Oil doesn’t experience unemployment as the most traumatic thing that can happen to it. Oil moves magically to new opportunities, unlike people who don’t often move at all. A barrel of oil doesn’t beat their kids, abuse drugs, commit suicide, or experiencing declining life expectancy from being battered around in the global marketplace. But people do, and they have, the consequences persist and last, and now they’ve made their voices heard. It’s the the dark side of Polanyi’s warning against viewing human being as commodities.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The entire essay, which looks at Donald Trump’s consistent message, is worth reading.
I happen to think the margin for capital flight is closer than most apparently believe. These people assume Trump is either a Polyanna or lying (he is both, bit to what degree?). I suspect he is clueless about how to do it properly but at least he seems interested in trying.
He gets close but doesn’t make the leap. When Trump spoke of jobs, he did so in terms of workers. He did so in terms of returning agency to individuals. The oil metaphor is apt and does describe how economists and globalists talk of jobs. It might be added that oil doesn’t car if it is processed to power a race car or dripped slowly into a waste oil heater.
A couple other sentences reveal a lot about the encumbered thinking:
“Short-termism” instead of the idea that bosses would rather give money to shareholders than invest.”
“Give” rather than return and no indication of whose money it really is in the first place.
“One obstacle I hit is that while getting wages up is a hazy and complicated process, redistribution can be done and measured with clinical precision.
“It can also be taken away with that same precision.”
After reading Mike Konzal article, what is important to think about is the Republicans ran two very successful business candidates the last two cycles. In reality, most successful business person act like Mitt Romney who was very careful and diligent in his business dealings. And his companies ran like most larges companies nation. However, he made a poor candidate for President because he was literally the Outsourcer and Chief and laid off numerous Americans. Trump probably was less successful but he focused on jobs and the political leaders in the role of outsourcing. It is Clinton’s fault your jobs got outsourced to China and Mexico not our business leaders!
(That said it should be noted that Mitt at (47%) got a higher percentage of votes than Trump (46%). And Mitt was beaten by a stronger incumbent candidate Obama. It is true Trump won the electoral inside straight with the WWC voters.)
It’s striking how far off in the weeds the Democrat golfers are by this time. All that half-forgotten jargon from when it was about the class struggle … At least he mentions ‘white supremacy’ at the end.
Btw, I always thought that guy was one of the angry young men. But his pic shows he’s actually an angry old fart. Every day you learn something.
I’ve written here before that national American politics is evolving into a more city-machine-like “Rival Clientalisms” framework.
That was an inevitable result of both demographic change on the one hand, and the evolution of the identity-politics-based progressive strategy of managing their coalition of clients on the other. Few people saw it coming, or wanted to see it. Movement (and to a minor extent, Reform) Conservatism held it off for a long time, but those efforts were bound to succumb eventually when they proved cowed and thus both unable and unwilling to tackle the fundamental issues head on.
A less polite term for ‘clientalism’ is ‘protection racket’, but lots of people feel they need a lot of protection these days. Persuading them to suck it up for the sake of larger objectives has been an increasingly hard sell; one that is now perhaps impossible.
They feel beleaguered and buffeted by the winds of cultural, economic, and technological forces that threaten to further degrade their social status and disrupt their ability to lead comfortably stable lives, and disruption to such an extent, and with such speed and unpredictability, that it makes them feel it is impossible or futile to make plans for the future.
When people don’t feel confident in their conditions and circumstances, they also don’t feel ready to form families or put down roots and invest personal resources in particular communities (and Burkean ‘little platoons’), which have substantial positive externality spillover effects. For society and – I think with justification and not being too grandiose about it – our form of civilization at large.
One can think about this from a Hayekian or even PSST perspective. It is hard to justify taking the risks necessary to discover new patterns of specialization and trade – even ones that would otherwise be sustainable and practical – when a situation is too uncertain and unstable. The extreme scenario is of course some kind of total breakdown of law, order, security, trust, and other normal economic conditions such as ongoing and locally-devastating warfare. But the personal experience of and reaction to risk and disruption exists on a continuum.
In this regard, I thought this earlier sentence from Konczal was on point:
“Trump is unapologetically against trade that harms American workers. I would have assumed he was fighting a straw man here, but one thing I’ve learned is how a certain class of liberals don’t approach job loss from trade with a regrettable sense of the trade-offs, but instead a more cutting sense that Americans don’t have any claim on the jobs that go away anyway. It’s all for the best, in the long-run.”
