Another Quote

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

- Frank Herbert (author of "Dune," 1965).

Another view, which is that "acting" and "deception" are part of the skill set of a politician.

Stocks

From here.

It is an open secret that the stock market in the U.S. is currently being driven by fewer than a dozen wildly overvalued tech stocks that account for the lion's share of it's growth (like the ones shown above, particularly Tesla and SpaceX).

The stock market is not particularly good at accurately estimating the true value of public held companies.

Inaccurate stock prices are an objectively bad thing at the level of the aggregate economy, because they cause investment capital to be misallocated. Too much money is allocated to investments that don't have as good of a likely return on investment, while too little money is allocated to investments that could produce better returns. And, since the stock market is huge, the economic consequences of these misallocations of investment capital on the economy are huge and negative.

Inaccurate asset prices also allocate personal wealth to people who hype their stocks to be worth more than they really are to stupid investors, basically, systemically creating immense returns to dishonesty.

Asset price bubbles aren't bad for everyone. There are two basic ways you can profit from them. One is to invest in the bubble asset despite knowing that it is overvalued, to ride its irrational surge in price, and to get out before the bubble pops. The other is to short the bubble asset and profit when the bubble pops, but this requires your short to be timed for when the bubble pops.

Why is the stock market so bad at pricing these stocks despite the fact that some of the smartest people in the country are employed to analyze and act on this data, and despite the fact that there is a lot of very good quality data about publicly held companies that can be used to value them accurately that is available?

One possibility is that a lot of investors in the stock market are on autopilot trading schemes, like index funds, that are free riding off the people who are actively trading individual stocks, that increasing numbers of ill-informed investors are actively trading individuals stocks as it has become easier to do so, and that the bad decisions of this dumb money is being amplified by autopilot trading.

Another explanation, not necessarily inconsistent with the first, is that this is a generational effect. Baby boomers are moving into their final years of employment and into retirement. They have immense stock market wealth. They are retired and bored, so they try actively trading individual stocks, and they are pouring money into the stock market that exceeds the extent to which stocks have reasonable values (as are individuals who save for retirement believing Social Security to be in peril and knowing that unlike Boomers, they have no defined benefit pensions). Due to the geriatric character of people with power who know what is going on, this is not a problem that they want to solve because they benefit from overvalued stocks in their retirement when they are living off of their investments. Political momentum for reform will come when the Boomers retire or when the bubble collapses, whichever comes first (and asset price bubbles inevitably collapse sooner or later even though the timing of when the bubble pops is notoriously difficult to estimate).

If the bubble sustains itself until the Boomers are mostly dead, the pain will be felt by Generation X and to a lesser extent Millennials (who will at least have more time to recover), in other words, by people like me.

Mental Energy Levels

Some activities take more mental energy, alertness, and attention than others. From low to high:

* Sleeping

* Staring blankly while sitting or lounging

* Sipping a drink alcoholic or otherwise

* Cuddling

* Taking a bath

* Listening to music

* Driving in ordinary conditions

* Interacting with a pet

* Watching spectator sports

* Looking at art in a gallery or museum

* Browsing statistics (e.g. in an almanac or government publication) or maps

* Washing dishes or dealing with trash/recycling/compost

* Facebook

* Grocery shopping

* Making journal entries

* Reading the newspaper or its online equivalent

* Scanning academic journal abstracts

* Researching a non-legal topic

* Watching TV or a streaming video

* Watching a full length movie or opera or ballet or play

* Choosing presents for particular occasions

* Applying math or physics rules that I already know

* Gardening or landscaping work

* Making a music playlist

* Cooking

* Reading fiction for pleasure

* World building in anticipation of writing fiction

* Leading a meeting

* Blogging 

* Rehearing for a music or drama performance

* Participating in most team sports at my mediocre level

* Typical legal work outside of a trial or hearing

* Teaching a continuing education class or college class

* Tutoring

* Reading non-fiction (or a fiction classic for a class)

* Learning how to use a new appliance

* Figuring out why a computer or app thing isn't working properly, or learning a new computer or phone skill

* Social chit chat or being at a party

* Filing papers (i.e. into categories and files)

* Writing fiction

* Planning an event or trip

* The design phase of a remodeling or landscaping project

* Hiking or going on a walk in an unfamiliar place

* Handling the return of a purchased product

* Learning new math or physics topics independently

* Driving in extreme conditions (e.g. an intense snowstorm)

* Acting as a lawyer in a trial or hearing or high pressure emergency situation

* Doing business management/accounting work

* Ice skating

* Trying to learn a foreign language

Music Can Make Life Liveable

 

Blame

Part of the reason we use the law to assign blame is to free those to whom blame is not assigned of guilt.

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).

Private Equity v. Local Landlorrds

Private equity is playing a larger role in the housing market. Why?

Because rapid increases in interest rates, that have increased faster than the residential real estate market has time to compensate for them with lower inflation adjusted housing prices, has made buying homes unaffordable for home buyers who rely on significant mortgage debt to buy a home (especially, but not only, first time home buyers). This has created increased demand for rental housing which private equity is filling by buying single family homes (it has been a major player in the apartment market for a long time).

But, local government limitations on new housing are still more important to tenants and prospective home owners. Private equity isn't moral, but neither are smaller landlords. The main difference is that private equity concentrates the profits more than ownership by smaller landlords (and is less likely to spend its profits locally). The proportion of landlord owners housing and rental prices are predominantly governed by market forces that affect both equally and are heavily influenced by local zoning and building codes.

How did we get in this mess?

For a long time interest rates were exceedingly low in order to stimulate the economy. Housing prices soared to adapt, but low interest rates made those higher prices affordable. 

But, for a variety of reasons, nominal housing prices are sticky. 

In the short run, listing prices, home value appraisals, and conventional wisdom about fair market value selling prices are based on historical sales prices which are necessarily retrospective and often include comparable sales that pre-date the rise in interest rates, but mortgage rates reduce buyer's ability to pay almost instantly.

In the long run, there are two factors. 

One is that sellers can afford to sell heavily leveraged homes for less than their mortgages and also need enough left over after paying off their mortgage to have a down payment for their next home. And, mortgages are in nominal dollars, not a percentage of the home price. Leverage makes a small decrease in home values disproportionately erode the seller's equity, and most younger home owners have lots of mortgage debt. 

Secondly, sellers are human and psychologically anchor on the price that they bought their home for. Selling at a loss feels like losing, and nobody wants to voluntarily be a loser.

If interest rates had increased more gradually, the fall in affordability caused by higher interest rates would have been more modest giving the housing market time to adjust, and allowing nominal housing prices to hold steady, while allowing inflation adjusted housing prices to fall.

