With many still worrying about the policy outcomes of Trump’s protectionist rhetoric, here’s yet another study demonstrating the importance of trade liberalization. From the abstract:
This paper estimates the effect of trade policy during the Great Liberalization of the 1990s on innovation in over 60 countries using international firm-level patent data. The empirical strategy exploits ex-ante differences in firms’ exposure to countries and industries, allowing us to construct firm-specific measures of tariffs. This provides a source of variation that enables us to establish the causal impact of trade policy on innovation. Our results suggest that trade liberalization has economically significant effects on innovation and, ultimately, on technical change and growth. According to our estimates, about 7 percent of the increase in knowledge creation during the 1990s can be explained by trade policy reforms. Furthermore, we find that the increase in patenting reflects innovation, rather than simply more protection of existing knowledge. Both improved market access and more import competition contribute to the positive innovation response to trade liberalization.
The “Great Enrichment” that has taken place over the last two centuries is due to what economist Deirdre McCloskey refers to as “market-tested innovation and supply“(or market-tested improvement). If we are interested in the continual enrichment and betterment of the world, we should be fully supportive of international trade.
Many complain that refugees are a financial burden, draining the host country’s economic resources. But new research casts doubt on this assertion. From the abstract:
The number of refugees displaced by civil conflict or natural disasters is on the rise. Economic impacts of refugees on host countries are controversial and little understood, because data have not been available and the question of refugee impacts does not lend itself to conventional impact evaluation methods. We use a unique Monte Carlo simulation approach with microdata from refugee and host-country surveys to obtain the first estimates of refugee camps’ impacts on surrounding host-country economies and to compare impacts of cash versus in-kind refugee aid. An additional refugee increases total real income within a 10-km radius around two cash camps by significantly more than the aid the refugee receives. Impacts around a camp receiving in-kind (food) aid are smaller.
This coincides with the findings of otherstudies. All of this makes me even more proud of my church’s “I Was A Stranger” initiative.
The outcome of the election still has many rocking. I had taken up reading GMU law professor Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter the week prior to the election, but finished a few days afterwards. What a timely read. Somin puts forth a wealth of evidence that political ignorance is pervasive among American voters. For example:
Prior to the 2014 elections, only 38% of Americans knew that Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, while the same amount knew that Democrats had the majority in the Senate (pg. 17).
In late August 2013, 44% of Americans did not know that the Affordable Care Act was still the law (pg. 18).
In September 2014, only 20% of Americans knew that the federal government spends more on Social Security than on foreign aid, transportation, and interest on the government debt (pg. 18).
In August 2012, 43% of Americans had never heard of Paul Ryan and only 32% knew he was a member of the House of Representatives (pg. 18).
A 2014 poll found that only 36% of Americans could name the three branches of the federal government (pg. 20).
A 2002 study indicated that 35% of Americans thought Marx’s “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” was in the Constitution with another 34% saying they weren’t sure (pg. 20).
Somin, however, does not believe the above results are due to voter stupidity. Instead, he believes that voters are rationally ignorant: the instrumental value of a single vote is vanishingly small, making the incentive to be well-informed about political matters incredibly weak. But even those who are politically informed act more like sports fans than objective truth-seekers. They cheer for their team and evaluate evidence in a highly-biased fashion. Many think this political ignorance and bias could be overcome with greater education, but Somin points out that even as educational attainment and IQ scores have risen over the last five or six decades, political knowledge levels have barely budged.
How does Somin propose tackling this issue? He advocates increasing the opportunity for people to “vote with their feet.” In the private sector, people spend more time acquiring information about the products and services they intend to consume. Those products or services they dislike, they do not purchase. Similarly, people spend more time acquiring information about the states and cities before relocating. This includes cost of living, laws, etc. Voters leave states and local governments when they find better opportunities elsewhere. To allow for more “foot voting” vs. ballot box voting, Somin recommends more decentralization of government. He explains,
Unlike ballot box voting, “foot voting” creates much better incentives to both acquire information and use it rationally. The reason is simple: for most foot voters, the choice to leave or stay is individually decisive. The would-be migrant does not have to take a vote in which her ballot has only a miniscule chance of making a difference. Rather, she knows that whatever decision she makes she can then implement, subject perhaps to the agreement of a few family members. This simple point has important implications for institutional design in democratic political systems. It strengthens the case for decentralizing political power. The greater the degree of decentralization, the more political decisions can be made by foot voting, rather than ballot box voting alone. The informational advantages of foot voting also buttress the case for limiting the scope of government authority relative to the private sector. In markets and civil society, individuals can often vote with their feet even more effectively than in a system of decentralized federalism. Foot voting in the private sector usually doesn’t carry moving costs as high as those of interjurisdictional migration. In addition, limiting the scope of government could alleviate information problems by reducing the knowledge burden imposed on voters. The smaller and less complex government is, the more likely that even rationally ignorant voters might be able to understand its functions. Smaller government does not make us smarter in the sense of increasing our intelligence. But it can help us make smarter decisions by improving our incentives to make effective use of the intelligence we already have (pgs. 14-15).
