Transformational Ideas – The Wrongologist

Firing Federal Workers

The Daily Escape:

It should be possible for a non-expert (like any of us) to look at how the Trump administration implements a policy and tell whether they are serious about delivering material results.

One such place is the plan to fire federal workers. As the co-heads of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are promising to slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. Trump and his DOGE sidekicks Elon and Vivek have made a lot of statements about cutting the federal budget by firing huge numbers of government employees.

The duo have cited areas they’d like to target, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And they want to take a hard look at foreign aid, defense spending and the inaccurate payments the government sends to Social Security recipients and others.

But taking that big a chunk out of federal headcount would be a tall order. Much of the headcount money supports mandatory programs, which must be funded in accordance with existing laws. These include Social Security and Medicare benefits and interest on the federal debt.

Based on summary numbers at federalpay.org, most federal employees (around 3 million) are associated with the Department of Defense, which Trump is reflexively likely to support. The next two biggest departments are the departments of Veterans’ Affairs (over 400,000) and Homeland Security (over 200,000). Again, big cuts to these departments are not likely to play well with Trump fans, and the number of Homeland Security employees will need to go up, not down, if Trump is serious about deporting large numbers of people. Federal employees are spread out across every state in the US, with most workers living in the DC area, Texas, and California.

Here’s a chart showing total US government employees by department:

Many federal programs are distributed around the country, especially those that deliver federal benefits (Veterans, HHS). Cutting those jobs will disproportionately hurt employment and government services in low-tax Red states that don’t have much in the way of state-level programs to pick up the slack.

Elon and Vivek can undoubtedly find a few DC offices to sacrifice, but that’s just a stunt. It won’t have a big impact on the US budget. For example, reduce the headcount at the Department of Transportation by 25k jobs that we assume are all 100k/yr. positions saves just $2.5 billion while wrecking the department.

The Department of Education, a favorite target of Republicans long before Trump, has only a little over 4,000 employees. The department has a $45 billion budget, but most of that is pass-throughs to local schools to pay for things like special education. Anything that interferes with those pass-throughs will not ultimately play well in rural areas that cannot fund such luxuries other than with federal dollars.

It is also important to remember that a $100,000 a year job in Washington DC might not be considered all that great, but it looks pretty darn good in Wichita. At the end of the day, the biggest thing the working class cares about is the availability of living wage jobs. Cutting some of the best-paid and most secure jobs throughout the country does not provide an immediate net benefit to the working class. It mostly just provides cover for giving more tax-cuts to the rich.

It may be theoretically possible to improve the economy by making the federal government more efficient, but it is fiendishly difficult to do in practice. The size of the federal work force has held about constant for the last 50 years, despite increasing responsibilities of the government. Downsizing has occurred in the past, (under Clinton), but events like the 9/11 attacks halted this trend due to increased security needs.

Although the bar is set low, the low-hanging fruit doesn’t offer lots of opportunity for Trump and Elon to make real gains on the headcount front in DC. Even though Democrats are not in control of much in Washington, they have a chance in 2026 and 2028 if a big backlash from firing federal workers occurs on Trump’s watch.

We’ll see what happens.

Happy New Year from the Mansion of Wrong to all who celebrate!

The Youth Vote Is Reached By Influencers

The Daily Escape:

Wrongo’s writing about how to Resist the Trump administration has focused on how in 2024 we didn’t target our messaging at the family or at workers. Those lessons give insight into how to persuade voters in 2026 and beyond when Trump promises to be deeply unpopular. A third lesson is how Harris failed to hold on to the youth vote after a promising start.

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 election was Trump’s gains with young voters, particularly young men. To understand the youth vote, we turn to John Della Volpe (JDV), the director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and one of the leading experts on the youth vote in America.

From JDV in the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Democratic Party leaders did not listen deeply to and earn the trust of young voters, who could have helped her prevail in Michigan and other swing states. As a pollster who focuses on the hopes and worries of these Americans, losing to Donald Trump — not once but twice — represents a profound failure. Ms. Harris’s campaign needed to shift about one percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., and other blue places. Think about that: Flipping just one in every hundred voters would have stopped the likelihood of mass deportations, tax cuts for the wealthy, rollbacks of L.G.B.T.Q. protections and the reversal of climate regulations.”

The story from the last six presidential elections is simple: When Democrats capture 60% of the youth vote, like Biden did in 2020 and Obama in 2008 and 2012, they win the White House. Harris garnered just 54%. Looking at CNN’s exit polls, Biden’s 24-point average margin among young voters in the seven battleground states collapsed to just 13 points under Harris, failing to hold 2020 margins among both young men and women.

The most dramatic shift came among the youngest voters (18-24), who swung 22 points to the Right from 2020, while their slightly older peers (25-29) showed more stability.

Wrongo has written before about how to reach the young voter. Reaching them required using different media than reaching the older generations. The young are largely on social media.

From NBC:

“…a new Pew Research Center survey reveals just how impactful so-called news influencers are in the current information ecosystem. About 21% of U.S. adults are turning to news influencers for information, with most saying creators “helped them better understand current events and civic issues,…”

Here’s a chart that breaks down how many people get news from influencers:

The number was highest among young adults, with 37% of people ages 18 to 29 saying they turn to influencers for news.

