as old as the abolition movement and after that, the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and further empowered by Eisenhower era, anti-Soviet motivated governmental ceremonial Christian observances), which the more liberal liturgical and Black Protestant Christians who had fought the Civil Rights movement together never really effectively rebutted in the political and public sphere with an alternative image of Christianity. 

This Evangelical Christian movement that claimed to speak for Christianity generally without an effective rebuttal, espoused a set of values and an approach to understanding what the Bible commanded of Christians that was utterly foreign to mainline white Christians in New England, the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco, much of the Northern Midwest, and immigrants from Western Europe.  These mainline Christians had been raised to believe in a tolerant, social gospel Christianity far removed from the de-emphasized pronouncements of Saint Paul's epistles and Old Testament rules designed for the culture of honor of Jewish herders and warrior-conquerors who had ceased to exist around the time of the Jewish diaspora a thousand years after their laws were committed to writing.  Examining the claims made by Evangelical Christians made young Northern Christians aware of parts of the Christian tradition and doctrine they would never have been aware of and hence, never repulsed by, otherwise.  Their local clergy didn't make these points, but weren't very effective in forcefully disavowing them and condemning Evangelical Christians as not very Christian themselves either. 

While the churches that they were raised in supported the values that they held, they did not need churches to find ways to live the values that they were taught in church growing up in a nation where tolerance and the social gospel were the values of the secure establishment culture and a part of the secular law.  In contrast, Evangelical Christianity preserved the culture of the American South which was in the wake of the Civil Rights movement's successes more threatened than it has been since Reconstruction, while Roman Catholicism was also a haven for preserving old world culture for many Hispanic immigrants, and Black Protestant churches were a haven in which a black culture that had never been an elite culture in the larger world almost anywhere sustained itself.  The young people who have become America's non-religious people were mostly drawn from the ranks of people who didn't need religion to provide a haven for their values and cultural ideas because their values and culture were the elite and dominant culture of the United States already.  Also, their parents had already disrupted the one powerful role that mainline Christianity had continued to provide in the North until then, the notion that the church was central in the script of the life cycle of birth, coming of age, marriage and death.  Their counterculture biographies, the generation gap between them and their parents, feminism, and the divorce culture that emerged at this point in time, all proved otherwise and undermined the cultural authority of the church for mainline white Christians in the process.

Science was increasingly making it possible to have a worldview that didn't need religion to fill the gaps, so a search for a new religious home after young adults rejected the Christianity that they were born into wasn't such an urgent task.  Their affluent upbringing compared to their ancestors also removed from their lives much of the uncertainty that drives a psychological need to call upon metaphysical favor.  These were children raised to believe in meritocracy and the security of the social safety net.

This generation also had the example of the dramatic secular shift of Western Europe, and increasing awareness of a more secular approach to an increasingly modern life in Asia to look to as well.  The most secular places in America today already had an instinctual opposition to Dixie cultural initiatives.  These regions saw large waves on immigration from less Christian Europe and and Asia into many professional caste positions in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.  In the case of the Northeast, an existing history of integration of Jews into the ranks of the previously WASP elites in the 1960s, in addition to non-Christian or only nominally Christian immigrants and the need to accommodate the religious diversity that had long existed there, created elite tolerance in both the Northeast and the Pacific Coastal states for a critical mass of non-Christians and heterodox Christians in daily elite life.

Meanwhile, at this point in time, Evangelical Christianity had come close to becoming an unofficially established religion, with only very modest mainline Christian minorities often themselves denominationally divided on North-South lines, and very few Catholics or Jews or Lutheran or Mormons or Orthodox Christians in much of the South.  In the South, it was only by the 1970s and 1980s that Northerners, a large share of whom were part of economic elites, began to migrate into the South's economically developing urban centers in large numbers, creating communities of white and Asian "carpet baggers" who did not share a sense of cultural solidarity with the native Southern whites who preceded them.  Others, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, moved South precisely to reform the South culturally, taking up a cause that had been abandoned when New England school teachers had been dispatched back to the North by local schools after Reconstruction ended. 

Some of the migrants assimilated, but many who moved to the South with no desire to become a part of Southern culture, did not. They were lured by the power to make good money transforming the South's economy into one consistent with their outsider's vision in a place that the Civil Rights movement had made more culturally tolerable, or as cultural missionaries seeking to reform the South's culture, not by a desire to join the ranks of likeminded people and share their historic vision of civilization themselves.

Cheaper and more widely available long distance telephone service, Hollywood and New York centered mass media, cheap long distance travel on commercial jet airplanes, Civil Rights laws suppression of local political power in the South, Warren Court era suppression of government limitations on freedom of conscience with roots deep in William Penn's colonial America, and eventually, the Internet, dramatically limited the social and legal pressure that Southern communities could impose on migrants who didn't want to assimilate local cultural norms.   So, some cultural foundation for a smaller but more motivated secular minority was put in place in the South as well, and then promptly threatened by an Evangelical Christian movement that had made a move to take political power and restore some measure of established religion on its communities. 

Notably, in my own home in Colorado, the secular organizations in the Evangelical Christian hotbed of Colorado Springs with Southern cultural roots, are much better organized and militant, despite having smaller numbers of non-religious people to draw from than in more secular Denver with Yankee cultural roots.  There is scarcely any organized secular movement at all in Pueblo, even further to the South, with long standing Southwestern American roots dating back to old Mexico and a tradition of casual and less militant and less political Roman Catholicism.

Why didn't the United States experience secularization when Western Europe did?

1.  In most of Europe, an expressly Christian Democratic party embroiled Christianity in politics in the immediate post-war period, mobilizing parties of the left to be openly anti-religious much earlier  than in the U.S. where few political forces had so explicitly aligned themselves with religious factions until the 1980s.

2.  A history of dominant established religious denominations weakened the need for churches to adapt themselves to win enthusiastic voluntary participation from their members, so when society collapsed after World War II, their religious institutions were less vital.  Competition for centuries and an absence of strong governmental support had made American religious organizations institutionally stronger.  Moreover, the need of Europe's established religions to remain acceptable to the rulers of the states they relied upon for their established status, prevented the anti-authority, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist Christian that had been endemic in America at least a century by World War II from emerging.  England and Europe generally had exported their most hard core religious dissenters to the United States for centuries and kept their own faiths tame and less threatening to establishment values in the process.

3.  European religious institutions, by and large, weren't strengthened as a means of protecting immigrant cultural traditions or outside a few notable exceptions like Ireland, of protecting local cultural traditions from elites imposed by outsiders.  Europe is mostly not a continent of recent immigrants (or wasn't anyway, during the period of European secularization).  In contrast, in the United States, a nation of immigrants that received a major new wave of immigration in connection with World War II, there were always many more relatively young immigrant churches whose cultural preservation role kept them vital.

4.  World War II was fought on lines that bridged the historical Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox religious divides of Europe on both side of the conflict rather than being a conflict framed by historic religious boundaries.  Catholic French waged war against Catholic Germans.  Nazis were both Protestant and Catholic united by nationalism and language despite their division religiously.  Much Nazi symbolism while anti-Jewish, was imagined in the tradition of an ahistorical form of Aryan paganism, and the Axis powers included the non-Christian Japanese.  Protestant Christians in Britain allied themselves with the secular Soviet Union and identified with the secularist left that lost the Spanish Civil War.  As a result, World War II didn't mobilize people on religious lines against foreign religious threats in the same way.  Instead, the Nazis were cast as uber-conservatives encouraging the whole of European society to a generally liberal reaction in the immediate aftermath of the war.  Even respectable European conservatism was wary of straying into the realm of fascism and wary of the Nazi use of superstition to consolidate power.

5.  The more comprehensive social safety net enacted in the post-war period after seeing how its absence had helped fuel the Nazi movement reduced uncertainty in daily lives and the instinct to turn to prayer to deal with uncertainty.  Also, almost every place in Europe had some period of anti-clerically inclined democratic socialist rule.  In the U.S., in contrast, anti-Soviet sentiment fueled conservative political gains and anti-secular sentiment as the Cold War arrived, and the social safety net remained relatively weak even after the New Deal.