Check out a lecture by Somin at the Cato Institute below.
This just keeps getting better and better. I wrote last month on research regarding cultural/ethnic diversity, immigration, and economic growth and institutions. A new study adds support to these findings by showing that cultural fractionalization and polarization positively effect real GDP per capita. The authors explain,
By using data on a large sample of world economies for 1960-2010, we construct two indexes of diversity:
Fractionalisation: the likelihood that two individuals randomly selected from the population were born in different countries
Polarisation: how far the distribution of the groups in one country is from a bipolar distribution where there are only two groups of equal size.
Causality can run both ways – countries that have a higher growth rate might attract more immigrants from a variety of origins, thereby increasing the degree of diversity. Therefore heterogeneity might be the effect rather than the cause of economic growth. Also immigration policies could be important drivers of immigration and, if unaccounted for, they could lead to incorrect inferences.
To address this we exploit the dyadic nature of our dataset to predict countries’ bilateral migration flows using a set of pre-determined or ‘exogenous’ dyadic variables such as geographic distance. We then use the predicted immigration flows to construct predicted indexes of diversity. This approach allows us to isolate the portion of the correlation between diversity and economic growth that is due to the causal effect of diversity.
We also exploit the time dimension of our dataset to control for unobserved heterogeneity by estimating a dynamic panel data model. This approach would remove any time-invariant country-specific unobserved factors that might possibly drive the relationship between diversity and economic growth.
We find that both indices of cultural heterogeneity – fractionalisation and polarisation – have a positive impact on the growth rate of GDP over long time periods. For, example, between 1960 and 2010, the growth rate of per capita GDP increased by about 0.15 percentage points when the growth rate of fractionalisation variable increased by one percentage point.
The impact is especially good for developing countries:
The literature on immigration emphasises that immigrants represent human resources, particularly appropriate for innovation and technological progress (Bodvarsson and Van den Berg 2013). So, as with the effect of education, the level of heterogeneity in their composition should enhance human capital formation and favour the adoption of new technologies (Nelson and Phelps 1966). Rich countries are closer to the technological frontier, thus the strength of the catch-up effect becomes smaller the more developed the host country is. This implies that developing economies would benefit the most from diversity.
To test this hypothesis, we split countries into two subgroups according to their initial level of development, and find that developing economies are more likely to experience an increase in GDP growth rate following changes in the degree of diversity. The most conservative estimates suggest that a one percentage point increase in the growth rate of fractionalisation (polarisation) boosts per capita output by about 0.1 percentage points in developing countries.
Our evidence suggests that immigration-fuelled diversity is good for economic growth. We recommend more openness to immigration so as to reap the large unrealised benefits from an increased range of skills and ideas in the destination country. Cultural diversity is a phenomenon that is continually changing, and difficult to define. Individuals have many observable characteristics – race, language, religion, nationality, wealth, education – but only some categories have economic salience. Because we don’t yet know which markers of identity are economically important, this subject will be a fertile area of study for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps we could all try being a bit more welcoming.
Both before and after the election results, Trump’s supporters were lambasted as racist, misogynist bigots. But do these insults work? Will shaming change anyone’s mind? If not, how do you convince people to drop their prejudices? As Vox reports: “a frank, brief conversation.”
[A 2016] study, authored by David Broockman at Stanford University and Joshua Kalla at the University of California Berkeley, looked at how simple conversations can help combat anti-transgender attitudes. In the research, people canvassed the homes of more than 500 voters in South Florida. The canvassers, who could be trans or not, asked the voters to simply put themselves in the shoes of trans people — to understand their problems — through a 10-minute, nonconfrontational conversation. The hope was that the brief discussion could lead people to reevaluate their biases.
