The politics of distraction: Evidence from presidential executive orders

a column by Milena Djourelova and Ruben Durante for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal


Source: Djourelova and Durante (2019).

It is often suspected that politicians time announcements of controversial policies strategically to avoid public scrutiny.

This column reports evidence from a systematic analysis of executive orders issued by US presidents, showing that their timing is consistent with strategic behaviour. Presidents tend to issue executive orders, and specifically ones that are likely to generate negative publicity, in coincidence with other important events that distract the media and the public.

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I know that this piece is telling many people what they already know but it is good to see the evidence.
I would dearly love to see a similar analysis of political announcements made in the UK.

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Italy And Beyond

Belén Fernández in the Washington Spectator via 3 Quarks Daily by S. Abbas Raza



Once upon a time in Italy, a prominent citizen declared: “It is unacceptable that sometimes in certain parts of Milan there is such a presence of non-Italians that instead of thinking you are in an Italian or European city, you think you are in an African city.”

In case the message was not crystal clear, he then spelled it out: “Some people want a multicolored and multiethnic society. We do not share this opinion.”

The citizen in question was none other than Silvio Berlusconi: billionaire three-time Italian prime minister, intermittent convict, and head of a super-powerful media empire, who, as the New York Times put it in January 2018, has now “cleverly nurtured a constituency of aging animal lovers—and potential voters—by frequently appearing on a show on one of his networks in which he pets his fluffy white dogs and bottle-feeds lambs.”

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Supporting Trump is killing white America

an article by Jonathan Metzl published in RSA Journal Issue 2 (2019) [via Medium.com]



It is said that uncertainty drives voters to support politics that ultimately go against their own interests. What this generally means is that atmospheres of insecurity push voters into backing politicians who play on their fears by offering solutions, not just to pressing real-world issues, but to a perceived loss of status or privilege.

These politicians often find ‘others’ to blame, while promising to help those who feel that the system is no longer working for them. Yet such support represents a double-edged sword: the policies these politicians implement can foment mistrust even further, thereby worsening the very problems they claim to want to fix.

Of late, we have heard a lot about the economically self-destructive nature of policies based on nationalism and xenophobia, and for good reason — isolationism shrinks markets, often to the detriment of workers.

Thus in the US, media is replete with stories about how, for instance, farmers in conservative states continue to support President Trump even after his disastrous trade wars threaten their livelihoods. Meanwhile, in the UK, support for Brexit continues unabated, and even grows, in the face of warnings that a no-deal exit could lead to rising interest rates, lower GDP and economic recession.

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Thomas Piketty Argues — Convincingly — That Parties Across The Spectrum Have Been Catering To Elites

posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily

Crawford Kilian in The Tyee:

Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology won’t be available in English until next March. At 1,150 pages, it will likely be more bought than read. But some of its ideas are already causing a stir, and one insight in particular could explain how the Canadian election will go.

In a 180-page report [Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right] published in March 2018, Piketty documented a remarkable shift in the political “cleavages” of Britain, France, and the U.S. Those cleavages certainly apply to Canada and other nations as well.

“In the 1950s-1960s,” Piketty writes, “the vote for ‘left-wing’ (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. This corresponds to what one might label a ‘class-based’ party system: lower class voters from the different dimensions (lower education voters, lower income voters, etc.) tend to vote for the same party or coalition, while upper and middle class voters from the different dimensions tend to vote for the other party or coalition.”

Having won the Second World War, the U.S. and its allies designed an economic system that would reward workers with job stability and relatively high income. This was not out of the goodness of their hearts; the late British historian Tony Judt argued that Western governments had seen workers turn communist after the First World War, while the middle classes turned fascist. They forestalled a repeat by imposing various forms of social democracy on themselves: health care, respect for unions, greater access to education, high tax rates on the wealthy.

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Does Philanthropy Subvert Democracy?

posted by Morgan Meis in 3 Quarks Daily

Nick Burns at The Hedgehog Review:

There is room for reform in American philanthropy, but circumspection is in order.

Is modern-day philanthropy a disease in the democratic body politic? Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University (not to be confused with former secretary of labor Robert Reich), believes that it is. And Reich is not alone. Near-universal outrage over the recent college admissions scandal has left two black eyes on American philanthropy: one for the role of Rick Singer’s fraudulent 501(c)(3) organization, Key Worldwide Foundation, in bribing several elite universities to accept children of privilege; the other for the universities’ susceptibility to such schemes. Reich’s book went to press well before the scandal broke, but it is hard to imagine a better indication of his central claim: that philanthropy amplifies the power of the few at the expense of the many.

Philanthropy, Reich reasons, is necessarily “a form or exercise of power”. Under the current regime, it is an undemocratic sort of power: Bill Gates’s donations to public schools, for example, give him a measure of curricular control that cannot be wrested away at the ballot box. Though Reich favors greater government oversight and a freer hand for representative bodies to regulate charities’ operations, he goes a step further by arguing for the abolition of American philanthropy’s legal mainstay: the tax deduction.

more here.