6.  World War II utterly interrupted the forces of tradition almost everywhere, while there was no interregenum of disrupted traditional authority in the United States until the Civil Rights movement was successful.  The United States held elections as usual in 1942 and 1944, right in the middle of World War II.

7.  Very little of the immigration that disrupted cultural patterns in the Northeast and West had parallel levels of immigration to the South or to the rural Great Plains until after the Civil Rights era because the stagnant economy there (employment-wise anyway) didn't need them.  Industrialization needed people in cities and the "Great Migration" in U.S. history was from the South to the North to feed the labor needs of factories, not the other way around to feed the labor needs of the more agricultural Southern economy.  Thus, traditional religious folkways were not interrupted in the South, while the North saw more disruption and Europe saw its whole society disrupted.  Secularism was greater in the North than in the South and remains so, in part due to the impact of this migration.  Religion can't be a credible basis of a majority political coalition as it did in the South eventually without a degree of religious homogeneity over large geographic areas that wasn't present in the urban North.

More Americans Have No Religion

A new survey by the Pew Forum On Religion and Public Life profiles the rising ranks of the religiously unaffiliated (eighty page pdf with the full report here).

Compared to five years ago, many more Americans are religiously unaffiliated.

About 6% of of American adults surveyed are atheists and agnostics, and another 14% believe in god in some sense but have "no religion." Overall about one in five Americans (19.6%) have no religion. The percentage of Americans identifying as having no religion has increased by about a third, from 15% to 20% in the past five years.  About 26% of Americans in 2012 were not Christians, up from about 19% in 2007.

The ranks of non-Christians who have a religious affiliation has grown at roughly the same rate as those who identify as having no religion. The percentage of people in the subset of people who have no religion who identify as atheists or agnostics has risen about 50% over the past five year, about twice as fast as the rate of growth for people who have no religion but do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.

At whose expense has the "market share" of the religiously unaffiliated grown?

Almost all of the growth in the percentage of people identifying as having no religion is matched by a decline in the percentage of people identifying as white and Christian (the survey classifies Mormons as Christians and not "other" as a recent 5280 magazine article did).

Other studies have indicated that mainline white Christians and white Catholics have seen their ranks shrink fastest; the ranks of white evangelical Protestants have also fallen, although a fair amount of the decline in particular white evangelical Protestant denominations is attributable to the rebranding of white evangelicals as non-denominational Christians.  The percentage of Americans who identify as Mormon or as Orthodox Christian, respectively, has remained roughly constant over the last five years, but part of this is due to the limited power of the survey to discern trends in populations that make up roughly 2% and roughly 1% of Americans, respectively.  Atheists alone (2.4% of American adults) and Agnostics alone (3.3% of American adults) were more common than either Mormons or Orthodox Christians.  Of course, there are important regional variations in these percentages.  Religion is one of the strongest markers of regional differences in American culture, particularly among whites.

Growth in the ranks of Hispanic Catholics has masked decline in the number of white Catholics in the United States until the past few years when Hispanic immigration to the United States has leveled off to roughly zero net migration.  Also, the number of children born to an average Hispanic woman in the United States has fallen considerably in the last few years.

The religiously unaffiliated are not generally seekers. Only 10% of people who are not self-described atheists or agnostics, but who describe themselves as having no religion, are looking for a religion. They are no more, and no less, accepting of supernatural ideas and New Age religious ideas (ghosts, psychics, astrology, reincarnation, spiritual energy in mountains or crystals, yoga as a spiritual exercise, deep connections with nature and the Earth) than members of the general public. A minority of people with no religion believe in God and pray.  These are people who were seekers and found an answer by discarding a religious affiliation, who are mostly satisfied with that choice: 74% of people who say that they currently have no religion now were raised with some religious affiliation.

The Roman Catholic Church places a great deal of emphasis on at least annual church attendance at Easter. And, it is right, viewed in light of its own self-interest. Only 8% of people who attend church at least yearly view themselves as having no religious affiliation, while 50% of those who seldom or never attend church see themselves as having a religious affiliation.

This result is not a function of methodology or small sample sizes.

This is not a statistical blip. The percentage claiming no religious affiliation, an atheist religious affiliation or an agnostic religious affiliation, respectively, has risen or held steady in every successive year in response to identical questions using the same survey method conducted by the same organization from 2007 to 2012 with sample sizes of not less than 9,443 in any given year. This year's sample included 17,010 respondents. The margin of error in the 19.6% estimate of the percentage of people who have "no religion" in 2012 is about +/- 0.6 percentage points, and the margin of error in the survey's 2012 estimate of the percentage of people who are atheist or agnostic is about 3.6 percentage points. The study from 2007 through 2012 is based on a total of 121,788 survey responses over this entire time span.

This study's results are also consistent with the trend lines observed by other studies measuring trend lines in religious affiliation over time using methods that are not identical to Pew's.

The General Social Surveys (GSS), conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago) which has seen the percentage of people identifying as having no religion as having roughly doubled from about 9% in 1990 to about 18% in 2010 (when Pew's figure was 17.4% a result consistent with the GSS result at the one standard deviation level given the margins of error in the two large survey samples).

Similar trends have also been observed in the state level American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS), the most definitive survey based study of religious identification in the continental United States in existence (ARIS does not survey either Hawaii or Alaska for reasons of cost and logistics) and in surveys by Gallup and Barna, to name a couple of examples.

The religiously unaffiliated are demographically distinctive.

The change is a generational one that is working its way up the age pyramid of people with no religion get older, with younger cohorts much more prone to say that they have "no religion" than older ones. About 32% of adults under the age of thirty have no religion while 9% of those sixty-five years old or older have no religion. But, every cohort born after World War II has seen increasing percentages of cohort members who identify as having no religion in the past five years.

Thus, while younger American adults are less likely to be religious than older American adults, Americans born since World War II have also grown more likely to view themselves as having no religion rather than more religious as they have grown older.

Education and income had only slight impacts on the tendency to identify oneself as having no religion.  Women were less likely to identify as having no religion and much less likely to identify as atheist or agnostic.  Blacks and Hispanics were less likely than whites to identify as having no religion.

Consistent with prevailing stereotypes, those who identify as having no religion are most common in the West (26%), then the Northeast, then the Midwest and make up the smallest share of people in the South (15%).

[T]he United States remains a highly religious country – particularly by comparison with other advanced industrial democracies. . . . The number of Americans who currently say religion is very important in their lives (58%), for instance . . . is far higher than in Britain (17%), France (13%), Germany (21%) or Spain (22%).

Secularization is arriving late in the United States, but it appears to be finally arriving despite a long delay relative to Western Europe. Indeed, the very high percentage rates of growth in the percentage of people identifying as non-religious, after many decades during which there was almost no change in this percentage, suggests that this is a cultural trend that started around the time that I went to college and may have reached a tipping point.

The religiously unaffiliated, and non-Christians generally, favor the Democrats

Almost one in four registered voters who are Democrats are lean Democratic have no religion, the most common single religious affiliation in that political party, compared to 9% who are white evangelical Christians and 16% who are black Protestants. Collectively, non-Christians (including, for example, people who no religion, Jews, non-Christian Unitarian-Universalists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and pagans) make up one in three registered voters who are Democrats or lean Democratic. Catholics make up 21% of Democrats (and 22% of registered voters who are Republican or lean Republican), while Protestants make up 45% of Democrats.

In contrast, non-Christians make up about 18% of all Republicans, while 34% of Republican are white evangelical Christians. Non-Christians are as large a share of Democratic voters as White Evangelical Christians are a share of Republican voters.

Race is a key factor in the political affiliation of Roman Catholics. One-third of Democrats who are Catholic are not white; about 18% of Republicans who are Catholic are not white. Race is also a critical factor in determining the political affiliatioon of Protestant Christians. More than one in three Democrats who are Protestant Christians are black. Only about 1.7% of Republicans who are Protestant Christians are black.

