Color me skeptical. I don't believe that polarization at the grass roots was nearly as polarized forty years ago as it is today.
We develop a new method to endogenously partition society into groups based on homophily in values. The between-group differentiation that results from this partition provides a novel measure of latent polarization in society. For the last forty years, the degree of latent polarization of the U.S. public has been high and relatively stable. In contrast, the degree of partisan polarization between voters of the two main political parties steadily increased since the 1990s, and is now converging toward that of underlying values-based clusters. Growing partisan polarization in the U.S. is a reflection of partisan views becoming increasingly aligned with the main values-based clusters in society.
Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuno-Ortin, Romain Wacziarg, "Latent Polarization" (May 2024).
Yesterday, seven weeks before the 2024 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a Presidential debate, that, by all accounts, Harris performed well in (in stark contrast to the debate between Trump and President Biden that triggered Biden's withdrawal from the Presidential race).
Harris used this rare moment with the eyes of the nation on her and Trump to go on the attack and to show, as much as tell, the audience that Trump is a weak and small man who has lost his marbles, by baiting him into rants that prove this point.
The Race Is Close
Terrifyingly, this Presidential race is extremely close. Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are all polling within one percentage point of a tied race. Harris has a 1.7 percentage point lead in Michigan and a 2 percentage point lead in Wisconsin. Trump leads by 4.4 percentage points in Florida. One candidate or the other leads by at least 5.3 percentage points in every other state or electoral vote granting Congressional District.
Harris leads in national polling by 2.8 percentage points, which given the inherent bias of the Electoral College against Democrats relative to the popular vote, is just barely enough, or maybe not quite enough, to win.
Worse yet, polling was consistently and decisively biased against Trump in both 2016 and in 2020, mostly because of low response rates from Trump supporters relative to supporters of the Democratic candidates. So, notwithstanding the narrow lead in the polls that Harris has, and the efforts of pollsters to address this problem, Harris may be doing worse than the polls are letting on.
This makes no sense.
If you look at the race from a rational, logical perspective, as Democrats are prone to do, this makes no sense.
The fundamentals of the U.S. economy and the state of the union are strong.
- Unemployment has been low on a sustained basis for a record length of time.
- Wages have been rising.
- Gas prices are below average and the current rate of inflation is low.
- The stock market and the gross national product have been growing tremendously.
- Crime rates are at close to record lows.
- The teen birthrate has never been lower.
- Opioid overdose rates have finally stabilized after growing relentlessly for decades.
- We are a nation as close to at peace has we have been for decades. The war in Afghanistan is over. The Iraq War is over.
Trump should be a uniquely weak candidate.
- Trump lost the 2020 election and a lot of Americans are sick of him.
- Trump's speeches are routinely rambling, almost incoherent word salad that are riddled with multiple factual assertions that are not true every single minute, alternating with just bizarre, inexplicable claims.
- Trump is a former Democrat, who lived most of his life in New York City, is married to an immigrant, and claims to be a billionaire who started out in life with a $400 million inheritance back when that was worth a lot more than it is today. He has very little in common with his based in any way.
- The departure from Afghanistan was chaotic and ugly because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban shortly before he lost the 2020 election, that undermined the U.S. backed regime there, Afghans who backs U.S. forces, and U.S. forces.
- Roe v. Wade was overturned, in an immensely unpopular decision, because he appointed three ultra-conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has never been lower.
- Trump has taken the side of long standing U.S. enemies like Vladimir Putin and King Jung-Un, and has shown open admiration of China's authoritarian leader.
- Trump stands convicted of 34 felonies for which he will face sentencing after the election and before the inauguration.
- Trump is still dealing with three more criminal cases where he was indicted, all of which are tangled up in appeals unrelated to the merits of whether he committed the crimes.
- While the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was not allowed to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this decision was reversed without disturbing the determination of the Colorado courts that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.
- Several dozen of Trump's senior close associates have been convicted of felonies.
- No living former Republican President endorsed Trump, and only a handful of senior officials from his administration have done so, while many former official in his administration have endorsed Harris.
