the Mexicans were participating in the bracero programme, which allowed almost half a million people a year to take seasonal work on America’s farms. But the parallels with the present are plain. Donald Trump has also complained that immigrants are keeping Americans from good jobs and has promised to do something about it (another parallel: not since Kennedy has America seen such an astonishing presidential coiffure). So it is a good moment for a bracing new assessment of the bracero scheme and its demise.
Did it work? According to a new study, the answer is ‘no’:
We find that bracero exclusion had little measurable effect on the labor market for domestic farm workers. Pre- and post-exclusion farm wages and farm employment were similar in states highly exposed to exclusion—which lost roughly one third of hired seasonal labor—and in states with no exposure. Bracero workers were not substantially replaced in the years immediately following exclusion with domestic workers, unauthorized Mexican workers, or authorized non-Mexican foreign workers. We find instead that employers adjusted to exclusion, as predicted by the theory of endogenous technical change, with large changes in technology adoption and crop production. We reject the semielasticity of wages to labor scarcity implied by the model in the absence of endogenous technical change, and o er direct evidence of induced technical advance. These findings suggest that new theories of technological change can inform the design and evaluation of active labor market policy (pg. 2).
They conclude,
The exclusion of Mexican bracero workers was one of the largest-ever policy experiments to improve the labor market for domestic workers in a targeted sector by reducing the size of the workforce. Five years after bracero exclusion, leading agricultural economist William E. Martin uncharitably assessed the advocates of exclusion in a little-read book chapter. Those who had believed exclusion would help domestic farm workers “were obviously. . . extremely naïve”, he wrote, and the hoped-for eff ects in the labor market never arrived because “capital was substituted for labor on the farm and increased e ffort was exerted by the agricultural engineers in 30 providing the farmers these capital alternatives” (Wildermuth and Martin 1969, 203).
…The theory and evidence we discuss here contradicts a long literature claiming, largely without quantitative evidence, that bracero exclusion succeeded as active labor market policy. We find that bracero exclusion failed to raise wages or substantially raise employment for domestic workers in the sector. The theory of endogenous technical change suggests a mechanism for this null result: employers adjusted to foreign-worker exclusion by changing production techniques where that was possible, and changing production levels where it was not, with little change to the terms on which they demanded domestic labor (pgs. 30-31).
At least those in economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology, according to a 2016 study. The abstract reads,
We investigate the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading U.S. universities in the fields of Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law, and Psychology. We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1. The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1, History 33.5:1, Journalism/Communications 20.0:1, Law 8.6:1, and Psychology 17.4:1. The results indicate that D:R ratios have increased since 2004, and the age profile suggests that in the future they will be even higher. We provide a breakdown by department at each university. The data support the established finding that D:R ratios are highest at the apex of disciplinary pyramids, that is, at the most prestigious departments. We also examine how D:R ratios vary by gender and by region. People interested in ideological diversity or concerned about the errors of leftist outlooks—including students, parents, donors, and taxpayers—might find our results deeply troubling.
Langbert, Quain, Klein, 2016, pg. 425.
Of course, this is nothing new. For example, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues recently highlighted the lack of political diversity in academic psychology. What’s particularly interesting to me, however, is the D:R ratio in economics. I recall a Facebook discussion toward the end of last year in which this bias was downplayed and economic departments were more-or-less given as examples of conservative (read Republican) hubs on campus.[ref]”They have the Hoover Institution at Stanford!” apparently counts as evidence that bias doesn’t exist.[/ref] I already knew this wasn’t true and said as much, but my comment was pretty much ignored. This exchange made me realize that many outsiders likely think mainstream economics is tainted by an American brand of conservatism.[ref]Nevermind that modern Republicans are virtually mercantilists: an economic theory that was refuted in the 18th century.[/ref] But more important, it made me realize that some (many?) on the left reject the findings of mainstream economics because they think it’s politically biased.
So, to those who think economic departments are full of conservatives: yes, these departments are more conservative than others. But the only way they could be labeled “conservative” is due to other departments being so far to the left. Basically, econ departments are more politically diverse. Nonetheless, they are still dominated by Democrats. While this may not instill confidence in my Republican friends, perhaps it will convert some of my Democrat ones.
From Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, 7th ed. (pg. 32).
Recently I was talking with friends about whether “mainstream media” (the TV, radio, and print media most commonly consumed by people) has an overall bias for leftist viewpoints. One of my friends countered that everyone is more likely to notice bias against their own viewpoints than against the other side’s, and that he has often felt the media was too favorable to the right-wing point of view. Since we were simply swapping anecdotes and personal perceptions, I offered three pieces of information to suggest the media is in fact left-biased:
Conservatives are much more likely than liberals to view the media as biased. – Pew Research Center
Liberals are more trusting of mainstream news sources than moderates or conservatives. – Pew Research Center
People who work in newspapers and print media are almost exclusively liberal. – Business Insider
Some of my friends countered that (1) conservative media strongly pushes the narrative that all others (“mainstream media”) are liberal biased, so that could influence conservatives to be more skeptical, and (2) just because reporters are liberal doesn’t mean they will report with bias. One friend linked me to a study by the progressive, left-leaning policy group FAIR which found that major newspapers, TV, and radio tend to cite centrist think tanks most often, followed by right-leaning think tanks, with left-leaning think tanks coming in last. The idea is that if the media were biased for liberal viewpoints, left-leaning think tanks ought to be cited more often than others, and apparently that’s not the case.
However, the FAIR study relies on FAIR’s evaluation of how left- or right-leaning a think tank is. Given FAIR is a progressive, left-leaning organization, this methodology gave me pause.
Here is a study of media citations of think tanks done slightly differently: the authors did not themselves evaluate whether a think tank was left- or right-leaning. As they describe it:
A feature of our method is that it does not require us to make a subjective assessment of how liberal or conservative a think tank is. That is, for instance, we do not need to read policy reports of the think tank or analyze its position on various issues to determine its ideology. Instead, we simply observe the ADA scores [based on voting records] of the members of Congress who cite it. This feature is important, since an active controversy exists whether, e.g., the Brookings Institution or the RAND corporation is moderate, left-wing, or right-wing.
Under this method, the researchers found a “strong liberal bias” in think tank citation for all outlets they examined except (surprise to no one) Fox News and Washington Times.
But even considering that, I’m not sure how much insight we get from looking at think tank citations. It’s better than no information, but what proportion of news stories even involve citing think tanks?
Instead, here’s a piece from Public Opinion Quarterly that looks at a lot of aspects of media beyond policy groups. The authors conclude that, with the exception of coverage of Republican and Democrat scandals, outlets don’t have a huge divide on how they cover descriptive news (as distinct from opinion pieces).
But notice in particular Figures 2 and 4. In Figure 2 you can see that all the news outlets except Fox produce more left-leaning articles than right-leaning articles (I’m not counting Daily Kos or Breitbart because I don’t think, and neither did these authors, that those are “mainstream” news sources).
Figure 2
In Figure 4 you can see that, over all the outlets, a lot more topics fall below zero (have a left-leaning slant) than fall above zero (have a right-leaning slant). (I tried to count the points myself and I got 75 below zero, 36 above zero, and then a few that looked right on the line.)
Figure 4
The authors rightly point out that there aren’t huge divides on either of these metrics, but on the aggregate it still means nearly all outlets produce net-left-biased content, and I think it has a pretty pervasive additive effect.
And this research was only looking at ideological slant in terms of whether articles were positive or negative toward members of the Democratic or Republican parties. That is valuable information, but I also think that tends to be more obvious bias. I think the aggregate industry-level bias includes obvious bias, sure, but I think it’s more common that bias is more subtle. I would particularly be interested in exploring (1) which stories an outlet chooses to focus on versus others and (2) how they choose to frame issues (as opposed to how they talk about Republicans vs Democrats).
The Public Opinion Quarterly research tried to address #1 by looking at how often different outlets covered different broad categories of topics (and they didn’t find large differences across outlets), but I don’t think that addresses the concern. For example, I have not seen people accuse one outlet or another of just not talking about abortion. It’s about which abortion-related stories they cover and how they talk about the issue. The great reluctance of most outlets to talk about the Kermit Gosnell scandal is a prime example of this. It’s my impression that a whole lot more people have heard of Dr. Tiller, the abortion provider who was murdered by a gun man, than have heard of Dr. Gosnell, the abortion provider who snipped the spinal cords of newborns and was found guilty of murder.
