What Is True And What Is False About Literacy?

Jared Henderson has a thoughtful Substack post about literacy statistics and the "literacy crisis." Many statistics thrown around in the public square about this issue are misleading or ill-sourced. 

Henderson spends a lot of time revisiting his prior commentary on the issue, acknowledging that some of what he said previously was probably wrong or overstated, and sourcing the common misleading statistics. I'll skip that here.

The most essential point is that there are different levels of literacy and commonly cited statistics on point frequently don't disclose what level of literacy they are talking about. They also often cite statistics about literacy in the English language, which is appropriate for many purposes, but neglect to mention that many people in the U.S. who are not literate in English are literate in another language.

"Could not participate" is a mix of non-English language speakers, and people who have physical or cognitive disabilities too serve to interview, two very distinct populations.

Level 1 is minimal basic literacy, and about 8.1% of adults in the U.S. either could not participate in the survey or can't attain this basic level of literacy, although even some people below Level 1 literacy might be able to read a simple story to their children, recite the alphabet, or read a street sign. Many people with Level 1 literacy would struggle to graduate from high school at all.

Level 2 is the literacy level of typical non-college bound high school graduates.

Level 3 is the literacy level of a college bound high school graduate and about 57.5% of Americans have that level of literacy (other sources have put this figure as low as 46%).

Levels 4 and 5 are the literacy levels, roughly speaking, of above average college graduates and people who have graduate degrees.

An OECD report puts the United States in the middle of developed countries for literacy levels:

The United States does have a very high level of disparity between the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile in literacy (and numeracy and problem solving) compared to other developed countries, which is to say crudely that we have very literate smart people and very illiterate dumb people (using the same scale as the mean literacy levels in the chart above).

Prior to COVID, the U.S. was seeing a very gradual trend of improvement in reading and math among school children, but it took a dip (hopefully temporary and due to disrupted educational programs) in the year 2020 from which it had not yet recovered in the most recent available data.

The author describes as a separate matter the decline in the extent to which adults who used demographically used to read books do so now, but attributes this to a disinclination to read rather than a decline in the ability to read long form books. But he makes a point of distinguishing this issue from adult literacy from childhood literacy, each of which are distinct issues with distinct workable responses.

40 Acres

An acre was traditionally meant to be the amount of land that a farmer could plow in a day with a farm animal's assistance.

40 acres was traditionally the amount of land necessary for a single family of unmechanized subsistence farms to support themselves. It is the most typical economic unit in which farmland and vacant land is sold, even today.

40 acres and a mule was what post-U.S. Civil War advocates for reparations to former slaves had advocated for (and obviously, did not achieve).

A square 40 acre plot is a quarter mile on each side (a.k.a. 1320 feet a.k.a. 440 yards), with a one mile circumference and a 16th of a square mile area.

The population density of subsistence farmers at this traditional pre-modern scale is about 100 people per square mile.

A survey township has 36 square miles (6 miles a side) and was traditionally the presumptive size of the smallest unit of local government, which at subsistence farming population density would have had about 3,600 people, and perhaps a bit more for a hamlet of perhaps 400 people who would make up the 10% or so of non-farmers who would have been present in a predominantly subsistence farming pre-modern society at the technology level that would have prevailed around the time of the American Revolution (250 years ago), so it might have had a total population of about 4,000 people. Non-farmers in hamlets like this would often include clergy, craftsmen in the skilled trades, doctors, veterinarians, and merchants.

In the brief period where there was democratic government and a predominantly pre-modern subsistence farming economy, people under age twenty-one couldn't vote, and neither could women, so perhaps 400-500 of those people would have been eligible to vote and/or participate in town meetings (in areas without slavery, as slaves couldn't vote either and were usually used to farm cash crops in any case).

In townships that were not governed in the town meeting style of New England towns, a typical town council would have had three elected trustees and sometimes an elected town clerk as well, so about one voter per 100 to 167 people would have been elected officials. This rate is similar to the rate at which people serve as precinct organizers in modern political parties.

A community of this size might have a single church that doubled as a community center and while pre-mechanized subsistence farming largely predated universal public education, a township would typically have something on the order of 2,000 school age children.

In that era about a quarter of children would have died in their first year and about half would have died before reaching adulthood. In any given childbirth, about 1% of pregnant mothers would have died in childbirth, and a typical woman would give birth six to eight times in a lifetime, leading to an excess of widowers over widows. There would be post-menopause age grandmothers in the community, but far fewer, proportionately, than there are today. Most elderly people would have lived with extended family. Then, as now, about a third of pregnancies would have ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth.

It would be unusual for a subsistence farming community to have more than a handful of people with post-secondary education (perhaps a priest and a government official or lawyer), and the percentage of people with the equivalent of a full high school education today would have been comparable to the percentage of people with graduate degrees today, although in some regions, a significant number of people without formal second education would nonetheless have been quite well-read autodidacts. Journalists and school teachers and merchants would typically not have a post-secondary education and would often not have the equivalent of a high school diploma today.

Affordability

What are the easiest policies to make life more affordable?

* Unilaterally end tariffs.

* Legalize car imports from China and reduce trade barriers to importing smaller cars from Europe. This would greatly increase choices and competition for basic cars.

* Support the infrastructure to shift to electric vehicles making us less vulnerable to global petroleum prices and less incentivized to go to war over oil.

* Eliminate fares for high volume transit routes.

* Encourage renewable energy sources like solar and wind which are now cheaper than coal and are not subject to natural gas price fluctuations.

* Remove barriers to building affordable housing, especially zoning that restricts density and rules out multi-family housing, parking mandates, lot size limitations, and aesthetic building code requirements. Encourage high quality manufacturing of homes and large components of homes in lieu of stick building everything on site.

* Encourage the Fed to take a more gradual approach to increasing interest rates when economic conditions call for it to do so, so that housing markets have time to adjust to higher mortgage rates which decrease affordability until housing prices transition to adjust to the ability to pay.

* Tax unoccupied housing more heavily to discourage hoarding of empty housing that reduces housing supply and drives up housing prices.

* Enact policies that financially penalize profitable companies for the burden that they impose on government when a significant share of their workers need welfare to make ends meet, in part, by increasing the minimum wage.

* Shift revenue sources for ECE (early childhood education)-12 education from property taxes to income taxes. This makes the taxes more progressive. It increases funding equity between places with large property tax bases per student (like rich suburbs and resorts) and places with small property tax bases per student (like low income municipalities and rural areas). This also reduces housing costs.

* Make free meals for all part of the standard ECE-12 education package.

* Make access to ECE and kindergarten and afterschool programs universal.