But the economic models that decision makers like the Fed use to set interest rate policies give little or no weight to how fast interest rates change when they estimate the effect that this will have on the economy, because economic models are heavily influenced by equilibrium models even though they acknowledge that the economy is dynamic to a limited, but insufficient, extent.

In short, the main reason that private equity is playing a bigger role in the housing market is that the Fed has flawed economic models and isn't sensitive to the needs of younger middle class people in the housing market. Interest rates were too low in an objective sense. But increasing them so quickly did as much harm as it did good.

If private equity hadn't done it, smaller individual landlords would have, albeit, somewhat less rapidly and in smaller chunks per neighborhood spread out over many landlords in more neighborhoods. Private equity isn't new. It's been around for several decades as an important economic force. It's been around in the apartment market for almost as long. But, the reason we've seen the shift from smaller landlords to private equity is that the Fed created a huge imbalance in the single family home market, and private equity was able to respond more quickly to this sudden change (that created a sudden demand for rental housing which occupants couldn't afford to buy due to higher interest rates) than smaller landlords were.

Extinction Burst!

A video at this link explains the concept of an "Extinction Burst". People go into a rage when something that they used to be rewarded for isn't working any more, until they give up.

This is the most hopeful thing that I've seen for ages.

Why Is MAGA Against The American Way?

A post at Quora has a thoughtful take on why the MAGA movement is opposed to so many fundamental American ideals.

Tomaž Vargazon ·

Practicing atheist 

Sep 10 [2025]

Why are MAGA so opposed to the very principles on which the United States are based -- liberty and freedom? Why does MAGA want to surrender their freedom to an authoritarian loser like Donald Trump, who only wants to use and destroy them?

My personal opinion, after spending an unhealthy amount of time looking at various extremists over the past 20+ years, is a significant minority of people who are simply not capable of modern human civilization. 

ISIS

Take the Islamic world for example. Various studies have been made as to how many Muslims support the crazies and it’s usually in the 10–20% range, depending on the country, region and time in history. They are a minority, but a very sizeable and vocal minority that has the ability to control the narrative, due to their vicious nature.

But this is not limited to Islam at all. In Europe we have various kooky-looney parties that look different, behave differently, but share the same core disdain for modern human civilization. In Germany they’re the ones who support AfD, across Europe they’re the main provider of various neo-Nazi gangs and so forth.

These same people, born in a Muslim family, would become the radical crazies of ISIS. In Europe they fawn over Michaelle Le Pen. In Britain they bend over for Nigel Farage. Born in an America, they become MAGA. It’s the same kind of mindset, right from the stone age: my way or the highway, my leader is perfect, your side has no redeeming qualities, anyone who opposes us is evil or crazy, we will solve everything and nothing you do is worth talking about.

The reason why I think this is intrinsic to humanity is because whereever you look, the numbers are always hover at approximately 20% of the population. Sometimes it’s a bit more due to temporary surges when people don’t really know what they’re voting for (Hitler in 1933 had about 33% support), sometimes it’s a bit less because there are several competing groups for the stone age vote and they steal the stone age vote. Sometimes the excesses of one such groups also drop their support, because they get percieved as bad - this certainly happened to ISIS.

But in the long run the crazies, once they’re known to everyone, end up with ~20% support. It’s not that odd if you think about it, approximately 99% of our history we’ve spent in tribal groups and endemic warfare in prehistory. It was your way or the club or spear of the other tribe. Of the recorded history we’ve spent a clear majority, certainly over 5500 of the past 6000 years and likely more, in one dictatorship or another. Keeping your mouth shut and head down in front of the powerful leader was the way you kept it on your shoulders, questioning authority being something positive is a new development.

In light of this the fact 1 person in 5 is not okay with the modern state of affairs and wants to have a strong ruler that will tell them when to shit, when to eat, when to clap and when to kill, should not be surprising. They don’t function well when disconnected from the hive and feel lost. Making choices and taking responsibility is hard and tiring, just following orders unquestioningly is easy. No, the most surprising fact should be is 4 out of 5 people do want modern society, with all that entails.

Unfortunately that means we have to contend with 20% support for crazies, like MAGA or what have you. What Trump did in other words was not to convince anyone of anything. He just rallied the deplorable vote under one banner and make them vote consistently for the return of the stone age.

The Complicated Story Of MAGA Politics

The modern Democratic party operates to a great extent like politics is supposed to work in Civics 101, and follow on political theory says that it is supposed to. It has found policies, that its leaders believe are good ones for the nation, that can unite a diverse big tent coalition. Democrats believe that government can be a force for good and want to use it the implement policies that make the world a better place. They go to great lengths to demonstrate with evidence that their policies do indeed do so. They aren't saints, but they also view stupidity, bad character, and malice in their leaders negatively and are generally happy to cast out leaders who demonstrate those traits.

The Republican party, in living history, was a pretty similar organization and movement that assembled a different bundle of policies to unite a different, smaller tent coalition.

But, that Republican party is almost gone and rapidly dissolving, even though most of its top leaders got their political start in that party.

The MAGA Republican party and movement, in contrast, is something else entirely. It absolutely still has its roots in the pre-FDR solid south Democratic party, in the Dixiecrats, and in the post-Southern strategy anti-civil rights Republican party. But unlike the Republican party that preceded it, it doesn't fit the Civics 101 model.

MAGA Republicans don't accept a lot of the bipartisan consensus about many aspects of policy making and governing that preceded it. It is isolationist. It is anti-trade, anti-immigration, anti-NATO, and unconcerned about alliances with foreign dictators. It has no respect for expertise. It doesn't think that government does anything good (and is oblivious to the benefits that its members receive from government), so it isn't troubled by having the government run by incompetent fools. It has strong authoritarian leanings, no commitment to democratic ideals, and little concern for the rule of law. It sees power as a tool to utilize to fight culture wars and its political opponents, rather than as a means to advance the greater good

Republican political leaders know perfectly well that most of President Trump's executive branch appointees, like RFK, Jr., are incompetent idiots whose only redeeming quality is their momentary personal loyalty to Trump. Most of them are also well aware that many of the policies that Trump is pushing for are objectively bad ones.

Then why do these Republican leaders back Trump anyway?

They can read the room. They know that they face mafia style backlash from Trump if they cross him. They also know that their not terribly bright constituents in the MAGA base firmly support Trump (or at least have until very recently within Trump's second term when they've discovered personally, the hard way, how bad his policies really are) seeing any deviation from Trump's agenda as a betray of Trump's MAGA base including them. The MAGA base also sincerely believe in a lot of the misguided elements of Trump's agenda because unlike most Republican leaders, they don't know any better.