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How Wiping Out $1.5 Trillion In Student Debt Would Boost The Economy

posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily

Jillian Berman in Market Watch:



Student-debt cancellation, once viewed as a niche political issue, has now, with loans topping a staggering $1.5 trillion, made it onto the platforms of major presidential candidates.

Since at least the Great Recession a decade ago, borrowers, activists and others have been building a case that erasing debt acquired during students college years is a matter of economic justice. More recently, researchers have found that canceling some or all of the nation’s outstanding student debt has the potential to boost gross domestic product, narrow the widening racial wealth gap and liberate millions of Americans from a financial albatross that previous generations never had to contend with.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both vying for the Democratic nomination for president, are proposing to wipe away some or all of the country’s burdensome debt as a key part of their campaigns. They plan to pay for it — and accompanying proposals to make public college tuition-free — by raising taxes on the wealthy. Warren estimates her plan would cost $1.25 trillion over 10 years, and Sanders says his would cost $2.2 trillion.

Critics question whether those proposals would fix the underlying problems in the way Americans pay for college, and also whether student-debt cancellation would entail a giveaway to well-off families.


More here.


Hazel's comment:
Yes, this is about the USA but the debts of many UK students are astronomical (not, of course, in Scotland), My granddaughter graduated this year and walked into a job the following week, she was lucky in that regard but she has no hope of paying off her student loan and the interest mounts up when you don't/can't pay.

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Why more democracy isn’t better democracy

a post by Robert B. Talisse for the OUP blog


“Torn,” by Sergio Vassio Photography, CC 2.0, via Flickr

Democracy is necessary for a free and just society. It is tempting to conclude that democracy is such a crucial social good that there could never be too much of it. It seems that when it comes to democracy, the more the better.

Yet it is possible to have too much democracy. This is not an anti-democratic contention. Holding that democracy is a crucial good is consistent with denying that more is always better. Democracy’s flourishing requires that we avoid overdoing it. In other words, when democracy is overdone, democracy suffers and politics devolves. Let me explain.

Continue reading please. This man is making sense!

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National borders don't stop in the physical world – they're in cyberspace too Virtual borders have also been subtly dividing the wo

a post by Meicen Sun for the Big Think blog

Virtual borders have also been subtly dividing the world



Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images

Murals and graffitis to protest against the regime in Cairo during the Revolution of 2011, which was organized on the internet.

To the globalists' dismay, recent years have seen the strengthening of national borders. State sovereignty rages on with each vehicle returned and each visa revoked.

But in case you thought the divisions were just physical, virtual borders have also been subtly dividing the world. You land in Country A with every hope for a romantic getaway, only to find that the dating app you had just used at the airport now no longer works on your phone. That's fine. But minutes before your big business meeting in Country C, you fall into a total panic when the cloud drive on which you'd stored all your files in Country B somehow won't open on your laptop. This is bad.

The state's power to disrupt and exclude goes far beyond the flow of people, goods and money. In erecting virtual borders, states are asserting an even more formidable type of power through controlling the flow of information on the internet. Unlike physical borders, virtual borders are at once everywhere and nowhere, and one may never even know for certain whether they exist.

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Deranged

an article by Joan Harvey published in 3 Quarks Daily


Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash

If you can get the old voting against state-subsidized healthcare, and the poor voting in favor of cuts to inheritance tax, then democratic capitalism really is workable after all.
Malcolm Bull

As the objective view of the world recedes, it is replaced by intuition as to which way things are heading now.
William Davies

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
Maggie Smith “Good Bones”

Mark Twain, in his wonderful Letters from the Earth, nails the essence of human unreason. It’s not just the creation story with a talking snake, but how man has conceived of heaven, at least in Christianity.

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Hazel’s comment:
I cannot truthfully say that this is an enjoyable read but it is great pessimism!
It is also worth going to the end and reading the comments.

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8 books to help us re-imagine populism and privilege

a post by Gabriella Baldassin for the OUP blog


“Capitol Building Full View” by “noclip”. Public domain via WikimediaCommons.

The 115th American Political Science Association Annual Meeting’s conference theme is “Populism and Privilege.” It will highlight the self-identified populist movements around the globe, whose main unifying trait is their claim to champion the people against entrenched elites. This scholarship raises vital questions about whether some or all of these self-labeled populist movements represent understandable, legitimate responses to entrenched, self-serving privileges and perspectives of global and national elites or whether they instead represent efforts to preserve privileges of established groups against economic, demographic, and cultural transformations. The meeting will feature writers from around the world, whom collectively or individually speak on pressing issues surrounding this topic.