* Encourage international students at colleges and universities who basically subsidize domestic students by paying full tuition.

* Publicly fund higher education, without significant student loans, with all students with a reasonable chance of completing their degrees, while limiting admissions for students who have a high probability of failing. This makes access to higher education possible for working class and middle class kids increasing their future incomes and class mobility while making the economy more productive, and reduces the squeeze on families at the low end of upper middle class who don't easily qualify for need based grant financial aid, but still pay higher shares of their income than others.

* Reinvigorate vocational programs at high schools and community colleges for students for whom a traditional liberal arts college curriculum or four year degree isn't a good fit.

* Establish new medical school and medical professional school capacity to increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals.

* Welcome foreign medical professionals, thus increasing the supply of medical professionals whose compensation is driven up by a limited supply, especially in rural areas where domestic medical professionals are least likely to prefer.

* Medicare for all or similar universal health care financing, that cuts out health care billing and insurance company administration costs and profits, ends barriers to health care for the self-employed and unemployed and those with jobs providing only second rate health insurance with high deductibles, funds health care in proportion to ability to pay, ends medical debt and bankruptcies, takes pressure off high cost ER care, and improves the bargaining power over drug costs and other provider costs. Health care expenses of employers also reduce wages more or less dollar for dollar.

* Broaden access to long term care, including home health care and assisted living, on a basis similar to universal healthcare, and finance it with estate taxes.

Empirical Tests Of Economic Theories

Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.

* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.

* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.

* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.

* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.

* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.

* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.

* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes. 

One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).

The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.

In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.

The Idea To Action Pipeline

My education and life training was typical of a lot of people who grew up in upper middle class families and lots of upwardly mobile people who used education and skill training and socialization in the course of securing those things. There are maybe a hundred million people in the United States, a country of about 340 million people, who have been raised or trained to have the kind of mindset that I have.

As younger children, a key focus from my parents (and the parents and teachers of most people like me) was on making good choices, and that's also something that was an important part of what my wife and I, and most of our peers viewed as good parenting.

As I got older, and advanced in my education and socialization all of the way into college, I was raised and taught (formally and informally) to identify problems, to analyze them in evidence and experience informed ways, to be familiar with lots of proven problem solving strategies, to devise appropriate solutions to problem that would work, and to know how to evaluate what is likely to work and test proposed solutions to see if they work as expected (and to revised the solutions if they don't).

Even in law school, the curriculum, while it taught us to nuts and bolts of what the law says, was very oriented towards identifying legal rules and official policies that were good, or were flawed, partially so we could use this knowledge in our adult lives and careers to push for better policies, and partially so that when we encountered flawed rules that we couldn't change we could understand what we were up against, why the rules were a problem, and with this information could devise the best strategies for dealing with them.

We learned to be on the lookout for good ideas that other people had, from other countries and places within our own country, from history, from different cultures, from people with a good track record for innovation, from sources that specialize in identifying good ideas. In the areas of science, and technology and medicine, back before the Internet, we subscribed to Popular Science and Science News. In the area of style and food and architecture when we moved to the West, there was Sunset magazine. These days, for example, I regularly check in on the Boing Boing websites, and read the latest academic scholarship from free sources like the arXiv and bioRxiv and SSRN preprint websites, NBER, the Legal Theory blog, and the various law professors blogs.

It is a way of thinking and conceptual tool kit shared with modest variation, by a large swath of people trained to make up our classes of mangers, professional, and makers. It's an approach used by scientists, engineers, inventors, transactional lawyers, mediators, business executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and innovators.

One of the textbooks used in my first college level political science classes, at Miami University of Ohio, was called "Power and Choice". And, the training, upbringing, and inclinations that I developed and that a huge swath of people developed, was focused on the choice side of this formula.

One of the reasons that I blog, and a major theme of my life, and the lives of lots and lots of people, although I probably have the luxury and means to do so more than most people, is to float constructive ideas for how we as a society can make better choices and find better solutions. Sometimes they are proposed government policies or laws. Sometimes they are better way to fund or finance something. Sometimes they are new technologies to could be used in a new way. 

Sometimes they are concrete approaches to concrete problems like better ways to landscape our home in a city in what is almost a high desert, or a better kind of appliance, or coming up with a better way to keep track of what pills I've taken or need to take, or a better way to keep track of what we need to buy at the store and what we already have in a way that we can actually find it, or how to manage household plants, or a more efficient way to pay bills.

Many of these ideas are solutions to problems that somebody else has. How to make better military procurement choices. What tools we could make available for first responders and disaster responses. How to tax publicly held companies and multinational business in a better way. How to deliver better health care results for our society as a whole, while doing so in a more affordable way. How to cut red tape in big bureaucracies.

Collectively, most of us have much less familiarity, less training, and less comfort and familiarity with the power side of the "power and choice" formula, even many of those of us who are truly exceptional and extraordinary at the choice part.

A lot of us are attracted to politics because we care about and have a good skill set for making policy, but are adrift when it comes to securing the power necessary to putting those policies in place. A lot of the scientists who see most clearly what paths to new scientific discoveries would be most fruitful and which are most likely to be dead ends are stymied at how to generate momentum and funding for those ideas in the scientific community. Lots of us are aware of businesses that would be good to invest in, or would be good to short, but don't have the financial wealth or the influence with people who have access to money to do anything about this knowledge. Lots of us are aware of innovative technological solutions that could bring about a lot of constructive change, but don't know where to begin to go about getting those solutions adopted more widely.

People like me, and there are perhaps a hundred million of us in the United States, have lots of good ideas, but feel hopeless or frustrated when it comes to turning these ideas into action.

And, it isn't just that we are stupid or missing the obvious. The idea to action pipeline is hard for most people to locate, is clogged up, and is full of seemingly unnecessary twists and turns that make it less effective. Acquiring the power to make even a seemingly obvious on brainer innovation that is itself minor seems to take absolutely epic amounts of time, money, connections, and effort that seems grossly disproportionate to the swift moment it takes to recognize that an idea is good and should be put into action.

It is no secret that I am no fan of Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world. And, Mr. Musk is not a particular genius when it comes to coming up with ideas of his own. The technological innovations behind Telsa, SpaceX, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Hyper loop, and his other projects were all the work of someone else. His ability to identify good ideas is slightly above average, but it isn't particular exceptional. Frederick W. Smith, who founded FedEx, is cut from the same cloth. He had identified one particular, not really profoundly innovative idea that could be implemented with technology that wasn't cutting edge but was still pretty new at the time he came up with it.

But, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that what Musk and Smith both excelled at (and may even continue to excel at) is securing the resources and momentum necessary to turn moderately good, although fairly obvious ideas that no one had implemented (as is so often the case) into action that allowed the ideas that were mostly children of other people to actually come into wide use.

In the case of Musk, being an heir to an emerald mine fortune helped a lot. Smith also grew up as the son of a wealthy, moderately successful business owner, attended the top local private schools, and went to Yale in some of the last years when doing so was more about money and connections than academic merit.

But turning ideas into action can be a lot more challenging for the rest of us, partially because we don't have nearly as much training in how to do this as we do in how to come up with good ideas (i.e. because we are much better at making good choices than exercising power), and in part, because the idea to action pipeline at the moment is mediocre and has deteriorated over time is a society that is starting to stagnate (something that Economist Tyler Cohen wrote a book about).

This is true even for people like me who have a solid nuts and bolts understanding of things like how capital is raised for businesses in the modern U.S. economy, how the political process works, and the inner workings of academia, while spending decades working side by side by quite successful political figures and business people and academics (albeit not necessarily the peak "A-list" individuals in their respective fields).

Yes, it is possible to innovate and turn good ideas into action, even if, in my humble opinion it is too hard to do so. And, it is true that innovation shouldn't be too easy or free of gatekeepers. There are also a lot of really bad ideas out there that, when implemented, do immense harm. The more easily ideas get turned into action, the more important it is that the ideas that receive the thumbs up are good ones.

For examples in the 20th century of bad ideas being adopted too quickly and causing immense harm, ask the people of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, revolutionary Cambodia, or North Korea. Ask the members of cults like the one organized by Jim Jones. 

Ask the people who thought it was a great idea to cover beautiful hardwood floors with cheap vinyl who convinced tens of millions of American homeowners to do so. Further back, ask the people who thought that putting the ill-drafted Second Amendment into the United States constitution was a good idea.

More recently, look at the policy initiative of RFK, Jr., or the actions taken by Elon Musk's DOGE, or the "Liberation Day" tariffs in the second Trump Administration.

On the other hand, lots of opposition to new ideas is mindlessly stubborn, ignorant, corrupt, or mendacious.

Sitting in my living room under the ceiling fan on a hot, dry summer day in August, after returning to work at home after a morning in my office doing a lot of work that actually generates money, I don't have a solution for how to improve the idea to action pipeline. But, surely, even identifying this as a crucial and pervasive problem in our society is progress in and of itself and can lay a foundation for future progress.

The Witches Road (Only Minimal Spoilers)

"The Witches Road" (2025) by Kate Elliott, can be summed up as The Apothecary Diaries x Shannara x Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. 

In typical Kate Elliott style, there is extensive world building that experiment with novel norms and social structures unfamiliar to many readers, there are richly developed characters, and cliche tropes and genre conventions are frequently turned on their head. 

It is part of a two book series, with the second volume to be released in November, and while it is not her magnum opus, something reserved for her seven volume pair of series in the Jaran universe, or her seven volume Crown of Stars series, it is still a very solid and immersive slow burn high brow fantasy romance in a lovingly crafted and fully realized world.

In this post-apocalyptic world, deadly instantly mutagenic spores associated with the "Pall" have enveloped huge swaths of land in a rigidly hierarchal empire with vague East Asian vibes. The empire is organized at almost every level to permit civilization to survive in the face of the scourge that is the Pall. It isn't entirely clear what lies beyond the oceans and the ocean-like barrier that is the Pall.

The part of the empire that we see, far from the emperor's palace in the heartland, is predominantly agricultural and organized around other primary industries like farming, herding, fishing, forestry, stone quarrying, and mining. The empire is a rigidly hierarchical, but intrigue filled, feudal society where aristocrats jockey for power united under a single emperor who has united all territory up to its natural boundaries. Many key professions like surveying, engineering, and serving as soldiers and as archivists, which one must enter something like a holy order at age seventeen, are also limited to children of aristocrats, above the level of servants assigned to support the professionals who may be commoners, although some professions, like couriers and midwives, need not be aristocrats, and meritocracy is creeping into upset the privileges of aristocratic rank within those professions. Education is limited mostly to aristocrats and the very promising commoner students of liberal aristocrats, with literacy being perhaps about as common as a college education was in the 1960s in the U.S. Themes of found family, sexual identity, servitude, child exploitation, overcoming trauma, and the role of single, adult, childless women in society, are explored in detail.

The empire has pre-industrial, roughly 17th to 18th century level technology (without gun powder, but with fairly easily available contraception and midwives that can safely assist women in obtaining abortions). It has steel, bows, crossbows, spy-glasses, portable fire starting kits, finely crafted clothing, precious metal coins (but not paper currency), accurate surveying and extensive written record keeping, carriages, Roman era grade plumbing and civil engineering, ships that can travel along ocean coasts, libraries but not printing presses, traveling theatrical companies, and significant amounts of travel and trade with all roads leading to the capital in the heartland. 

There are isolated elements present in the empire, like ancient triple towers of stone and a set of roads magically immune to spores and the Pall that are also conduits for telegram-like messages, which pre-date the empire and are associated with a legendary era associated in lore with ancient sorcerer-kings. Silk road style hostel-cities (also similar to inns along ancient roman roads), provided for when the roads were built, dot the ancient "witch roads" in enclaves that are also engineered to be free of the Pall and its spores if properly managed, although rural villages have far inferior defensive measures, and it isn't safe to travel at night due to spores, various forms and races of marauding bandits, and deadly wild animals. 

The current empire has a class of fairly modestly potent magic users under the strict control of the empire via its dominant religion, the Heart Temples, which is more pagan than quasi-Christian. But the people of the empire, who are apparently all nominally adherents to this religion, are not meaningfully more superstitious or religiously minded than their more magical than ours world warrants. Other, mostly lost and forgotten, magic exists as well.

While humans are predominant, their are minorities of several other sentient races - a race of indestructible giants that can read and write and understand human language but not speak it who go dormant at night, a race of three horned dwarves who ride wild cats in small groups through forests and sell themselves a mercenaries, a race of elf-like folk who can be hard to distinguish from humans broken into two hostile groups called the Sea Wolves and the Blood Wolves, and a more peaceful group known as Forest Wolves, and a couple of other sentient races who are mentioned by name in passing, but are not described or introduced in the first volume. Some of these humanoid minority races are refugees, sometimes more recently but often generations ago, from areas devastated by the Pall (as are, we eventually learn, our main character and her deceased sister). Aristocratic messengers riding griffins provide limited air mail service. A few kinds of fantasy creatures, as well as magically powered animal golems, fill the place of heavy machinery, for example, pulling fast carriages. The more advanced, prosperous, and magical days of the sorcerer-kings of legendary history also apparently had dragons and various kinds of powerful chimeric warriors.