(Pew surveyed 10,000 adults and analyzed 500 news influencers, which it defined as individuals who regularly post about current events and have over 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube).

The gap in Harris’s youth strategy was a failure to address the 37% where they get their news. And to provide persuasive messaging that resonated with their interests.

At the end of the 2024 campaign, nearly all of Trump’s media interactions were with Right-leaning podcasters with massive social media followings. The GOP has actively tried to support their influencers with interviews and attention. While Kamala Harris did appear on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, most Democrats kept podcasters and news influencers at arm’s length.

From JDV:

“The youth vote that emerged in 2024 defied every partisan prediction and stereotype – it was something entirely new. Generation Z maintained progressive positions on social issues while showing deep skepticism of foreign intervention. They combined concerns about economic inequality with support for free trade. They rated Trump higher on pure leadership while backing Harris overall.”

The vote shift from blue to red in college towns like Ann Arbor was staggering; in some University of Michigan precincts, the vote shifted 20 points toward Mr. Trump in just four years.

From Dan Peiffer:

“Democrats must radically reshape how we think about reaching the public. During the careers of powerful Democratic Party members (especially President Biden and some folks in the Senate), the press was the best way to reach the public….That world is gone, but too many folks in our party still run to CNN or the New York Times when they have news to make.’

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“We need to widen the aperture when we think of the media. We must include folks who don’t have a White House press pass. We must learn to reach the voters who don’t pay attention to traditional news. We have to aggressively support the nascent progressive media ecosystem. Most importantly, we have to recognize that politics in 2024 is information warfare, and we are getting our asses kicked.”

In the campaign’s final weeks, Trump pulled out of interviews with CNBC and NBC News. He turned down a prime-time CNN town hall. In fact, Trump didn’t do a single interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign’s final stretch. No national broadcast interviews, no sit-downs with local TV anchors or newspapers journalists.

The winning candidate ignored the traditional media, focusing instead on partisan media outlets and politics-adjacent podcasts. While this change isn’t new, it seems clear that 2024 was a pivot point for the role of the legacy media in politics.

The biggest lesson is that the youth vote is reached by influencers. Our older-than-dirt politicians need to give way to the younger pols who can survive on social media. We need a generational shift in who communicates. A younger generation of elected Democrats who prefer to fight back instead of curling into a ball and hope Republicans leave them alone.

Think Josh Shapiro, AOC, Fetterman, Katie Porter, Gretchen Whitmer, Abigail Spanberger and Chris Murphy. There are a hundred others but Harris wasn’t one of them.

Podcasts Turned The Tide

The Daily Escape:

Bear Trap Gap, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC – November 2024 photo by Mandy Gallimore

Wrongo had not heard of the Manosphere until the last weeks of the election. It’s an emerging term for disaffected young men who make up one of the voting blocks that carried Trump into office. From Wired:

”You’re going to hear a lot of people attribute Trump’s win to all kinds of reasons: inflation fatigue, immigration fearmongering, President Biden’s doomed determination to have one last rodeo. But he owes at least part of his victory to the manosphere, that amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly the drivers of whatever monoculture remains in an online society that’s long since been fragmented all to hell.”

From Professor Galloway:

“…this election gave us the opposite of the expected referendum on bodily autonomy; it was the Testosterone Election. The only thing I’m (fairly) certain of is what medium played a pivotal role, for the first time, in young people’s decision to violently pivot to Trump: podcasts.”

And that’s what this post is about. How Trump used the podcasting marketplace in a way that Harris didn’t. When a presidential candidate wins, their campaign staff, strategy, and tactics are paraded in the political press as genius. From Kyle Tharp:

“Despite billions of dollars spent each cycle, specific campaign tactics can only make a difference at the margins and in key moments. In such a noisy information environment, it’s difficult to say what, if any, tactics or strategies made the difference for Trump’s win. Politics isn’t science, and insidery persuasion ad testing can sometimes be just as useful as well, vibes.”

Harris Needs To Speak To Gen Z’s Reality

The Daily Escape:

Before tackling the major subject for today, Wrongo wants to briefly cover something you probably missed. There was an abortion ruling in Georgia that overturned the state’s anti-abortion law. The judge plowed new ground with his reasoning: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“While the State’s interest in protecting ‘unborn’ life is compelling, until that life can be sustained by the State — and not solely by the woman compelled by the Act to do the State’s work — the balance of rights favors the woman….Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have….It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another….When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

The ruling is unlikely to be the final word on abortion access in Georgia, since the case will ultimately be decided by the Georgia Supreme Court.

The judge has a solid argument: Why does society have an interest in a viable fetus when we know society won’t lift a finger to financially and medically support the newborn? Why allow the government to intervene at a time when the costs involved for the mother to continue with the pregnancy increase substantially?

