Saturday, June 11, 2016

Daily Drum Comment

Read this post (it is good)

my comment

I tend to agree with you. I will, in fact argue that your two efforts to find some way to agree with the people who say people are pissed don't work.

1) wages. The hint from 16 data point regressions by political scientists is that it is often the economy stupid, but in particular the change in the year of the election. Real wage stagnation from 2001 on should not cause people to be pissed in 2016 but not in 2012. In fact, real wages have been growing recently. Of course people don't believe that (perceived inflation is always higher than measured inflation) but they should be less sure that their real wages are shrinking than usual not more sure.

2) family structure. Oddly you seem to assume that all adults are parents. Both the suffering single mom and the alimony paying dad are parents. Single adults without children have less reason to be angry (especially if they are living with their partner without formal marriage and uh men). I think the trend you need to look at is the trend in children living with both parents. So I googled and found that that fraction has been increased (a tiny bit) in the past few years. http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=family-structure "The proportion of children living with both parents, following a marked decline between 1970 and 1990, has fallen more slowly over the most recent two decades, dropping from 69 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2012. By 2015, the proportion had actually increased, to 65 percent."

On the other hand, not all "illicit drugs" are created equal. Those numbers include marijuana which doesn't make people pissed maaaaannn . In contrast opiates make people dead and leave people who care about them emotionally devastated. A summary statistic which sums marijuana, crack, meth and heroin is of only limited usefulness. (note that to be honest I included crack use of which I believe has declined).

"OK so what is happening Robert ?" asks no one at all. I'd guess two different things. I didn't expect Trump to be nominated, but I can understand why Republican voters do the opposite of what the Republican elite want -- this is the "wrath of the conned" hypothesis (I'm a pathetic Krugman groupie even when writing about politics).

Sanders is the first left populist oh roughly since Bryant. I have to mention that I have been predicting for decades that pundits and main stream Democrats will be surprised by the level support for class war. I think this was obscured by the illusion that Obama was a leftist (which is odd given how clearly he expressed his moderation in 2008). It is also true that Clinton was an extraordinarily established establishment candidate. Almost all the other main stream Democrats declined to run. That gave Sanders a (near) monopoly on Democratic sufferers from Clinton Derangement Syndrome and Democrats who don't want the party elite to tell them how to vote. Also she is stuck with her husband's choices from the 90s when the party was very different.

Both parties show anger over the power of the donor class (Trump was self funded before he wasn't). This is clearly a strong sentiment. 80% of Republicans want Citizens United to be reversed. I sure can understand this anger, since I share it. It is clear (and demonstrated with regressions with large sample sizes by Larry Bartles and others) that money is political power in the USA. No one ever thought this was OK. The support for the (lying as always) "my own money" candidate and the "$27 dollar average donation" reflect this anger over politics. Even excellent economic outcomes wouldn't make democracy for sale to the highest bidder OK. I'd say this is a strong aspect of the PPP Trump mentioned (pissed public politics).

Finally, I'd advise you to avoid clicking on twitter notifications. One way to avoid them might be to delete all twitter apps and never ever type www.twitter.com in a browser.

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