- Trump's personal lawyer has been disbarred and is bankrupt from sanctions imposed upon him for his misconduct fighting the 2020 election results. Many other lawyers who helped him in connection with that were also disbarred or had their licenses to practice law suspended. Some of the people who pushed that losing fight are in prison.
- About a thousand people involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital to overturn his losing electoral vote outcome have been convicted of crimes, many of which were serious.
- Fox News had to settle a defamation case related to its election outcome fraud for about $800 million. Several other conservative news commentators who backed him have lost defamation suits that sent them to bankruptcy and/or lost their jobs.
- Trump's Truth Social conservative social media outlet has seen its stock market price tank.
- Trump lost a civil fraud lawsuit resulting in a judgment against him for hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Trump lost a pair of defamation and civil sexual assault lawsuits, resulting in a civil finding that he sexually assaulted a woman.
- Trump is 78 years old and starting to show strong signs of dementia in his public speeches.
- The media not longer hesitates to call out Trump for his non-stop lying about every factual matter under the sun.
- Trump's mismanagement of the COVID epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, their lives.
- Trump ran up the deficit tremendously, and not just from COVID related spending. A lot of that deficit comes from huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich that did little or nothing to help the economy.
- The fact that Trump had an affair with a prostitute while his wife was pregnant with his youngest child, and then paid her $100,000 of hush money.
- Trump has had five children with three wives and indisputably cheated on all three of his wives, including his current one.
- Both Trump and his wife are former pornography actors.
- Trump rarely, if ever, attends church and lacks even surface level understanding of the Bible or Christian doctrine.
- Trump's older children have profited handsomely from selling their relationship to him for the corrupt reason of their apparent political influence and Trump himself received immense improper personal financial gain during his Presidency. Their misconduct with a charity that they were involved in has caused them to be barred from running charities in New York State.
- Trump's businesses, have gone bankrupt six times, including a casino.
- Trump University was a dismal failure that he had to settle for a huge sum because he personally participated in fraud promoting it.
- Trump has a long history of losing or having to settle racial discrimination lawsuits and his father was a literal Nazi and KKK member.
J.D. Vance isn't helping his ticket.
- Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, has also repeatedly put his foot in his mouth, and plays to the MAGA base, not to swing voters.
Biden's departure should help.
- Joe Biden's advanced age had been a major talking point in the Presidential race. Now that talking point has been turned on its head with Harris replacing him in the race.
- Joe Biden did little campaigning, wasn't very effective at it when he did, and did miserably in the first debate.
Walz helps his ticket.
- Governor Walz from Minnesota is a very decent guy and a military veteran (like Vance) who is moral in all of the ways that Trump and Vance are not.
Republicans in Congress are dysfunctional.
- The Republican Party holds a razor thin majority in the U.S. House but has been plagued with infighting, struggled to elected a speaker in the first place, replaced their speaker, and struggles to pass even basic appropriations bills without Democratic party backing.
- Maverick gadflies in the House GOP have more power than they should because the GOP majority is so thin, and they have repeatedly embarrassed their party on a national stage, while undermining their own majority coalition.
- There is a real possibility that the government will shut down on October 1, 2024, a little more than a month before the election, because House Republicans can't agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning.
- In the U.S. Senate, a rogue Senator from Alabama has single handedly impaired the functioning and good order of the U.S. military by blocking defense department related appointments.
- The Republicans have not been very effective in achieving their goals in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that two Democratic Senators have left their party midterm (and will not be re-elected in 2024).
- For example, Biden has appointed new federal judges at roughly the same rate that Trump did.
Why is Trump so greatly over performing in face of all of the factors that should make this race a landslide for Harris?
* At the federal level at least, partisan divides have never been bigger. There is not a single Democrat who is more conservative than a single Republican in Congress. There are very few moderates of either party in Congress. The magnitude of the gap between the parties is as big as it has ever been since the eve of the U.S. Civil War.
* The amount of split ticket voting in 2020 was a record low and all but about 8% of voters have a clear partisan preference which they always back in every election.
