Month: October 2018

Political Identity Divides Us More Than Policy Preferences

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Politics is the worst:

Increased sorting could reflect identification with groups that better match our values. Perhaps Republicans and Democrats can’t compromise because their policy preferences are irreconcilable. However, this doesn’t explain why Americans personally dislike political opponents with such intense fervor. U.S. liberals and conservatives not only disagree on policy issues: they are also increasingly unwilling to live near each other, be friends, or get married to members of the other group. 

…Now, surprising new research suggests that what divides us may not just be the issues. In two national surveys, political psychologist Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland measured American’s preferences on six issues such as abortion and gun control, how strongly they identified as liberals and conservatives, and how much they preferred social contact with members of their own ideological groups. Identifying as liberal or conservative only explained a small part of their issue positions. (This is consistent with findings that Americans overestimate the differences in policy preferences between Republicans and Democrats.) Next, Mason analyzed whether the substantial intolerance between liberals and conservatives was due to their political identities (how much they labelled themselves as “liberal” or “conservative”) or to their policy opinions. For example, who would be more opposed to marrying a conservative: a moderate liberal who is pro-choice, or a strong liberal who is pro-life? Across all six issues, identifying as liberal or conservative was a stronger predictor of affective polarization than issue positions. Conservatives appear particularly likely to feel cold towards liberals, even conservatives who hold very liberal issue positions.

…[W]e see that Americans are increasingly divided not just on the issues but also on their willingness to socialize across the political aisle. It is normal that society manifests new social cleavages as it heals old ones. However, when identities are fused with policies that have vast, long-term consequences (e.g., war, taxes, or the Paris Agreement), these divisions imperil our ability to select policies based on their expected outcomes. To paraphrase anthropologist John Tooby, forming coalitions around policy questions is disastrous because it pits our modest urge for truth-seeking against our voracious appetite to be good group members. If Americans slide into seeing all policy debates as battles between Us vs. Them, we stop selecting policies based on their actual content. Ironically, this would lead to choosing policies that don’t match our personal values, because the content and evidence would become less important than the source. In short, seeing politics as a battle may worsen things for everyone.

Once again, politics makes us into worse people.

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Post-Kavanaugh, Democrats’ November advantage fades

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In his October 5 WSJ op-ed (Kavanaugh May be the Democrats’ Waterloo), Allen Guelzo asserts,

In the Missouri Senate race, Republican Josh Hawley has overtaken incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill, largely in reaction to the Kavanaugh hearings. In North Dakota, Republican Kevin Cramer has opened up a yawning lead over Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. The newest Quinnipiac and NPR/PBS NewsHour polls show that the Democratic generic-ballot advantage has halved and the party’s enthusiasm advantage has vanished.

I hadn’t heard any of this so I looked it up myself, and he’s right. According to the October 2 Quinnipiac poll:

Five weeks before the Midterm Elections, 49 percent of American voters back the Democratic candidate in their local race for the U.S. House of Representatives and 42 percent support the Republican candidate, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.

This compares to the results of a September 12 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University National Poll, showing Democrats with a 52 – 38 percent lead.

And here’s NPR’s summary of the NPR/PBS NewsHour poll:

Just over a month away from critical elections across the country, the wide Democratic enthusiasm advantage that has defined the 2018 campaign up to this point has disappeared, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

In July, there was a 10-point gap between the number of Democrats and Republicans saying the November elections were “very important.” Now, that is down to 2 points, a statistical tie.

Keep in mind that historically the President’s party loses ground in the mid-terms, and this is especially so if the President has a lower approval rating. So I’m still expecting that result next month. However I feel uncertain about any predictions. Ever since Trump won in the first place, it seems like we’re in a new era, and it’s hard to pin predictions on his administration.