Let’s move to a powerful idea that emerged in the VP debate. Wrongo thinks the key to winning the election will be how Harris reaches out to Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). PBS Newshour interviewed Kyla Scanlon, who reminds us that Gen Z now has more people in the workforce than the Boomer generation, but they aren’t faring as well. Scanlon says that Gen Z has had a tough go of it, being essentially born into the tech bubble, growing up during the Great Recession and then graduating or being in college during the pandemic.

From Scanlon: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…I think for a lot of Gen Z’ers, rent is definitely not as affordable as it used to be. Real wages have increased, so [have] wages adjusted for inflation, but rent has increased much more. And that’s sort of the foundation of how everyone experiences the economy. It’s where you live and how you have to pay for where you live….people look at the price of rent, they look at the price of gas, they look at the price of food, they just look at the inflation that we have experienced over the past few years, and it’s sometimes just not enough to even make those real wage gains worth it.”

“It’s also the cost of childcare, eldercare, these things that are economically quite painful, but don’t necessarily show up in traditional economic measurements like GDP….They’re things that are… hidden costs that people experience.”

Scanlon also talked about the negative bias in the media that’s driving how people feel about their economic circumstances. Media sentiment on the economy has trended either skeptical or negative for a very long time, so people are reading negative headlines despite the economists and pundits saying the economy is OK. This is a big disconnect for the younger generations who get most of their news from social media.

In the debate, Vance said a few things that certainly resonate with Gen Z and others. He noted three things in particular:

People are struggling to pay the bills. Times are tough.
The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
We should stop shipping jobs offshore.

It’s hard to disagree with any of that, and Harris shouldn’t cede any of this ground to Trump. How hard is it to build this into your stump speech? She could easily acknowledge that we’re in the midst of a global cost of living crisis. The biggest one in half a century.

But it was left to Vance and Scanlon to say the things that most Americans feel.

Gen Z and their younger cohorts mistakenly think that the economy is a zero sum game, meaning that if China is doing well or immigrants are coming here and finding work, that regular Americans must be doing worse, even though the economic statistics say otherwise.

Harris needs to deliver an economic message that’s grounded in the reality that Gen Z and others are experiencing. It can be as simple as acknowledging what Vance or Scanlon called out as problems for many younger Americans.

All she needs to do is “Just Say It”.

Many of Wrongo’s 12 grandchildren (17-32 years-old) largely feel that the American Dream is beyond their reach. They’re certain Social Security won’t be there for them. Most think that they’ll never own a home.

Why can’t Harris speak to this? Harris and the Dems talk vaguely about “the opportunity economy” but a more emotional and empathetic call out is required. People with economic problems need to trust the head of the ticket, and that trust starts with acknowledging their reality: That things aren’t as good for the younger generations as the economic statistics say they are.

The Dems have an actual track record: Investing in infrastructure and encouraging domestic production of strategic goods. Investment in manufacturing is at an all time high. We’re starting to produce advanced chips in Arizona. Unions are stronger than in recent years.

Harris needs to show empathy for those in Gen Z (and younger) who are not fully participating in the opportunity economy.

It will help her win in November.

A Unifying National Narrative

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Paines Creek, Brewster, Cape Cod, MA – May 2024 photo by Bob Amaral Photography

Wrongo has just started reading Erik Larson’s “The Demon of Unrest”, a history of how Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC fits into the overall story of the Civil War. It has a certain currency, since Wrongo and Ms. Right took a Charleston harbor tour in April that prominently featured Fort Sumter.

Usually, Wrongo would wait until he’s finished it to talk about a book, but today is an exception. In Larson’s note to readers (pg. XI) he starts by saying:

“I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place.”

That is the only time Larson refers to Jan. 6. The book mostly covers the five+ months from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to the shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861. We see that during those five months, amid the building talk of secession, a pro-slavery mob attempted to stop Congress from tallying the vote to elect Lincoln.

Knowing about that should hit very close to home for Americans today.

While there’s nothing explicitly in the book about Jan. 6, the Trump years (down to today) is a kind of spectral presence, not least when Larson describes the urgent concerns of public officials that the electoral count to certify Lincoln’s election would be disrupted, or that the certifications would be stolen or destroyed, and the Capitol attacked by angry Americans.

Sound familiar? The basic question today is similar to the question in 1861: “Can America stay together?” After the Civil War, we never thought that we would have to ask that question again. Today we can add a question about whether a presidential election loser should suffer consequences if they launched a coup attempt to retain presidential power.

It seems clear at this point that to bind the country together, we need to rediscover and commit to a new national narrative, a reaffirmation of America’s Cause.

All of this came to mind when Wrongo looked at a survey completed in April by the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. The Nationhood Lab is working to develop a new narrative of America’s purpose that can be broadly shared.

They asked registered voters what in the nature of the US they most identified with by offering statement pairs about our national purpose, American identity, and the meaning of our past. In each case, one statement was keyed off the ideals in the Declaration of Independence (Civic Ideals) while the other was rooted in characteristics like ancestry, heritage, character, and values (Heritage and Traditions).