* The deep partisan divide reflects a deep economic and cultural divide between "red counties" and "blue counties". Biden won less than 54% of the popular vote in 2020, but the counties he won account for 71% of the nation's GDP. Trump won a little more than 46% of the popular vote, but the counties he won account for only 29% of the nation's GDP.
* Red America is less educated, less affluent, more religious, less diverse, and more rural, than Blue America. Red America has participated very little in the last 50 years of economic growth.
* The economic weakness of less educated white men in Red America has caused them to fail as economic providers resulting in them less often getting married, usually having children out of wedlock, and getting divorced when they do get married early and often at unprecedented rates. Their failure as providers has also driven deaths of despair, and caused many of them to have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or to have their parental rights marginalized in custody fights, and driven lots of domestic violence criminalizing them.
* Red America has interpreted its failing families as caused by moral failure, gay rights, abortion, and feminism resulting in backlash against "wokeness", when the real problem is that the economy no longer needs many uneducated, unskilled, socially rough around the edges men, leaving them with regular bouts of unemployment and low wages.
* White religious people, living in an increasingly secular society in which they are not thriving economically, and are constantly losing out to educated knowledge workers (an increasing share of whom are non-white women), have ceased to trust the mainstream media, educational institutions at all levels, and the government. Together with the rise of social media and niche Internet media sources, this has left them exposed to ridiculous lies about almost everything going on in the world, which they embraced, initially, to protect their religious worldviews that are at odds with science and reality.
Trump's Messaging
- Trump's campaign has tried, with considerable success, to blame Biden for the short but intense period of high inflation post-COVID, even though it was driven by factors beyond Biden's control (like Ukraine War driven oil price surges and big corporate profit taking greed). This, and Biden's failure to regularly tout his economic successes, means that many conservatives don't realize how strong the economy is doing.
- Trump did his best in the debate, and has in all of his campaigns, tried to demonize immigration and hasn't hesitated to resort to bald faced lies to back that effort. In part this is playing to economic fear, that Red America sees waves of low skilled workers as competing with them in a zero sum game for unskilled work. But more than that, he is focusing on immigrant driven crime (which is contrary to reality because crime is low and because even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than native born Americans) and on immigrants undermining a white Evangelical Christian nationalist vision for America and its culture. He's also tried to fan completely unsubstantiated claims that fraudulent voting by immigrants who aren't allowed to vote is depriving his backers, the "true Americans" of their rightful control of their country. Never mind that immigrants are particularly scarce in many of the places where Trump's message is most warmly received, like West Virginia.
- The MAGA movement isn't about governing. Trump himself is mostly only weakly interested in policy despite the nefarious and terrifying Project 2025 agenda that has been prepared for him by right wing think tanks. Conservative wonks in think tanks want to govern in a way that transforms the nation with hard core conservative policies to fit their minority vision for the country. But, the MAGA movement and Trump himself, are about persecuting their enemies for disloyalty and out of spite, and about burning down the entire institution of the federal government (and a lot of state and local government) which they believe has failed them and they don't trust.
- A fair amount of the MAGA movement is about older, disgruntled white people in places that have failed economically who mostly aren't thriving themselves, trying to hold onto white male Christian hegemony in an economy where you can be prosperous without education or skills, as the nation steadily becomes less Christian, less white, more educated, and has given more power and rights to women. They want to roll back cultural change including gay rights and feminism. They want to deny the existence of things like climate change.
- They want everyone to buy American and forego international trade. Trump is pushing big new tariffs in his tax proposals. His vision for America is isolationist and anti-globalist.
-They are attracted by the certainty and manliness of authoritarian leaders internationally. Trump touted support from far right Hungarian leader Mr. Orban in the debate.
- Trump's message is a message of fear and division. Harris is trying to go back to Obama's message of hope and unity.
- The Democratic party's left wing has to some extent fallen for the trap that Trump has created for them, threatening to back third-party candidates due to disillusionment with Biden over issues like Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians that isn't salient to many voters, and focusing on the negative long term perspective on the economy rather than the good news from Biden's administration compared to Trump's administration.
Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.
