Obscure Music Friday: Unhinged Rockabilly!

Earthling, what means this "B-I-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Go-Go"? We'll let Gene Vincent explain! 

Bonus: Hal Willis and "My Pink Cadillac". I mean really, what could be cooler?

Optimistic Leftist Book Club: Straight Talk on Trade by Dani Rodrik

The Optimistic Leftist Book Club isn't much of club (I'm the only member!) but I thought I'd start sharing some particularly fine recent reads. Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik is a must-read if you want to get your head on straight about where our economic world is headed--and how we might be able to make it better.

Rodrik is a good, clear writer who never lets economic jargon substitute for explanation when he's analyzing economic problems and trends. His general stance is heterodox though in the sense of eschewing dogmatic interpretations of neoclassical economics and prizing methodological flexibility, rather than, say, being a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory. He first came to attention back in 1997 with his refusal to sign up to the "Washington Consensus" that completely open economies and the free movement of capital was the key to prosperity for all developing countries. Rodrik pointed out that this approach was not supported by the data and reflected more a commitment to a selective set or economic principles--really dogmas--than to finding what works for individual countries (these views are nicely-summarized in his 2007 book, One Economics, Many Recipes). 

Rodrik continues to research and write widely on the problems of the global economy, including the connection between these problems and recent rise of populism. The Straight Talk book contains much useful material along these lines since it is based partly on a long-running series of columns for Project Syndicate where he has repeatedly grappled with populism and other hot contemporary issues. For example, here's Rodrik on why working class voters might vote against what appears to be their economic self-interest :

Many elites are puzzled about why poor or working-class people would vote for someone like Trump. After all, the professed economic policies of Hillary Clinton would in all likelihood have proved more favorable to them. To explain the apparent paradox, they cite these voters’ ignorance, irrationality, or racism.

But there is another explanation, one that is fully consistent with rationality and self-interest. When mainstream politicians lose their credibility, it is natural for voters to discount the promises they make. Voters are more likely to be attracted to candidates who have anti-establishment credentials and can safely be expected to depart from prevailing policies.2

In the language of economists, centrist politicians face a problem of asymmetric information. They claim to be reformers, but why should voters believe leaders who appear no different from the previous crop of politicians who oversold them the gains from globalization and pooh-poohed their grievances?

In Clinton’s case, her close association with the globalist mainstream of the Democratic Party and close ties with the financial sector clearly compounded the problem. Her campaign promised fair trade deals and disavowed support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but was her heart really in it? After all, when she was US Secretary of State, she had strongly backed the TPP.

This is what economists call a pooling equilibrium. Conventional and reformist politicians look alike and hence elicit the same response from much of the electorate. They lose votes to the populists and demagogues whose promises to shake up the system are more credible.

Framing the challenge as a problem of asymmetric information also hints at a solution. A pooling equilibrium can be disrupted if reformist politicians can “signal” to voters his or her “true type.”

Signaling has a specific meaning in this context. It means engaging in costly behavior that is sufficiently extreme that a conventional politician would never want to emulate it, yet not so extreme that it would turn the reformer into a populist and defeat the purpose. For someone like Hillary Clinton, assuming her conversion was real, it could have meant announcing she would no longer take a dime from Wall Street or would not sign another trade agreement if elected.

In other words, centrist politicians who want to steal the demagogues’ thunder have to tread a very narrow path. If fashioning such a path sounds difficult, it is indicative of the magnitude of the challenge these politicians face. Meeting it will likely require new faces and younger politicians, not tainted with the globalist, market fundamentalist views of their predecessors.

It will also require forthright acknowledgement that pursuing the national interest is what politicians are elected to do. And this implies a willingness to attack many of the establishment’s sacred cows – particularly the free rein given to financial institutions, the bias toward austerity policies, the jaundiced view of government’s role in the economy, the unhindered movement of capital around the world, and the fetishization of international trade.

I always find Rodrik's views refreshing....and highly educational! Pick up the book if you can. Bonus: John Judis recently conducted a very nice, lengthy interview with Rodrik that showcases many of his most interesting perspectives.  