Three approaches that, whatever their merits, can’t work politically:
1. “Let them eat the long-run”
2. “Let them eat creative destruction”
3. “Let them eat welfare”
Senator Lee’s (aspirational? inferential?) articulation of Trump’s “principled populism” approach is one in which the leader of a state will intervene and provide various forms – both explicit and obscure – of protection, distortion, subsidy, bail-out, and redistributive transfer – to insulate his political clients as much as possible from the forces threatening to disrupt their lives and expectations. Now, in many cases that can mean nothing more than accepting costs and inefficiencies in order to slow down the changes enough to give people who can adjust some extra time to do so.
But they will still appreciate that as better than nothing, and certainly better than the elites glorifying and celebrating certain policies and being utterly cavalier about the trade-offs that fall disproportionately on this group. Also, and unfortunately, the optimal political solution, once that state of affairs is established, is to shape things such that those political clients come to be absolutely dependent for their condition on their guy remaining in power, lest to lose them in a zero-sum game to the rival set of clients.
“Have a nice day.”
As Ezekiel Kweku writes in an excellent article, “The lesson we should draw from Clinton’s loss is not that white supremacy is unbeatable at the polls, but that it’s not going to beat itself…If the Democratic Party would like to keep more Donald Trumps from winning in the future, they are going to have to take the extraordinary step of doing politics.”
Did he really spend a dozen or so paragraphs studying Trump’s economic message and then decide in the last one that his appeal was really about identity politics and racism?
Konczal’s writing makes me sick.
“how the Democrats can rebuild their economic message out of this mess”
If you want your team to adopt the policies of the other team, why not just change teams? Oh yeah, these aren’t teams, they are tribes.
“simply getting past neoliberalism”
Yes, let’s get past the most effective economic system ever devised to … use the wealth it created to steal from the other tribe to bribe people to join your tribe, and thus democratically achieve power and status for your tribe.
“It’s implied it is a specific kind of job, a white, male, bread-winning manufacturing job”
No- it’s not implied. People reflexively add this stuff to their writing now to keep from getting attacked by the Race/Gender Marxists, and it makes them look like the racists. Identity politics is a sickness.
Ignore the fact that Democrat policy has been focused on paying people that don’t work, and paying people that do work more, not giving more people the satisfaction that comes with working.
“He doesn’t mention corporations, or anything relating to class struggle.”
Because economic classes are as made up as races and people aren’t Marxists. Modern Marxists tried to replace economic classes with race and gender.
“runaway inequality”
Aren’t we done with this exaggeration yet?
“We’ll need to do better putting populist energy against the bosses and owners”
Why? What does this accomplish? Why not enable people to become bosses and owners? Konczal doesn’t want people to succeed, because they are not on his team anymore. It points to a huge flaw in the Democrat platform- it’s hard to build around policies for people that don’t work while supporting those that do, and those that want to.
“We need to talk about monopoly power,”
And the biggest kind of monopoly is the monopoly public employee unions have to provide services that our tax dollars pay for. Government enforced monopolies, like the local cable or power company, are the kind people really run into.
“his (white) voters”
not all legal US workers are white.
I am sorry, I can’t take a charitable view of this sort of pedantic, pathetic garbage. It’s pure tribal status demands from him. Not a word about how reducing immigration would put short supply pressure on wages. Not a word about to make US labor more competitive.
We already know we can’t just flip the free trade switch without a plan to handle the transition, but this is the specialization problem you point out so well Dr. Kling. It’s not a matter of abandoning trade, just going into it with an idea of what we are going to do….
No, he isn’t worth reading.
Yes, worth reading, to understand the pathology of elite Democrats.
“Watching Trump with fresh eyes shows that we need to think clearer about how our policy forces people to concede to changing social norms, how to convey the rich as the problem, how to have clear messaging, how to deal with trade, and how to deal with wages and power.”
4 of 5 are needed: 1) changing social norms; 3) clear message; 4) trade; 5) wages & power.
But note #2: “the rich as the problem”
The Democrats ARE the party of rich who are the problem (except maybe the Libertarian Koch brothers, so often Dem demonized), plus the gov’t employees, plus most welfare workers who vote.
The rich got rich from a) providing more goods at lower prices (like Same Walton), or b) cronyism << which both Reps & Dems pay lip service to being against, altho in practice the Dems have been terrible.
(I strongly suspect The Donald will also be terrible on this).
Bad gov't policy, and bad results from that policy, are the problem. Not (necessarily) "the rich".