Each was presented in a manner that made them sound as attractive as possible. The participants were then asked to choose between civic ideals and our traditional heritage/character. Interestingly, the civic statements proved far more attractive regardless of gender, age, race, education or region, except for Republicans and those who voted for Trump in 2020:

Sixty-three percent of Americans preferred the statement that we are united “not by a shared religion or ancestry or history, but by our shared commitment to a set of American founding ideals: that we all have inherent and equal rights to live, to not be tyrannized, and to pursue happiness as we each understand it”
The alternative, that we are united “by shared history, traditions, and values and by our fortitude and character as Americans, a people who value hard work, individual responsibility, and national loyalty”, was embraced by only 33% of respondents.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said they agreed more with a statement that Americans “are duty-bound to defend one another’s inherent rights” over one that said we “are duty-bound to defend our culture, interests, and way of life” which was preferred by 36% of the survey participants.
Fifty-four percent preferred the statement “Freedom, justice, and equality are ideals each generation must fight for” and that “we must pledge ourselves to make our Union more perfect.” While the alternate statement, “Security, individual liberties, and respect for our founding values are the heritage each generation must fight for” was chosen by 40% of those surveyed.

Below is a chart with the full demographic results of the survey:

These results are in some ways, an antidote to the terrible polling Biden is experiencing. Nothing in the NYT poll should cause panic. While the NYT headline is that Trump leads in 5 states, that’s not actually what their own data says. Trump leads in 3 (AZ, GA, NV) and 3 are essentially tied.

But it’s very hard to believe that a significant share of people in the Nationhood Lab polls that share an overwhelming belief in civic ideals will turn around and vote for Trump in six months.

If you want additional support for the concept that current political polling can’t be relied on, consider the just-concluded Maryland Democratic Senate primary. David Trone, a businessman who put $62 million of his own money into his primary campaign lost to Angela Alsobrooks, Prince George’s County Executive. From Charlotte Clymer:

“There were ten polls on the Maryland US Senate Democratic Primary released this year. David Trone led in seven of them, most by double digits. Angela Alsobrooks led in three, never by more than five points. Alsobrooks just beat Trone by double digits.”

Political polling is massively overrated even if there is some marginal utility to it. If you really want results, you have to get out and vote.

Democrats Are Better For The Economy

The Daily Escape:

Sunset at Fonts Point, Anza-Borrego Desert SP, CA – March 2024 photo by Paulette Donnellon

“If you want to live like a Republican, vote for a Democrat.” – Harry S. Truman

Republicans always claim that they are the Party of prosperity. They pretend that their policies lift everyday workers and their families, what with tax cuts and all, and the public seems to buy it. In polls, the Republicans usually get better marks on the economy than Democrats, often by hefty margins.

But as John E. Schwarz notes in the Washington Monthly:

“What is truly startling is the astonishing degree to which American workers have fared better under Democratic than Republican presidents….Today, the economic data are unambiguous: Whether it’s real wage gains or job creation, average Americans have fared far better under Democratic than Republican presidents.”

From the economist Jeffery Frankel, Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers:

“Since World War II, Democrats have seen job creation average 1.7 % per year when in office, versus 1.0 % under the GOP. US GDP has averaged a rate of growth of 4.23% during Democratic administrations, versus 2.36% under Republicans, a remarkable difference of 1.87 percentage points. This is postwar data, covering 19 presidential terms—from Truman through Biden. If one goes back further, to the Great Depression, to include Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the difference in growth rates is even larger.”

Frankel says that the results are similar whether one assigns responsibility for the first quarter of a president’s term to him or to his predecessor. He also makes the point that the average Democratic presidential term has been in recession for 1 of its 16 quarters, whereas the average for the Republican terms has been 5 quarters, a startlingly big difference.

Frankel asks whether these stark differences in outcomes are simply the result of random chance? But he concludes they aren’t:

“The last five recessions all started while a Republican was in the White House (Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush twice, and Trump)….The odds of getting that outcome by chance, if the true probability of a recession starting during a Democrat’s presidency were equal to that during a Republican’s presidency, would be (1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2), i.e., one out of 32 = 3.1%. Very unlikely.”

I know, nobody said there’d be math in the column. Frankel says that the result is the same as the odds of getting “heads” on five out of five consecutive coin-flips. And it gets worse if we look back further in time:

“A remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president. The odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are even more remote: one out of 100. [That is, 10/2¹⁰ = 0.0098.]”

More math, but you get the idea. If you look at job growth, the results are similar. More from John Schwarz:

“The significant contrast between each party’s record on wage and job growth has held true from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 through to the onset of the pandemic, just after 2019 ended, and after that, starting once again under Joe Biden.”

Here’s a chart from The Economist:

The Republican and Democratic Parties were in the White House for roughly equal amounts of time, 24 years each. During the Republican presidencies they created about 17 million jobs, whereas Democrats presided over the creation of about 60 million. That’s such a big gap that Americans can safely reject claims of stronger economic performance under Republicans.

Schwarz closes with this:

“Democrats have an amazing story to tell in 2024. They should tell it loud and clear.”

Absolutely!

Enough of the hard math. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we try to disconnect from Trump’s Bible sales and from the plan by Senate Republicans to introduce articles of impeachment of the Secretary of Homeland Security when there’s so much truly pressing business for them to consider.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we’re attending to some spring yardwork in the precious time between passing rain and snow showers. We will also find the time this weekend to watch college basketball’s March Madness.