Google AI says this about U.S. barge traffic (of freight) by commodity type:
Here are some commodities that are transported by barge in the United States:CoalIn 2007, coal was the primary commodity moved by barge, accounting for 29% of all tonnages.PetroleumPetroleum was the second largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 27% of all tonnages.Crude materialsCrude materials, such as forest products, sand, gravel, ores, scrap, and salt, were the third largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 18% of all tonnages.Food and farm productsFood and farm products were the fourth largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 12% of all tonnages.GrainCorn and soybeans are the major bulk grain commodities moved by barge along the Mississippi River.FertilizerFertilizer is another farm product that is moved by barge.Heavy bulk commoditiesHeavy bulk commodities, such as cereal grains, processed agricultural goods, animal feed, fertilizer, and sand and gravel, are commonly moved by barge in the rural area of the Mid-America Port Commission Region.Machinery and equipmentLarge and bulky pieces of machinery or equipment, such as giant cranes, steam generators, automobile plant presses, military vehicles, and rocket boosters, are also transported by barge.
eMachines was a brand of economical personal computers.eMachines was founded in September 1998 by Lap Shun Hui as a joint venture of South Korean companies Korea Data Systems and TriGem. The company sold PCs at prices [intially] ranging at $399 or $499, not including a monitor. By March 1999, the company was ranked fourth in U.S. computer sales, with a 9.9% market share.In 2004, it was acquired by Gateway, Inc., which was in turn acquired by Acer Inc. in 2007. The EMachines brand was discontinued in 2013.
In the Ukraine War, Russia has so far lost about 2/3 of its major army military systems like tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and artillery batteries, in two and a half years of fighting.
Some of its losses are being replaced with vehicles left in boneyards, but Russia is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel even there, putting tanks from the 1960s and 1970s back in service, sometimes as stationary pillboxes or filled with explosives and converted into crudely controlled unmanned ground vehicles full of explosives and used as rolling bombs. A thousand of its early T-72 tanks are too far gone and have too complex autoloading systems to restore at all.
Russia has perhaps 1,750 tanks in operation with perhaps 2,000 more fifty to sixty year old tanks that are salvageable to some extent from its bone yards. It has lost about 3,000 tanks, including the lion's share of its most advanced ones. It has lost about 10,000 artillery pieces leaving a bit more than 4,000 left. It can build only about 100 new tanks a year. It is already having to ration artillery shells, despite its depleted supply of artillery pieces, because it can't make new ones fast enough. Russia's supply of guided missiles is dwindling and can't easily be replaced. It is getting new armed drones from Iran but can't procure them as fast as it is using them.
At the rate that Russia is taking losses, by the third anniversary of the conflict it will have lost 3/4 of it army's major military systems. A year after that it will have lost 90%. Russia doesn't have enough major military equipment to keep fighting for another two full years from now.
Russia's naval and air force losses have been less severe, but it has lost about half of its Black Sea fleet, including its flagship, its headquarters in Crimea, and two submarines. At the current rate, its Black Sea fleet could be 75% depleted by the third anniversary of the war, Russia could be down to a dozen ships and armed boats or less out of an original eighty or so, by the fourth anniversary of the war. This isn't a huge blow to the overall Russian navy, although surely the Ukraine war must at least be causing Russian resources to be diverted from maintaining and expanding the Russian navy to the war (notwithstanding claims by Russian leaders that it is expanding its navy). The fact that Russia has suffered these Black Sea fleet losses from an opponent without a navy of its own and with only a limited air force also underscores how vulnerable the rest of Russia's navy is in a near peer war where its opponents have modern anti-ship missiles and modern air and sea drones.
Russia has lost more than 300 aircraft and is losing about 50 more every six months. This isn't negligible, but it also isn't crippling. But Russia's air force has been largely impotent in this conflict due to its inability to gain air superiority in the face of Ukrainian air defenses. This example also provides a roadmap for other countries wondering how to thwart Russia's immense on paper air force. And, the pace at which Ukraine is damaging Russian air assets is rising.
After some quick territorial gains relative to the 2014 status quo, it lost much of that, and there is been little progress territorially for either side since then. There is no reason to think that Russia will make any meaningful territorial gains in these time periods, indeed, Ukraine recently occupied some of its own territory.