Negative Effects of the Corporate Income Tax

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I’ve looked at the evidence for adverse effects of the corporate income tax in a previous post. A brand new article in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics provides some more insights. The authors find,

A reduction in the corporate income tax rate leads to moderate job growth. If the corporate income tax were eliminated, the model predicts that the non-employed population would decrease from 34.1 percent to 31.7 percent, about a 7 percent fall in the relative nonemployment rate.

…[E]liminating the corporate income tax has a relatively small overall effect on TFP (an increase of only about 0.9 percent). The productivity loss due to capital misallocation caused by the corporate income taxation is estimated to be 2.6 percent.

…Average welfare is maximized with a 10 percent corporate income tax rate. With a lower corporate income tax rate, the widening of the corporate income tax base allows the government to maintain revenue neutrality without large increases in the personal income tax burden. An overwhelming majority of the population would be in favor of such a corporate income tax cut in this environment (pg. 302-303).

The Tax Foundation also has a new brief that looks at the benefits of cutting the corporate income tax rate:

  • One of the most significant provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is the permanently lower federal corporate income tax rate, which decreased from 35 percent to 21 percent.
  • Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the United States’ high statutory corporate tax rate stood out among rates worldwide. Among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. combined corporate income tax rate was the highest. Now, post-tax reform, the rate is close to average.
  • A corporate income tax rate closer to that of other nations will discourage profit shifting to lower-tax jurisdictions.
  • New investment will increase the size of the capital stock, and productivity, output, wages, and employment will grow. The Tax Foundation Taxes and Growth model estimates that the total effect of the new tax law will be a 1.7 percent larger economy, leading to 1.5 percent higher wages, a 4.8 percent larger capital stock, and 339,000 additional full-time equivalent jobs in the long run.
  • Economic evidence suggests that corporate income taxes are the most harmful type of tax and that workers bear a portion of the burden. Reducing the corporate income tax will benefit workers as new investments boost productivity and lead to wage growth.
  • If lawmakers raised the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 25 percent, we estimate the tax increase would shrink the long-run size of the economy by 0.87 percent, or $228 billion. This would reduce the capital stock by 2.11 percent, wages by 0.74 percent, and lead to 175,700 fewer full time equivalent jobs.

Minimum Wage: Canadian Edition

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Increasing the Minimum Wage in Alberta: A Flawed Anti-Poverty Policy

The Fraser Institute has a recent study on the minimum wage in Alberta. The results are telling:

  • As part of its effort to reduce poverty, Premier Rachel Notley’s government will raise Alberta’s minimum wage from $10.20 per hour, the rate when the Notley government took office three years ago, to $15 in October 2018. But, raising the minimum wage is not an effective way to alleviate poverty primarily because the policy fails to provide help targeted to families living in poverty.
  • In 2015, the latest year of available data, 92.0% of workers earning minimum wage in Alberta did not live in a low-income family. Though counterintuitive, it makes sense once we explore their age and family situation. In fact, most of those earning minimum wage are not the primary or sole in-come-earner in their family.
  • In 2017, 50.1% of all minimum wage earners in Alberta were between the ages of 15 and 24, and the vast majority of them (85.1%) lived with a parent or other relative. Moreover, 23.2% of all minimum wage earners in Alberta had an employed spouse. Of these, 90.1% had spouses that were either self-employed or earning more than the minimum wage. Just 2.1% of workers earning minimum wage in Alberta were single parents with young children.
  • In addition to ineffectively targeting the working poor, raising the minimum wage produces several unintended economic consequences to the detriment of young and inexperienced workers. This includes fewer job opportunities, decreases in hours available for work, reductions in non-wage benefits, a shift towards automation, and higher consumer prices, which disproportionately hurt the working poor.
  • A work-based subsidy is a more effective policy since it better targets the benefits to those in need without these negative economic consequences.