The visible presence of, and attitudes towards, LGBT folks (several of whom are important or secondary characters) is comparable to that of the 21st century in the U.S. (with attitudes mixed between more liberal and more conservative aristocrats), although acceptance of concubinage, indentured servitude, roles of women, and the like are more or less in line with those of 17th-19th century East Asia albeit with gender equality approaching late 19th century to early 20th century Western levels or what is seen in modern Islamic countries, and attitudes towards psychology and appropriate interpersonal interactions to deal with people's emotions that are very modern.

Refreshingly, the main character is neither the 17 year old young man about to declare his profession, nor the handsome but arrogant prince who is second in line, together with his sister who is trying to undermine him, to the throne, after the incompetent and ill tempered young crown prince. Instead, it is the young man's 31 year old never married aunt who has served for ten years as a deputy courier, delivering messages by foot over a route that takes weeks to walk while keeping her eye open for spore outbreaks in order to stop them immediately before they get out of hand, and reporting generally on local conditions to the local junior aristocrat who runs the local way station along the imperial road and provides county-level type governmental supervision to the local rural villages.

Most of the characters, including our main character's sister who died a couple of years earlier in an avalanche while on bad terms with her child, have deep dark traumatic pasts that are only revealed bit by bit.

The nominal core plot revolves around our main character guiding the handsome prince with a secret mission on a shortcut past an avalanche blocked canyon (a problem his rival sister hid from him in an effort to one up him, or to create an opportunity to assassinate him in royal succession politics), off the safe and ancient witch roads, together with her nephew, both of whom are urgently escaping their dark pasts trying to catch up with them. But this mission gets a new twist when a charming, wiser, more open minded, and ancient "haunt" temporarily possesses the prince so it can travel to the same destination as the one where the prince was bound on a mission of its own.

I have no quarrel with the fact the she introduce many important terms and concepts long before they are fully explained. But, a small nitpick is that she invents many proper names and creature type names that it is hard to know how to pronounce, such as Xilsi, for which the pronunciation is the "X" is unclear. Given the neo-East Asian setting, I pronounced it in my mind as if it was a transliteration of Chinese with an "sh" sound, rather than the "ch" sound used for X as an initial letter in words of Greek origin. But the proper pronunciation of this name, and several other names and terms used in the book, is less than clear.

Education Reduces Poverty

Education reduces poverty through economic development in economies that use this resource to make its economy more skilled. Specifically, it helps the poor in developing countries and not just a wealthy elite.

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. 

Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.

Amory Gethin, "Distributional Growth Accounting: Education and the Reduction of Global Poverty, 1980-2019" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjaf033 (July 22, 2025).

Why Is David Brooks Wrong About Why People Admire Donald Trump?

Brooks On Why People Admire Trump

David Brooks, a pundit who also writes for the New York Times, who is a former conservative who later in his career transitioned to being a moderate, has a new article today in the Atlantic magazine, entitled "Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?" that is also an engagement with the life work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed in May at the age of 94.

MacIntyre argued that from at least the time of the classical period, communities ("a dense network of faily, tribe, city, and nation") created duties and expectations about how to live your life and act morally according to your social role ("soldier, farmers, merchants" and mothers), which people generally accepted and made it their life's work to live up to as well as you could. Judaism, Christianity and Islam tweaked these duties and expectations to give greater weight to compassion and humility, but through the Middle Ages maintained the same social structure in which morality and your duties in life were societally imposed. The wars of religion at the end of the Middle Ages convinced people that maybe religion was not the best thing to organize societies upon and in reaction to that came the Enlightenment period of the 18th century centered upon reason and science, and relegated morality to a matter of individual choice.

MacIntyre argued that this produced a decline in shared morality, although Brooks himself would put this moment in the mid-1960s. The narrative continues with Nietzsche famously saying that "God is dead" because we'd killed him and made ourselves our own gods. In this narrative, Hilter, Lenin, and Mao fill that moral vacuum with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, "and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

At this point it becomes less clear whether it is MacIntyre or Brooks talking. But the two solutions to a moral vacuum that Brooks presents are coercion or manipulation. Either coerce others to believe what you believe, e.g., with corporate DEI, or manipulate people with the kind of lies and sleaze that Trump and Fox News are known for utilizing. The battle of these methods in the 1980s and 1990s "looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared to today", Brooks argues, because in the last thirty years people have sought righteousness instead through their political identities and politics permeates everything.

Without a firm universal ground in "the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness", "People are rendered anxious and fragile" and without a moral foundation, they "fall apart when setbacks come."

He sees Trump as a man "who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality", doesn't care about weakening "our shared moral norms" with his example, speaks a language of preference "I want" and a language of power "I have the leverage", and a language of self, of gains of acquisition, of benefitting himself, instead.

Brooks argues, within the framework of MacIntyre's philosophy that Trump is "just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create." He also argues (inaccurately, in my view) that if Trump was on their team, most Democrats would like him too, and that you're lying to yourself if you deny it.

Brooks argues that pluralism is the answer to to resolving the tension created by incommensurate values, but that we need to recalibrate it to make people "more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community" and to provide rigorous moral education to the next generation (which sounds a lot like the coercion he condemned earlier in his argument).

Why Is Brooks Wrong?

I don't think this rings true, and find better answers in psychology and economics than in philosophy, which I've always considered something of a dead end and historical curiosity that recalls long since superseded proto-science, than something of real value today as anything more than intellectual history.

In my view, Trump, a psychopath rich in "dark triad" traits, is an archetypical figure familiar to observers of politics and public affairs and history since classical times, if not earlier, who is a constant threat to every organization from families to empires. There is nothing novel or surprising about him, himself. 

Demagogues were something that the Founders of the United States, at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, worried about. Democracy and the Bill of Rights were their answer to the narcissistic mad kings and equally dark leaders of established religions with whom they were very familiar, both from the 18th century world and from the history that they knew from the classical era through the Middle Ages. The Founders were familiar with Roman Emperor Nero. Machiavelli in "The Prince" wrote about how dark triad tactics might be advisable to a leader seeking to gain power for his people. They were intimately familiar with the tyrants of British history, right up through King George. The believed that people whose rights were guarded by law would not vote for such scoundrels. Lest we forget, George R. R. Martin, in his Game of Thrones series, a fantasy series that draws heavily on the War of the Roses, history that was much more fresh in the minds of the Founders, reminds us of what that was like and why it is best avoided.

It wasn't a bad plan. 