And that doesn’t even get into more subtle language differences, like “pro-choice” versus “anti-abortion” or, worse, “anti-choice,” or like describing a pro-life walk that draws hundreds of thousands of people as being comprised of “thousands,” a downplay of two orders of magnitude. Those are very small details, right? But they add up, and I don’t know of any research that measures this or even how it could–although I think Gallup kind of touched on it when they found that almost everyone, including pro-lifers, underestimated how many Americans are pro-life.
I don’t think the topic of abortion is the exception here. And I think the aggregate bias is pretty clear to, well, most people who aren’t Democrats/leftists. Perhaps you can dismiss the frequent conservative suspicion of the mainstream media as conservatives all being duped by conservative media, but that doesn’t explain why independents have shown similar levels of distrust, or why more than six-in-ten Democratic and independent voters believed most journalists were “pulling for Obama” in 2008.
“The Earned Income Tax Credit isn’t super well-known,” writes Vox,
but it’s one of the best tools the federal government has for fighting poverty. It functions as a wage subsidy for the working poor, providing an average of $2,982 a year to families with children come tax season. The results are impressive. According to the Census Bureau, refundable tax credits like the EITC and the similarly structured Child Tax Credit cut the poverty rate (correctly measured) by 3 percentage points in 2013 — that’s 9.4 million people kept out of poverty.
But a [2015] study suggests that even that is an underestimate. UC Berkeley economist Hilary Hoynes and the Treasury Department’s Ankur Patel find that the EITC might be twice as effective at fighting poverty as the census estimate suggests.
How so?:
Hoynes and Patel focus on the credit’s effect on single women with children, the single biggest group of recipients. It’s well-known that the EITC encourages nonworking single moms and dads to enter the workforce; an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that EITC brought more single mothers into the workforce in the 1990s than welfare reform did. That means that it boosts income not just by giving people money, but by getting people to work more and bring in more in wages. These increased wages can reduce income in other ways, such as by making people ineligible for programs like food stamps, but on the whole it boosts pay.
Hoynes and Patel find that bringing this effect into the analysis doubles the number of people lifted out of poverty by the EITC. The expansion of the EITC included in Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget reduced the share of people under the poverty line by 7.9 percent. That’s much more than you’d find in an analysis that doesn’t take the EITC’s effect on employment into account.
Hoynes nicely summarizes these findings in a 2016 policy brief. In short,
“The EITC is the cornerstone of U.S. anti-poverty policy. It is the largest anti-poverty program for children in the US. Together with the Child Tax Credit (CTC), the EITC removed 4.8 million children from poverty in 2015. It is also the second largest anti-poverty program for the population as a whole. Together with the CTC, the EITC lifted a total of 9.2 million people out of poverty in 2015. Only Social Security removes more people from poverty” (pgs. 2-3).
The EITC “lowered mother’s risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorder and inflammations, and improved their mental health. The expansion also led to a reduction in smoking among single mothers with children” (pg. 4).
The EITC also “reduced the incidence of low birth weight…and increased mean birth weight” (pg. 4).
“The EITC raises both math and reading test scores in elementary and secondary schooling” (pg. 5).
“The EITC is associated with higher rates of high school completion (or GED) and also higher college attendance rates. This in turn translates into better employment outcomes and higher earnings” (pg. 5).
I’ve written before about the (un)likelihood of dying at the hands of a foreign terrorist here on American soil. But for kicks, let’s drive the point home a little more. As Vox reports,
To put [the Cato Institute’s numbers] in perspective, I’ve produced the following chart, which compares the average annual likelihood of American pedestrians being hit by a railway vehicle, dying due to their own clothes melting or lighting on fire, and being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant. It’s quite revealing:
Even better, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning than being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack:
Here’s hoping we can all get a grip.[ref]Unfortunately, Trump’s Chief Strategist Steve Bannon doesn’t just dislikeillegal immigration, but legal immigration. I imagine the restrictions will continue to be ratcheted up.[/ref]
As a friend of mine said in response to this Tweet, “The left is anti-drone bombing once again. Welcome home after 8 years.” Now, if you think his quip is unfair, it should be noted that it’s based on sound social science: the majority of anti-war Democrats of the Bush years weren’t really all that anti-war as much as they were anti-Bush. As soon as Obama took office, the opposition dropped considerably.
