Category Archives: culture

Some Thoughts on the Election

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Here, I’m riffing off some Wall Street Journal articles about the election outcome.

Vice President Kamala Harris lost her bid for the White House on Wednesday despite spending most of the funds on an expansive ground operation, staffing and a flood of ads. President-elect Donald Trump won a second term with half of what Harris’s campaign spent.

Maybe there’s something to a businessman’s understanding of expenses and budgeting. It’s also true that the performance of the administration of which Harris was such a vital part was a serious handicap that money had a hard time papering over.

The experts said the economy was doing great. Everyday Americans disagreed.

Everyday Americans, us average Americans, aren’t as dumb or ignorant as the Left, or the press, or the Progressive-Democratic Party insist that we are. And we got tired of their gaslighting and insults.

On Tuesday night, wealthy Democratic donors and operatives, who had been getting positive updates from the campaign throughout the day….

This is either the Progressive-Democrats lying to their own donors or a measure of their own incompetence in reading the voters and reading the incoming returns. Both of those are well within the performance bounds of Party. Party has, after all, been lying to us all about our economy for nearly four years.

In laying blame for Harris’s loss, Democrats were quick to point to Biden’s decision to run for re-election two years ago and the ensuing efforts to quash any dissent from those who thought it was a bad idea or sought to challenge him.

This, also, is typical of the Left and of Party: it’s always someone else’s fault. This part is sort of recognized, if broadly tangentially (yeah, yeah, math majors), by Chris Kofinis, former chief of staff to Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV):

The elites of this country alienated voters everywhere because they didn’t want to hear what working- and middle-class voters were screaming for four years—focus on us and our problems, not your agenda to destroy Trump[.]

Indeed. They’ve—all three: Party, Left in general, and press—have been solely focused on Trump is bad, not Trump policies are bad and Party’s are better. All three, further, ignore working- and middle-class voters because us average Americans are too ignorant and stupid to be worth listening to.

And one overall riff, this on the polls and the pollsters who make them. Once again, as has been the case for the last several election cycles, both Presidential and intermediate, the polls were widely off, especially on the size of the leads and of the victory margins, but also on who would win, though they did get one right. Take the just concluded election as a typical (I claim) example.

The contest was balanced on a knife’s edge, with a (very) slight advantage to Harris. The seven battle ground States each hung on a knife’s edge, also. That’s according to the polls. In the realization, Trump won a decisive victory, and he won solidly five of the battle grounds. The remaining two (as I write Thursday), Nevada and Arizona with 92% and 71% of the votes counted, respectively, have Trump leading by 4 percentage points and 5 percentage points, respectively. If the battle grounds truly were on a knife’s edge, it would be reasonable to expect anywhere between 3 and 5 of them to go to one candidate with the remaining going to the other. The likelihood of all 7 of them going to one candidate (assuming, for this simplified overview, that “knife’s edge” means a 50-50 chance) are a skosh under 0.8%—1 chance in 12,800. Even the likelihood of 5 States going one way (the upper bound of my middle range) is only 3%.

These errors, though, have been repeated over the last several cycles. The likelihood of accurately done polls being so consistently wrong in the same way is even smaller. That strongly suggests either (or both) of two things to me. One is that the pollsters creating these polls are utterly incompetent. They’ve had all these cycle with which to figure out what they’re getting wrong in their poll construction and execution, and they still haven’t succeeded.

Alternatively, the pollsters are dishonest and are focusing their efforts on getting a particular outcome to their surveys so as to construct a narrative favoring one candidate/party over the other rather than simply reporting a potential narrative as told by the pollees in their aggregate.

Either way, it’s become clear that no one with two neurons to bump together into a ganglion can take the pollsters’ products as anything more serious than mindless entertainment.

News Bias

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The Washington Post has a problem, and it seems to stem from the paper’s (owner Jeff Bezos’) decision to not endorse a Presidential candidate this year or, so far, in any subsequent election cycle..

The wave of customer defections after the controversial decision…has further eroded an already shrunken base of Post subscribers and heightened feelings among some staff that the paper faces an existential crisis.

Amanda Morris, WaPo “disability reporter:”

Please don’t cancel your subscriptions. It won’t impact Bezos—it hurts journalists and makes another round of layoffs more likely[.]

In keeping with guild solidarity, players from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others chimed in, with their precious #WhyISubscribe.

250,000 have become ex-subscribers since The Decision; that’s 10% of the paper’s subscriber base.