The tendency of people who have "no religion" to favor Democrats over Republicans in the Presidential race has increased. In 2000 and 2004, people who no religion favored the Democratic Presidential ticket over the Republican one by a 2:1 margin. In 2008, people with no religion preferred Obama to McCain by more than a 3:1 margin: "Obama’s margin of victory among the religiously unaffiliated was 52 points; McCain’s margin of victory among white evangelical voters was 47 points."

About 48% of all registered voters are self-identified Democrats or leaning Democratic, 63% of people with no religion are, while 43% of all registered voters identify as Republican or leaning Republican, compared to 26% of registered voters who have no religion. People who have no religious identification are also, unsurprisingly, also more liberal than registered voters as a whole. But the difference is much more pronounced on social issues (e.g. abortion and gay rights) than economic ones (e.g., whether government is too big or too small).

Growth in the percentage of Americans who are not Christian and their increasing propensity to favor Democrats is a long term trend that favors the Democratic Party for the indefinite future.  If the Republican party does not become more welcoming to ethnic minorities and/or non-Christians, it is on a path towards permanent minority status in American politics.  The perception that the public has of the Republican party as bigoted, even if this is not fully accurate, is deadly to its political prospects.

Impressions From Albion's Seed

David Hackett Fischer's opus, "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America" (1989), a self styled "cultural history" of the United States is a classic far beyond its core area of inquiry, the history of colonial America.

More than anything else, Albion's Seed is notable for making a powerful case that the culture of a founding population leaves a pervasive and persistent cultural legacy that can remain central to politics, dialects, and attitudes about how to live daily life centuries later, despite massive subsequent immigration, technological development and social change.

Linguists, political scientists, and cultural anthropologists have long observed some of the main currents of regional diversity in American life. But, Fischer traces in excruciating detail the way that these regional cultures came into being, naming names, attaching dates, trotting out statistics, quoting diaries and reviewing obscure legal enactments along the way to make his case.

The fact that differences in founding populations produce regionally different cultures itself is unremarkable. The fact that the detailed cultural affinities of a few thousand people here and there three hundred and fifty years ago could lead to wars and drive politics in the United States today is stunning.

The differences in adolescent sexuality and family structure we see in "Red State/Blue State" comparisons in the past decade were deeply ingrained already in colonial New England, Pennsylvania, Appalachia and Virginia by the 1770s and have clear British antecedents which have faded to near irrelevance to some extent where they originated. By then, 10% of women in the Delaware Valley (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Northern Maryland),15% of New England women, 30% of women in Virginia and 40% or more of women in Appalachia (one contemporaneous source put the figure as high as 94% in one county) were pregnant when they married. On that wedding day, the average Delaware Valley woman was 24, the average New England woman was 23 years old, the average Virginia woman was 18, and the average Appalachian woman was 19. About 33% of the Delaware Valley women were literate, as were 50% of the New England women, 25% of the Virginia women, and a smaller percentage of the Appalachian women.

At the same time that Salem was prosecuting witches, Virginians were prosecuting people for falsely accusing their neighbors of witchcraft.

Fischer also notes a few of the notable exceptions to his four founding waves theory: the Dutch founders of New York City and the Hudson River Valley, the mix of founding families from the West Indies and French Huguenots as well as Virginia to coastal South Carolina that produced the Gullah dialect of the black slave majority there (Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court has origins there), and the Gaelic settlers of the Cape Fear Valley in North Carolina. Fischer also omits the cultural impacts of the French and Spanish colonists in later acquired territory, and doesn't discuss at any length of cultural origins of Canada.

More pertinently to his core thesis, however, he does discuss how subsequent waves of migrants to the United States assimilated not "American culture" at large, but the specific regional cultures of the places where they settled.

My own origins, for example, are from 19th century German Lutherans and an Irish Catholic migrant on my father's side, and Swede-Finn Lutherans on my mother's side. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia and lived there until I started the first grade, and one of my earliest childhood memories is of a visit to a monument to confederate war heroes. Yet, my cultural legacy owes a great deal to New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers. My accent is that of a Midlander, not a coastal Southern drawl or the accent of a European immigrant or even the accent of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where my mother grew up. My allegiances are Blue and not Gray. I use more Yiddish and Japanese derived words that would have mystified all of my immigrant ancestors in my every day speech, than I do Swedish or German or Irish ones combined.

Personal and Economic Recovery

I had back surgery (successful) on Monday (once again, the lesson learned: piano movers are worth it).  Recovery is a tricky thing. One moment you think you are sharp and energetic. Another, like today, you sleep twenty hours in a day.

I caught bits and pieces of the debate on the radio yesterday.  Most commentators seemed to call it for Romney.  Debates in a Presidential race aren't so much won or lost, however.  They are pass/fail events, and this time around, no one failed.  If neither candidate fails (or both do), then they have little impact on the race.

The bits of the debate that I did capture were striking mostly for how much both candidates embraced a merchantalist, regulated mixed economy, welfare state.  Simple statements of principle were not in vogue.  This was a natural for President Obama (who also, wisely, embraced the moniker "Obamacare").  It was not at all a natural stance for Romney's political base.

The quality of the Presidential candidates' economic analysis left something to be desired. 

Probably least impressive point was a failure to challenge the notion that income taxes on business profits impact jobs, either in the debate or the analysis by pundits at larger. 

The case that business tax rates have an impact on job creation is quite weak.  The key point in economics is that incentives matter.  Your incentive to make a bigger profit, rather than a smaller one, is very similar whether the tax rate on those profits is 13% or 40%.  The incentive to hire more employees is independent of the rate of taxation on business profits.  You choose a profit maximizing level of payroll first, and then you pay taxes on that profit at whatever rate applies.  Payroll taxes directly impact the cost of labor.  Profit taxes don't. 

Profit taxes, instead, impact the desirability of investing in profit generating businesses.  But, at this point, a shortage of capital investment is not driving employment - businesses and banks are sitting on wads of cash and can borrow money at very low interest rates, and returns on capital investment are still tax favored, but aren't investing their capital in business because they don't see opportunities that are worth the risk involved in a capital investment.  Even when investment in government bonds provides a real rate of return that hovers between zero and negative, the bonds have many takers and private sector capitalists are having trouble providing investors with more attractive alternatives.  The incapacity of Wall Street to offer up investments that are more attractive than Treasuries is really rather pathetic.

Our tax code already heavily favors business spending on capital investments over payroll and job creation.  Neither candidate was willing to argue in favor of changing those incentives.  So, we are almost certain to continue to have a tax code that discourages job creation, relative to other forms of spending by businesses, for the next four years.

The only way that tax rates on business profits impact employment is via how the profits are spent.  If the tax rate is higher, more dollars are spent on government and government employment rises.  If the tax rate is lower, more dollars are spent on private sector goods and services (if not invested) and private sector employment rises.  It is not at all obvious that in late 2012, a marginal dollar spent on government generates fewer jobs than a a marginal dollar spent or invested in the private sector.  One of the main reasons that employment is recovering so slowly is that cuts in governent spending are resulting in the loss of government jobs.

Romney's pitch on the virtues of consolidating job training programs also rang sour.  Dan Quayle advanced a bill that did almost the same thing.  So have other politicians before him and after him.  None of these efforts has ever worked.  There is no reason to think that Romney's proposal would work this time around.

Global Diaper Shortage Looming

A fire at a Japanese factory that is one of the only factories in the world to make large supplies of a critical resin used in most of the diapers of the world threatened to disrupt diaper supplies globally.

China's Great Depression Will Start Post-2014 And Pre-2024

The going rate for iron ore in the international commodities markets is $105 (U.S.) per metric ton. At that price, 40% of China's iron mines can't afford to operate. To put all of those Chinese iron miners back to work, the price would have to go up to about $120 a metric ton. It is unlikely that they will reopen any time soon.

Not surprisingly, China's steel industry is also floundering as a result of the same trend.