This fits somewhat with U.S. data. From David Neumark:

[T]he relationship between being a low-wage worker and being in a low-income family is fairly weak, for three reasons. First, 57% of poor families with heads of household ages 18–64 have no workers, based on 2014 data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Second, some workers are poor not because of low wages but because of low hours; for example, CPS data show 46% of poor workers have hourly wages above $10.10, and 36% have hourly wages above $12. And third, many low-wage workers, such as teens, are not in poor families (Lundstrom forthcoming).

Considering these factors, simple calculations suggest that a sizable share of the benefits from raising the minimum wage would not go to poor families. In fact, if wages were simply raised to $10.10 with no changes to the number of jobs or hours, only 18% of the total increase in incomes would go to poor families, based on 2010–2014 data (Lundstrom forthcoming). The distributional effects look somewhat better at a higher threshold for low income, with 49% of the benefits going to families that have incomes below twice the poverty line. However, 32% would go to families with incomes at least three times the poverty line. By this calculation, about a third of the benefits would go to families in the top half of the income distribution (pg. 2).

Low-wage workers =/= low-income households.

Scholarship or “Scholarship”?

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A group of academics performed another Sokalesque sting operation, but took it to eleven with multiple articles in multiple journals.

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The authors explain,

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

How did they come up with ideas for papers?:

Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinand Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.

At other times, we scoured the existing grievance studies literature to see where it was already going awry and then tried to magnify those problems. Feminist glaciology? Okay, we’ll copy it and write a feminist astronomy paper that argues feminist and queer astrology should be considered part of the science of astronomy, which we’ll brand as intrinsically sexist. Reviewers were very enthusiastic about that idea. Using a method like thematic analysis to spin favored interpretations of data? Fine, we wrote a paper about trans people in the workplace that does just that. Men use “male preserves” to enact dying “macho” masculinities discourses in a way society at large won’t accept? No problem. We published a paper best summarized as, “A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists.” “Defamiliarizing,” common experiences, pretending to be mystified by them and then looking for social constructions to explain them? Sure, our “Dildos” paper did that to answer the questions, “Why don’t straight men tend to masturbate via anal penetration, and what might happen if they did?” Hint: according to our paper in Sexuality and Culture, a leading sexualities journal, they will be less transphobic and more feminist as a result.

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

What were the results? 7 papers were accepted (including one recognition of excellence), 2 were revised and resubmitted, 1 was still under review, 4 were in limbo, and 6 were rejected. Here are a few highlights:

The put it crudely, the paper argued that men should have the “rape culture” trained out them in ways similar to dogs. Reviewers described it as an “incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized given the incredibly diverse literature sets and theoretical questions brought into conversation.” More telling, the editor wrote to them,

As you may know, GPC is in its 25th year of publication. And as part of honoring the occasion, GPC is going to publish 12 lead pieces over the 12 issues of 2018 (and some even into 2019). We would like to publish your piece, Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon, in the seventh issue. It draws attention to so many themes from the past scholarship informing feminist geographies and also shows how some of the work going on now can contribute to enlivening the discipline. In this sense we think it is a good piece for the celebrations. I would like to have your permission to do so.”

To sum up, the paper argues that social justice warriors shouldn’t be made fun of, but that they maintain the right to make fun of others. One reviewer wrote, “Given the emphasis on positionality, the argument clearly takes power structures into consideration and emphasizes the voice of marginalized groups, and in this sense can make a contribution to feminist philosophy especially around the topic of social justice pedagogy.” Another thought it was an “Excellent and very timely article!” 

Bottom-line: feminazi is apparently a thing. The reviewers found it “interesting,” stating that the “framing and treatment of both neoliberal and choice feminisms well grounded.” In their view, the paper had “potential to generate important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars.”

If you will excuse the language, this is why others have referred to this brand of scholarship as scholarsh*t.

You can see what other academics are saying about the hoax here.