Since the editorial room had intended to endorse Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, it seems likely that the vast majority of those cancelations are by the paper’s strong Left readers.

This would seem to show how politically unbalanced the WaPo‘s readership is. That, in turn, seems a strong indication of how biased the paper’s news room has been.

That bias is executed by the news room writers’ and editors’ decisions of which facts to include and which to omit in their news writings, what and how much personal opinion to include or try to sub rosa embed in the pieces, what stories they choose to write and what stories they choose to downplay or outright spike.

Maybe if those writers and editors can learn to be objective and balanced in news pieces and carry out their opining on the opinion pages, or if Bezos can replace his current news room with a crew of writers and editors who will and who will back up their anonymous sources with at least two on-the-record sources (which used to be a journalistic standard of integrity), the paper can begin to start being a credible source of actual news.

Economies, Culture, Regulation

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Greg Ip had a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal touting the strength of our economy, especially in comparison with the European Union’s continental economy. Among other points, he had this regarding the difference between our economy and the EU’s, and this is what I want to focus on in this post.

More important is the role of technology. No EU company worth more than 100 billion euros, equivalent to $108 billion, “has been set up from scratch in the last 50 years,” while all six US companies worth more than $1.08 trillion were created in this period, Draghi said. America’s companies are also faster to adopt technology such as artificial intelligence, which explains much higher productivity in professional services, finance, insurance, and information technology services.

Ip missed, though, that that difference is from a combination of things that are not economic, but things that make an economy more or less capable, that make rapid technological advances possible. Those things are culture and the regulatory environment that puts bounds on what economic players are allowed or required to do.

Our economy has, until relatively recently, players much more willing to run risks and accept mistakes and failures on the way to grand success. That risk-taking runs the gamut from guys like Elon Musk (an outlier, to be sure, but he’s not that far extreme, except in the venues in which he’s chosen to operate) to heads of families striking out, many even before they have families to head, to start their own businesses, risking everything they have just to get started.

The EU has no one willing to run the risks an Elon Musk does. Even the Fiat acquisition of Chrysler was achieved less by a risk-taking entrepreneur leading Fiat than it was an acquisition supported, indirectly, by the US government and EU regulations, since the combined company would be governed by EU rules. Neither do EU individual families start new businesses at anything close to the rate American families do: they’re much more used to government presence in their lives and to reliance on government for their business success.

The EU’s regulatory environment is much more restrictive than ours, as well, for all the recent explosion of regulations governing our business behavior.  EU’s more socialist-in-effect governance that tends to cap performance so the laggards—for whatever reason they lag, good or ill—can keep up. EU regulations are especially restrictive regarding areas that our nation would consider competition and the outcomes of competition.

Gains from a willingness, or government limits on willingness, to run risks aren’t as available to EU economic actors the way they are here.

Teachers Union Against Minority Child Education

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That’s the outcome of Nebraska teachers union opposition to Nebraska’s scholarship program to support families with children wanting to attend private schools, a program administered by Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska.

The union, through the Save Our Schools organization that the union backs got onto next week’s general election ballot a referendum aimed at repealing that scholarship program.

Currently, some 1,500 children benefit academically and their parents benefit financially from those scholarships. Of those families,

half…have household income below 213% of the federal poverty level, the measure used to determine eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Some 40% are nonwhite and 11.5% have special needs.

(For 2023, the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four was $30,000. 213% of that works out to a skosh under $64,000.)

But the teachers union says to Hell with those minority children and those special needs children. Their union-controlled public schools are the only schools acceptable. It doesn’t matter that those public schools are broad failures.

A Tough Move to Make

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The headline poses the question:

Harris Doesn’t Campaign on Her Gender. Is That a Sign of Progress?

Hillary Clinton did, overtly and zealously, when she ran for President on the Progressive-Democratic Party ticket in 2016. That didn’t run out well for her, but her failure was far more a result of her being a lousy and openly arrogant candidate than it was a function of her running on her sex.

Harris’ decision to eschew running on her sex could have been a sign of progress as the headline alludes. She also isn’t campaigning on her race, for all that there was a brief back and forth with former-President and Republican Presidential campaign over her variously self-identifying as black [via Jamaica] or Indian, and that could have been a sign of progress, also.

However.

Against the backdrop of Progressive-Democrat Joe Biden’s having selected her as his running mate explicitly because she was black and a woman—what many termed, for good or ill, a diversity hire—either of those would have been a tough sell to make independently of her origin as Vice President.

The touting would have been too likely to have been taken as sexist and racist—just as Biden was accused for his selection criteria.