It worked. The trial found not only that voters’ anti-trans attitudes declined but that they remained lower three months later, showing an enduring result. And those voters’ support for laws that protect trans people from discrimination increased, even when they were presented with counterarguments for such laws.
…In talking with researchers and looking at the studies on this, I found that it is possible to reduce people’s racial anxiety and prejudices. And the canvassing idea was regarded as very promising. But, researchers cautioned, the process of reducing people’s racism will take time and, crucially, empathy.
This is the direct opposite of the kind of culture the internet has fostered — typically focused on calling out racists and shaming them in public. This doesn’t work. And as much as it might seem like a lost cause to understand the perspectives of people who may qualify as racist, understanding where they come from is a needed step to being able to speak to them in a way that will help reduce the racial biases they hold.
It turns out that favorite buzzwords and phrases like “racist,” “white privilege,” and “implicit bias” are often seen by these voters “as coded slurs. These terms don’t signal to them that they’re doing something wrong, but that their supposedly racist attitudes (which they would deny having at all) are a justification for lawmakers and other elites to ignore their problems…What’s more, accusations of racism can cause white Americans to become incredibly defensive — to the point that they might reinforce white supremacy. Robin DiAngelo, who studies race at Westfield State University, described this phenomenon as “white fragility” in a groundbreaking 2011 paper[…]The innate resistance and defensiveness to conversations about bigotry don’t mean that you should never talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, or other kinds of hate. But those conversations may have to be held more tactfully — positioning people into a more receptive position to hear what these problems are all about.”
It didn’t happen. When the dust settled, not only had Trump carried the presidency, but he’d also carried Utah by a wide margin: he took 46.8% of the vote, compared to 27.8% for Clinton and 20.4% for McMullin. So much for the “Mormon problem,” I guess.
Not so fast.
As my friend Nate Oman wrote a couple of days ago, one way to look at how Trump fared in Utah this year is to compare how much of the vote he got in 2016 vs. how much the Republican candidate (Mitt Romney) got in 2012. You could call this gap the “vote swing,” and if you really want to know if there’s any substance to the idea of a “Mormon problem,” you’ve got to compare Utah’s vote swing to the vote swings for the rest of the country. This is how that looks:
The data from this table came from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016
This is definitely an interesting chart. You can see, for example, that Clinton had a negative swing in almost every single state, whereas Trump had a mixture of positive and negative swings. But–for the question at hand–we can see quite clearly that Trump’s negative swing in Utah is unlike anything else (for either candidate) in this election.
Quick technical note before we move on. If there were only two candidates in 2016 and in 2012, then one candidate’s negative swing would equal another candidate’s positive swing, but that’s not the case. Although third parties didn’t have a major impact on the national level, McMullin took over 20% of Utah’s votes. That’s why Trump has such a starkly negative swing for 2016, but Clinton’s positive swing is quite small.
Now, before we move on, you might be suspicious. After all, Mitt Romney wasn’t just any Republican candidate in 2012. He was a specifically Mormon candidate, so maybe it’s not so much that Trump has a huge Mormon problem as it is that Mitt Romney just did unusually well in 2012. Well, based on the data, that’s not really the case. Romney took 74.6% of Utah’s votes in 2012 and McCain took only 64.5% in 2008, but in 2004 Bush did just about as well as Romney with 73.3% of the votes, and he also did quite well in 200 with 68.3%. So the Romney-Trump swing was 27.6%, but if we used the average of non-Romney Republican candidates over the previous few elections, the swing is still 21.7%, much higher than any other swing in 2016. In short: Mormons disliked Trump a lot more than they liked Romney.
Nate was curious to get a bit more historical context, however, and so he sent me a data set containing the electoral results for every presidential election going back to 1828. I ran some very quick analysis at the time, and he posted an addendum here. I’ve had a bit more time to go through the data since then, however, and so I want to share a few more observations of my own.