The Constitution adopted in 1789 lasted without an insurmountable constitutional crisis for 72 years, when Civil War broke out. After the crisis over slavery that manifested in the Civil War was overcome in 4 years of brutal deadly fighting (that still leave the nation deeply divided) was over, followed a 12 year Reconstruction period, and in turn followed by 77 years or so of de jure segregation but a fragile peace. We then went on to have another 70 years or so of the constitution working more or less as intended. 

We are in the midst of another constitutional crisis now, which their plan may or may not be good enough to overcome. 

The United States of America, including its 13 years before the current constitution was adopted, is 249 years old, making it the oldest fully non-hereditary democratic governmental regimes still in existence on the scale of a large nation. But the Founders, as one of the first countries to have a full fledged democratic Republic at a large national scale, lacked the historical experience or foresight to plan for every potential eventuality and their plan is now clearly not the optimal design, although it may be that our Republic's woes are such that no formal constitution would have been sufficient to prevent them.

The times and places in history where tyrants arose also doesn't match up. MacIntyre's framework suggests that we should have seen a breakdown in a sense of duty and morality in the Enlightenment. But we didn't see this happen across the board. Yes, the moral divide in the U.S. may be traceable to the moral fight over slavery that emerged in the Enlightenment. But, this was not a general, individualized loss of community norms, it was a divide that arose between two coherent and vital cultures, that of the slaveholding South on one side, and of the abolitionist North on the other, sustained, as much as anything, by the perceived economic needs of each region, with clergy serving of cheerleaders of each side and framing these economic imperatives with moral justifications.

Why did we get Hitler in Weimar Germany, and Lenin in Russia, while France, England, and the United States were not similarly afflicted?

Hitler is the clearest example. Germany's defeat in World War I, the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and economic collapse, radicalized many Germans, making them crave an authoritarian strong man to save them, and causing them to abandon the luxuries of caring for their fellow man whom they saw as their competitors, or as a drag on their society's ability to overcome the malaise that they faced.

Similar economic forces drive American politics today. After a couple of decades of remarkable shared prosperity, economic growth, which make the liberalism and the care for their fellow man of the Civil Rights movement possible, ceased to be shared starting sometime around the early 1970s. Since then, mostly educated, urban elites have captured almost all of the economy's economic growth for a half century, while less educated folk in rural areas and small towns have seen their economic prospects stagnate. The Civil Rights movement improved the economic lot of non-whites and women. New immigration laws welcomed foreigners. Free trade allowed manufacturing to be offshored to markets with lower wages, fewer labor protections, and weaker environmental laws. The U.S. de-industrialized and the Rust Belt came into being. Free trade rules, environmental rules, protections for unions, automation, birth control and abortion have, in their view, destroyed an economy fueled by domestic manufacturing and fossil fuels, in which men received good pay that made them heads of their families.

Half a century later, counties that vote blue have more than double the per capita GDP of those that vote red. Red America has captured almost none of the economic growth of the last half century, while Blue America is more prosperous than almost any other place on Earth. Prosperous Blue America extended its inclusive shared affluence mindset to allow the LGBT community to live publicly and in dignity, and to make it safe to be openly secular. 

Straight white Christian men in Red America without much education have seen every other demographic but them improve their lot in the last fifty years, while they have seen almost no improvement in their real wages, increased unemployment, and an inability to maintain stable and solid marriages and families. In relative terms, they seem themselves, and the rural and small town communities that they live in, as the losers, and see the economy as a zero sum game in which non-whites, foreigners, and women have taken what was theirs, and in which atheists and gays have ripped apart the moral framework that held their parents and grandparents families together. They want to throw out everything that they see as having driven their half century of eroded status with no end in sight, and return to the days when their relative status was vastly greater, no matter how unfair that may seem to everyone else. 

They are so frustrated over this sustained defeat that they are willing to turn to an indiscriminate authoritarian who breaks the rules that they see as having held them back, and are even willing to resort to violence, to get it. Their concerns about good character and process values and fair play have dissolved in the face of falling life expectancies, deaths of despair, regular unemployment, disability from the manual work that they are qualified to do with the economy doesn't need anymore to same extent, and their inability to hold onto wives and children that really arises not from an immoral society but from their own failures of economic providers. Faced with their conditions, they want to burn the system down and start over from new foundations that elevate their relative socio-economic standing.

Not everyone who votes for Trump has experienced this, and not everyone in red counties and red states has supported him. Some have supported Republicans simply out of thoughtless, long ingrained habit, or because they think that they are among the rich who will benefit from tax cuts. But peer pressure from enough people who matter in their little small town and rural communities, and in the working class underworld of Blue America, have made their political views (stripped of any reasoning behind them) normative in their communities, won over their wives, and caused religious congregation to which these men have been drawn because they are saying what these men want to hear to thrive and reinforce these men's views.

What we see today is more a product of capitalism, appropriately regulated but with only modest redistribution, doing what it does naturally: increasing GDP as fast as it can, while leaving the productive better off than the less productive who are worse off. But capitalism has done its thing to an extent greater than the political system is willing to bear, bringing us to a breaking point. 

It's worse in the U.S. because we have done less to cushion the blow for those who are less productive either by finding them places in the new economy or redistributing wealth and creating a stronger social safety net (in part, because racism has left the U.S. with a weaker sense of solidarity). But the same pressures are present in Europe, with somewhat different targets to fit local changes over the last half century, and are strongest in the places that are economically struggling.

Democrats Are Predominantly More Correct Than Republicans

The main sin that the Democrats have committed is not taking seriously enough the grievances of the working class, especially working class white Christian men, who have not shared in the improvement in relative or absolute prosperity that much of the rest of the nation has enjoyed, and who are lashing out at people they see as competitors or as people undermining morality, when neither of these things is the real problem. 

Despite adopting many policies that substantively benefit Red America more than their own base, they didn't go quite far enough, and left this constituency economically struggling, and equally importantly, feeling like they didn't matter and were neglected.

Progressives gets this and have tried to secure radical economic reforms to address this problem, so they don't have to resort to the injustices towards innocents that Trump has inflamed his supporters to think they want. But progressives do not make up a majority of the American public, and the bigger tent necessary to secure the majorities needed to reach a position of power where change can be enacted, and a constitutional framework and political system that tends to create gridlock and too strongly defends the status quo, has thwarted their efforts to secure more than incremental change, which has not been enough. Sometimes the frustration of progressives over their insufficient clout and numbers to achieve the full measure of their goals in a system that already makes it too hard to do so, when they rightfully believe that their proposals are urgently needed to keep far right tendencies at bay and secure economic justice, even boil over into claims that Democrats are no different than Republicans, since both are controlled by big business, despite the fact that this just undermines their own cause.