Billionaires and the political representatives of many big businesses also know personally well that Trump is a horrible person who supports mostly bad policies who is basically trying to destroy the federal government from the inside. But, for them, the immense tax cuts that Trump has delivered to them, and the dismantling of federal laws and regulations that cost them money have seemed worth it to them so far.

The conservative leaning members of the college educated upper middle class, who used to work in think tanks formulating conservative policies that they thought furthered the national interest on a basis similar to that of their liberal peers, who served as senior civil servants, and served as professionals in roles that either supported conservative economic and religious interests, or were at least apolitical, meanwhile, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves, some to be unaffiliated politically, some to be libertarians, and some to become "moderate" and "neo-liberal" Democrats. Fools loyal to MAGA and Trump's cult of personality, and powerful hypocrites, have rushed in to fill the vacuum that they upper middle class conservatives left behind.

The agenda of Trump and his MAGA cult of personality isn't sustainable. But it wasn't really meant to be. The objective of MAGA is to burn it all down, and to entrench far right cultural dominance and political power now, knowing that in the long run, the democratic process and respect for the rule of law and settled political norms, run fairly, will undermine those objectives.

Destruction can be accomplished more quickly than building something that works. So, it doesn't have to last long. And, if the MAGA base comes to realize that the face eating leopard they supported ate their faces once the damage done is irrevocable, that's their tough luck in the eyes of the billionaires and far-right cranks who actually benefit from its agenda. By then, if the MAGA agenda is successful, they will have dug the United States (and even the larger world) into a hole that will be very hard to get out of again.

The system struggles to stop them. Trump has installed enough people loyal to him that share his far from the mainstream agenda in key institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court, the military, and senior government offices that he wasn't supposed to be able to oust and oust, and key policies that he wasn't supposed to have the legal right to control, that the systems and people designed to stop him aren't doing their jobs. The system wasn't designed to to stop a President who had no respect for his oath of office, no commitment to the good of the nation, no respect for the rule of law, and immense political power arising from a base brainwashed by decades of lies from clergy, Republican political leaders, and cynically manipulative conservative mass media outlets that jettisoned their journalist ethics long ago.

Of course, the willingness of the MAGA base to be manipulated and accept these lies didn't come from nowhere. It isn't that information that reveals that these are lies isn't available. It isn't that members of the MAGA base unanimously agree that Trump has good character.

They are motivated to accept a false worldview because the last half century of American progress has left them behind and greatly diminished their socio-economic status in relative terms. They are willing to take the gamble of destroying the system because of they feel that it has done nothing for them, and that they have no prospects of improving their lot within it.

Most of them made a bad bet. Trump's agenda will leave them worse off and reveal to them that they actually did have something to lose in the system that they are trying to destroy. The policies that they thought were the problem aren't the source of their dismay. Their future prospects within the system that they support destroying were better than they believed them to be. But, now that they've made that bet, a psychological unwillingness to admit that they've been duped and made a mistake, and the fact that much of the damage to both the system and the political process has already been done, makes remedying their mistake difficult.

The situation could still be turned around: If enough of the MAGA base is disillusioned fast enough. If enough old guard Republicans and conservative judges who are hypocrites wake up to the fact that the end game isn't a good one before it is too late. If Trump dies or implodes (which is a bet the left is trying to make by pushing the Epstein files issue) and no successor to Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement arises. 

But if it is turned around, the most likely failure mode for MAGA will be a dramatic collapse of the entire political movement. It will look like an economic bubble popping. It will look like the sudden death of the Whig party in favor of the new Republican party shortly before the Civil War. It will look like the collapse of Naziism at the end of World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will look like the post-Herbert Hoover Republican Party of the 1930s. It might even look like the French Revolution with guillotines and all.

There isn't much room for a middle ground business as usual alternation of power at the margins at this point.

The Safety Of Trains v. Cars and Trucks

Understanding Rail Accident Risks With Appropriate Context

Honestly, it is surprising that so many railway deaths are not in the right of way (ROW). The defining characteristic of rail transportation is that it travels on fixed tracks which have a right of way.

There are extremely rare incidents of someone getting killed from a train while not being on the tracks - like when it falls off a bridge and kills someone below as one did not so long ago on I-25 near Pueblo, or when an accident releases a poisonous gas that kills people outside the ROW but nearby which happened to the parents of one of my first clients - but those are vanishingly rare.

Of course, what they are really doing in these statistics is distinguishing between deaths in the ROW at highway crossings and deaths in the ROW at something other than highway crossings, and basically ignoring the tiny percentage of deaths that fall in neither category.

The regulatory focus on highway crossings to the near exclusion of safety measures in railroad railways isn't unreasonable.  According to the Federal Railway Administration:

Highway-rail grade crossings are intersections where highways cross railroad tracks at-grade. Approximately 212,000 highway-rail grade crossings exist on the approximately 140,000 miles of track that make up the United States’ railroad system.

If we conservatively assume that the average highway rail grade crossing is 105.6 feet (i.e. 0.02 miles), then there are 4,240 miles of track in highway-rail grade crossings, which is about 3% of the total miles of track in the U.S. (and realistically the truth is probably closer to 1-2%). 

While only 30% of rail deaths nationally are at highway crossings, the number of deaths per mile of track are 10-30 times greater at highway crossings than they are away from them. But, the cost of safety measures to prevent rail deaths is roughly proportional to the length of the track when they are put in place.

Also, both passenger rail and freight rail cause far few deaths per passenger-mile than cars, to both passengers (who are safer by a factor of seventeen) and bystanders like pedestrians and bicyclists and people other cars, and per freight ton-mile than trucks carrying freight to both operators and bystanders.

In the U.S., in 2024, there were 954 railroad deaths and 6,542 nonfatal railroad injuries.

(Source)

There is about 1 fatal rail death away from highway crossings per 196.5 miles a track away from highway crossings, and there is about 1 fatal rail death per 806 highway crossings at highway crossings. Vanishing few fatal rail deaths are to people on the train itself 

People on railroad tracks who shouldn't be (i.e. trespassers) account for 69% of railroad deaths, but only about 10% of nonfatal railroad injuries, because 51% of rail accidents involving trespassers that make it into official statistics are deadly. 

The vast majority of rail traffic in the U.S. is freight. U.S. freight rail carried 1.71 trillion ton-miles per year with about 100 tons per train car. So, about 17,000 million train car-miles per year. 

Amtrak provides 6544 million passenger miles per year of transportation. About 35% of those are in the Northeast Corridor which run about 80% full on average and about 65% are outside the Northeast Corridor which run closer to 50% full on average. A coach car holds about 74 people which is about 59 people per car in the Northeast Corridor and about 37 people outside it. So, about 39 million train car miles per year in the Northeast Corridor and about 115 million train car miles per year outside the Northeast Corridor, for a total of about 152 million train car miles per year.

