Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Case for the TPP
It’s a measure of the lunacy of this election that neither candidate is robustly defending the TPP, and the task of making the case for it has been offshored, so to speak, to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong:
His comments about Japan are noteworthy. If the agreement fails, he argues, US credibility will be severely undermined:
I think in terms of America’s engagement of the region, you have put a reputation on the line. It is the big thing which America is doing in the Asia Pacific with the Obama administration, consistently over many, many years of hard work and pushing. And your partners, your friends who have come to the table, who have negotiated, each one of them has overcome some domestic political objection, some sensitivity, some political cost to come to the table and make this deal.
And if, at the end, waiting at the altar, the bride doesn’t arrive, I think there are people who are going to be very hurt, not just emotionally but really damaged for a long time to come. Mr. Abe, for example, several of his predecessors thought seriously about and decided not to participate in the TPP. They came very close. They prepared the ground, they walked away. But Mr. Abe came through and decided to commit. Why? Because he wants to help. He wants his country to benefit and to open up its markets, and this is one way to do it.
It hurts your relationship with Japan, your security agreements with Japan. And the Japanese living in an uncertain world, depending on an American nuclear umbrella, will have to say: on trade, the Americans could not follow through; if it’s life and death, whom do I have to depend upon? It’s an absolutely serious calculation, which will not be said openly, but I have no doubt will be thought.
This is the one thing Obama really got right — but now we have not one, but two candidates running against free trade.
Have I mentioned recently how dispiriting I find this election?
Published in General
Health Care and College have outpaced inflation, College is not the value it used to be, and lots of people have argued its value down. Housing is more expensive. It is harder for my clients to obtain housing than it used to be. Just because some people live in bigger homes, my clients struggle to rent apartments. The rising tide has not lifted their boats.
Americans of this generation are posed to have a decrease in their lifespan. Heart disease, diabeties and obesity are all going up. I don’t know how you think Americans are getting more healthy.
Finally, you can point to all the rosy stats you want too, but the average American feels less secure. What is your answer to that? What the middle class sees is that the rich get richer, elites they do not trust make policy they do not understand, and their own sense of security goes down annually. Parents fear their children will not even match their standard of living, much less exceed their own (In the 30’s failing to improve standard of living for one generation was called “The Great Depression”).
I think today is the best time to live in all sorts of ways, and I even did a post about it. AND if you want to sell things like TPP, you have to address that people feel insecure, that the system is rigged against them, and that their way of life is being destroyed.
And frankly, neither party addresses those fears.
This is true; healthcare and college now take up a larger portion of our wealth. Food takes up less, because we’re wealthier (in part because we have more education).
Do you have stats to back the former claim up? It’s certainly true that there’s a lot of complaining.
The number of people who fail to find housing has fallen. It’s possible that there is some point on the income spectrum where things have not improved, but every demographic I’m aware of has more housing space. What is the characteristic of your clients that sees them doing poorly? Do you have any statistics that support your anecdotal evidence?
Well, maybe. That’s been predicted before, and it’s always been wrong.
Life expectancy is the best overall measure for that, and it’s pretty clear. Where the US healthcare system particularly shines, though, is in quality of life outcomes. No one else gets hip replacements and prosthetics as quickly and of as high quality.
This is true, although it’s not as unusual as people often suggest. Quite frequently eras of growing prosperity feature widespread discontent.
I can see that there’s political advantage to catering to people’s delusions. It’s one of the reasons I don’t think I’d be a good candidate for office. I agree that there’s a lot of questions over the best ways to sell this stuff, and that I’m not going to be the right person to help you out in questions about perception.
You had me right up until you used the term “catering to people’s delusions”. I don’t think people feeling insecure in 2016 is a delusion. I know too many people hurt in the housing market and banking crash. Maybe you think they just all imagined losing their homes to the bank?
As long as you, and people like you, trying to sell something, think of ordinary Americans as morons, then don’t expect to sell much of anything. Your one sentence just set back two days of work on the TPP you had done with me.