To help you focus on anything but politics on this Easter weekend, grab a seat by a south-facing window and listen to Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere mei, Deus” (Have mercy on me, O God), performed here in 2018 by the Tenebrae Choir conducted by Nigel Short at St. Bartholomew the Great Church, in London.

Allegri composed this in the 1630s, during the papacy of Pope Urban VIII. The piece was written for use in the Tenebrae service on Holy Wednesday and Good Friday of Holy Week. Pope Urban loved the piece so much, that he forbid it to be performed elsewhere outside of the Sistine Chapel.

We all could use a little mercy now, and this is beautiful:

Demographics Is Destiny

The Daily Escape:

Avila Beach, CA – March 2024 photo by Slocoastpix

Wrongo’s back! What did he miss? Nothing? Let’s take a look at global demographics. You’re saying, what, no discussion of Trump’s latest falsehood, or about Biden’s age? Nope, not today.

The facts are that the nation (and the world) need on average, a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman to maintain its population at any given level. This is called the replacement rate. The additional .1 accounts for children who die before they reach reproductive age, or who never reproduce.

Live Science reports:

“Population growth could grind to a halt by 2050, before decreasing to as little as 6 billion humans on Earth in 2100, a new analysis of birth trends has revealed. The study…predicts that if current trends continue, the world’s population, which is currently 7.96 billion, will peak at 8.6 billion in the middle of the century before declining by nearly 2 billion before the century’s end. “

In 1970 the world’s total fertility rate was well above 5 live births per woman; now, it’s about 2.3 and is continuing to fall. Africa’s total fertility rate is 4.1, down nearly half that in the mid-20th century, while Asia and Latin America both have fertility rates of 2.0. North America (including Mexico) is at 1.8, and Europe is down to 1.6 live births per woman.

India, the world’s most populous nation, is at 2.0; China, second most populous, is at a stunningly low 1.1 despite efforts by its government to encourage births. Last year, China reported that its population was 2 million people lower than the year before. The US, third most populous, is at 1.7, and Indonesia, fourth, is at 2.1.

Only when you get to the fifth most populous, Pakistan, does the fertility rate sustain population growth (3.3). The sixth, Nigeria, has a fertility rate similar to what the entire world had half a century ago, 5.1. Only six countries on the planet have higher fertility rates than Nigeria does, while 187 have a lower rate. At the very bottom is South Korea, with a 0.8 fertility rate; if that stays unchanged, it will leave each Korean generation at a little more than a third the size of the generation before it.

Demographers say that sometime in the next two decades, the world will reach its all-time peak human population and begin to see sustained year-over-year contractions.

This will raise serious political issues. First, it means that economic growth will slow in any country experiencing a population decline. Lower growth means incomes will fall. Second, we’re already seeing the effects of illegal mass migration from high-growth/low income countries to the lower growth/high income countries in the developed world. Third, falling populations and better healthcare will make humanity older as a whole and lower the proportion of working-age people, placing an even greater burden on the young to finance health care and pensions.

But this isn’t all bad. Many authors have written about how continued population growth would strain, and if unchecked, ultimately damage the environment and reduce resources required to sustain human life as we know it today. Whenever the dwindling resources discussion takes place, (e.g. America is using up its ground water) or similar, someone says not to worry. They insist that technological progress would soon eliminate our reliance on oil, water (or oxygen). That an even cheaper and more abundant resource will be found to replace the ones we’re wasting. But there isn’t much evidence for that viewpoint.

Think about the equation: In most years the economy grows. Why does the economy grow? Ultimately, because population increases. With every passing year, there are more people joining the workforce, buying assets, making investments, and purchasing goods and services. Population growth is the engine behind economic growth. The smaller the population, the smaller the economy.

To see this more clearly, imagine that a population contraction was happening in the US. There are fewer people who need to buy or rent a home this year than last year; there are fewer people shopping at the neighborhood stores, or working at the shops and factories, and so on. From Nature Magazine:

“Using population projections, we found that, by 2100, close to half of the nearly 30,000 cities in the United States will face some sort of population decline, representing 12–23% of the population of these 30,000 cities…”

What happens to housing prices, rents, business profits, local tax revenues, in that scenario? They go down. And if it weren’t for immigration, western Europe, the US, and other countries would fall into population contraction. And the entire structure of business, power and wealth that depends on economic growth would slowly come apart.

The most potent issue is that birth rates are falling in some countries that until now have produced most of the immigrants. Mexico’s fertility rate right now is around 2.0 per woman, below replacement level. As a result, these days, Mexico sends fewer migrants to the US. Most are migrants that are passing through Mexico from countries that still have a population surplus.

These consequences are already being felt in some countries. And when the world transitions from an economy based on growth to a new economy based on contraction, expect to see rapid political change.

From Scientific American:

“We’re at a crossroads—and we decide what happens next. We can maintain the economic status quo and continue to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet. Or we can heed the warning signs of a planet pushed to its limits, put the brakes on environmental catastrophe, and choose a different way to define prosperity that’s grounded in equity and a thriving natural world.”