The Shortcomings Of An Always Booming Economy

China has been praised as an economic miracle for producing high annual GDP growth rates, year after year, for decades. The growth rates are even more incredible when one realizes that China has basically two economies - one is an Eastern Chinese urban industrial economy that is experiencing economic growth at rates much greater than China as a whole. The other is a profoundly more poor, mostly interior Chinese, rural economy which is experienced slower economic growth - rates in the range of countries in the developed world that drags down the economic growth rate for the nation as a whole.

I'll discuss rural China's situation in a moment, but lets focus for moment on something that China's shuttered iron mines and steel factories, which in absolute magnitude are a blimp in the global economic picture, but are notable because they may be a symptom of a far deeper phenomena that could have global economic implications.

Every country's economic decision makers make mistakes, regardless of the political economy they are acting in, and sooner or later, these mistakes have consequences. A country's recent business cycle history influences the kind of mistakes that economic decision makes will make. China's thriving urban industrial economy is vulnerable to the mistakes usually made by a generation of economic decision makers too inured to booms who haven't come to terms with the notion that sustained, high levels of exponential economic growth are inherently unsustainable.

In a booming housing or investment asset market, of the kind we saw in places like California, Florida and Nevada in the years leading up to the 2007 housing price collapse in those markets, there is a natural tendency to overleverage and to be sloppy in underwriting new loans secured by bubble assets, since foreclosures can promptly forgive ill conceived decisions to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers. Likewise, guarantees of loans are lightly made, since the possibility of a loss seems remote. People who do more deals get rich and the rising tide cures their bad judgment calls painlessly. People who are cautious miss profitable opportunities and few chances to say "I told you so.", to people who ignored the risks that they foresaw.

Of course, this ethos and experience leads to systemic misjudgment by the biggest participants in the marketplace. When a bust arrives, the consequences of excessively optimistic lending practices come to roost, equity positions in the bubble assets are wiped out, declining collateral values turn attention to the creditworthiness of the borrowers and produce huge losses to lenders. In the U.S. subprime market alone, the result was $1 trillion dollars in bad debt and the ripple effects of the write offs produced by these bad lending decisions (mostly in a few select markets where non-recourse lending kept borrowers from injecting an extra layer of caution into their decisions), has brought the U.S. economy, and ultimately the global economy, to its knees.

Risks that are similar in kind loom in China.

In a booming industrial economy, a growing economy quickly soaks up the fruits of a decision that at the time made was an overinvestment in productive capacity. If you build a factory that makes more wigets than anyone needs at the moment, no so many years later, the economy will have grown to the people where those widgets are needs and the only down side was trouble finding buyers for the factory's output for a rough first few years.

A booming industrial economy also generates conventional wisdom organized around periods of seemingly never ending expansion of the demand for industrial goods. So, the economy rewards the decision makers who capture market share early on with razor thin profit margins and then grow their wealth by growing their volume rather than their profit margins.

More generally, economic booms due to literal financial side of the balance sheet overleveraging, and the de facto leveraging associated with very thin profit margins, pose the same basic risk. They organize economic enterprises with little staying power that are not robust enough to weather an economic downturn and decline in demand gracefully.

Bottom Line: Sooner Or Later China Will Have Its Own Great Depression

Sooner or later, unsustainable, relentless exponential economic growth in China will level off and even produce a recession where the size of China's GDP declines for at least six months. When it does, bad decisions rooted in excessive optimism on the part of China's economic decision makers developed through a generation where the next year was always much better than the last, will come to roost. The bigger the boom was without interruption, the bigger the bust will be, and China's boom has been long and large indeed. There may or may not be some "little earthquakes" in China first that put it on guard. But, sooner or later, this much of a bubble is going to produce "the big one."

China's first industrial age Great Depression will be epic.

If I were prescient enough to time business cycles accurately, in China or anywhere else, I'd be wealthier than Warren Buffet. No one has a consistent track record of accuracy when it comes to market timing in the long run. Some people make plays, get lucky and win big. And, if you are smart, you can have better odds trying to time China's next recession or the collapse of a real estate bubble than putting money on the tables in Las Vegas, maybe even odds that win more than they lose consistently, albeit with lots of mistakes along the way.

It turns out to be far easier to know that someone is coming sometime, than it is to know when. This can be done with far greater accuracy. The possibility that China will experience its own Great Depression as its economic growth starts to level off as it inevitably will, may not be quite as certain as, for example, the prediction that the world will experience "Peak Oil" with far ranging consequences (although Peak Oil could easily trigger a Chinese Great Depression). But, I would put its likelihood at some point before China is fully economically developed at something on the order of 75%-85%.

The Question of Timing

Also, despite my warnings on timing, some crude methods can bound the timing, and I will be a fool and rush in to calculate them in a place where angels fear to tread.  The easiest way to get a question of timing right is to be sufficiently vague.  The more roughly one predicts when something will happen, the easier it is to be right.  The art is in figuring out just how accurate you can manage to be with a reasonable degree of confidence. 

First, it hasn't happened yet. Indeed, I think that there will probably be a month or three of warning when evidence that a sustained economic growth driven bubble has run its course will reach the grass roots of society and become overwhelming. For example, recall the taxi drivers giving stock picking advice on the eve of the 1929 crash, and the janitors buying $1,000,000 California homes on the eve of the 2007 financial crisis. China doesn't appear to be there yet, so any Great Recession in China will probably start in 2013 or later.

The firmest bound on the latest possible time that a China's Great Depression could happen derives from the widely understood fact in development economics that economic growth slows as per capita GDP approaches the level of affluent, fully developed countries. So, if one calculates a trendline for exponential growth in per capita GDP in China at a conservative growth rate within the range of recent Chinese experience and marks the point in time at which this produces an affluent, first world level of per capita GDP in China (perhaps per capita GDP in France or Italy or Spain might be used as a bench mark), you have the end of the time frame. Using the rule of 72, and doing this calculation from a 6% per capita GDP growth rate, you get a doubling in per capita GDP every twelve years. The World Bank estimated that China had a per capita GDP in 2011 of $8,442. By the same measure, France had a per capita GDP of $35,194, Italy has a per capita GDP of $32,569, and Spain had a per capita GDP of $32,701. In round numbers, this suggests that China's Great Depression ought to happen sometime before 2035.

But, a 6% GDP growth rate for the calculation may be low, given the recent historic data: "Since economic liberalization began in 1978, China's investment- and export-led economy has grown almost a hundredfold and is the fastest-growing major economy in the world. According to the IMF, China's annual average GDP growth between 2001 and 2010 was 10.5%, and the Chinese economy is predicted to grow at an average annual rate of 9.5% between 2011 and 2015." Likewise, per capita GDP growth that could trigger a major Chinese economic downturn that produces a Great Depression as opposed to a merely transient business cycle, may start to lag materially sooner than a cutoff of the per capita GDP of Spain or Italy. The Czech Republic with a per capita GDP of $25,959, Portugal with a per capita GDP of $25,444 and Greece, with a per capita GDP of $26,892 are all still clearly developed industrialized first world countries that are capable of generating the kind of economic growth via imitation that one can achieve during periods of industrialization.

If you are looking at the time it takes an economy's per capita GDP to triple at a conservative something a bit over 8% per annum rate, you are looking at fourteen years. In other words, you would bracket the next Chinese Great Depression to the time frame of late 2013 to 2025.

You could probably trim a couple of years at the front end and back end of that range without undue loss of accuracy, given the conservatism of the assumptions that go into the boundaries on each end of the prediction, and get a time frame for the commencement of the first Chinese originated Great Depression of 2015 to 2023, an eight year spread of plus or minus four years around a midpoint date of 2019, a date well within the economic medium term.

This is the medium to long term future, but hardly impossibly remote either. My estimate is that in terms of probabilities, the certainty of this time frame is probably on the order of a +/- one standard deviation error bar, i.e. about 68%, give or take.

So, there you have it. Based on some admittedly thin information and some very simple economic models, as well as some deeper historical insight and understanding of economic development generally, and in China in particular:

My prediction is that there is a 68% chance that China will experience its own first, post-Cultural Revolution Great Depression (defined by standards similar to those used by first world economy financial journalists to distinguish between a mere recession and a true depression) sometime between 2015 and 2023.