If they feel like things could be better, that’s not delusional. If they believe that they have personally suffered some wrong, that’s not delusional. If they believe that America is poorer, suffers more crime, is less literate, etc. etc. etc., then they’re under a mistaken impression. It’s a common mistaken impression, and I understand that both parties have to do better at catering to people under it. I just don’t think that I’m particularly good at seeing how to do that (as this recent exchange shows!) If I want to explore how, for instance, housing supply levels have impacted Americans there are statistics that the HUD prepares that help me to understand the issues involved. If I want to explore how Americans perceive the supply of housing to have affected them, I’d need a whole different skill set.
I don’t think that ordinary Americans are morons. More specifically, I don’t think that you’re a moron. I disagree with you about the degree to which Americans suffer from a lack of housing as compared to the supply of housing ten or twenty or thirty years ago. I think that there’s a variety of psychological effects that make nostalgia common and that there are partisan effects that exaggerate this during periods of opposition power, but it could also be the case that there’s something unusual about the circumstances of your clients; I’m not pretending to know why your experience might be different from that of the country as a whole. In terms of the general public, there’s a whole industry of anger peddling. Happily, most Americans seem to pull through and support sound policies.
Persuading you and persuading the masses is a different thing. If you and I disagree about an issue, then I’ll bring arguments for my position and listen to your arguments for your position. If I discover that many Americans believe, eg., that massive spending on foreign aid is why the government is going bankrupt I’ll make some arguments on occasion, but I’m not generally going to be as interested in counter-arguments. It’s not that they’re dumb, just that experience has told me that they will have been misled in a convincing manner and hence that this isn’t likely to be terribly productive (which isn’t to say that political discussion with that person won’t be, but I should probably find a different topic of political conversation). There have been moments in knocking on doors that I’ve heard people make persuasive cases for things that I haven’t believed, but they’re not as common as one in a thousand (far more often they raise issues and ask questions to which I don’t know the answer and will go and research). If you tell me that something I say is a problem for you, then I’ll be interested in what I should do to make our conversations more productive. If you tell me that something is a problem for persuading Americans at large, I’ll be pretty comfortable with my lack of persuasive impact on America (on this issue; there are issues where I am interested in working with the public).
Wait you do think crime is up since BLM? That is a lie?
Using the word delusional is far more incendiary than mistaken.
If the people have been misled it is because no one is telling them the truth. Who’s fault is that if not the elite? Who’s fault is that if not the very people at your conference?
Unskilled men are not finding jobs. I have seen that fact on NRO. Do you now say they are lying?
Sure, there’s a small recent uptick. Still down on where it was when Obama took over, way down from when Bush took over, down further still than when Reagan did.
That’s fair.
I don’t think it’s right to blame Mark Levin and Sean Hannity on the elite. Heck, there aren’t many voices that percolate down that are controlled by the elites. That said, elite Democrats do tend to talk America down. Elite Republicans tend to be more upbeat.
Compared to what? There are a lot fewer unskilled men. As you extend qualifications downward through society, you’d expect a reduction in outcome statistics for the average unskilled man. That’s somewhat offset for unemployment purposes by the greater ease with which they leave the labor force. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate for unskilled men is 6.1%, significantly lower than the general average rate through the Reagan years and a figure that would generally be considered pretty positive for that demographic on a global basis. I don’t know what the specific claim made on NR was, but there are many claims along those lines that would certainly be true; “things are better from that perspective that during the Reagan years” and “life is easy for people in this situation” are very different statements.
I have seen article after article, on places like NRO, talking about how we have had a “mancession” and that unskilled men are the most hurt. I have seen in places like NRO that the “real” unemployment numbers are much higher. If I cannot trust NRO to be telling me the truth, then, really, there is no hope at all for me to understand what is going on “for real”.
From The Daily Caller in 2013: http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/27/male-african-american-unemployment-is-over-50-percent-among-dropouts/
Is this for Dropouts and not all unskilled men? Yes, but Still, I doubt in 3 years time this has even gotten close to the average.
There was a time when men could get work with their hands. That time is ending. We can say it is a good thing all we want, but who is speaking for these men, failed by our education system? How are the supposed to earn a living, if anything they might have done job wise is shipped to another county.
Look, I want to get every cheaper stuff and I get free trade. But, to sell this stuff, there has to be valid answers to these questions.