The Right-wing nativist movement in the US rallies around an anti-immigration platform. At the same time, they attack women’s reproductive rights. But we’re not going to reproduce our way out of the coming depopulation trend.

The canary in the coal mine is birth rates.

We’re entering an unfamiliar world, one that Wrongo certainly won’t be around long enough to see. But since demographics is destiny, we can be pretty sure depopulation is in our future.

Wake Up To Monday’s Hot Links

The Daily Escape:

Cypress trees, Lake Verritt, LA – November 2023 photo by Rick Berk Photography. Note the egret in the background.

For today’s Wake Up Call, we return to a staple of yesteryear, some hot links that caught Wrongo’s eye over the past few days.

Wrongo isn’t happy with how the Ukraine War has slipped from the consciousness of America’s media and thereby, from our view. Saturday’s WSJ offered an intriguing idea with its column, “Does the West Have a Double Standard for Ukraine and Gaza?” (free link). The article makes two excellent points. First, how these two wars have divided the world. Here’s a view of the division:

From the WSJ: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Outrage and political mobilization have become subordinated to geopolitical allegiances—a selective empathy that often treats ordinary Ukrainians, Palestinians and Israelis as pawns in a larger ideological battle within Western societies and between the West and rivals such as China and Russia.”

Second, the article concludes by saying that the main difference between the two wars is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with all its complexities, lacks the moral clarity of the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. They quote British lawmaker Alex Sobel:

“There is no moral justification for the Russian invasion. Zero. It’s just about Russian imperialism….But in Israel and Palestine, it’s about the fact that there are two peoples on a very small amount of land, and political and military elites on both sides are unwilling to settle for what’s on offer.”

Yes, America may have the moral high ground in both cases, and views can differ on how both wars are being waged. But as the article says in its second paragraph:

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was unprovoked, while Israel sent troops into Gaza because of a mass slaughter of Israeli civilians…”.

Make of the article what you will, but it’s important to think through why you (like Biden) think both wars are morally equivalent.

Link #2 is apropos of the COP28 conference now underway in Dubai. Grist Magazine has an article: “Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms.” As solar energy expands, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it through the grid later. One new idea is to source that battery back up at least in part from used electric vehicle batteries:

“Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80% of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.”

“Before they are disassembled…studies show that around three quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage.”

Apparently there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV battery packs sitting around in the US that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.

Link #3 also shows the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act. Wolf Richter writes that:

“In October, $18.5 billion were plowed into construction of manufacturing plants in the US ($246 billion annualized), up by 73% from a year ago, by 136% from two years ago, and by 166% from October 2019.”

“The US is the second largest manufacturing country by output, behind China and has a greater share of global production than the next three countries combined, Germany, Japan, and India.”

All of this construction spending will take time to turn into production. When these new plants are up and running and producing at scale, manufacturing’s share of US GDP will rise. And much of the new construction is happening in fly-over America, which can use the help.

Finding factory workers in sufficient numbers to support the new capacity will be a key. America has energy in abundance and has robotic manufacturing. So pulling production from overseas with fewer workers needed will be a giant plus for the US.

Link #4 is a downer. Civic Science says in this week’s 3 things to know column, that “Nearly 3 in 10 Americans say they have had to forgo seeing a doctor in the past year due to costs.” Here’s their chart”:

Civic Science says that 12% of US adults have had to miss or make a late payment on medical bills in the last 90 days, a two percentage point increase over September 2022.

A far larger percentage of Americans – 27% of the general population and about 30% of respondents under 55 years old or with an annual household income under $100,000 – report they could not go to a doctor in the past 12 months because they could not afford the cost. Gen Z adults and households making between $25K-$50K are more likely to have held off seeing a doctor due to cost (34% and 31% respectively).

We all know that medical costs have continued to rise and that medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. If Congress was really interested in helping provide for the general welfare, they would deal with this out of control problem.

Time to wake up America! There’s plenty going on that isn’t getting visibility in the mainstream media or on social media. You have to cast your net widely to be on top of the good and bad happening in the US.

To help you wake up, we turn to Shane MacGowan, frontman for the Irish group the Pogues who died last week. He left behind a body of work that merged traditional Irish music and punk rock. He wrote many songs that could easily be mistaken for traditional Irish tunes including this one, which was also used as the music for wakes by the Baltimore Police Department in the great, great HBO series, “The Wire“. Here’s “The Body Of An American” from their 1986 album, “Poguetry in Motion”:

RIP Shane.

When Perception Isn’t Fact

The Daily Escape:

View of fall colors and Linn Cove Viaduct, Banner Elk, NC – October 2023 photo by David Peak

Polls continue to show that people think the economy is terrible and that it’s Biden’s fault. Biden supporters chalk it up to the general unreliability of surveys: Asking people questions and then assuming their answers are accurate or honest. But often, they are not because people find it difficult to say, “I don’t know.”

A second issue is the astounding changes in polling data over the past decade: People’s self-reported emotional state in 2022 was worse than the very worst events of the past few decades. But are things as bad as people seem to think? From Barry Ritholtz:

“From an economic standpoint, things are much better than people seem to be willing to admit: The rate of inflation has plummeted by two-thirds from 9% to a little over 3%, but 60% of respondents believe inflation is “continuing to increase.” The economy is not on the right track, even as Americans’ Net Worth Surged by Most in Decades During Pandemic.”