First, a couple more notes. I couldn’t actually use all of the data from 2016-1828 because in several cases there were third parties (or even fourth parties) that attracted significant votes. The whole idea of “vote swing” only works if you’re dealing with basically two candidates from the same parties. So I only included pairs of consecutive elections where:
Third parties captured 5% or less of the national vote in both elections
The candidates from the primary two parties were from the same party in both elections
Doing this left me with 20 pairs of elections to look at. Since the data is older than some states, I ended up with 971 individual elections. Finally, to keep things a little simpler, I only used one vote swing for each year. In those years where there were no third party candidates at all, this was simple, because whatever votes one candidate gains come from the other candidate, and so the vote swings are equal anyways. (One is positive, one is negative.) Since I included some elections where third party candidates took up to 5%, I couldn’t rely on the vote swings being identical, so instead I just took the absolute value of the maximum vote swing.
OK, methodological notes aside, here’s what the histogram of vote swings looks like for all the eligible elections between 2016 and 1828:
From this chart, you can see that the vast majority of vote swings are less than 10%, and that a vote swing of over 27% is very rare but not unprecedented. To be exact, there were 932 vote swings less than Utah’s 2016 swing and 38 vote swings more than Utah’s 2016 swing. That puts Utah’s vote swing this year in the 96th percentile.
So that makes the 2016 defection from Trump very unusual, but far from unprecedented. There were larger swings than Utah’s 2016 swing in elections from 1976, 1964, 1952, 1948, 1932, 1920, and 1900. However, when we look at those years, something else pops out of the data that makes the Utah swing this year even more unusual.
So the thing that should be sticking out in both of these charts is that in the other years with major vote swings, these were national or regional phenomena. I’ll make a few annotations to see if I can draw that out:
So, in the years where there were bigger vote swings than Utah’s in 2016, there were much bigger vote swings across the nation as a whole and there were significant spikes in multiple states (usually states in the Deep South, for obvious historical reasons.) What sets Utah apart is not just that the anti-Trump vote swing was very high, but also that it happened in a year where the rest of the vote swing was actually pretty mild and that it was localized in just a single state.
There’s another way to measure that, by the way, which is to look at the difference between the maximum vote swing and the 2nd highest vote swing. So the all-time greatest vote swing was in Mississippi in 1948 at 83.5%, but during the same election Alabama had a vote swing of 81.7%. So the gap between the highest vote swing and the second-highest was really small: just 1.8 percentage points.
Contrast that with 2016. Utah had a 27.6% swing and the next-highest was 11.9% in North Dakota. The gap between the two was 15.6%. It turns out, that was higher than the gap between the largest and second-largest swing in any other election year.
So that “Mormon problem” that everyone was talked about? Even though Trump managed to take Utah, it’s still totally a thing. He suffered a historically large election-over-election vote swing as Utah voters abandoned the GOP for third parties, for the Democrats, or to just stay home. It’s not the resounding repudiation I’d hoped for with an Evan McMullin win, but it’s still a pretty clear signal.
And, before we wrap this up, it’s worth noting that when it comes to Mormons’ anti-Trump sentiment, the feeling is mutual. Just yesterday, Trump picked Steve Bannon as his senior adviser (think: Karl Rove). Bannon was the CEO of Trump’s campaign and, before that, he took over Breitbart after founder Andrew Breitbart passed away and turned it into the alt-right mouthpiece it is today. Along the way, he’s taken pot-shots at Mormons more than once, including calling Mitt Romney’s sons out for serving full-time missions and running an anti-Mormon, anti-immigration piece from Tom Tancredo. With Evan McMullin continuing his conservative insurgency and Trump placing anti-Mormon advisers in top positions, the Mormon/Republican rift is unlikely to narrow–let alone heal completely–any time soon.
If there was a theme to the closing session of the April 1974 General Conference, this was it: get to work. I can’t think of a better way to summarize a series of talks that really focused on just going out to do the hard things that we’re supposed to do: paying tithing, going on missions, and bearing testimonies. Towards the end of this session, (then) Elder Spencer W. Kimball shared an anonymous quote that went along with that theme:
Someone said, “Many people are willing to plod along for 16 to 20 years, from grade one to a Ph.D., to learn medicine or engineering or psychology or mathematics or sociology or biology—to study, research, attend classes, pay tuitions, accept help from teachers and professors—and yet to learn about God, the maker of all, the author of it all, in a few intermittent prayers and some very limited hours of research, they feel they can find the truths about God.”
It was a good reminder for me to check my priorities, especially on this week. We’ve been doing the General Conference Odyssey for almost a year now, and one of the most consistent and consistently surprising things I’ve learned is how much I can like or dislike a session almost entirely based on my attitude when I read it.