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Hazel’s comment:
Interesting but too much like hard work for me now that I’m retired and have no need to actually read anything much, Just find trusted sources and tell you, my reader.

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The Debasement Puzzle

posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily

an article by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Everybody knows what real-world political disagreement is like: shouting, name-calling, dissembling, browbeating, mobbing, and worse. As it is practiced, deliberation in actual democracy has little to do with collective reasoning about the common good; it’s instead a constrained, but nevertheless ruthless, struggle for power. Notice, however, that hardly anyone embraces this condition. When people describe democracy in such terms, they are most often complaining. But notice that lamentations over the cut-throat nature of politics make sense as criticisms only against the backdrop of an aspirational alternative. Our forthcoming book, Democracy in a Divided World, develops a democratic ideal worth aspiring to. According to that ideal, democracy is a system where political equals govern together by means of well-run political argument.

This ideal is admittedly distant, but it hasn’t been plucked from thin air. Despite the condition of our democracy, citizens and officials alike hold one another to high standards of civil conduct. When the President characterizes those he perceives to be his critics as “very dishonest people,” he appeals to the public virtue of honesty. Charges of bias uphold the related public virtue of evenhandedness. When one criticizes a news organization for being slanted, one is insisting upon a public virtue of fairness. Note, too, that it is common now for the word “partisanship” to be used as a criticism; when one official charges another with being “partisan,” she is claiming that the other is dogmatically committed to a party line. Such charges uphold the ideal of proper argumentation. The fact is that real world politics, warts and all, is still animated with the aspiration to democracy as a system of well-run argumentation.

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Tackling Corruption in Government

a post by Vitor Gaspar, Paolo Mauro and Paulo Medas for the Public Financial Management Blog

No country is immune to corruption. The abuse of public office for private gain erodes people’s trust in government and institutions, makes public policies less effective and fair, and siphons taxpayers’ money away from schools, roads, and hospitals.

While the wasted money is important, the cost is about much more. Corruption corrodes the government’s ability to help grow the economy in a way that benefits all citizens.

But the political will to build strong and transparent institutions can turn the tide against corruption. In our new Fiscal Monitor, we shine a light on fiscal institutions and policies, like tax administration or procurement practices, and show how they can fight corruption.

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My Generation, Baby: The Politics of Age in Brexit Britain

a post by Laura Gardiner and Torsten Bell for the Resolution Foundation blog

Generational politics is nothing new, but the extent of the profound generational cleavage that has emerged in British electoral politics is novel. The Brexit vote and the 2017 general election put generational politics centre‐stage, eclipsing in some ways the traditionally dominant role of class. Our two main parties now rely on age‐based coalitions of support—on the votes of the young in the case of Labour and the old in the case of the Conservatives. Both are severely constrained in their ability to spread their support to other age groups and, partly as a result, to form a government with a significant majority. This matters for understanding the cut and thrust of British politics today, but its importance only grows when we look ahead.

Both sides may be tempted to view this as an equilibrium they can live with, as Labour believes it has the voters of the future and the Conservatives rely on the age groups most likely to actually vote. But the risk is that this ‘generational lock’ on our politics blocks a much‐needed progressive governing shift for post‐Brexit Britain—a shift to address two crucial, but generationally charged, economic challenges.

First, the need to support young people’s living standards, because the expectation of each generation doing significantly better than their predecessors is not being met for younger cohorts today.

And second, delivering and, crucially, paying for the health and care that a growing older population will need as the large baby boomer generation retires. Such a governing agenda will involve trade‐offs that a generationally polarised politics hinders at best, and blocks at worst.

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‘Playing the victim’ is politically vital and morally serious

a post by Ashwini Vasanthakumar for the Big Think blog

Victims are moral agents rather than moral patients.

Those who speak out against bad treatment are often dismissed as 'playing the victim', accused of dwelling on imagined slights or indulging in an exaggerated sense of grievance. In the face of ridicule or, worse, the threat of violence, it would be easier to keep quiet. And yet, victims of injustice often do speak up: far from any desire for glory, they are often morally motivated, and act from a sense of duty.

Someone who is subjected to demeaning treatment might owe it to herself to protest and to undermine the apparatus of assumptions, stereotypes and norms that enable this treatment. But, importantly, she might also owe it to others who are vulnerable to similar treatment — fellow victims — to resist the injustices they face collectively and repeatedly. This is especially the case for what the US political theorist Iris Marion Young in 2003 called structural injustices, which are perpetuated through seemingly benign institutions, everyday practices, background assumptions and expected behaviours. Even where there is no explicit discriminatory policy, in fact when such discrimination is publicly, repeatedly and earnestly disavowed, oppression on the basis of, for example, class, race and sex prevails.

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Hannah Arendt on why some people are immune to fact-checking

a post by Scotty Hendricks for the Big Think blog

Why do people buy into stories that are clearly lies? Hannah Arendt can help us understand.