So, about 0.9% of train car miles are passenger train car miles and about 99.1% of train car miles are freight train car miles.

If rail deaths are no more likely, per train car mile, to be caused by freight train cars than by passenger train cars (although arguably the risk is per train and not per train car, in which cars passenger trains which have far fewer cars per train are much more dangerous, even though this is harder to estimate), we can reasonably estimate that passenger trains kill about 12 people per year on average (2 passengers and 10 other people), while freight trains kill about 942 people per year on average. Adjusting for train car length who shift this somewhat from freight trains to passenger trains, but even so, freight trains would be the dominant issue.

Do Existing Rules Reflect The True Nature Of The Problem

Of course, it only makes sense to take measures to reduce right of way deaths away from highway crossings if there is an effective (and cost effective) way to do so. 

People walk across and along train tracks all the time, and since trains are noisy, and you only need to move a few feet away from train tracks to avoid being hit by one, normally walking across or along train tracks is pretty safe, so long as you are able to hear them coming, you pay attention, you don't fall asleep on them, you don't get stuck on them, and you get out of the way when they come. And, it isn't really clear what the statistics use to define a trespasser, and we can't really understand the statistics without knowing this definition.

Is a trespasser merely someone who is in the right of way at all? Is a trespasser someone who tries to hitch a ride on a train that isn't using it like a passenger on a typical passenger train? Or what?

Common intuition wouldn't consider crossing over a train track when there is no indication that a train is coming, away from a highway crossing, to be trespassing, nor would common intuition consider walking along a train track in the right of way when there is no indication that a train is coming to be trespassing. I did that on my walk to and from school in junior high school almost every school day for two years without anyone even suggesting that I was trespassing.

Crossing a highway crossing when there are indications that a train is coming such as flashing lights or barriers that come down probably is trespassing, but that obviously doesn't apply when you aren't at a highway crossing.

The Federal Railway Administration, however, begs to differ, stating:

It is illegal to access private railroad property anywhere other than a designated pedestrian or roadway crossing. Trespassers are most often pedestrians who walk across or along railroad tracks as a shortcut to another destination. Some trespassers are loitering or are engaged in recreational activities such as taking photographs, jogging, bicycling, hunting, or operating recreational off-highway vehicles (ROVs). Riding ROVs along railroad tracks leads to the erosion of an important part of the track foundation known as ballast, or the rock and soil material that supports the ties and rail.

But, this definition is awfully harsh. From a pedestrian's perspective, it is often much safer to walk across or along railroad tracks away from a designated roadway crossing, than it is to cross at a highway crossing where there is much more frequent and less noisy car traffic, or across open ground away from the railroad right of way (indeed, railroads that are no longer in use are often converted to pedestrian trails for just this reason) which may constitute trespassing on private property (which is dangerous in much of rural America) and is sometimes uncleared brush. 

Sticking to official pedestrian routes is challenging. Many rural areas have no sidewalks, and walking along rural roads at night can be much more dangerous than walking along railroads. 

Designated pedestrian crossings are extremely very rare outside of dense urban areas and resort areas, because they aren't cost effective in places with little pedestrian traffic and only marginal safety risks to the pedestrians who do without them. 

But train tracks have to be crossed somewhere to get from point A to point B in many cases, because tracks often split whole states in two. 

In flat farmland, highway crossings are often a mile to six miles apart, and highway crossings can be even more sparse in mountains, forests, wetlands, and deserts. 

These detours can be tolerable in a car or a motorcycle, but represent immense delays relative to crossing a train track away from a highway crossing for a pedestrian who may have to cross that track to get to school or work or a friend's house on a regular basis.

So, simply writing off people who are simply meeting the strict FTA definition of rail right of way trespassing as "at fault" is really unreasonable, blames the victim, and unreasonably protects railroad operators from legal liability when the common law "Learned Hand" test for negligence liability (i.e. that the probability adjusted risk of harm is greater than the cost of a measure that would prevent that harm) would hold railroad operators liable for these injuries if they didn't take reasonable and cost effective measures to prevent them.

In the face of unreasonable trespassing definitions and regulations of pedestrians near train tracks, even extremely expensive preventative measures, like tall fences, will be routinely circumvented. And, authorities won't do much to prevent the harm, because the authorities seeing the situation up close will be aware that these work arounds that circumvent overkill prevention measures like tall fences, will mostly do more good than harm.

Also, my intuition is that ordinary pedestrians walking across or along railroad tracks, especially in rural and suburban areas, are not at all typical of people who are killed in rail accidents, because it is so easy to hear trains coming and because it is so easy in most cases to get out of the way. I suspect that these cases probably actually make up less than 10% of rail accidents involving pedestrians, even though the FTA itself admits on its own website that this is the predominant form of "trespassing" in rail right of ways.

Instead, I suspect that the typical cases that result in serious injury or death are very different. 

Maybe the pedestrian is a young child to little to appreciate the risk of being on train tracks when one can hear a train coming. Maybe the pedestrian is deaf or wearing headphones. 

Maybe the pedestrian falls asleep on the tracks while drunk, on drugs, or homeless, mistakenly thinking that this particular track which has low frequency traffic has been abandoned entirely. Maybe the pedestrian has been assaulted or knocked unconscious and left on the tracks. 

Some of these cases may be close to the boundary between reckless behavior indifferent to the grave risk that they will be killed and full fledged intentional suicide a bit like playing Russian roulette. 

Maybe the pedestrian is trying to hitch a ride on a freight train and stumbles. 

Maybe the pedestrian is on a rail bridge or other part of the right of way where there is no easy place to move and get out of the way of the train when it is coming. Maybe the pedestrian somehow gets stuck on the tracks with a foot wedged into a gap or is trying to rescue someone else.

Ideally, better data would add insight that the official statistics do not, and we wouldn't have to rely on intuition. But, relying in intuition grounded in common sense and lived experience until better data is available, is usually better than taking no action at all until better data is available, especially if the measures suggested by that intuition aren't terribly expensive or difficult to implement.

If my intuition is right and these are the predominant cases of result in rail deaths or injuries to "trespassers", then the broad FTA definition in addition to blaming the victim, also undermines its effectiveness by being so broad that it fails to distinguish between reasonable conduct that is only dangerous in the most freak circumstances and unreasonable conduct that really does pose an extraordinary risk of death which should be actively policed to prevent rail deaths and injuries. By not tolerating reasonable conduct, the overbroad definition undermines its own effectiveness at preventing the harms it is designed to discourage.

Distinguishing between "safe trespassing" within the FTA definition and "unsafe trespassing" within the FTA is also critical to determining what kind of preventative measures could reduce rail right of way deaths and injuries.