This past Sunday I taught two lessons (Gospel Doctrine and also Elder’s Quorum) and—with all the lesson prep—I didn’t get to my General Conference talks until later than I wanted to. I has zero desire to be reading the talks. I knew—as I was going through them—that I wasn’t getting very much out of them. I did it anyway.
The best case scenario: you do the right thing, for the right reasons, with the right spirit. Next-best case scenario: you just do the right thing any old way you can. I prefer that to quitting. I’m glad I frog-marched myself through those talks so that I could keep going. But I’m even more glad when I can approach the talks with some time, some real attention, and be open to learning.
According to Snopes, as of yesterday (November 13) Clinton is currently ahead of Trump by about 630,000 votes, and it looks likely that number will increase as the ballots continue to be counted. This situation has lead to familiar calls to end the electoral college, and already I’ve seen plenty of angry posts from HRC supporters feeling they’ve been robbed. So a few points here:
1. At least as of now, statistically Trump and Clinton are actually tied.
So far, about 121M people voted for either Trump or Clinton. Previous research has suggested the error rate for uncounted votes in a presidential election is roughly between 1.1% – 2.0% (here’s the study and its tables). If those numbers hold, one of the candidates would need to beat the other by somewhere between 1.3M – 2.4M votes for it to be statistically significant. At least as of now, Clinton falls short of that, meaning the difference between them is in the margin of error. They’re tied.
2. Even if Clinton ends up above the margin of error, it doesn’t mean the electoral college has robbed anyone.
Politicians campaign and people vote with the electoral college in mind. Think of how many times you heard people discuss how everyone in swing states ought to vote, whereas if you were in a solid red or blue state, people didn’t care as much. Why? Because they knew how the electoral college works. Party hardliners were relatively forgiving of third party votes in the states already decided. I live in California, and no one seemed very worried about third party votes here. We all assumed (correctly) that Clinton would get all of California’s electoral votes either way. But if you went third party in Florida this year? Apparently the end of the world might be a bit your fault.
If the electoral college hadn’t existed, you don’t know how people would’ve voted differently. How many more conservatives would have bothered to vote in California? How many more liberals would have showed up in Alabama?
The same goes for the way the politicians campaign. They choose which states to pour their ads into, to get people on the ground, to hit hard, based on their knowledge of the electoral college–and those processes greatly influence people’s votes.
If the electoral college didn’t exist, campaigning and voting would have looked different, and we don’t know how different. We don’t know how the landscape would have changed, and so we don’t know which candidate would have received the “mandate” from the American people.
So it’s possible HRC will end up above the margin of error. And it’s possible if she does that would happen to represent what Americans would have wanted if they had voting absent an electoral college. It’s also possible it would have looked completely different. Especially when considering how unprecedented this election was and how surprised so many of us were by the results, it’s pretty hard to predict. It’s certainly not clear that the electoral college foiled the (overall) will of the people.
News and social media outlets have been reporting numerous incidents of racism, hate crimes, and racially-charged harassment since the Tuesday election outcome. According to USA Today, “There indeed has been a spike in the number of reports of such incidents, say representatives for two organizations that track such occurrences. A representative for one group, in fact, said the rise appears to be even worse that what was took place immediately after the terror attacks in 2001.” One of these organizations–the Southern Poverty Law Center–“says it has logged more than 200 complaints since the election, and while it could not provide a figure for the average number of complaints it takes in each day, Cohen assured that the number is much larger than what is typical.” Confidently declaring that the number is above average while being unable to provide an average to compare it to is rather unhelpful and possibly just a case of availability bias (they may have a more detailed analysis in the next couple weeks). Furthermore, there is the need to distinguish between legitimate and fabricated complaints.
Nonetheless, what can we realistically assume? Some of us here at Difficult Run have compared the current American situation to the political climate that produced Brexit. Looking at the aftermath of the EU referendum may give us an idea of what to expect in the next couple months following Trump’s victory. According to the statistics released by the Home Office in October, racist or religious abuse incidents increased by 41% in England and Wales in the months following the UK’s exit from the European Union.
shows the monthly number of racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded by the police in the last four years. There is an increase in these offences recorded in June 2016, followed by an even sharper increase in July 2016. The number of aggravated offences recorded then declined in August, but remained at a higher level than prior to the EU Referendum. These increases fit the widely reported pattern of an increase in hate crime following the EU referendum. Whilst January to May 2016 follows a similar level of hate crime to 2015, the number of racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded by the police in July 2016 was 41% higher than in July 2015. The sharp increase in offences is not replicated in the non-racially or religiously aggravated equivalent offences (pgs. 18-19, Figures 1A & 2A).