Thank you for acknowledging the language.
That’s true. The recession mostly impacted the private sector and women are disproportionately employed in the public sector. The Stimulus mostly helped women. After that you had articles complaining about the recovery mostly helping men. Both were true. Today, men have an unemployment rate that is 0.3% higher than women’s. That’s not equality, but while “hardest hit” is technically accurate, they’re not much harder hit now (they were a few years ago).
I tend to think the alternative employment numbers are somewhat gimmicky, but they vary in their legitimacy. If your stat counts 90 year old men who are not capable of work and do not want it as “unemployed”, it doesn’t seem better to me than the stat that most people use. Stats that are less ambitious in their efforts to get huge numbers often have useful insights.
I think that the key with this figure is counting part time work as “unemployment”, which is why no dincriminating news outlet carried this as the story. The HuffPo and DC did, and it’s mildly surprising that the Daily Mail didn’t, but it’s not a terribly serious source. Look at the table I linked to earlier and you’ll find that unskilled African Americans have an unemployment rate of 10.8%. That’s not good, but it’s not a similar figure to the stuff that Sanders and people wheel out by mislabelling statistics.
There have always been men failed by the education system, but there have never been as few men illiterate as there are today. The replacement of work is far more by technology than trade; America manufactures more than ever, but does so more efficiently. The stats are even more extreme for America’s amazing agricultural production, which feeds a good chunk of the planet on a tiny portion of American’s labor. When America freed most Americans from work in the fields, that didn’t mean that most Americans became unemployed, and the current system doesn’t leave most of those replaced by technology unemployed. Instead, we have massively more people in healthcare, leisure, and education, and a decent number of jobs in healthcare and leisure are unskilled. Retail, too.
Trade makes most Americans much, much wealthier. Sometimes it does this directly; Wall Street and Silicone Valley are rich because America is the world’s primary tech and finance hub for high value work, America is a net exporter of Hondas, etc. Sometimes it does so indirectly through the market. American education thrives as an industry both because it attracts more foreigners than anywhere else, and, more importantly, because Americans are absurdly wealthy which means that they spend more of their resources on education (which is, in turn, partly why they then earn more than others). Likewise with healthcare; if you have a job looking after elderly people in an assisted living home, you have your job in part thanks to trade. Sometimes it does so indirectly through government. Part of the reason that outcome metrics for poorer Americans have been so good for the past few decades is that America has been able to spend so much money on Medicaid, the EITC, and such, and part of the reason that middle income Americans have done so well is that their government runs on taxes from the high value industries. That makes it easier for the businesses that employ poor and middle income Americans, too.
James,
It sounds like you are saying that, economically, most people are doing better today than they were a decade ago, despite anemic growth. The poor mood is due only to fear mongers looking to gather power.
The problem is, I have watched affordable housing go away in my community. I have seen people that I know lose their homes when the economy collapsed. I know students with 6 figures of student loan debt it will take years and years to pay off.
I know that for me personally, I did not feel financially secure until I was making well north of the Median American income.
I just cannot square the picture you paint about how great everything is today, Morning in America, if you will, with the mood of the nation. I also do not believe that the right track/wrong track numbers show so many people think we are headed in the wrong direction thanks to a couple of conservative talk show hosts. Or even a dozen.
People do not feel secure, and they do not feel safe.
I accept that your community may have seen a loss of affordable housing; I have statistics for the country as a whole, but there’s a lot of diversity in America. I also accept that you know people who suffered in the recession. It has always been the case, though, that recessions have hit some people hard. Cutting down on trade would not end the economic cycle of boom and bust. In particular, the Community Reinvestment Act and mistakes in the creation of complex derivatives would not have been prevented by the application of tariffs on China. I’m not saying “nothing bad happens”, but “less bad happens”.
I’m not sure I follow; are you presenting the fact that students could be loaned six figures with reasonable security as a negative indicator for the economy? It’s certainly true that there are many people out there with substantial student debt.
Sure. Do you feel like you’d have been more secure if you’d reached the Median American income 30 years ago? On what basis?
Do you at least accept that they’re safer than they used to be? Less crime, fewer fatal car accidents, less in the way of just about all causes of sudden death and dismemberment?