In President Obama’s last year in office, the United States dropped 26,172 bombs in seven countries. This estimate is undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single “strike,” according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions. In 2016, the United States dropped 3,028 more bombs—and in one more country, Libya—than in 2015.
Most (24,287) were dropped in Iraq and Syria. This number is based on the percentage of total coalition airstrikes carried out in 2016 by the United States in Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the counter-Islamic State campaign. The Pentagon publishes a running count of bombs dropped by the United States and its partners, and we found data for 2016 using OIR public strike releases and this handy tool.* Using this data, we found that in 2016, the United States conducted about 79 percent (5,904) of the coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, which together total 7,473. Of the total 30,743 bombs that the coalition dropped, then, the United States dropped 24,287 (79 percent of 30,743).
Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations points out,
As Donald Trump assumes office today, he inherits a targeted killing program that has been the cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism strategy over the past eight years. On January 23, 2009, just three days into his presidency, President Obama authorized his first kinetic military action: two drone strikes, three hours apart, in Waziristan, Pakistan, that killed as many as twenty civilians. Two terms and 540 strikes later, Obama leaves the White House after having vastly expanding and normalizing the use of armed drones for counterterrorism and close air support operations in non-battlefield settings—namely Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.
…Less than two weeks ago, the United States conducted a drone strike over central Yemen, killing one al-Qaeda operative. The strike was the last under Obama (that we know of). The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. As he reportedly told senior aides in 2011: “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
The newspaper headlines today all blare shocking reports about Trump’s continued bigotry. But further down the page, a different story about Muslim lives is receiving far less attention: the U.S. bombing of Syria, and its increasing numbers of civilian casualties. While Trump says racist things about Muslims, U.S. warplanes are actually killing them, something far less discussed even though (or perhaps because) it morally implicates Democrats.
The U.S. has also been accused of concealing the true death toll…[But i]t’s also important to remember that death tolls themselves only begin to capture the scale of a bombing’s impact. The numbers of injuries are often far higher (and frequently unreported). “Injuries” can mean lost limbs, blindness, and paralysis. They can mean permanent disfigurement. They can mean that a person will never work again, and will suffer from depression and PTSD, or will require medical care for the rest of their lives. Furthermore, even those who are not “injured” can experience deep and lasting trauma, after seeing loved ones or even strangers torn to shreds before their eyes. The actual pain of a mother realizing her child has been blinded, or a brother watching his sister die, is absent from death toll statistics.
The complaint of human rights advocates has centered around the fact that the United States is downplaying and concealing casualties, and that the deaths are growing in frequency without any justification…All of this occurred under a Democratic president. So while the organizers of the Democratic National Convention where proudly presenting the Khan family as evidence of their superior devotion to Muslim lives (and while DNC attendees were chanting “USA, USA, USA” as if they were frenzied 2004-era Bush Republicans), the Obama administration was directly responsible for killing scores of living, breathing Muslim civilians. While Democrats were voicing their outrage that Donald Trump had said yet another despicable racist thing, the party was speaking up in defense of a candidate who had decimated a Muslim country, and who had actually voted for the senseless war that killed Cap. Kahn in the first place.
Rhetorical attacks on Muslims are indefensible. But physical attacks on Muslims, using tanks and gunships, are even more horrific. Democrats might not want to be so certain that they have the moral high ground when it comes to valuing Muslim lives.
Of course, this by no means lets Republicans off the hook. Nor does it equate Obama and Trump (or the GOP) or fail to recognize the nuances of war. It shouldn’t dampen our optimism about the decline of war and violence in the modern era either. But it does call for some consistency; to minimize selective outrage. If we treated all administrations like public servants accountable to us instead of celebrities on our favorite football team, some of this might have been avoided.[ref]Unfortunately, I don’t have all that much faith in the generalelectorate to oppose bad policies.[/ref]
Climate change could have massive negative effects on the U.S. economy according to a new study:
We exploited random fluctuations in seasonal temperatures across years and states, using the richness of historical data available in the US. We employed a panel regression framework with the growth rate of gross state product (GSP) and average seasonal temperatures for each US state, and found that summer and autumn temperatures have opposite effects on economic growth. An increase in the average summer temperature negatively affects the growth rate of GSP. An increase in the autumn temperature positively affects this growth rate, although to a lesser extent. This suggests that previous studies’ aggregation of temperature data into annual temperature averages may mask the heterogeneous effects of different seasons.