Possible Infrastructure Based Solutions To Reduce Harm

If the real problem is predominantly people who fall asleep or are otherwise unconscious or stuck or inert on train tracks away from highway crossings, then the solution might be to periodically put something like a LIDAR sensor along active train tracks that warn the train operator of the obstruction in time to stop the train (which could take more than a mile of warning about a minute before the train reaches that point), which would prevent not only deaths to trespassers, but also train collisions with fallen trees, large sleeping wildlife (for which "cow catchers" were designed in an earlier era), and debris carried there by a storm. These preventative measures weren't really technologically feasible or cost effective in the late 19th century and early 20th century when existing freight rail systems were invented. But now, these kinds of sensors and a way to send their signals to trains on the routes are cheap and easy to retrofit commercial off the shelf technologies that require only minor modifications for this application.

At crossings, something like a LIDAR system, or even just an "emergency stop" switch that someone could activate in the highway crossing infrastructure, could reduce the number of collisions arising from vehicles stuck at a highway crossing. Even if the warning was transmitted to the train when it was too late to come to a full stop, on oncoming train aware of an imminent collision could slow down as much as possible and activate maximum warning sirens to mitigate the magnitude of the harm from an unstoppable collision and could alert first responders so that they could on their way to the scene of the nearly inevitable collision before it even happened, in situation where every moment counts in saving someone's life. 

If a big part of  the problem is people who are deaf or wearing headphones, bright, flashing, motion sensor activated lights that only go off when trains are actually coming, located away from highway crossings, which are also cheap, easy to retrofit, commercial off the shelf technologies could do the trick, and might even reduce the need for loud train horns in the middle of the night.

The solutions above would be cheap, and could be implemented at a very manageable cost by railroad operators in response to newly adopted safety regulations (which would prevent a race to the bottom by profit minding companies competing with each other) over a period of perhaps five or ten years.

If the problem is people trying to hitchhike on train cars, hobo style, maybe a partial solution would be to design train cars so that they are difficult to ride or mount, without ladders or anything else to grip, and with the top of enclosed freight cars designs with pitched roofs that are too steep to rest upon for any length of time.

This would be very expensive to retrofit, but if the new design standards were imposed only prospectively to newly purchased freight cars as they were replaced over their useful lives, the new design would probably not be much more expensive than the old one, and as the percentage of new design cars increased over time, the entire strategy of hobo style hitchhiking on freight trains would grow increasingly less popular.

This gradual replacement would also dovetail with reduces consumption of coal, which is the single largest component of of rail freight, in favor of renewables, nuclear, and natural gas transported by pipeline, and declining consumption of liquid fossil fuels (another major component of rail freight) as electric vehicles gradually replace internal combustion engine vehicles, with freight rail instead being used to ship more containerized cargo.

Regular underpasses or overpasses for wild animals might not save many human lives but might prevent train collisions with wild (or domestic) animals that are unable to get out of  the way in time or don't realize the risk, which is surely something that both conservationists and train operators would appreciate, which is fundamentally, very low tech, like Roman Empire class civil engineering. But these measured could potentially be quite expensive to retrofit into existing rail lines. Still, good data on "rail kill" could identify the areas where these kinds of collisions are most common so that the investment in these solutions could be implemented first where it would do the most good, and these standards could be established for new rail lines (mostly proposed high speed rail lines).

Admittedly, none of these measures would be very effective against someone who is simply reckless to the point of being virtually suicidal, or someone who is actually suicidal. 

For these cases, a highly targeted campaign of public service announcements, that focuses only on the conduct that other preventative measures can't deal with, that actually is high risk, in channels that the people most likely to act this way are most likely to hear and take seriously may be the best possible solution - a bit like the campaigns in the 1980s about drunk driving and the importance of having a designated driver. A PSA campaign probably wouldn't be as effective as some of the new safety infrastructure suggested in this post, but it would almost surely make some difference if it was well done.

Conclusion That Egg Consumption Reduces Alzheimer's Disease Not Very Significant

A study in the peer reviewed Journal of Nutrition claiming a 47% reduction in clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's during life due to eating at least one egg a week, is much weaker than it appears at face value. 

The results (based upon a clinical diagnosis during life) were consistent with benefits as low as 17% within the margin of error.

 

And, the clinical diagnosis rates weren't very accurate. Post-mortem examination of the brains of more than half of the sample (578 cases) found a 56% false negative rate for clinical diagnosis during life and an 18% false positive rate for clinical diagnosis during life. This casts doubt on whether the lifetime clinical diagnosis data is meaningful at all, given its immense inaccuracy. 

The results when based on autopsies were consistent with benefits as low as 10% for two or more eggs a week.

Both these results are only modestly better than the p=0.05 statistical significance threshold, and the fact that the cases where Alzheimer's disease was accurately diagnosed showed less of a benefit, also casts doubt on the significance of this study. None of the evidence supporting the author's hypothesis that dietary choline intake was the protective factor was statistically significant, and none of the results were significant at anything close to the p=0.01 level. This significance, moreover, is overstated, because the study fails to adjust for the inaccuracy of the clinical diagnosis process or for the uncertainty in the result caused by self-reporting of what people ate. 

Dietary self-reporting is particularly problematic in a population where a large percentage of the reporters will ultimately be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in less than ten years. It could be that many people who don't report weekly egg consumption did so because their memory was not good enough to remember everything that they ate in the last month due to having undiagnosed or subclinical levels of Alzheimer's disease, rather than being due to actually eating fewer eggs.

The sample size is small, so the statistical significance of the result is modest. The total sample was 1024 people, and only 370 of them did not eat at least one egg a week.

Also casting doubt on the result is the fact that there was no dose-response effect (i.e. eating more than one egg a week is no better than eating one egg a week, and eating no eggs is not significantly different from eating 1-3 eggs a month) and indeed, eating more than one egg a week reduced the benefit in individuals who had post-mortem exams done, relative to those who had one egg a week.

The average diagnosis at 6.7 ± 4.8 years from the start of the study is also soon enough after the study began, that given strong evidence in the literature (which is not mentioned in the literature review in the study) that Alzheimer's disease starts at sub-clinical levels decades before it is diagnosed in many cases. So, the diet of the people in the study during the study period probably didn't influence the outcomes.

Finally, while the study controls for 13 potential confounding factors (of which some, like education, didn't vary significantly between the subgroups), it could easily have omitted an important factor. And, it doesn't prove cause and effect either. For example, it could be that having undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease influences your body in a way that you don't like eating eggs as much.