Sure they are safer. I am not sure they are more secure financially. The complaint is not that people get to go into debt, but that college is so much more expensive.
It basically sounds like you are saying most everyone is better off, and thinking otherwise is a mistake, according to your statistics. So if someone feels less secure, they are just mistaken, or they are no different than someone at median income 20 years ago.
Am I getting that right?
As with housing, college is more expensive, but the number of people who manage to afford it has increased and those who can afford it are more likely to buy more of it. It’s even more dramatic with education; Americans have always had more housing than just about anyone else, but having more education than any other country is relatively recent.
The diversity of outcomes is much wider than the difference, so there are certainly individuals who are dramatically worse off than they were. If you think that you’d have been better off in the 1980s, or in any other time period, you have a tough counter factual if you want to prove things, but your intuition may be right (this gets less likely the further back you go); likewise if you think any given individual would have been. If you think the average person is less well off, I believe that you’re mistaken. As you’ve noted, the positive differences, while still present, are weaker for men than for women; although male education is more widespread, men have bigger houses, longer lives, and such, the difference in female quality of life, marriage excluded, is dramatically bigger. The same is true for minorities and whites; all groups got better off, but some more than others.
Also, I should have done more to note the difference in marriage; while divorce has come down again, the rate at which Fishtown marries has been declining, and that’s simply awful. Likewise, while successful America goes to church, parts of America have seen substantial declines. Those two outcomes stand out as being genuine exceptions to the mostly positive picture; I think I didn’t mention them because they’re not really trade issues. So far as I know, the Chinese provide no reason for a lack of belief. There’s a few folks who are unmarried because the person who would otherwise have married them married a foreigner, but I don’t think that this provides a net reduction in the marriage rate. I married a foreigner, but if you knew how irritating I was in person you’d appreciate that Mrs. Of England was improving the wellbeing of the average American by saving an unlucky woman from that life. ;-)
Also, I should note that security is a slippery term. Also there are some bad outcomes one might worry about that are not core to most people’s concerns, but that are to some. The prison population has been falling throughout Obama’s administration, for instance (thanks in part to Bush era policies; the rate was already declining and declined through a recession that would normally see spikes in unrest), but it’s still higher than it was in 2000, and way higher than in the Reagan era. People often talk about feeling insecure when they’re in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, and that shows up in polls about security because we have more of those now (although, at the same time, people are less bothered than they used to be). Similarly, LGBT issues and others represent changes that can reduce one’s sense that one understands the world, and hence security. On the plus side, we don’t have serious inflation any more, and inflation messes with people’s minds in surprisingly profound ways. Also, in addition to people often talking about feeling less secure from crime in an era of unprecedented safety from it, some research suggests that concern about terrorism and war are particularly high in the post 9/11 era, despite the rationality of concern being lower than in the Cold War era, when wars produced far larger casualties and the threat of nuclear obliteration loomed larger.
Sorry about the length; it’s been a crazy week.
tl;dr: Yeah, sorta, but not for individuals.
Oh, and easier access to drugs is a problem for some people. If you’re in that category, some of the developments of the last decade will likely not have been good.
You really did not answer my question:
Labor is essentially irrelevant as anything other than a conduit for continual cash infusions into the demonrat party. This is why so many union members are supposedly supporting Trump. As a former member of the steelworkers union I understand why. I still recall the day we got a response back about a complaint made by both the company and the union about dumping, signed by both Bill Clinton and the local democrat rep, John Dingell. It boiled down to a common two-word expletive.
It seems to me that these areas actually voted for Republicans, which is different.
Perhaps, but I’ve never seen anything from them, and I haven’t heard tell of public citizen for many years. I’ve grown to loath one certain plutocrat from Janesville, because of his witless globalism and the government wall built around his house, but that’s another topic.
Shrug. Ok.
Sure. I’m not saying that their affection for trade is the reason that manufacturing areas vote as they do, but, as I say, I spent a lot of the week being told that mill workers all had opposition to trade as a key value, and that’d been bugging me.
Ryan might be witless and walled, but he doesn’t have as large an activist budget as trade opponents have.
Just about every demographic is better off, but that’s not the same as every individual being better off.