• People who don't believe facts or news that disagree with their worldviews can be impossible to deal with, and boy there are a lot of them lately.
• Hannah Arendt tells us this isn't all new; it happened before around 1936.
• It isn't easy to convince a person who has given up on facts that they really should face reality again, but it can be done.

A strange phenomenon has infected global politics. Fact-checking, once seen as a dull but effective way to figure out what is true and what is false, is now an extremely contentious business that often utterly fails to convince people that their views are based on falsehoods.

Most of us who care about being accurate and seeking truth from facts are, justly, shocked by this. How can it be that entire political movements are based around falsehoods and eagerly supported by people who claim all attempts at fact-checking are "fake news"?

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Voter bias and women in politics: Evidence from French parliamentary elections

a column by Thomas Le Barbanchon and Julien Sauvagnat for VOX: CEOR’s Policy Portal

Despite many efforts to close the gender gap, women remain underrepresented in politics.

This column shows that in the case of France, voters’ preferences towards gender shapes political selection and ultimately the gender composition of elected politicians. This suggests that gender parity in policymaking relies on improving the slow-changing attitudes of voters towards male and female political candidates.

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A nation of persuadables: politics and campaigning in the age of data

a post by Josh Smith for the DEMOS blog

A few days ago, I found myself talking to a woman I had just met, running through a list of facts about her family.

The week before, Demos had been challenged by the BBC to find out as much as possible about a volunteer, using only public, online data, and starting solely from their email address and a protected Twitter handle. We weren’t allowed to spend any money, or put more than a few hours into the research. “She doesn’t think there’s much out there”, we were told. “See if you can surprise her.”

It was her mother’s history, gleaned from a public social media account, which first raised an eyebrow from our volunteer. We were able to guess, correctly, which MP she had voted for in the last three elections, and the way in which she had cast her referendum ballot. We walked through the causes she’d supported over the years, and the campaigns she felt most strongly about. The internet knew her current address, the house she had moved there from, and how much the latter had sold for. It knew the shape of her signature, and her husband’s.

This experiment does not replicate the ways in which political parties prepare for a campaign. Even the best funded groups are unlikely to have the resources to conduct their own, detailed searches on every voter. The tools for doing similar work at scale, however, already exist, and are being used in political campaigns.

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Scary but that is the way life is today.

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Strikes and local politics

a column by Jakob Molinder, Kerstin Enflo and Tobias Karlsson for VoX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Conflicts in the labour market are detrimental to economic growth and welfare. Sweden was among the countries with the highest incidents of industrial disputes in the 1920s, but experienced declining levels from the 1930s onward. Using Swedish data from 1919 to 1938, this column shows that towns with both powerful unions and strong Social Democratic presence experienced labour market peace. The results point toward the importance of labour market peace for strategic political reasons, rather than to politicians offering tangible concessions via municipal governmental power.

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Money and monetary stability in Europe, 1300-1914

a column by K. Kıvanç Karaman, Sevket Pamuk and Seçil Yıldırım-Karaman for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

There is a notable lack of long-run analyses of monetary systems and their stability. This column addresses this gap by looking at the monetary systems of major European states between 1300 and 1914. The evidence collected suggests that, despite many switches between standards and systems, fiscal capacity and political regimes ultimately shaped patterns of monetary stability. Theories of monetary stability that rely on the mechanics of monetary systems perform poorly when such a long-run perspective is taken.

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Hazel’s comment
Even if you have little or no interest in money or monetary stability you will find some fascinating graphical illustrations of devaluation and inflation in this column. I spent far more time than I should have done actually reading.
If I did that for all my posts I would never get anything posted.

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Should Politics be taught within secondary school?

a post by Elena Jones for the OUP blog


Classroom by Wokandapix. Public domain via Pixabay

Despite the higher youth turnout than originally anticipated, it has been estimated that around one third of millennials did not vote in the EU Referendum. Whilst the outcome of the EU referendum was disappointing for the majority of Millennials – statistically – if everyone within the 18-24 age category had participated in the EU referendum (and voted remain) the 3.78% required to equalise the leave vote would have been met, and the UK would have likely remained a member of the European Union. These statistics reveal that a large majority of young people are not realising their political power. So why did so many choose not to participate?

The truth is that many millennials have said that they did not understand the concept of the European Union and what it meant for the UK to leave it, evidenced by the tumult of bizarre notions which flooded social media. These misconceptions demonstrate that whilst our democracy gives people the right to vote, our education system is not reflective of this right. That is not to say that millennials were the only generation lacking an understanding of the EU; Google searches about the EU peaked following the referendum. But could a better understanding of the European Union, and political affairs in general be achieved if Politics were taught more widely in schools? Would more young people be willing to engage with politics?

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