Some of the uncertainty is attributable to my methods.  But, something like the timing of a major economic downturn is also inherently uncertain and relies on a vast number of detailed facts that can never be successfully modeled. 

My intuition, having seen efforts to model events that are similarly complex in their causation over the years, is that it is impossible, with all the brainpower and resources in the world, the kind of resources that might be available to top CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency and Executive Office of the President and State Department policy makers and leading professors at top Western universities, to make an estimate that is accurate to much better than plus or minus 18 months to two years, i.e. to a 3-4 year range.

So, while I'm sure that my eight year range prediction could be improved upon, the room for improvement from this back of napkin estimate to a state of the arts all available resources estimate that would cost millions of dollars to assemble and involve immense intellectual resources to develop, is pretty modest.  Something like a third to half of the eight year range I have proposed arises from inherent unpredictability, with only the balance being due to my rather crude methods.

An Aside On Rural Chinese Economic Development

Rural China is honestly doing so not poorly compared to agricultural economies starting at their level of development. This is mostly because it is not plagued by the problems endemic to most developing agricultural economies.

Rural China not ravaged by wars and succession fights. It has had more than thirty years (figuring from the end of the "Cultural Revolution") of social and military peace. Unlike its neighbor North Korea and despite the immense scale of the Chinese military machine, China has fewer people in military service per capita than almost any other country in the world. Similarly, rural China doesn't have rampant social disorder and massive levels of crime, in the way that much of rural Latin America and Africa do.

Unlike most developing agricultural economies in the world, rural China has strong political and social ties to more developed economies that it can trade with and learn from, has easy access to financing for long term infrastructure projects, has resources to educate its best and brightest who wish to use their skills to return to the places where they grew up, has decent public health systems considering the local per capita GDP, and has no problem finding a market for its products not prone to being hijacked by political dramas of trading partners sublimated to trade policy. While China's anti-natal policies aren't applied as strictly in rural China as in urban China, the rural Chinese are in the unusual position of having progressed well into the demographic transition associated with industrialization and economic development well before it would have been expected to do so were it an independent country.

While rural China has no shortage of corruption, it isn't nearly so corrupt as a typical Third World subsistence farming economy. Indeed, the Chinese national government's experiments with essentially non-partisan democratically elected local government in rural China have been a great success. Rural China's political system is considerably more democratic than urban China's politics and China's national and provincial level politics.

All this allows rural China to have consistent, slow economic growth; rates of economic growth any American President would be happy to take credit for producing. Almost everyone is rural China is much better off than their great-grandparents and grandparents, with the possible exception of the descendants of pre-revolutionary minor landed gentry, many of them have probably found decent Communist party posts by hiding their roots, or have migrated to the cities where they can forget their pasts by now. And, in the Confucian, ancestor oriented milieu of rural China, most people are far more intimately familiar with the lives of their grandparents and great grandparents than Americans.

If you want a best case scenario for economic development in an agricultural economy, look to the example of rural China. This is as good as it gets, and almost any other country with an agricultural economy seeking to encourage economic development while continuing to have an agricultural economic base should have expectations of being less successful at it than the Chinese have been in the last thirty years.

This isn't to say that rural China is viewed as a success story within China. In relative economic success terms, their plight is awful.

The rural Chinese have gone from being economic peers of, or just a bit worse off than, the urban working class to having incomes that are a sixth or eighth or tenth of their urban peers. A fair share of those urban peers are the prize of the village children of neighbors who moved to the big city, who write home with stories of their hard struggled but new found wealth, and who visit now and then in economic displays that prove that their stories are real. The relative privation of the rural Chinese is not just immense, it is also immensely personal and concrete.

In a country whose officially proclaimed central political principle is economic equality, in the same sort of sense that "freedom" is the central political ideal of American politics, this is an acid bath of class tension ready to explode in a sudden, catastrophic revolutionary earthquake, perhaps akin to the one that ended Soviet communism and lead to the break up of the Soviet Union, at any time. The lid that an authoritarian one party national and provincial level political system with massive resources that can be mobilized from a nation of far more than a billion people, prevent any more gradual process from letting off steam from rural Chinese discontent in any other way.

One of the few factors that argue against such political collapse, at least in Han Chinese areas (the submerged nationalist movements in Chinese deep interior highlands and parts of South China are another, more complicated story), is that unlike restive rural communities experiencing economic development in other parts of Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America, rural Han Chinese peasants do not have a bulging generation of underemployed youths ready to cause trouble. Restrictions on family size, and migration from rural areas to more quickly developing cities had left the youths who remain with no shortage of economic tasks to occupy themselves with and little time for revolutionary organizing.

Rather than having an excess of young women causing distress to their families, rural China has a shortage of young women and is turning to questionable means to bring them to reasonably prosperous rural young men as wives. The nasty social consequences of an excess of young men in the current generation in China seems to be more visible in the chaos of China's big cities that are growing so quickly that no one fully understands what is going on in the big picture.

Political And Military Implications

Serious economic downturns produce a predictable grass roots political response that is indifferent to the policy preferences of the people currently in power: Throw the bums out.  Likewise, regime change is quite heavily balanced towards moments when a nation is at the economic bottom.  China may not be a free and open democracy, but it isn't a hereditary monarchy either and requires a considerable base of supporters to stay in power.  Also, China's political elite is much more tightly linked to its economic elite than political figures in most Western developed countries.  So, pointing the blame for an economic collapse elsewhere might be harder for China's political elites than it would be in the West.

The obvious moment for China's fragile but intense pent up political frustrations, including those that fall on its intense urban-rural divide would be in the wake of China's first modern Great Depression, which I have predicted will most likely begin sometime in the time frame from 2015 to 2023.  So, look to that time frame, not just for Chinese domestic economic malaise, but also for major Chinese political upheaval of some sort and for Chinese aggression in foreign policy and military affairs in a probably vain attempt to divert public attention from the domestic crisis.

U.S. foreign policy makers and defense planners should be prepared for this kind of critical moment in U.S.-Chinese diplomatic and military relations by the early end of this time frame.  The preparations they engage in, moreover, should be devoted to considering what possiblities are plausible when it does happen, how to respond to each, and what resources need to be marshalled and developed in that time frame, rather than to pinpointing more precisely exactly when this will happen.

Given the relatively modest and medium term nature of this diplomatic and military challenge that we can expect to fact, major new research and development programs are not a wise investment.  Instead, planners should focus on the resources that can be bring fruit that would be useful in foreseeable scenarios in the next two to six years, since this planning and development of resources should reflect the reality that any development of resources not accomplished before a crisis breaks out is useless.

In Europe, Even Bloggers Go On Strike

There are multiple general strikes planned in Europe for tomorrow, something I learned of here. 

The successionists movement in Catalan Spain has really taken hold, produced mass protests in the streets from ordinary people, and won threats of harsh reprisals from the military in response that carry echos of Franco and the Spanish Civil War. 

The proximate cause of this unrest is a series of austerity plans imposed to address imminent or actual sovereign debt collapses in one nation after another, triggered by a long and slow chain reaction of economic events that can ultimately be traced to the U.S. financial crisis five years ago.  Bankers insisted on ignoring political reality and the politicians who acceded to their demands (or in the case of Greece, their successors who have been left holding the bag after their predecessors were thrown out at the polls) are paying a high price for giving into them.

Europe is in a place right now, in terms of economic pain and extreme grass roots political tactics, that the United States hasn't been in for seventy-five years (although none appear to be so horribly devistated as Weimar Germany was in the 1930s) before my father was old enough to start grade school.  Some European countries have taken a deeper economic hit in the past few years than they did during the Great Depression.  In contrast, the U.S. "Great Recession" has never come close to rivaling the U.S. Great Depression's economic magnitude. 

Europe's economic buffers postponed the impact, but ultimatelythese safety nets have given way catastrophically in much of the continent, particularly the countries where outside E.U. development support had created artificial economic bubbles.