And the political fallout may be worse than you think. Bloomberg’s recent poll reveals some significant danger for Biden:

“Donald Trump is leading President Joe Biden in several key swing states as voters reject the economic message that is central to Biden’s reelection bid….Trump…leads Biden 47% to 43% among voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The results across those seven states had a margin of error of 1 percentage point.”

Thirteen months before the election, Biden lags Trump in head-to-head matchups in five of the seven swing states. These states will be particularly important in delivering the electoral votes that decide who will be the next president. More from Bloomberg:

“A 51% majority of swing-state voters said the national economy was better off during the Trump administration, and similar numbers said they would trust Trump over Biden on the economy going forward, 49% to 35%. Among independent voters, the chasm on trust to handle the economy is even wider, with a 22-point advantage for Trump.”

Seems like a problem. This is despite the fact that, since 2019, households invested more, home values have jumped, and savings levels have risen. Here’s more from Bloomberg’s polling partner Morning Consult’s Caroline Bye:

“Right now, Biden is not getting any credit for work he’s done on the economy….Almost twice as many voters in the swing states are saying that Bidenomics is bad for the economy, as opposed to good for the economy, which is a really startling fact if you’re the Biden campaign.”

Why is it that people’s perception doesn’t match the data? Back to Ritholtz, who thinks the fault may lie with the media:

“…the 2010s seems to be when they shifted their online presence to a much more aggressive stance. Perhaps most significant is in the way coverage became increasingly “click-bait” oriented via headlines filled with emotionally loaded language….Words that conveyed “Disgust” rose 29% and “Sadness” was 54% higher; words that reflected “Anger” were up 104%. The biggest gain was from perhaps the most emotionally loaded word: “Fear” skyrocketed by a huge 150%. And the words expressing “Joy” or “Neutral?” Down 14% and 30% respectively.”

But it isn’t just the media’s headlines that are hurting people’s perceptions; it’s also the choice of what the media covers that can lead us astray. Ritholtz provides us with a fantastic chart about the causes of death in the US from Our World in Data comparing actual causes of death with what was reported in the NYT:

This shows that the way the media covers deaths this is totally inverted: The things least likely to kill you get the most coverage: The bar chart on the right shows Terrorism, Homicide, and Suicide capture about 70% of the column inches. This is despite the odds that you are most likely to die from heart disease (30.2%), cancer (29.5%), or a car accident or fall (7.6%). The very bottom of the list are suicide at 1.8%, homicide at 0.9%, and terrorism at 0.01%.

So do negatively-laden headlines matched with wildly disproportionate coverage combine to send sentiment readings to places that do not match the reality of the economy or more broadly, the real world around us?

We’ve always had sensationalist journalism. The media’s response to social media is to approach news coverage in a similar manner to social media. Apparently the business plan is: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. It’s important to remember that we are what we eat, including our media diet. It’s making us unhappy, and increasingly detached from reality.

There are a few economic realities that may help explain where the public is right now:

Gas prices are both very volatile, and something that annoys an enormous percentage of Americans, because of the need to spend large amounts of money on a weekly basis to fuel their gas guzzling vehicles.
The housing market is a mess. The median sale price of a house in the USA went from $313,000 in 2019 to $480,000 in 2022. Since then the massive spike in interest rates has reduced median price to $416,000, but coupled with high mortgage rates, this is bad news for people wanting to buy homes in this market.

From a behavioral economics viewpoint, the extent of peoples’ reaction to price inflation may reflect the concept that people are loss averse: that is, they dislike what they perceive as losses more than they like what they perceive as gains.

This means if prices and wages were to increase at the same rate, politicians might assume that people would be indifferent to the nominal changes in prices, since they would be offset by wage increases. But if Americans are loss averse, when prices and wages both go up by a significant amount, (as they have over the past three years), people feel worse, because the “loss” incurred through higher prices feels worse than the “gain” of higher wages.

Time to wake up America! Perception isn’t fact until it is. How Dems fight this will determine the outcome of the 2024 election. To help you wake up, watch and listen to Bruce Springsteen perform “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live”, live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2006. This is one year after Katrina, which Bruce focuses on at the start of the song:

Sample Lyrics:

Well, the doctor comes ’round here with his face all bright
And he says, “In a little while you’ll be all right”
All he gives is a humbug pill, a dose of dope and a great big bill
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Are Drones Replacing Artillery As “The King Of Battle”?

The Daily Escape:

First Snow, Cedar Breaks NM, UT – October 2023 photo by Dawn A. Flesher

America is all a-twitter over whether we are going to continue to fund Ukraine. The basic argument NOT to fund them going forward is how expensive it is, and how the money could be better used at home. Paul Krugman disputes this:

“In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, US aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1% of federal spending (and less than 0.3% of GDP. The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5% of America’s defense budget.”