Et Tu, Iowa? The Wheels Come Off the Trump Bus

Did you know that Trump carried Iowa in 2016 by more than he carried Texas? That might be hard for Trump to pull off in the future, since Iowa voters seem to have been hit with a serious case of buyers' remorse. The year-end Iowa poll, conducted by Ann Selzer's firm, has Trump at an extremely anemic 35 percent approval in the state versus 60 percent disapproval. That's very bad. And keep in mind that Selzer's polls have a sterling reputation for accuracy; 538 has actually dubbed her "the best pollster in politics". So if Selzer say Trump has a 35 percent approval rating in Iowa, he probably does have that or very close to it. 

While Selzer's poll does not provide extensive crosstabs, we can make a pretty good guess as to what's going on from other data. No doubt a lot of Trump's dreadful approval rating (can we call him "the failing Donald Trump"?) is driven by white college graduates bailing out on him in the state, as they have in others. But Trump's support was already relatively low among these voters in 2016, so it's doubtful disaffection among this group can account for all of a precipitous drop to 35 percent approval in the state. Instead, it is likely that he is seeing significant attrition among white noncollege voters, who are a strong majority of the state's voters (62 percent, twice as large as the white college share of 31 percent) and who were overwhelming responsible for Trump's 9 point victory in 2016.

Of course, there is no doubt you could wander around any of the counties in Iowa that swung to Trump in 2016 and--as journalists are wont to do--still find "die-hard' Trump supporters who love what he's doing, think he's sticking it to the Establishment and believe there's a massive conspiracy against him. There's a whole cottage industry of these "Trump's base still loves him!" stories. 

But that's not the point; some voters will indeed support him no matter what. But, equally, his somewhat less die-hard supporters may indeed head for the exits because he's an insane blowhard, hasn't done what he said he would do, only cares about the rich--whatever. Politics is fought at the margins and that is where he is losing.

But, some may argue, that's Trump. He's not on the ballot in 2018. Therefore, perhaps his free falling approval rating even in states which embraced him with gusto are not that important. Well, that's probably never been true; approval ratings of the incumbent President have always been a significant factor in midterm elections. Good approval ratings help the incumbent party's candidates; bad ratings hurt them; terrible ratings hurt them even more.

And here's the thing. Not only is this generally true, it's probably more true now than ever. Ron Brownstein points out in his latest CNN piece:

As the 2018 election year begins, one question above all is likely to shape its outcome: Will Americans vote to constrain President Donald Trump by electing a Democrat-led Congress that will challenge and resist him, or to empower the Republicans who are increasingly working in harness with him?

Voters have increasingly viewed House and Senate elections less as a choice between individual candidates than a referendum on which party they want to control Congress -- a choice grounded in their assessments of the President. All evidence from the special elections in 2017 suggests that pattern will continue to drive voters' decisions this year.

As more voters have treated congressional elections in effect as parliamentary choices, it's grown difficult for either side to maintain the unified control of the House, the Senate and the White House that Republicans enjoy now. The last three times one party went into a midterm election holding unified control, in fact, voters have revoked it -- providing the opposition party control of one or both congressional chambers. That was the fate of Democrats under Barack Obama in 2010, Republicans under George W. Bush in 2006 and Democrats under Bill Clinton in 1994.

The ominous precedent for Republicans is that Trump's standing with the public now is weaker than each of those predecessors' was when their party lost unified control during midterm elections.

That about sums it up. The GOP can run, but they can't hide. Not even in the cornfields of Iowa.

Science Fiction Saturday: Cixin Liu

Science fiction is hugely popular in China. The leading light of Chinese science fiction is Cixin Liu, whose novels are now being translated into English. The gateway drug here is The Three Body Problem, the first volume in a mind-blowing space opera trilogy called Remembrance of Earth's Past. Here's the basic setup of the novel which interestingly starts with the Cultural Revolution:

During the Cultural Revolution in China, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics alumna from Tsinghua University, witnesses her father being beaten to death by Red Guards from Tsinghua High School, the latter being supported by Ye's mother and younger sister. Ye is officially branded a traitor and is forced to join a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia, where she befriends a government journalist who recently read Silent Spring, and who wishes to write a letter to the central government containing policy suggestions based on the book. When the central government responds, viewing the letter as an act of sedition, the journalist betrays Ye, who helped to transcribe the draft, and Ye is set to enter prison. However, she is salvaged at the last minute by Yang and Lei, two military physicists working under Red Shore (a Chinese initiative for alien communication similar to SETI) who require Ye's skills in physics. Ye discovers the possibility of amplifying outgoing radio messages by bouncing them off the sun, and fires off a message. Eight years later, by now in a loveless marriage with Yang, Ye receives a message from a concerned alien pacifist, warning her not to respond or else the inhabitants of Trisolaris will locate and invade Earth. The alien proceeds to describe Trisolaris's environmental conditions and societal history. Ye, who has come to despise humankind, responds anyway, inviting them to enter Earth to settle Earth's problems. Ye murders her husband, Yang, and Lei to keep the alien message a secret.