Russia has already sustained more casualties (only about 5-6% fatal) so far, probably 500,000 to 600,000, than the entire size of its active duty military less its navy and air force, of about 400,000 ground troops, when the war began two and a half years ago. At the current rate, it will sustain perhaps 120,000 more casualties between now and the third anniversary of the conflict. By the fourth anniversary of the conflict it is on track to have suffered more than 800,000 casualties with perhaps 50,000 lives lost. Russia's losses can and have been backfilled with green conscripts and with reserve soldiers who were former conscripts or retired and have a lower level of readiness. It may have only something on the order of 50,000 group troops who haven't suffered casualties and were part of the active duty Russian army when the Ukraine war started.
These losses involving such a large percentage of the soldiers deployed to the war have a corrosive effect on morale and unit cohesion. It has, or soon will, have too few experienced soldiers at a high level of readiness to hold the new conscripts and reservists pressed into action together and functioning effectively.
Indeed, assuming that Russia suffers losses at current rates is optimistic. It has fewer major military systems and the ones it has less are inferior older models or in ill-repair. Its troops are getting steadily less skilled. Its logistics systems are being degraded. The Western supplies that Ukraine is getting are becoming more advanced, like longer range MLRS artillery missiles and F-16s.
So, while the current situation in the Ukraine war is frustrating, the current territorial stalemate and war of attrition ultimately works in Ukraine's favor because it has more access to new resources from the West than Russia does from its allies. Russia, realistically, only has the ability to continue for fight for six to eighteen months. And, of course, every month that Russia suffers more losses reduces the conventional warfare threat that it presents to NATO.
Also, as Russia's ground forces grow more depleted, the time becomes ripe for would be insurgents in ethnic minority reasons to rise up again into civil wars in their regions, knowing that Russia has only very limited military resources available to put them down. There mere threat that this could happen discourages Russia from trying to fight down to its last man and last tank in Ukraine.
There is one major content based categorical fair use exemption from copyright. It is for parody. I would propose at least two others:
1. Advocacy. People who are advocating for a view or position want their works to be widely distributed and aren't creating content for the purpose of making a profit. Infringement of copyrights for works of advocacy should be categorically classified as fair use.
2. Scholarship. Academic scholars likewise want their works to be widely disseminated, so long as their works are properly attributed, and earn most of their incomes from salaries as professors or researchers, not from royalties earned on their academic work. Infringement of copyrights for works of academic scholarship that give attribution to the authors should also be categorically classified as fair use.
Today is Labor Day. As usual, there is much discussion of what can be done to help workers. But few focus on the one type of reform that is likely to help more poor and disadvantaged workers than virtually anything else: increasing labor mobility. In the United States and around the world, far too many workers are trapped in places where it is difficult or impossible for them to ever escape poverty. They could vastly improve their lot if allowed to "vote with their feet" by moving to locations where there are better job opportunities. That would also be an enormous boon to the rest of society.
Economists estimate that eliminating legal barriers to migration throughout the world would roughly double world GDP—in other words, making the world twice as productive as it is now. A person who has the misfortune of being born in Cuba or Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, is likely condemned to lifelong poverty, no matter how talented or hardworking he or she may be. If they are allowed to move to a freer society with better economic institutions, they can almost immediately double or triple their income and productivity. And that doesn't consider the possibility of improving job skills, which is also likely to be more feasible in their new home than in their country of origin.The vast new wealth created by breaking down migration barriers would obviously benefit migrants themselves. But it also creates enormous advantages for receiving-country natives, as well. They benefit from cheaper and better products, increased innovation, and the establishment of new businesses (which immigrants create at higher rates than natives). Immigrants also contribute disproportionately to scientific and medical innovation, such as the MRNA Covid-19 vaccines, that have already saved many thousands of lives around the world.
barriers to labor mobility also harm workers within the United States. Exclusionary zoning prevents many millions of Americans—particularly the poor and working class—from moving to areas where they could find better job opportunities and thereby increase their wages and standard of living. Recent evidence suggests that the problem is even worse than scholars previously thought. Occupational licensing further exacerbates the problem, by making it difficult for workers in many industries to move from one state to another.Breaking down barriers to labor mobility is an oft-ignored common interest of poor minorities (most of whom are Democrats), and the increasingly Republican white working class. Both groups could benefit from increased opportunity to move to places where there are more and better jobs and educational opportunities available.