Without more evidence, it is impossible to determine if the hate crimes have continued to drop to average levels. It’s worth pointing out that when one looks at the trends from 2013-2016, it appears that the offenses go up during the summer and tend to decline as winter approaches. Someevidencesuggests a correlation between hotter weather and crime, though this would not fully explain the significant jump we see in 2016. If anything, hotter weather added fuel to the fire (or vice versa). This could mean that with winter approaching, the American backlash will be comparatively smaller and shorter.
All this, of course, is conjecture. Americans will have to wait on the FBI’s 2016 hate crime stats to know for sure. Still, the spike in the UK following Brexit could possibly serve as a realistic model of what to expect in the next couple months: a short-lived, but abrupt increase in racially or religiously aggravated offenses followed by a steep decline.
A recent post at the IFS’s Family Studies blog has a nice summary of the individual and social benefits of healthy marriages. For those who have kept up with me over the years, this is a subject I spend quite a bit of time researching. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have it all in one spot. Here’s the list:
“[T]he presence or absence of marriage impacts economic well-being, particularly for women and children. Children raised by married parents are significantly less likely to experience poverty, whereas single-mother families are over five times as likely to be poor. Additionally, the majority of homeless families are headed by unmarried mothers.”
“A study by IFS Senior Fellow W. Bradford Wilcox, Robert Lerman, and Joseph Price found that larger shares of married-parent families at the state level are linked to greater economic mobility, higher family incomes, and less child poverty.”
“[M]arried-parent families boost the academic prospects of students, especially boys. Research has consistently confirmed that a child’s home environment (family structure, parental education, and family income) is more closely associated with student success than school resources and spending. And a new study by Wilcox and Nicholas Zill found that “the share of families headed by married couples is a more powerful predictor of high school graduation and school suspension rates than are income, race, and ethnicity in Florida.””
“Married-parent families also improve the safety of women and children and communities. In general, unmarried women, including those in cohabiting relationships, are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than married women. And hands down, the safest place for a child to grow up is with his or her own married mother and father, while a child living with an unmarried mother and live-in boyfriend is the most vulnerable to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In addition to safer families, violent crime is significantly less common in communities and states with larger shares of married-parent families.”
“We know…that girls who grow up in single-mother families are more likely to engage in early sexual activity and to experience a teen pregnancy. Conversely, children who grow up in a married-parent family are more likely to form lasting marriages as adults and to raise their own children within a married union.”
“We also know that family fragmentation, including divorce, is especially harmful to children. Although the suffering sometimes manifests itself in less visible ways, it deserves to be acknowledged. Importantly, the harms of divorce are not just seen in lower income families; research shows that even privileged kids suffer when families break down.”
“Finally, the growing marriage divide between the college-educated and the poor and working class is at least part of what’s driving economic and social inequality in our nation. Because the college-educated are more likely to get married and less likely to divorce than less-educated Americans, they are more likely to reap the benefits of marriage, including better education, higher incomes, and family stability for their kids. Meanwhile, marriage is in retreat among the less educated and working class, who are more likely to be raising children outside of marriage, and to suffer the negative effects of family instability, including poverty. Bridging the marriage divide is an important part of efforts to boost economic mobility for all Americans.”
This is why marriage is still the gold standard. Check out the rest to see their pro-family policy proposals.
The outcome of the election still has many rocking. I had taken up reading GMU law professor Ilya Somin’s 
It turns out that favorite buzzwords and phrases like “racist,” “white privilege,” and “implicit bias” are often seen by these voters “as coded slurs. These terms don’t signal to them that they’re doing something wrong, but that their supposedly racist attitudes (which they would deny having at all) are a justification for lawmakers and other elites to ignore their problems…What’s more, accusations of racism can cause white Americans to become incredibly defensive — to the point that they might reinforce white supremacy. Robin DiAngelo, who studies race at Westfield State University, described this phenomenon as “white fragility” in 