And off we go, through many, many plot complications and two further books (The Dark Forest and Death's End), both of which are now available in English. Cixin Liu's work has been very well received in the English speaking world, with The Three Body Problem winning the two most prestigious science fiction awards, the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. 

All the cool kids are reading this guy (including Barack Obama!). Can you afford to be left behind?

Obscure Music Friday: Die Toten Hosen and a Punk Version of Auld Lang Syne

Die Toten Hosen are a German punk band from Dusseldorf. They really nail it on this punk version of Auld Lang Syne, which I urge you to play LOUD. And the video gives you some idea of what the annual neighborhood New Year's Eve party at my place is like.

The Formula for a Blue Texas

A formula you say? There's a formula for a blue Texas? Well, sort of. I mean this in the sense that a sober quantitative accounting of the challenge Democrats face in Texas provides a useful guide to how the blue Texas goal can actually be attained. More useful I think than the countless breathless accounts of grassroots Democratic organizing in Texas (here's a recent example), which make little effort to explain which groups have to move and by how much to be successful.

So here's the "formula". In 2016, Clinton improved over Obama in Texas, reducing his 16 point deficit in the state to 9 points in 2012. How did she do this? The dataset developed at CAP for our Voter Trends in 2016 report indicates that Clinton improved over Obama among both white non-college-educated and college-educated voters. The Democrats’ deficit among Texas’s white non-college-educated voters fell from 60 points in 2012 to 55 points in 2016. The shift toward Clinton among white college graduates in the state was even larger—from a 30-68 percent deficit in 2012 to 37-57 percent in 2016, a margin improvement of 18 points. The white college-educated improvement cut Clinton’s deficit in the state by about 4.5 points and the white noncollege improvement moved things in her direction by about 1.5 points, for a total shift of 6 points toward Clinton from better performance among whites. The rest of Clinton's gains relative to Obama were accounted for by improvements in Latino turnout and support.

This suggests that the correct formula for a blue Texas is not to rely on demographic change and better mobilization of existing pro-Democratic constituencies, which often appears to be the default strategy. That is not likely to be enough to cut the additional 9 points off of Democrats's statewide deficit anytime soon. Instead, while demographic change will continue to provide a boost to Democratic prospects and mobilization efforts should continue, the key question is how to keep the trends evident in 2016 going. Rough calculations indicate that if Democrats can cut their white noncollege deficit to 45 points and their white college deficit to 10 points, while continuing positive, if unspectacular, Latino trends (getting Latino turnout of eligibles to around 40 percent, while improving Latino vote margin to around +30D), that should be enough to flip the state or come very close. 

Note: I'm not saying this would be easy to do! But I do believe the formula would work and builds plausibly on current trends.

Science Fiction Saturday: Adrian Tschaikovky's Children of Time

Now this is a cool SF novel! Adrian Tschaikovky's Children of Time completely blew my mind. Here's the description from Wikipedia:

The book's plot involves a planet inhabited by evolved spiders uplifted by human scientists, and their later discovery by the last humans alive in the universe. The work plays off the contrast between the societal development of the spiders and the barbaric descent of the starship crew of the last humans.

The work was praised by the Financial Times for "tackling big themes—gods, messiahs, artificial intelligence, alienness—with brio."

It was selected from a shortlist of six works and a total pool of 113 books to be awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction of the year in August 2016. The director of the award program said that the novel has a "universal scale and sense of wonder reminiscent of Clarke himself."

All true. This is a fantastic book and the portrait of the uplifted spider society is amazing; so vivid you could see it existing in real life (somewhere). And it's now available in a Kindle edition for $0.99; if that isn't a bargain I don't know what is! Grab it immediately if not sooner.