Contrary to Brooks' assertion, Democrats wouldn't fall for a Trump. They aren't desperate in the way that the MAGA Republican base is, and so they are happy to purge people like him from their ranks when they are caught. The Democratic Party isn't full of criminals, and is much less corrupt than the Republican Party which has had vastly more criminals and is now openly corrupt. 

Democrats and progressives are right that a manufacturing based fossil fuel economy isn't coming back, and that even if manufacturing did come back that 21st century manufacturing is so automated and skill intensive for most jobs, and so unproductive and low paying for others, that it wouldn't restore the economy and related societal consequences that flowed from it anyway.

Democrats are right that the rich aren't taxed enough, although they are mistaken that unions are a leading cause of the shared prosperity benefits that came from a tight labor market, rather than a symptom of that tight labor market that more efficiently utilized economic power that workers already had.

The Democratic effort to create working class clean economy jobs was the right idea, but was too little, too late.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that putting the Ten Commandments in schools, embracing religion, restricting abortion and birth control, making it legally harder to divorce, and squashing gay rights and transgender rights will restore morality and strengthen working class families.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that economics is a zero sum game, in which gains for non-whites, women, educated people, and immigrants, and imports leave white native born men without higher education, their communities, and the U.S. economy, generally, worse off.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that taxes and government spending are bad for the economy or bad for them. They are particularly wrong in thinking that reducing social safety net spending which disproportionately benefits them, will leave them better off, or that tax cuts for the wealthy, big businesses, and people with high incomes weaken the economy or leave them worse off. They have also forgotten (or never knew) that the era they seek to return to "when America was great" was characterized by high taxes and lots of government spending (as well as a very militant union movement).

Republicans are wrong in thinking that they don't benefit from the world order that foreign aid spending and our historical military alliances supported, and are a waste of money, and in thinking about military strength purely in terms of U.S. military might standing alone when wars are almost always won by the side with the most allies and "soft power."

But It Takes More Than Facts And Logic To Change Minds

Of course, as we've learned very painfully, mere facts and logic are enough enough to change political views, and in particular, are not enough to change the political views of a base that holds those views precisely because it has not prospered in an economy based upon knowledge and intellectual ability, and has had wealthy, amoral elites manipulate the information that has been imparted to them.

People's political identities are fundamentally social and are deeply shaped by economics and the information, however untrue it may be, that they have chosen to listen to when forming their world views (something that is itself influenced by their economic circumstances, as well as their ancestral culture).

You have to quash fountains of disinformation and fact resistance that have been gradually taking hold for decades. You have to either get people to admit that they have been conned, or find a way for people to change their political views that allows them to deny that this has happened. You have to make their views uncomfortable for them to hold in their own personal lives, but must do so in circumstances where converting from them is less painful than retreating into their denial with likeminded victims of the con. You have to be able to show them in terms that they understand and believe that your proposals are better than MAGA's and to back that up with an ability to produce tangible results for them. You have to address their needs and hardships, and not merely show that the other side is worse.

Those are tall orders, and it isn't clear that Democrats are up to the challenge. 

Democrats best hope is really that the Republicans, at a time when they are undeniably in complete control, are making the lives of the MAGA base tangibly worse, or convince the MAGA base that this is imminently about to happen, and to undermine any hope that they have that burning everything down will lead to a future that leaves them better off in relative terms, if not in absolute terms. Trump and his allies, as they attempt to govern in a purely ideological manner, are their own worst enemies here.

The GOP's hold on Congress is tenuous. In 2026, flipping 4 seats out of a 53 GOP seats would flip the Senate, and flipping 3 seats out of 220 GOP seats in the House (and reclaiming three currently vacant democratic seats in vacancy elections) would flip the House. Trump is the least popular President since Trump, and many of his particular policies, including his recently passed budget, are wildly unpopular with voters. The public is no fan of Congress and a lot of Republicans in Congress have voted for measures that are unpopular with the people who elected them (even though the final budget bill retreated from many of Trump's demands) and will actively hurt the people who elected them. Some of the gerrymandering that influenced the results of the 2024 election will also be remedied in 2026. Elon Musk's proposal to create a new "American Party", even if it wasn't terribly successful, would split the conservative vote in a way that could benefit Democrats immensely. The U.S. Supreme Court has also never had less popular support in the history of modern polling, and conservative voters no longer need to support Trump and the GOP to keep in that way (or to have their tax cuts for corporations and the rich made permanent).

It is unlikely that Republicans will hold both Houses of Congress in the 2026 election. They will probably lose control of the House and at least lose ground in the Senate, barring a major escalation in the steps that Trump has tried to take to erode democracy in the last sixteen months, with lukewarm but significant support from the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority which has significantly impaired the ability of other federal courts to restrain Trump.

Time will tell how it turns out in the midst of the constant political chaos and societal unrest that Trump have actively stoked.

Left leaning forces don't have to keep MAGA's dictatorial power grab at bay forever. The MAGA base is in demographic decline. The Democratic base is growing. If the left can endure this crisis and thwart full on totalitarianism until Trump is dead and his MAGA agenda has been discredited by its own failures severely enough, for enough years, the crisis will be overcome and the Republic can be saved. It may be bruised, battered, and irrevocably harmed in many ways, but it would not be beyond all saving. 

But history is also not without precedents, like Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, where progress is dramatically reversed when totalitarians succeed, and this backward state continues for forty years or more with minimal progress. And, unlike the case of people subject to the Axis regimes in World War II, no other country or alliance will be coming to rescue us, because we are too big and too militarily mighty. Another civil war might save us if that happens, but that would be a horrible price to pay.

Musings

* Will we someday reach a point where computer software is routinely bug-free, routine software updates are a thing of the past, and there is a single standard of cables for everything? If not, why not?

* One of the main things that I want AI to do is figure out my habits and patterns and suggest ways to automate them. 

Do I always put emails from a certain sender in a particular folder? Suggest a rule to automate that task. 

Do I go through a certain set of steps to create a citation from an academic journal or preprint webite in a blog post along with its citation? Suggest creating a button in my UI to do that. 

Have I never used a word processing font ever? Suggest putting that font somewhere other than the main dropdown menu in my word processor. 

Do I adhere to certain style standards when drafting legal documents? Suggest making that an MS Word style. 

Do I usually bookmark certain kind of webpages in certain bookmark folders? Make those folders the default choice when I hit the bookmark button. 

Does a webpage or file seem to be in the wrong folder? Confirm that this is where I really want to put it in a pop up question.