Kavanaugh the Folkloric Monster of the Mid-Atlantic

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In my wife’s country, there is an old folkloric story from the time of small villages and horse-trodden roads of a monstrous woman called la Cegua. She only appeared at nights on lonely roads, asking late-night travelers for a ride to the nearest village. To drunk men returning home from a night at the bar she appeared as a beautiful woman, and would ask to climb atop the horse and sit behind him. Then suddenly, midway into the ride, she would change and reveal her true form as a monstrous demon with a horse skull for a head and eyes of fire. She would then grab tight onto the man, and the startled horse would begin to gallop, until they both fell. Only those men who had innocent intentions would escape alive; the rest would die.

Obviously, no such creature as la Cegua ever existed, but you can imagine how the story came about. You can imagine older men in town swearing to God and the Virgin that they saw la Cegua on a road one night years ago, that they in fact gave her a ride and looked into the flaming eyes in her skull, and escaped only because of the purity of their hearts. You can imagine a man on his way home on a dark night atop his old slow horse, convincing himself la Cegua wasn’t going to come out, until suddenly a woman on the side of the road causes him to send his horse off in a gallop.

You can kind of imagine what he says, breathlessly, as he arrives at his door:

“I saw her, la Cegua! She was on the road, looking like a beautiful woman. She was asking for a ride, but then a cloud shifted and the moon came out to shine full on her face. In a moment she changed, and her flaming eyes pierced out of her skull straight into mine. I don’t know how I made it back, except that I ran the horse as fast as I could.  I’m sure it was her!”

Today, we are beginning to see the formation of a new folkloric monster. It is in the form of Brett Kavanaugh. Not the real Brett Kavanaugh, but the one that exists in the present leftwing imagination.

This folkloric Kavanaugh has evolved in a darker turn from the “Bill Brasky” stories. Rather than just being comically adept at drinking and picking up women, this Kavanaugh is more like a drunken ogre who emerges from a cave deep in the Mid-Atlantic woods and wanders forth into civilization, stumbling into parties, starting fights and assaulting women, before dragging a helpless victim back to his cave. Maybe he’ll show up at your boat party in Rhode Island and get into a fight while groping women.  Maybe he’ll throw ice at you in a bar in Connecticut.  Maybe he’ll drunkenly stumble out of a bar and pin you to a wall.  Or maybe he and his companion Mark Judge (of equally folkloric proportions) will drag you into a cave and take turns raping you all night.

No one can know if or when they’ll be safe from Brett Kavanaugh, or where he’ll appear next.

One thing for certain is that he only appears on dark nights when the moon is hidden, and that he only comes to places with lots of beer. Kavanaugh likes beer. And then in a moment, he’ll rear up to 8 feet tall, an angry monster with poor temperament, beer on his breath and hands that end in knives for cutting off loose clothing. Will he wag his penis at you? Will he drop qualuudes in your punch and summon a gang of rapists to take turns having their way with you? Or will he just throw beer in your face?

It’s Brett Kavanaugh! As unpredictable as he is belligerently drunk!  80’s partiers beware!

More and more sightings are beginning to appear in the press, and I expect even more and more and more as the week drags on and the FBI finishes its investigation and what passes for a press in this country struggles to print anything at all that anyone at all is willing to say to stop Kavanaugh from becoming the fifth (now much more-so) conservative on the Supreme Court.

You can almost imagine an old man in a bar swearing to God and his mother’s grave that he saw Brett Kavanaugh one night in a bar back in the 80’s. Was it ’83? ’84? He came swaggering in, drunk as a goat and mean as sin. Demanded a whole pitcher of Bud Light, which he downed in a single enormous gulp. Then he smashed the pitcher over the head of the guy next to him and just slides over the bar and starts chugging Miller straight out of the tap. Bartender tries to stop him, but Ol’ Man Kavanaugh grabbed him and in a ferocious rage hurled the bartender clean across the room. Then he grabbed the nearest woman he could find, slung her over his shoulder, and with a hideous growl of anger at everyone walked back into the night. We never saw either of ’em again. I’m sure it was him. Brett Kavanaugh.

You can almost imagine, right?