Thus, while the study might justify further research, its conclusion the weekly egg consumption greatly reduces Alzheimer's disease onset risk is too weak to make a life choice based upon, or to recommend clinically, despite the fact that their best fit benefit purports to be as much as a 47% reduction in the risk of getting Alzheimers. Indeed, if anything, the details of the data tend to favor some uncontrolled for confounding factor that is merely mildly correlated with egg consumption.

The failure of the study to engage with many of these issues in a forthright manner also casts doubt on the quality of the peer review at the Journal of Nutrition for this study.

The study and its abstract are as follows:

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with increasing prevalence due to population aging. Eggs provide many nutrients important for brain health, including choline, omega-3 fatty acids, and lutein. Emerging evidence suggests that frequent egg consumption may improve cognitive performance on verbal tests, but whether consumption influences the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia and AD is unknown.

Objectives: To examine the association of egg consumption with Alzheimer’s dementia risk among the Rush Memory and Aging Project cohort.

Methods: Dietary assessment was collected using a modified Harvard semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. Participants’ first food frequency questionnaire was used as the baseline measure of egg consumption. Multivariable adjusted Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to investigate the associations of baseline egg consumption amount with Alzheimer’s dementia risk, adjusting for potential confounding factors. Subgroup analyses using Cox and logistic regression models were performed to investigate the associations with AD pathology in the brain. Mediation analysis was conducted to examine the mediation effect of dietary choline in the relationship between egg intake and incident Alzheimer’s dementia.

Results: This study included 1024 older adults {mean [±standard deviation (SD)] age = 81.38 ± 7.20 y}. Over a mean (±SD) follow-up of 6.7 ± 4.8 y, 280 participants (27.3%) were clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia. Weekly consumption of >1 egg/wk (hazard ratio [HR]: 0.53; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.34, 0.83) and ≥2 eggs/wk (HR: 0.53; 95% CI: 0.35, 0.81) was associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s dementia. Subgroup analysis of brain autopsies from 578 deceased participants showed that intakes of >1 egg/wk (HR: 0.51; 95% CI: 0.35, 0.76) and ≥2 eggs/wk (HR: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.44, 0.90) were associated with a lower risk of AD pathology in the brain. Mediation analysis showed that 39% of the total effect of egg intake on incident Alzheimer’s dementia was mediated through dietary choline.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that frequent egg consumption is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s dementia and AD pathology, and the association with Alzheimer’s dementia is partially mediated through dietary choline.

Yongyi Pan, et al., "Association of Egg Intake With Alzheimer’s Dementia Risk in Older Adults: The Rush Memory and Aging Project" 154(7) The Journal of Nutrition 2236-2243 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2024.05.012.

Macroeconomics Is An Art Not A Science And Is Influenced By Politics

Don't trust Republican economists when it comes to GDP during Republican Presidencies or the benefits of tax cuts.

Using a novel dataset linking professional forecasters in the Wall Street Journal Economic Forecasting Survey to their political affiliations, we document a partisan bias in GDP growth forecasts. Republican-affiliated forecasters project 0.3-0.4 percentage points higher growth when Republicans hold the presidency, relative to Democratic-affiliated forecasters. Forecast accuracy shows a similar partisan pattern: Republican-affiliated forecasters are less accurate under Republican presidents, indicating that partisan optimism impairs predictive performance. This bias appears uniquely in GDP forecasts and does not extend to inflation, unemployment, or interest rates. 

We explain these findings with a model where forecasters combine noisy signals with politically-influenced priors: because GDP data are relatively more uncertain, priors carry more weight, letting ideology shape growth projections while leaving easier-to-forecast variables unaffected. Noisy information therefore amplifies, rather than substitutes for, heterogeneous political priors, implying that expectation models should account for both information rigidities and belief heterogeneity. Finally, we show that Republican forecasters become more optimistic when tax cuts are salient in public discourse, suggesting that partisan differences reflect divergent beliefs about the economic effects of fiscal policy.

Benjamin S. Kay, Aeimit Lakdawala, and Jane Ryngaert, "Partisan Bias in Professional Macroeconomic Forecasts" SSRN (2025).

Ghibli v. Disney Villains

In a nutshell, this video makes the case that Disney villains are inherently evil and must be defeated and punished, while Ghibli villains are redeemable and have understandable motives but have suffered and are misunderstood. To a lesser extent DC Comics follows the Disney model and Marvel Comics follows the Ghibli model. The video argues that Ghibli villains are more realistic and creatively interesting, but acknowledges that Disney villains are cathartic, efficient, and satisfying. The video attributes the difference to a Judeo-Christian American culture compared to Japanese values rooted in Shinto religious roots (although much of that is really Confucian).

Honestly, I disagree that Ghibli villains are "more realistic".  Ghibli style villains may be more common, but Disney style villains are out there too. We call them "psychopaths" and some key distinctions in criminal law, like the distinction between 1st degree murder and 2nd degree murder, are attempts to distinguish irredeemable psychopaths from misguided or impulsive or environmentally pressured individuals who are capable of being reformed.

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.

Male Labor Force Participation Increases With Higher Wages

Not an unreasonable hypothesis, that explains lower labor force participation in red states. But this may be actually capturing, indirectly, the likelihood that a man is a blue collar v. a white collar worker.

Male labor force participation (MLFP) has declined sharply over the past 50 years in the United States. 

We show that a key driver of this decline is changes in mens' beliefs about the returns to work, shaped by their lifetime experiences of aggregate male wages. Using PSID data tracking individual labor histories linked to state-level real male wage time series, we find that prime-age MLFP increases with the average male wage in a man's state of birth over his lifetime, even after controlling for current labor market conditions and a host of fixed effects and covariates. 

A one standard deviation increase in the average experienced aggregate lifetime hourly wage-corresponding to $0.33 and comparable to the difference in 2000 between being born in 1970 in Louisiana and Texas-raises the probability of labor force participation by 10 percentage points. These effects persist for men who migrate and are stronger when restricting to same race wages. 

Our findings suggest that lifetime wage experiences shape long-term beliefs about work, generating lasting spillovers from labor demand to labor supply.

Levin, Remy and Vidart, Daniela, "'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore': Lifetime Wage Experiences and the Decline of Male LFP in the United States" (March 18, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5216777 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5216777

Envy v Jealousy

 From Quantum Entanglement (Episode 11).

More Random Thoughts

* What if the Younger Dryas extra-terrestrial impact didn't happen? 

Pleistocene megafauna might have survived. The Clovis culture would have lasted longer. Native American cultures in North America might have been more patriarchal. Göbekli Tepe might not have been built at all, or might have been very different. The Neolithic Revolution might have arrived 4,000 years earlier. The genetics of European hunter-gatherers might have been more diverse.

* There is more than one scenario by which brain evolution could be next level. 