Swing States Favor Obama

Six weeks before election day, a host of recent, state level opinion polls favor Obama over Romney in November 2012 Presidential race, despite a less than stellar economy (see also here). Those states, and the number of percentage points by which they favor Obama, are as follows:

Colorado (3 and 6),
Florida (-1 and 1 and 5),
Iowa (7),
Michigan (9 and 12),
Minnesota (8 and 9),
Nevada (7),
North Carolina (2 and 4),
Ohio (4 and 5),
Pennsylvania (2 and 8 and 12),
Wisconsin (12) (where GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan was elected to Congress), and
Virginia (3).

In Nebraska, which allocated some of its electoral votes by Congressional district, rather than statewide, there is one Congressional district (the second) where Obama and Romney are tied.

Among the states that are safely for Obama are California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts (where Romney served as Governor), New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Washington State. (Washington D.C. is a safe win for Obama as well.)

Among the states where Romney leads are Arizona (3 and 10), Georgia (6), Indiana (6), Missouri (6), South Dakota (15), Tennessee (7), and Texas (11).

Many of the Obama leads in these swing states are not so great that they couldn't be reversed in a month and a half, and Presidential polls in one state are not independent of Presidential polls in another. But, Romney needs almost all of them to win 270 votes in the electoral college and hence to win the Presidency. One of the last natural turning points in the campaign for either candidate is the October 3, 2012 Presidential debate which will be held at the University of Denver.

If the Presidential election were held today, Obama would win. With a seven percentage point shift in Obama's favor (e.g. winning Virginia by a 10 percentage point margin instead of a 3 percentage point margin as current polls indicate), Obama would win by a landslide. With a seven percentage point shift in Romney's favor, he would win, but not by a landslide. Romney couldn't win the Presidential election even with a three percentage point shift in his favor from current polling in swing states. Romney needs more than Florida, North Carolina and Virginia to win.

Even a really notable "October surprise" would be unlikely to swing current polls much more than seven percentage points either way in the nation's swing states, and usually late breaking news has something less than a seven percentage point impact on polling. The closer we get to election day, the less likely it is that new information will matter. By late October, many people will have already cast their ballots via mail in voting and early voting.

National polling shows a closer race (five recent national polls favor Obama by two to six percentage points, while a sixth national poll is tied), but the race isn't decided by the national popular vote. It is decided by electoral votes in swing states. A surplus of support in states that aren't close doesn't matter.

Remembering Dale Siegler

My uncle, Dale Siegler, died the evening of September 19, 2012, at a not unnaturally young age, after many months of struggling with a serious health condition that, whatever the precise diagnosis may have been, amounted to natural causes.  He was survive by his wife, four children, many grandchildren, at least one great-grandchild, and many other relatives.

The life that he and my aunt Rose, my mother's sister, lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near my maternal grandparents home, was different from that of most of my maternal relatives. He and Rose had children early, stayed close to home where family support was available, and had many children themselves. Rose's two brothers and my mother all went away to college, found professional careers in big metropolitan areas and raised families with two children each. (Kay, their other sister, had been starting college and headed on the same track when an M.S. diagnosis took he on another course that left her a spinster, blind, and spending her final days, in middle age, in a succession of nursing homes).

Dale had worked in the iron mines were he'd found a job for himself as a newlywed man with a baby daughter for many years, and served as a security guard for the closed mine after it shut down. He and his son and his friends hunted deer in deer season, trapping small furry animals destined for coats and stoles and taxidermy, fished, managed family forests, and was a community and family leader, well liked by all.

I remember watching in awe as a child as he neatly filleted fresh caught lake fish leaving them boneless, with just two or three perfect cuts of his fillet knife. He roamed the woods, first with the kids in the generation of my cousins and me, and then with kids in my children's generations, showing them deer trails and his traps.

The life he lived was not unlike my grandfather who had lived most of his life as a lumberjack supplemented by subsistence farming at a home place nearby tucked into hills and forests. As in Dale's own generation, some of his children moved far away to the big city, and all but a couple of his descendants went to college. However, his grandson, his grandson's wife, and their child lived right across the street from him in their little hamlet, in his final days. I never heard the slightest twinge of regret in his voice or his eyes over the road he had taken, although he was always eager to discover what we had experienced.

Despite the fact that his home in a town found in a list of Michigan Ghost Towns was further away from any city of any consequence than my paternal grandparent's place in Dola, Ohio, his world in Northern Michigan always seemed less insular. Perhaps it was the fact that their church retained stronger ties to Swedish speaking Finland. Perhaps the mining companies and tourist oriented operations that dotted the birch and fir forests had more connections to the rest of the world. Perhaps Rose's siblings and his children provide more of a connection to the larger world.

We will also miss him now as those whom he has left behind live his legacy.

Big Law Associate Payroll Down

NALP just announced that the median salary for first year associates in Big Law has dropped from $160K to $145K. . . . We are now back to to the entry level price point of 2007. . . . In 2011, firms of 500+ attorneys hired 2,856 entry level lawyers. In 2007, that figure was 4,745. So, after five years, Big Law is paying the same wage but hiring 40% few lawyers.

From here (note that the definition of Big Law used for salaries in the quote is broader than firms with 250+ attorneys, not 500+ attorneys). The higest salary (75th percentile) for new graduates in the the biggest law firms was $160,000, which about 3,000 new graduates in the sample (about 6%) earned.

There were 44,495 in the graduating law school class of 2011. NALP has data on 43,001 of them, including virtually complete data on big law firm hiring. About 62% of those graduates were hired at full time jobs that required passage of the bar exam (just under half of all employed new graduates worked for law firms), while about 10% were unemployed and seeking employment. Part-time jobs were most common for new graduates in academic, public interest and non-legal business positions.

As usual, the salary distribution was bimodal with one high peak for Big Law hires and one low peak for everyone else.

The median salary for new law school graduates finding full time jobs as lawyers in private private was $85,000. In government, the median salary was $52,000, a bit more than the median pay of $50,000 for graduates hired to be lawyers by small law firms with two to ten lawyers in all (who make up 43% of private practice law firm hires). For all graduates finding jobs at lawyers, it was $61,500. A quarter of graduates hired to be lawyers earned less than $50,000 a year as lawyers. Across the board, those law school graduates hired for jobs that did not require them to be lawyers made less than those hired to be lawyers.

Aggregate Subprime Losses Exceded $1 Trillion

Five years after the housing bust that triggered the financial crisis that in turn produced the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression (and contributed a few years later to a Eurozone economic crisis that has left many European countries worse off than the were in Great Depression), we can much better assess its aftermath. Government bean counters have pretty good estimates of how much debt had to be written off as a result of bad mortgage debt write offs (which were concentrated in the subprime housing lending markets, although in the hardest hit markets, losses have been widespread).

The bottom line is that roughly a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000.00) of household mortgage debt alone has been written off so far.

This corresponds to some of the most bearish estimates made when the collapse started in 2007, such as the one made at Calculate Risk (to which I have linked).

This is on the same order of magnitude, for example, as the cost of one year of federal spending, or the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars combined.

The subprime mortgage industry that created the problem has virtually ceased to exist. Almost none of the subprime lending specific firms, or the subprime divisions of larger banking institutions, that created the crisis are still operating. They closed there doors mostly within a year or two of the collapse.

There have also been big declines in other asset classes and in incomes. The median Colorado income is down about 7% since the collapse according to a recent Denver Post story, with suburbs and industrial cities hit harder than Denver proper and college towns.

Most people knowledgable about current economic conditions (myself included) on the eve of the collapse knew that the U.S. economy was overleveraged and that the U.S. has a number of serious housing bubbles in places like California, but weren't sure why or how to change that in a way that wouldn't have disasterous effects. The markets and private law rules decided to solve both problems, disaster be damned, before anyone managed to take decisive action to address either issue. Now, real estate prices at back at the levels suggested by long term historical pre-bubble trends (or even a little less in a few cases) and the U.S. economy is less leveraged than it has been for a very long time.