The latest op-ed by Paul Krugman, entitled, "The Political Rage of Left-Behind Regions" (NYT) explains the single most important factor in the gains of the far-right in the U.S., in modern Germany, and elsewhere.He notes that:There were local elections in several German states a few days ago, and the results — a strong showing by the Alliance for Germany or AfD, a right-wing extremist party — were shocking but not surprising. . . . In some important respects Thuringia, the German state where the AfD won more votes than any other party, resembles West Virginia. Like West Virginia, it’s a place the 21st-century economy seems to have left behind, whose population is in decline, with younger people in particular leaving for opportunities elsewhere. And West Virginia strongly supports Donald Trump and his party, whose doctrines bear considerable resemblance to those of the AfD. . . .MAGA’s rise does seem connected to the economic decline of much of rural and small-town America. This decline has happened in many parts of the country, including, for example, much of upstate New York, but it is concentrated in what Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers have called the “eastern heartland.” In what follows I’ll focus on numbers for West Virginia, which is arguably the heart of that heartland, and epitomizes both the economic and political problems of left-behind regions.So what stands out when you compare West Virginia with other parts of America is the number of men not working. I say “men” because even now, despite the rise in the percentage of women in the paid labor force since 1970, our expectation that adults of working age will, in fact, have jobs is stronger for men than for women.Here’s a comparison between West Virginia and New Jersey. Why New Jersey? I’ll explain in a moment.
The chart shows the percentage of adults ages 20 to 64 who didn’t have jobs in 2019 (before the pandemic):Credit...American Community Survey
Adults of both sexes were much more likely not to be working in West Virginia, although the gap was larger for men (67 versus 43 percent).Why is not working a problem? Obviously, it means you aren’t earning wages, but it goes deeper than that. Jobs are a source of dignity, a sense of self-worth; people who aren’t working when they feel they should be — a problem that, like it or not, is even now bigger for men than women — feel shame, which all too easily turns into anger, a desire to blame someone else and lash out.So the lack of jobs for men helps extremist political movements that appeal to angry men. In Germany, the AfD has much stronger support among men than women. Polls show a large advantage for Kamala Harris among women in the United States, while Trump leads among men. Places where there are many men without jobs are fertile ground for MAGA, which is trying to court the “manoverse.”Why are jobs, especially for men, so hard to get in West Virginia?Despite what you may hear from the likes of JD Vance, native-born West Virginians aren’t losing jobs to immigrants because the state hardly has any immigrants — only 1.8 percent of the population is foreign-born, the lowest in the nation, while the corresponding number for New Jersey is 23.5 percent, close to the top.The parallel between economic and political developments in the United States and Germany also rules out the idea that the heartland is suffering because trade deficits are undermining our manufacturing sector. For while America has indeed been running trade deficits, Germany has been running huge surpluses — yet is experiencing similar discontent and anger[.]. . .
The most likely story is that the 21st-century economy is driven by knowledge-intensive industries that flourish in metropolitan areas with highly educated work forces. This has led to a self-reinforcing process in which jobs migrate to places with lots of college graduates, and college graduates migrate to the same places, leaving less-educated places like West Virginia stranded.
Is the solution, then, for the regions that have benefited from this process to provide aid to those on the losing end?
No, he answers. As it stands, the federal government subsidizes West Virginia to the tune of 12% of its GDP in federal spending less federal taxes from the states, due to progressive taxation and programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and also benefits greatly from Obamacare.
Credit...Rockefeller Institute, Bureau of Economic Analysis . . .
Credit...KFF
West Virginia has seen its traditional mining and logging jobs collapse, while its health care, education, and social service jobs have grown.
Credit...FRED . . .