Wrongo isn’t saying that $77 billion is chump change. But if the MAGA types making the argument to spend it at home instead of in Ukraine would actually agree to increasing social spending with it, they’d have a solid argument. But that’s doubtful. It’s difficult to see them agreeing to spending anywhere near that level to improve the economic distress of America’s middle class and poor.

One thing that thinking about this expense highlights is just how expensive our military hardware has become. Take the F-35 fighter jet, which cost about $80,000,000 each. Air and Cosmos International reports that the maintenance costs for the F-35 are $42,000 per flight hour. And it’s reported that only about 26% of all F-35s are “available” at any point in time, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

It’s maybe an unfair comparison but think about how many drones Ukraine could purchase with one hour’s operating expense of one F-35, or with one of the bombs it carries, which cost about $500,000 each. One hour of F-35 operating expense equals about seven switchblade drones. The smallest Switchblade model fits in a backpack and flies directly into targets to detonate its small warhead. Each F-35 bomb’s cost is equivalent to around 90 drones.

America’s military strategy is based on air superiority, followed by massive bombing sorties and artillery fire. The big lesson in Ukraine is that piloted aircraft have been mostly irrelevant. Russia has many more and newer aircraft, and although they’ve bombed much of Ukraine, they haven’t gained an advantage as a result. Basically they’re using jets to launch missiles from positions beyond the range of Ukraine’s Stinger and Patriot missile systems.

Similarly, Russia’s navy hasn’t been decisive vs. Ukraine. Russia has the advantage at sea, while Ukraine’s ancient fleet is bottled up. But Ukraine is managing to ship (some) grain because the Russian navy is hiding from Ukraine’s cheap naval drones.

Ukraine isn’t breaking through Russia’s lines because its military, like Russia’s military, isn’t fit for the purpose. The artillery-based stalemate on the ground would favor Ukraine if it wasn’t for the in-depth layering of land mines by the Russians in the Ukrainian territory that the Ukies are trying to retake.

The days when Russia could advance into Ukraine under a screen of artillery fire, as they did during the first summer of the war, are over. Ukraine is the one advancing now. From Mark Sumner:

“Over the past several months, Russia tried to make advances at Svatove, quickly capturing a series of villages. That attack fizzled within days, and a week later Ukraine recaptured all the territory it had lost. Something similar happened at Kupyansk, where Russia was reportedly massing over 100,000 troops to drive Ukraine back across the Oskil River. Ukraine is still on the east side of the Oskil, and still in Kupyansk.”

At the moment, Ukraine appears capable of successfully capturing areas it targets and holding them against subsequent Russian assaults.

That’s not to say that the militaries built by the US, NATO, China and Russia are useless. Obviously, they have great value. But it’s clear how capital intensive warfare has become. Ukraine is showing us that there is an evolution in military tactics underway right in front of us.

In Ukraine, drones—both aerial and aquatic—have reached a critical mass. They are demonstrating widespread capabilities that make some traditional weapons systems take on more limited roles. And the immediate future in the Ukraine/Russian war will be drone warfare.

Any military in the world will become somewhat obsolete particularly in a land war, without a robust drone and anti-drone program. All are working feverishly to get there. Except perhaps for Turkey, who’s Bayraktar drones are already exported to both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war.

In Ukraine, drones have redefined the front lines. Before, we generally regarded the front line as the area where the infantry of both sides were engaged. But if soldiers with drones and a smart phone can project force sufficient to stop a tank 4-5 miles away, and then pick up another $1,000± drone and do it again a few minutes later, where’s the real front line?

This and more can be done with precision weapons like HIMARS at even greater ranges. But that requires more expense, more setup, and greater levels of support. There’s a vast logistical train behind a weapon like a mobile HIMARS launcher.

Going back to Napoleonic times, artillery has always been called “the king of battle”, because there’s no real defense against it once it’s firing. But this old artillery officer can tell you that it comes with those pesky logistics problems and much more expense and training.

In contrast, what’s needed to support a DJI quadcopter is in the hands of the operator. Early in the war, drones were performing roles that formerly were played by traditional aircraft. Now they’re also performing the roles of artillery and mortars. They are precision systems that deliver value at not just a lower price, but with fewer burdens of transport, maintenance, and training.

Like Ukraine, Russia has a lot to gain from drones since they bypass the two things that Russia does badly: logistics and training. You don’t need to get a million shells to the front lines if you can get a hundred thousand drones—and better than half of them will hit their target.

Drones can’t replace much more of the military equipment in the field, because the legacy equipment still has a big edge in both range and destructive power. But the cost-benefit ratio of drones is incredibly favorable. As battery technology continues to improve, the destructive power of drones will go up without significant incremental development cost.

What we’re seeing in Ukraine is the 2020s version of the asymmetric warfare that killed us in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Guerilla tactics on their home turf were more valuable than all of our expensive weapons systems.

And Russia is getting their ass kicked by the same kind of asymmetry in Ukraine today.

(Many thanks to Brendan K. for his input to this column)

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Transformational Ideas

Podcasts Turned The Tide

Harris Needs To Speak To Gen Z’s Reality

Democrats Are Better For The Economy

Are Drones Replacing Artillery As “The King Of Battle”?