One is exemplified by the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica who have essentially the three main layers of the human brain plus a new one on top of that - dolphins come close to that. Another is exemplified by octopi who have a completely different brain structure with is decentralized with many sub-brains throughout their bodies. Yet another would be the cyborg approach (perhaps exemplified by Ghost in the Machine) where brains would be part human and part computer (perhaps the most likely as it has already been done at a very limited level).

* “Eternity is two people and a ham." - Irma Rombauer in The Joy of Cooking. But the price is right. You can get so much red meat for so little money when there are holiday ham sales.

* I visited the Colorado History Museum today and saw, among other things, the 90s exhibit. It is actually fairly stunning how little fashion, music, and movies have changed in the last 35 years, even though technology has changed dramatically. There was a much smaller generation gap between me and my children, culturally, than there was between me and my parents (or my wife and her parents).

* I still don't really understand why the dust bowl of the 1930s happened, or what the risk of it recurring is.

* My son is in Mexico City with his (serious, long term) girlfriend. He is almost exactly the same age that I was when I went there on my honeymoon.

* The U.S. Navy has been quietly developing unmanned surface and undersea ships that are just about ready for "prime time" as important components of our overall naval fleet. Here are some recent examples:

For example, the Australian Eureka unmanned or minimally manned ship has a 1,150 mile range, a 44 ton payload, can travel at 50 knots (60 mph a.k.a. 100 km/hr), and can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and anti-ship Naval Strike Missiles (NSM). But is fairly small at 36 meters in length.

The Lionfish UUV (i.e. drone submarine) is about to enter service.

Lionfish is designed to address critical undersea warfare needs, including mine countermeasures, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), anti-submarine warfare, and electronic warfare.

The REMUS UUV family delivers critical advantages across modern naval operations and the autonomous systems have been proven to operate independently or in conjunction with crewed platforms — such as Virginia-class nuclear submarines — to extend mission range, reduce detection risk, and limit personnel exposure.

The U.S. Navy has a 100 foot long, 100 ton, unmanned surface vessel (USV) in the works (confusingly the same article seems to describe it as a 180 foot, 240 ton USV). It would have a range of thousands of miles.

The vessel is envisaged to be multi-role, capable of transporting logistics payloads, conducting ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) missions, or supporting naval munitions delivery without human oversight.

* My wife is currently watching White Lotus. One of the striking parts of the show is how aptly it captures the ways that men and women completely misunderstand each other because they have very different communications styles. To oversimplify, men are much more direct. Men rely far less on implied meanings and expecting people to "take a hint" than women. Women, in turn, overthink what men say, trying to look for hidden meanings in what men say that aren't there. Women, meanwhile, underestimate how much men can be hurt when they take what women say literally, when what women really mean is different, and is supposed to be implied from context. It also puts the lie to the notion that women are better communicators. Both are men and women are bad at communicating with members of the opposite sex. This mirrors differences in national communications styles. Germans, for example, are much more direct than Americans, while the Japanese, for example, have a much more indirect communication systle.

The Theoretical Foundations Of Republican Politics

People who understand the theoretical foundation of Republican policy positions tend to see it as too obvious (and obviously flawed) to mention. But this post is devoted to setting forth the core points of that theoretical foundation in the hope that a better understanding of it can point us towards better political tactics.

1. The Zero Sum Theory Of Employment Economics

Stylized Consensus Facts

The left and the right agree that the economic well-being of U.S. born white men without college educations relative to other workers in the U.S. economy has declined greatly, in relative terms, since at least 1970. They have captured almost none of the benefit of U.S. economic growth in the last 55 years, while women, non-white men, and college educated men, have all seen significant economic gains, relative to white men without college educations, over the last 55 years.

It is also widely agreed that the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign born was at an all time low in 1970 and is now at or near an all time high, 55 years later. It is widely agreed there are a signifiant share of people in America (about 10 million in round numbers) who are not U.S. citizens and do not have legal immigration status, and that the undocumented immigrants who are in the labor force are predominantly less educated, less skilled workers. A significant number of U.S. born citizens, moreover, are children of undocumented immigrants.

And, it is widely agreed that a large share of good consumed in the United States are produced outside the United States with non-U.S. labor and imported to the U.S. There is also a significant off shored employees who provide services to people in the U.S., most notably, people who answer customer service telephone numbers for big U.S. businesses. The share of goods and services consumed in the U.S. that is produced with non-U.S. labor is much lower now than it was in the time period from roughly 1945 to 1970.

Zero Sum Thinking

Where Republicans (and right wing political movements generally) and Democrats (and centrists and left wing political movements generally) differ, is that the right believes that the labor market is well approximated by a zero sum model, in which the number of jobs in the economy is largely fixed.

If the labor market is a zero sum game, then all growth in non-white employee employment and pay comes at the expense of white employee employment and pay. Likewise, this theory implies that every improvement in female employment and pay comes at the expense of male employment and pay, that every job filled by someone who is not a U.S. citizen comes at the expense of a job that would otherwise be filled by a U.S. citizen, and that every off shored job that provides goods or services to the U.S. economy comes at the expense of a U.S. person's job.

In this theory, the Civil Rights movement, disparaged as "DEI", caused women and minorities to get jobs that white men would have gotten without government intervention, which they see as discrimination against white men. Therefore, it is imperative to right the horrible wrong that the Civil Rights movement has done to white men, who they feel that the pre-Civil Rights law economy demonstrated were actually more qualified than women and minorities.

In this theory, immigration laws that allow more immigration and illegal immigration have taken many millions of jobs away from native born Americans, as have the children of illegal immigrants whom they do not see as legitimate U.S. citizens since their citizenship was made possible by the illegal conduct of illegal immigrants. And, since most of these jobs are less skilled, this has come at the expense of non-college educated native born Americans. So, mass deportation of immigrants (legal and illegal), discouraging new immigration, and ending birthright citizenship all increase the supply of jobs available to native born Americans, especially those without college educations.

In this theory, free trade has made it economically feasible to off shore work that contributed to the U.S. economy and all of the off shored jobs would have otherwise filled by people in the U.S., so large tariffs are desirable in order to force firms to replace off shore workers with U.S. workers. And, again, off shored jobs tend to be disproportionately jobs that don't require college educations.

2. Moral collapse theory, and the belief that homosexuality and transgender identities are perverse and immoral choices.

Stylized Consensus Facts

Relative to the 1945-1970 time period, divorce rates have soared, marriage rates have fallen, couples are getting married later, a larger share of children are born out of wedlock, more children are being raised in single parent families, and people are having fewer children. Divorces are disproportionately sought by women. These trends have been particular stark for non-college educated men who are also experiencing economic stagnation.  This economic stagnation has led to economic pressures which, together with inferior social skills due to being less smart and educated, makes it more likely that they will be accused of child neglect and/or child abuse.