What is true, and may partially explain political rage in left-behind regions, is that many of the jobs federal aid creates tend to be female-coded, certainly more so than coal mining — which may in turn explain why the problem of adults without jobs appears to be worse, at least in terms of its political weight, for men than for women.That said, the Biden-Harris administration has been making a serious effort to promote manufacturing as part of its industrial policies — an effort that seems to be disproportionately helping heartland states.The odd thing is that the politicians angry heartland voters support — Trump received more than twice as many votes in West Virginia as Joe Biden in 2020 — oppose the very programs that aid these depressed areas. Trump tried, in effect, to kill the Affordable Care Act. Not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to create manufacturing jobs in the heartland.But then Adam Tooze, who does know something about German political economy, tells us that while the AfD talks a lot about “social distress” in lagging regions, this “does not translate into a platform that supports greater state spending.”In Germany as in America, then, voters in left-behind regions are, understandably, angry — and they channel this anger into support for politicians who will make their plight worse.
Colorado will not use any coal for electricity generation by 2031. It currently has ten coal fired power plants. It will take three of them off line in 2025. The rest are scheduled to be taken off line in the five years that follow.
Colorado will be more aggressive than most states in this time frame, but some states are already coal free, and almost all states are reducing the extent to which coal powers their electrical grids.
Greatly improved solid state electric vehicle batteries will start coming on line in 2025 and vehicles powered by them will make up a large share of new vehicles by 2031, greatly reducing gasoline and diesel consumption.
These developments, taken together, will greatly reduce U.S. fossil fuel consumption over the next seven years, and the reduction will be particularly dramatic for coal consumption. The falling demand for coal will hit Wyoming and West Virginia hard, because they are the two dominant producers of coal right now in the U.S. (the U.S. imports little, if any, coal). This will also heavily impact freight rail and barge transportation demand, because those are the two main ways that coal is delivered to power plants. Coal is the single largest revenue stream for both means of transportation.
The coal fired power plants are being replaced largely by wind, solar, and natural gas over the next seven years. So, the U.S. is going to see continued strong demand for natural gas, which is mostly sourced from North America, but should be seeing a gradual decline in petroleum demand (a fuel that the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in now, although global oil prices still influence domestic oil prices). The energy self-sufficiency of the U.S., however, buffers it from major macroeconomic shocks driven by rising oil prices like those seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The increase in the share of vehicles that are electric, spurred by solid state batteries, will be global. Indeed, many places in Europe are already in the lead on this front. And, since gasoline and diesel powered vehicles are the predominant end use of oil, this should drive down the price of oil in the global market. This will make high cost oil producers, like fracking wells and off-shore oil rigs, uneconomic first.
Meanwhile, the Ukraine War has put intense pressure on Europe, which has cut off or reduced access to Russian oil and gas, to be more efficient in order to reduce its fossil fuel consumption, to increase it share of renewable power, to delay shutting down coal fired power plants, and to keep its nuclear power plants on line. This may mean more insulation, more blankets and sweaters, more heat pumps, more electric vehicles, a shift to buses and trains, and fewer natural gas power plants.
China is in the way of these developments strongly addressing global warming, because it seems to be increasing, rather than decreasing, its coal consumption in the short to medium term.
But China is also a world leader in electric car production and in building a high speed rail network, so China may play an important part in reducing global petroleum consumption. And, China's path in electric vehicle development is likely to heavily influence countries in Southeast Asia that in its sphere of influence, and to a lesser extent, may influence Africa and South America in which China has attempted to expand its economic influence.
China is also a leading producer of high efficiency, low cost solar panels, and eventually this, together with its rapidly declining fertility rates and starting to shrink population, may make its current round of investments in coal fired power plants short lived.
As oil demand and prices fall, this will eventually undermine the often authoritarian leaning countries with heavily oil dependent economies, in the Middle East, but also Brunei, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. It will also impact Norway, the U.K., Canada, and U.S. states like Alaska, Louisiana, and Texas that are major oil producers. Oil wealth is what has made ultra-conservative Islam feasible in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It has been central to the economies of Iran and Iraq. It has been an important factor allowing Russia and Venezuela and Iran to continue to be authoritarian.
These countries will see a collapse in their standard of living and they will face intense pressure to convert to a commercial economy. Most of their "guest workers" will be sent home for good.