* How can we disrupt the systems that create flat Earthers, young Earth creationists, evolution deniers, anti-vaxxers, the sovereign citizen's movement, and similar anti-scientific and conspiracy theory thinking?

* If there a better way to restrain bad actors like Fox News that consistently spread misinformation without doing unnecessary harm to free speech?

* Can courts devise better remedies for administrations like Trump's that consistently ignore or defy the law and court orders?

* Somehow, before today, I managed to run my household without owning an ax or hatchet. A need to get branches I'd trimmed from the tree in front of my house down to under four feet in length and four inches in diameter in order to be eligible to put in my compost bin was the final straw.

* Lawful permanent residency is just second class citizenship. It would be better if that category were abolished and everyone who has or would be eligible for a green card immediately becomes a citizen.

* How much of Japan's reasonable housing prices is due to policy, and how much is due to its shrinking population and unfriendliness to long term immigration?

* People are happier and more productive in countries with higher taxes. Low taxes are a sign of economic underdevelopment. They aren't pro-growth.

Education And Church Attendance In The U.S. And In Europe

The relationship between education and church attendance in the U.S. is the opposite of what you would expect in the U.S. according to data in this blog post. 

In the U.S., more education corresponds to more church attendance (New Hampshire, Maine, and Wyoming are exceptions to that trend and a number of states seem to be bimodal with the least and most educated people both attending church at higher rates), while in Europe (except for the formerly Communist Lithuania and Slovakia) more education corresponds to less church attendance (although the least religious countries like Finland, France, Germany,  Hungary and Iceland, are quite flat and the education-church attendance relationship basically breaks down).

I don't think that this means that more educated people in the U.S. are more religious, however.  

Rather, I think that it means that more educated people who are religious are much more diligent in attending church regularly as their religion dictates (in part because they have more time to devote to church attendance), than less educated people who are religious but not very diligent. As one comment to the post notes, free time to spend on anything but working, eating, sleeping, and the basic needs of your household is increasingly a luxury good.

There is solid evidence (for example from Pew) that more educated American are less religious in terms of belief and the importance of religion in their lives (although the magnitude of this difference isn't as big as one might intuitively expect), but this isn't necessarily inconsistent with higher religious attendance by more educated people, if more educated people who are religious attend church more regularly than less educated people who are religious.

Also, there is evidence that students and college graduates of more elite institutions are much more secular than college graduates of less elite institutions.

To the extent that Pew and the U.S. survey cited in the blog post are at odds, however, Pew is more credible and has a long track record of accurate data in this area. 

Also, it is worth noting that a variety of measures have shown that reported church attendance in the U.S. is much higher than the levels of actual church attendance. See, e.g., here and here. So, survey data on church attendance may not be the most accurate measure of actual behavior. 

I also don't give much credit to an anecdotal evidence based book pointing to a religious revival among Gen Z people in the U.K., which does more to capture the changing flavor of religiosity among the minority of young people there who are religious, than capture of growing rate of religious affiliation among British youth. 

I also suspect that there is a generational factor. The trend towards more secularism in Europe is 30-40 years older than it is in the U.S. So, older educated Europeans are much more secular than older educated Americans, an effect which may swamp differences in rates of secularization among younger people by level of education. Further, education levels rose sooner in the U.S. than they did in Europe, so in Europe, education level is a better proxy for age than in the U.S.

It is also worth noting that the European data breaks out far more detail among non-college graduates and among non-high school graduates. In part, this reflects larger numbers of immigrants to Europe with very low levels of formal education, and immigrants, in general, tend to be more religious (because religion thrives when it defends a threatened culture). Apart from people who didn't graduate from high school, the European data is quite flat.

U.S. Data

European Data

What Is New Under The Sun?

Some things in our era have genuinely never happened before in human history.

1. There have been few times in history where a smaller percentage of the global population has been subject to rule by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats with actual power.

2. Big cities are bigger than they have ever been. And, there are far more cities of any given size than there were not so long ago.

3. Science has never been so advanced, we have never understood the universe and our world better.

4. Technology is at an all time peak.

5. The world, measured in the time it takes to communicate to distant places and to travel there, has never been smaller.

6. We have been to space and still have people in space, something that is very recent indeed.

7. It hasn't been all that long that we have lived in an era where no one knows how everything works, and indeed, no one knows how everything the deal with in their daily lives works.

8. It hasn't been very long that almost all children live to become adults.

9. It has only been quite recently that large shares of the global population are not religious.

10. It has not been very long that many many millions of people, are familiar with the foods and music found almost everywhere in the world.

11. Computers and artificial intelligence have only been remotely so powerful very briefly.

12. The percentage of the global population that lives in slavery is near an all time low.

13. Average global temperatures are the highest that they have been, at least, since modern humans left Africa, and everyone was a hunter-gatherer.

14. We have more control over our reproduction in the last eighty years than in any era that preceded us.

15. We are the most educated people, on average, that have ever lived.

16. We have for a brief time, been the only people who have the power to destroy the world and end our species.

17. We have consumed energy so abundantly only briefly.

18. The population of the world is the highest it has ever been, and close to the highest it is likely to ever be.

19. Our power to health with medical knowledge and technology has never been greater.

20. We are continuing a brief period in which we are the source of unprecedented rapid mass extinctions.

What If They Get What They Want?

Suppose that Trump gets most of what he wants, just slower than he hoped, as SCOTUS takes time to overrule setbacks he faces in the lower courts, and as Congress enacts through legislation what he fails to achieve through Executive Orders.

* Massive cuts in federal government programs, even if a few of the initial cuts are rolled back as imprudent, will have a devastating effect on most red states, especially in the South and Appalachia. Federal aid is 50% of the government budget in West Virginia, for example. Local tax revenues won't be able to replace lost federal aid. 

* Special education will basically vanish there. Schools in low income communities will be deeply starved for resources. 

* More of the poor will start dying from preventable diseases in the tens of thousands a year.  Infant and maternal mortality will soar. Infectious diseases will become more common. Food poisoning will again be a concern in every day life. Increased pollution, especially in low income areas, will lead to diseases associated with dirty air and dirty water. 

* The elderly, the disabled, and military veterans won't be able to get by and will have to leave their homes to live with extended family, or will live far more meager lives of poverty and despair. Social security, realistically, won't vanish, but programs like social security disability will be much harder to access and benefits will probably be cut.