Five years after the collapse, in my own professional life, about two-thirds of my work load in any given month is still directly traceable to working out who will have to bear which share of the $1 trillion of losses in individual transactions that was sustained in the aftermath of, and as a consequence of, the financial crisis. The new business transactions and tax planning work that dominates my professional life during economic boom periods has just started to pick up again in the last six months or so.

47 Percenters Mostly Republicans

Mitt Romney’s characterization of 47% of the American electorate as “victims” who are “dependent on government” and refuse to take “personal responsibility” for their lives. . . appears to have categorized a large segment of his party’s own voters as supporters of President Barack Obama. . . . The unspoken truth is that, compared to “blue-staters,” those who live in red states exhibit less responsibility, on average, in their personal behavior: they are less physically fit, less careful in their sexual behavior, more prone to inflict harm on themselves and others through smoking and drinking, and more likely to receive federal subsidies.

From here. See also a more detailed analysis by Brad DeLong.

Also, since when do Republicans favor working and middle class tax increases, which is essentially what Romney has advocated when he calls for these people to receive fewer government benefits net of taxes paid?

This certainly isn't the philosophy of Republican safe state Alaska, where they don't have state income taxes and pay every man, woman and child who lives there a fixed chunk of money simply by virtue of living in the state. According to Romney, all Alaskans except oil executives should be voting for President Obama. Likewise, residents of swing states like New Hampshire, Nevada and Florida, which also lack state income taxes, should also clearly support President Obama in 2012, according to Romney, if their citizens vote their enlightened self-interest.

Meanwhile, New York City and Boston, whose residents pay some of the highest combined local, state and federal taxes in the land, must clearly be Romney supporters. Right? Personal responsibility may resonnate among the members of the vanishing breed of New England Republicans, but most members of the regional party of the regional party of the American South and the Southern diaspora in the rest of the nation take a dimmer view of this approach.

There seem to have been some good reasons that Romney went into business rather than politics as his first career.

Overcoming Heartbreak

As a public service, I thought I'd pass along this bit of practical guidance.

Q: Have you ever had your heart broken . . . ?

A: Yeah, I have . . . .

Q: How did you get over it?

A: Hmmm . . . You're completely in love with him, aren't you?

Q: What?!

A: In my case, it was easy.  I burned his pictures, sobbed really loudly, ate ten pieces of cake . . . then I felt totally better.
 

From Matsuri Hino, "Captive Hearts" Vol. 1, page 144 (1998) (translated from Japanese original in 2008).

Of course, in fairness, you ought to know that this approach does not end up working for the person receiving the advice.

 

Is A Princess An Anti-Feminist Icon?

The Denver Post, spurred by Britains royal wedding, noticed, when that happened, that Disney's media empire has strong anti-feminist (and monarchist) tendencies that are also diffused in many other parts of American culture. The Princess memes clearly sell, although I have some doubts about the timing of this trend which they report as being merely a decade old.

The contemporary craze for queens-in-waiting finds roots in Disney's introduction, in 2001, of its Princess line, which offered a small pantheon of Disney princess dolls — like Cinderella and Snow White — along with dress-up clothes, makeup and more. The line has taken in as much as $4 billion. . . . For some, the current princess- mania seems a royal, anti-feminist pain. . . . Roswitha Burwick, who teaches classes on fairy tales at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., analyze princess fairy tales, showing students how, among other things, the stories portray women — even princesses — as passive, polite and without professional ambition. But the fascination persists, even through adulthood. Proms and weddings, Burwick notes, are laden with princess imagery and messages. The popularity of the princess troubles Burwick's colleague Judy LeMaster, who also teaches the class.

"I have a granddaughter and she likes to dress up as a princess, and it's not a good career goal," she said. Though she sees it as an opportunity "to tell little girls, no matter what you do in life, it doesn't matter if you aren't beautiful and don't marry a prince."

As one of the newspaper comic strips observed that week, there are far more children's stories with kings and queens and princesses than there are about Presidents and Governors and Mayors.

Of course, nobody has a monopoly on the term "feminism" which means different things to different people and sometimes different things to the same person at different times. It is a diffuse ideological movement that encompasses both an embrace of feminity, but with a someone different line of logic to arrive there, and a rejection of stereotypes about women, which between the two can encompass a multitude of sins.

Commoners marry princes about as often as young women earn medals for military bravery and gallantry. Both happen, but both are count examples on your fingers in your lifetime in the entire world rare.

The contradictions of feminism, to some extent, reflect the contradictions of day to day life. For a great many women, probably a plurality, the princess model of solving one's problems in life and finding social status from marriage, and the old school feminist model of working for a living in fields not historically open to women co-exist. The vast majority of non-African-American women will marry, and the vast majority of women of every ethnicity will become mothers at some point and will pay a steep economic price for doing so. But, the vast majority of women, both with children and without children, have paid work for most of their adult lives. The rising labor force participation rate of women has been one of the major long run economic stories of the last forty or fifty years.

The critique of the narrowness of the princess persona for young women needs to be rivaled by a critique of the unrealistic pervasiveness in fiction of the anti-stereotypical warrior woman persona (e.g. in The Hunger Games  or Scott Westerfield's Behemoth series). There are women today in what were historically hypermasculine roles in society now, but they remain a decided minority. Something on the order of 95% of serious violent crimes are committed by men, and in the military, women are disproportionately concentrated in occupational specialties that show continuity with historical roles for women in war like medics.

Today's college educated woman is more likely to marry and stay married than a woman in her mother's generation. Prolonged breast feeding has become normative again, despite the way it interferes with roles other than that of homemaker mother for new moms (a debate that has gone in surges back and forth since at least the days of Balzac in France, when the alternative to breast feeding for the affluent was a wet nurse instead of formula).

The ranks of women who are physicians, engineers and have careers in the "hard" sciences is an order of magnitude greater than it was in the early 1970s, but unlike non-STEM professions like law, are still nowhere near a 50-50 gender balance, which biological sciences and IT professions have come much closer to reaching. It is hard to tell if we've approached a "natural" equilibrium due to inherent gender differences in ability or inclination to enter professions that require very long training regimes or call for post-calculus mathematical study.  It could instead be that cultural and sociological barriers to women in some of these professions have been more resistant to change than others.  A Harvard President was soundly criticized for suggesting the former possibility.

But, at the very least, while securing gender balance in fields like law school graduates has been largely a matter of simply taking down the "no girls allowed" sign at the front door, in some other fields, overcoming barriers that are keeping women out may require a fairly deep rethink of how we go about preparing people to enter these professions.

For example, to become a physician, one typically needs to go to college until about age twenty-two, go to med school until about age twenty-six, spend at least four years in a residency putting you at age thirty, and often to spend several years after that in all consuming training in a medical specialty as well. A profession that has a training regimes that is for practical purposes incompatable with being a good mother of young children in the time range from puberty until age thirty-two is not surprisingly going to drive away women who want both careers and families, because of the decidedly medical human reality of the biological fertility clock.

There are a variety of ways that those issues could be addressed, but so far, our society's choice by default has been, "none of the above."  So, before we criticize Disney from promoting anti-feminist icons, we should first examine the ambivalence reflected in what we do as opposed to what we say.

Paper v. Electronic Formats By Content Type

The following exchange of comments from a February 2009 posting deserve to be restated in a post of their own now.  The observations I made are just as true now as they were then.  This point is underscored by the rise of eBook readers like the Kindle and the Nook in the last few years that have shown that while a paywall model for electronically distributed content does not work well for newspaper economics or for academic journals, that it does work reasonably well for novels.

Michael Malak said...

You get your news in print and your novels online? Isn't that backwards?

2/02/2009 1:16 PM 

 

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

 

There are lots of reasons to get a newspaper in print, while getting novels online.

1. Newspapers are a much more convenient way to get and compare coupons and grocery store fliers. Novels have no parts you need to keep or give to someone else.

2. Newspapers have lots of stories and large newsprint sheets are superior to a computer screen to scanning lots of stories in a random access fashion. Novels typically have only a single story which you usually read purely sequentially.