Non-college educated men, who have seen lower relative incomes and growing unemployment rates, also tend to end up having weaker relationships with their children when they are born out of wedlock or following a divorce, to have greater difficulty and willingness to pay child support and/or alimony, and to increasingly see marital assets reliably split 50-50 even though those marital assets were purchased disproportionately from their incomes.

The time period since 1970 has also been marked by the widespread increased availability of birth control pills and IUDs, by the legalization of abortion, by the rise of gay rights, and by a stark decline in the percentage of people in the U.S. who identify as Christian (in favor of both "nones" and non-Christian religions) as well as the percentage of people who attend church and otherwise actually make Christianity a part of their lives. It has also been accompanied by the near universal availability of unilateral "no fault" divorce, and laws that have given women with lower earnings more reliably larger child support and alimony awards, larger property division awards, and a greater ability to enforce those court orders. And, furthermore, women's rights outside the workforce have improved, making it easier for women to borrow money independently and receive higher education in fields previously reserved almost entirely for men like law and being medical doctors.

This is also a time period in which "war on poverty" and "Great Society" social programs have provided economic support to poor families, and especially, poor single mothers, first mostly black mothers, but increasingly non-college educated white mothers.

And, in the later part of this time period, access over the Internet to free hard core pornography of all kinds has become ubiquitous, when the First Amendment establishment clause has been enforced to make public schools and government more secular (such as removing prayer and the Ten Commandments from schools), when public schools have been more comfortable teaching scientific and historical discoveries at odds with Christian doctrine, and when school and public libraries have been more willing to shelve books that are arguably obscene or contrary to more restrictive conservative Christian belief systems.

Moral collapse theory

The right attributes most of these changes to moral collapse, and to feminism motivated changes in the law that have helped facilitate this moral collapse by undermining traditional values.

In this view, the law is making it too easy for women to have children out of wedlock, and making it too easy for women to shirk their marital obligations to their husbands by divorcing them and getting unfair benefits for doing so in female biased divorce settlements, and by restricting the number of children they have without the consent of their husbands or lovers. They also see abortion as murder. They see laws against marital rape as undermining the basic concept of marriage where a wife is obligated to have sex with her husband who is the head of the family and should be the ultimately decision maker on all questions in the marriage, in which wives should obey their husbands.

They feel that a transgender identity is contrary to common sense, isn't real, is a voluntary choice, and actually reflects a combination of perversion motivated fraud, and liberal brain washing. They feel that homosexuality is a voluntary choice that is sinful and perverse, is contrary to nature and God, and is disgusting. They see trend of the law treating homosexuality and transgender identity as legitimate as a symptom of the overall moral collapse in society that feminism has likewise facilitated.

In this worldview, gay rights, transgender rights, legalized abortion, birth control without a husband's permission, no fault divorce, prohibitions on marital rape, interpretations of the law that criminalize sexual assertiveness in pre-marital relationships, and greater independent economic rights of women, the decline of Christianity in general and in public institutions, and state intervention in the father-child relationship for abuse and neglect or to recognize an adolescent's or wife's autonomy, are all deviations from traditional values that are symptoms of a larger moral collapse in society.

This moral collapse is in this view the cause of these changes and needs to be addressed by returning society to a previously more implicit, Christian foundation.

In this view, the remedy to the fact that non-college educated men are having increasing difficulty getting married, staying married, keeping their kids and maintaining a relationship with them, and not being accused of rape, is to insist on making society more overtly Christian and to reinstate laws based upon a pre-1960s "traditional values" across the board.

3. Government is harmful theory.

Stylized Consensus Facts

Total nominal government spending has increased steadily. The scope and scale of the federal government, in particular, increased dramatically, first after the U.S. Civil War, modestly again during the Progressive era in the late 19th century and early 20th century, dramatically again during the Great Depression and World War II, and then significantly but less dramatically in the post-World War II to 1970s era. The scope and scale of the federal government far exceeds what was initially contemplated by the Founders and what the practical reality was for the first 80 years or so of the United States.

Government is harmful theory.

A third major pillar of right wing political theory is that government spending generates no value and is inherently less efficient and economically valuable than private sector spending, and that each government employee on average, has a net negative economic impact. And, taxes automatically reduce economic output.

In this view, the correct size of government is always to have less government spending and fewer government employees, with less taxation. So, indiscriminate tax cuts, spending cuts, and layoffs of government employees, especially at the federal level, is a good thing.

4. Education is overrated.

Stylized Consensus Facts

Educational attainment has steadily increased since World War II, with more people graduating from high school, more people attending college, more people graduating from college, and more people earning graduate and professional degrees. At first this was due to the GI Bill (which benefited veterans which a very large share of adult men young enough to consider college were after WWII, Korea, and Vietnam), and due to the creation of cheap state public universities made possible by high levels of economic prosperity at the time. Starting in the 1970s, women and minorities began to receive higher education at greatly increased levels, with women achieving something close to parity sometime in the early 1990s and continuing to have greater educational attainment than men since then.

Many jobs that previously did not require a certain level of formal educational attainment now do, either formally, or as a matter of practical reality. Almost all of the benefits of economic growth since 1970 in the U.S. economy has been captured by college educated people. College educated people have faced less competition from immigrants and off shoring than non-college educated people. Government has devoted far more resources to supporting higher education than vocational education such as apprenticeships in skilled trades.

Education is overrated.

The right sees the educational establishment from kindergarten through higher education as equally as much an institution for spreading left wing ideologies and propaganda, and undermining religion and traditional values, as it is an institution for actually providing value added knowledge. They see most educational requirements for work as artificial cultural and class driven barriers to entry rather than as being genuinely necessary to do the job. They believe that teachers and academics immorally twist what they teach to their own political agendas and self-interest that have little to do with truth and more to do with an agenda to undermine traditional values and to facilitate moral collapse. They will grudgingly acknowledge that sometimes education can be necessary (especially in STEM and in basic literacy), but that even there instruction is improperly undermining traditional values and religious beliefs based upon alleged academic knowledge that they do not trust. They see most teachers and professors as less competent and valuable than people who more directly produce economic value in our economy.

They see this as being motivated, especially, by a collective class effort of the upper middle class of college educated people to appropriate economic gains from the working class and middle class of non-college educated people and people with some college but not four year or greater degrees.

Conclusion

While there are other, less central, foundations of Republican politics, such as economic beliefs about where prices come from, energy policy, homelessness, crime, controlled substances, prostitution, and the political process, these four core theoretical foundations (all of which could be facially plausible, but don't bear out to be true with closer examination) which also impact some of these issues, at least in part, go a long way towards explaining right wing political stances.