* Medical and scientific research will basically vanish. Federally supported financial aid (both grants and loans) with dry up, shutting working class and middle class students out of higher education to a great extent. International students will become much more scarce. The best professors and scientists, especially in fields not culturally tied to the U.S., like science and engineering and medicine, will emigrate. Their goal of making colleges and universities conservative will largely fail, notwithstanding witch hunts to try to root out liberals in academia. Red states will greatly reduce funding for their public colleges and universities and have few well-endowed private colleges and universities that will struggle to downsize as well. Blue states will pick up some of the loss of funding caused by lost federal support, but will nonetheless be seriously disrupted. And, even in blue states, all but a few of the most well-endowed colleges and universities will have a much larger share of upper middle class and rich students. Bright, academically capable, working class and middle class young adults, shut out of higher education, will turn to lower management and union leadership posts.

* Loyalty purges and cuts at the nation's military academies will within four or five years significantly reduce the quality of the U.S. military's officer corps in every single one of our military services. Impaired international trade and a declining domestic manufacturing sector and the loss of scientific and engineering talent will mean that the U.S. military pays more for less in military equipment procurement and produces less capable systems. But the U.S. retreat from a global military presence may mean that the new, less capable U.S. military won't be tested.

* Public schools across the nation will lay off teachers, and see their best and brightest and most caring teachers leave the profession.

* Mass deportations and trade friction and the loss of federal aid will cripple U.S. farmers, will probably cause more than half of U.S. farms to fail with abandoned farms dotting the landscape of every rural area in the country, and will greatly drive up the price of food while reducing its quality and variety. The same pressures will greatly shrink the construction industry. Working class men across the nation will see a dramatic surge in unemployment. Kids in high school and middle school will be pressured to work long hours in unskilled work to make up for the loss of immigrant labor, in the fields, at construction sites, and in the hospitality and food service industries.

* The U.S. manufacturing industry will crumble and the price of everything will surge.

* Reduced gun regulation and economic collapse will drive up crime rates. Drug dealing will rise as people try to cope with despair and that will also drive up crime rates because decriminalization will end and go backwards.

* Poverty rates will rise.

* LGBT folks will migrate away from red states to avoid active state sponsored persecution.

* New obstetrics and gynecology specialists will refuse to take positions in anti-abortion states, and a meaningful share of existing ones will also relocate, leading to greater maternal morality, more stillbirths, more unwanted pregnancies, and more congenital disorders in infants there. The loss of Medicaid funding will close down many rural hospitals and will hit labor and delivery wards especially hard.

* Financial and technology and manufacturing companies will relocate outside of the U.S., which will be a boon for places like the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, but will hurt the American economy greatly.

* Once conquered, Greenland and the Panama Canal, will see local military insurgencies emerge. An invasion of Greenland will end NATO and result in all European and Canadian military bases closing.

* Emboldened by a weak U.S., China will conquer Taiwan and make the Philippines a subject state, because the U.S. won't have the means or the will to fight China and China will have little to lose having been alienated in international trade from the U.S. China will also start supplying military equipment, supplies, and even troops to Russia, turning the tide in Russia's favor in the Ukraine War, despite vigorous and costly military aid to Ukraine from the rest of Europe.

* A complete U.S. withdrawal from Africa will give ISIS affiliated forces in Africa a modest boost.

* Canada will realign its economy to trade far less with the U.S. and far more with everyplace else, and will see a medium term boost as it absorbs high quality immigrants from the U.S.

* A major global economic recession will tank oil prices which will cause most U.S. oil producers to shut down and cause the U.S. to import far more oil which will be costly because the dollar will be much weaker.

* Disinvestment from the U.S. will drive up interest rates. This will squeeze the federal budget as the cost of interest on the national debt goes up, taking away lots of the gains from spending cuts, and combined with the blow to the construction industry, will make housing less affordable and contribute to homelessness. Migration for red states that are economically collapsing with less federal spending to blue states that were not so reliant upon federal spending, will also drive up blue state housing costs and lead to a surge in homelessness in blue states.

* Many immigrant professionals in medicine and tech will either leave positions they have filled in red states for blue state posts, or return to their homelands, leaving a shortage of skilled medical personnel and weakening the competitive edge of U.S. tech companies.

* Red states will start ignoring the establishment clause and have governments that are overtly Christian, leading non-Christians to migrate to blue states and making them even less tolerant of religious minorities.

* Smart and talented young people will move away to blue states at an even greater rate than they already do, leaving a lower quality work force in red states and undermining red state economic prosperity even further.

* Increased government corruption will strengthen a class of American oligarchs.

* New high speed rail and transit programs will end, almost everywhere.

* Tesla, with less government support, will wither and may even go out of business, with remnants acquired by its competitors.

* Carrying a passport on your person will become necessary for almost everyone, especially Hispanics and Asians.

* Museums and monuments documenting the history of anyone who isn't a white man will be looted with that part of U.S. history permanently lost to some extent, and minority and women's related and LGBT related books will be removed from public libraries in red states and will find themselves limited to private collections.

* Unemployment rates of minorities and women will be higher relative to whites and men than they have been historically.

* Suicide rates will increase greatly.

* The U.S. life expectancy will fall.

* Red state birth rates will rise by an amount that will offset rising maternal and infant and childhood mortality there, even as the raw number of births fall, as the number of women of childbearing age will fall as those women disproportionately relocate to blue states and immigrant populations fall, making it harder for young men in red states to find wives and partners. Birth rates will fall in blue states, partially made up for in absolute numbers of births by an increased number of young women in those states, but overall, U.S. birth rates will fall despite pro-natalist government incentives.

* The U.S. will experience a recession of a magnitude and duration not seen since the Great Depression.

* Unfair election reforms, both nationally and especially in red states, and targeted persecution of dissenters, will mute the extent to which increasingly unpopular sentiment towards Republicans translates into electoral results.

* Tooth decay will surge, but it will be harder to afford dental care.

* Income inequality will rise, and taxes will fall on the rich, although in blue states, this will be offset by new taxes that fall most heavily on high earners.

* More generally, "state capacity" will fall greatly across the U.S., and U.S. infrastructure, nationally, but especially in red states, will decay.

* Global warming will slow at a lower rate than it would otherwise, resulting in more climate change impacts in the U.S., especially in the South and the Southwest (which is more red than blue).

* The U.S., in general, but red states, in particular, will slip significantly towards losing developed country status and becoming a merely developing nation, in a collapse of economic progress unrivaled outside post-Soviet Russia. 

* The U.S. will sink further and further down in all manner of international ratings from GDP per capita, to productivity, to democracy, to corruption, to economic growth, to human development, to life expectancy, to cost of living (which will go up), to obesity, to intergenerational economic mobility, to education, and so on. The U.S. incarceration rate and crime rate will rise again.

* Tourism to the U.S. will plummet and a U.S. passport will become less valuable as other countries impose new visa requirements on Americans.