3. Newspapers on computer often don't obviously link photos and charts that related stories to a main story. Novels rarely have materials you have to jump between to enjoy the novel.

4. It is much faster to read a large number of comics in print than online. I read webcomics, but it takes much longer per comic to do so. Once downloaded, in contrast, a novel is just as fast to read on a computer as it is in print.

5. Newspaper is useful as shelf/counter/table liner for messy children's projects. Novels are ill suited for this task.

6. Newspapers come in bags useful for disposing of leavings of neighborhood dogs on our lawn. Novels don't.

7. Acquiring the current hard copy newspaper is something you can do at home without getting out of your pajamas. Going to a bookstore or library can only be accomplished by driving somewhere and getting out of your pajamas before doing so.

8. Newspapers and ebooks never generate late fees and don't have to be returned (ebooks simply expire). Novels from the library generate late fees if not returned.

9. Newspaper photos look better in hard copy than on my low end computer screen. The novels I get from the library rarely have illustrations other than simple black and white line drawings, so the image quality doesn't matter.

10. Reading newspapers only online contributes to the financial distress of a resource I use a great deal by reducing subscription revenue and reducing paid subscription counts for advertising purposes. Novels from the library generate the same revenue for the author and publishers in hard copy and eBook form.

6000 Posts

This is the 6000th published post here at Wash Park Prophet, a couple of months after its seventh anniversary.  The total post count, of course, is somewhat skewed as a lot of my blogging as shifted to the less generalist "Dispatches From Turtle Island" blog over the last fifteen months.  The combined total is a rather less numerologically significant 6,379 posts.  In print that would fill two to four dozen standard sized paperback novels given the average length of the posts.

Will Christian Conservatives Stay Evil?

Christian conservatives remain at the core of the Republican Party, while it could go a variety of directions on foreign policy and economic issues. This analysis is based largely on the importance of Christian conservatives in the core of the Republican party that remains loyal, notwithstanding a wave of support for President Obama and Democrats generally in 2008.

"Steve Balboni," at Steam Powered Opinions made something of a permanent Democratic majority argument in 2009, referencing an astute statistical analysis that shows that demographic trends in the United States favor Democrats, quoting the following from the National Journal:

To grasp how powerfully demographic change is reshaping the political landscape try this thought experiment about the 2008 election.

Start by considering the electorate's six broadest demographic groups -- white voters with at least a four-year college degree; white voters without a college degree; African-Americans; Hispanics; Asians; and other minorities.

Now posit that each of those groups voted for Barack Obama or John McCain in exactly the same proportions as it actually did. Then imagine that each group represented the share of the electorate that it did in 1992. If each of these groups voted as it did in 2008 but constituted the same share of the electorate as in 1992, McCain would have won. Comfortably...

[P]itch the thought experiment forward 12 years. Imagine that the major demographic groups voted as they did in 2008, but cast a share of the vote equal to their expected share of the population in 2020. (For argument's sake, let's divide whites among college and noncollege voters in the same proportions as today.) In that scenario, Obama beats McCain by nearly 14 points -- almost twice as much as in 2008. Demography will indeed be destiny if Republicans can't broaden their reach.

Demography, of course, isn't necessarily an insurmountable challenge if the Republican Party repositions itself. Electing a first black RNC chair is a place to begin.

More importantly, as we have relearned as the 2012 election has loomed large, many voters act like "Referrendum Voters" who try to throw the bums out when the economy does poorly and give them another chance when they are better off  than they were four years earlier.

Liberals have spent most of the last few decades flat out flabbergasted at the sheer hate and mendacity of rank and file Republicans.  This isn't gone, as I noted in a recent post here noting a racist incident at the national convention.  But, is this hard core of Bircher/Haters in the GOP a sustainable future for the Republican party?  And, could it change as the bitter old men die off and are replaced by a better socialized younger generation of Christian conservatives?

A Meg Cabot novel I read a few years ago, which features articulate, albeit caracatured, portrayals of the prejudices of a few big business establishment Republicans, underlines my real lack of confidence in the "Christian conservatives rule" thesis about the Republican party.  The Romney-Paul ticket exemplifies the big business establishment wing of the GOP that she captured in fiction.

The Christian conservative triumphs of the 1980s have been tarnished. Focus on the Family is growing irrelevant and laying people off. The Evangelical environmental movement is finally taking flight, a mere generation after it took hold among mainstream Americans. Young Evangelicals are not terrified of or worried about the gay and lesbian community in a way that drives the fervant hate of their parent's generation. Conservative intellectuals are starting to come to terms with the notion that if they are going to encourage economically and emotionally unprepared women to carry their pregancies to term, that what happens afterwards needs to be more functional than what we see today.

The left, right and center move of American Christianity towards greater use of contemporary language and music is slowly having a cultural impact. There are underlying assumptions that are transmitted when one uses contemporary language and music to convey one's message. Some of those assumptions come from the emotional and value constructs embedded in the words and melodies themselves. An embrace of the cultural flourishes of modernity in one's rituals makes it harder to make a case that participants should reject the modern world wholesale, or that it is fundamentally corrupted.

One can make rifleshot objections to particular elements of modern life, but a church with a contemporary worship approach has turned any broad opposition to larger trends in moral and ethical values in the establishment culture into a doomed rearguard action. It is as absurd as PETA's campaign to "save the sea kittens" (formerly known as "fish").

Churches aren't the only place where the Southern regional culture seems to be coming around.  Country Western music (one of the pre-sets on my radio is 98.5 FM and Disney's radio channel of all places has made great efforts to show that hip-hop, bubblegum pop and country can co-exist with a single audience), while still having a distinct God and country message, is in a far less insular cultural bubble than it was twenty years ago.

It is entirely possible that the kinder, gentler, rebranded non-denominational Christian movement that has turned its attention away from electoral politics and outdated denominational commitments made with political motives will transform the next generation of Republicans.  In a few words, Christian Conservatives of my generation may be less evil than their brim full of hate parents, and their children who carry on after them who are just now in high school and college, may be even less evil.

Mitt Romney, who has managed to become his party's Presidential nominee despite being grossly unrepresentative of his party's rank and file as one of the dying breed of New England Republicans, is no dummy when its comes to politics or what works in the real work in business.  He has emphasized his economic message to the near exclusion of social issues.  His speech at the Republican National Convention that nominated him was the first in decades that didn't say a word about a foreign war that was in progress as he spoke.  He knows that social issues and foreign policy are not what will get him elected in an election that is all about a still struggling economy and isn't talking about them beyond dog whistle messages to the base.  His choice of running mate, who has made his name in Congress with his tax and budgetary policy stances, emphasizes the message that Romney wants to make this election.  Romney wants a referendum on the economy, not a broad choice between a Republican and a Democratic policy message overall that would be much harder for him to win.  Fortunately for Romney, it is two months before the election and the economy is still dragging, and a wealthy of political science data supports the notion that swing voters do indeed tend to be referrendum voters in Presidential elections.

Is Romney's choice merely a cynical marketing decision?  Or, does it represent a repudiation of a conservative agenda based on social issues that has mostly taken center stage since Goldwater that doesn't have a demographic future?  Has Romney been successful in co-opting the Tea Party's public priorities (lassiez-faire, anti-stimulus, anti-regulatory, anti-redistributionist economic policies), while trying to sweep under the rug their less public highly consistent and highly conservative views on other issues that provide an unstated intellectual and moral framework for these positions?  Would he change his emphasis once he was elected, or would the moderate governing strategies he employed as a Governor come out and leave his base feeling short changed?

If the base doesn't change its values, they will feel short changed and the Romney ticket will be just a deceptive blip in the long run ideological trajectory of the Republican party reflecting nothing more than a short term tactical political decision to make it look like the tent is bigger than it is.  But, if the larger zeitgeist of Christan conservatives really is evolving, then there is reason to hope that Romney's tactical choices may have long term influence on the policy course of his party which was otherwise headed towards a hard line permanent minority status as a purely white Southern regional party.