The summer effect is particularly pronounced in data since 1990. This leads to a negative net economic effect of rising temperatures. This implies that the US economy is still sensitive to temperature increases, despite the adoption of adaptive technologies such as air conditioning (Barreca et al. 2015). Temperature also has a stronger effect in states with relatively high summer temperatures, most of which are located in the south.
Our analysis quantified the effect of rising temperatures across sectors of the US economy. We find that an increase in average summer temperature has a pervasive effect on all industries, not just the sectors that are traditionally assumed to be vulnerable to climate change…In our empirical analysis, an increase in the average summer temperature decreased the annual growth rate of labour productivity. An increase in the average autumn temperature had the opposite effect. Our analysis used data at the macroeconomic level, but it is consistent with existing studies of this relationship at the microeconomic level (Zivin and Neidell 2014, Cachon et al. 2012, Zivin et al. 2015).
The authors find that the long-term effect of climate change would be a reduction in “the growth rate of US output by 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points by the end of the century. At the historical growth rate of US GDP of 4% per year, this would correspond to a reduction of up to 10%. The results are even more dramatic in the high emissions scenario (A2). Here, the reduction of economic growth could reach 1.2 percentage points, corresponding to roughly one-third of the historical annual growth rate of the US economy.”
You can see economist Bridget Hoffman explain the findings below:
These results echo Joseph Heath’s analysis of climate change’s effects on the global economy. But perhaps more important, it helps drive home his main point: climate change will drastically reduce economic growth over the next 100 years without intervention. But people will still be be significantly better off compared to us today even if we fail to act (check the GDP graph at about 0:46). They just won’t be as well off as they could have been.
Policy makers should consider both of these facts when discussing how to combat climate change.
President Trump on Wednesday began a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, ordering the immediate construction of a border wall with Mexico and aggressive efforts to find and deport unauthorized immigrants. He planned additional actions to cut back on legal immigration, including barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States.
The four remaining draft orders obtained by Vox focus on immigration, terrorism, and refugee policy. They wouldn’t ban all Muslim immigration to the US, breaking a Trump promise from early in his campaign, but they would temporarily ban entries from seven majority-Muslim countries and bar all refugees from coming to the US for several months. They would make it harder for immigrants to come to the US to work, make it easier to deport them if they use public services, and put an end to the Obama administration program that protected young “DREAMer” immigrants from deportation.
In all, the combined documents would represent one of the harshest crackdowns on immigrants — both those here and those who want to come here — in memory.
Even liberal reforms–such as would allow 10% of the world population to move–would increase global output by 14 percent.
Migrants contribute nearly 10% of global GDP. Integrating migrants more effectively could lead to a $800 billion to $1 trillion boost to worldwide economic output.
The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist on American soil is extremely low. In fact, immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native population.
Sure enough, more evidence comes rolling in. A new IMF study finds
that migrants help increase per capita income levels in host advanced economies, and this effect is both statistically and economically significant. Our estimates suggest that a one percentage point increase in the share of migrants in the adult population (the average annual increase is 0.2 percentage point) can raise GDP per capita by up to 2% in the long run. Moreover, this effect comes mainly through an increase in labour productivity and, to a lesser extent, through the more standard channel of an increase in the ratio of working-age to total population.
The result survives a number of robustness checks, which include controlling for other determinants of income per capita (trade openness, the level of technology, the education level, and age structure of the host population, and policy variables); excluding from the sample countries that were created through migration and have high income levels (USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand); and using alternative gravity model-based instruments.
We find that both high- and low-skill migrants raise labour productivity. There is no evidence of major physical or human capital dilution, as investment adjusts over time to the larger pool of workers, and migrants are increasingly high-skilled. Instead, our results suggest that the complementarities that earlier analyses uncovered mostly at the micro level are also relevant at the macro level. The evidence from the microeconomic literature suggests that the positive productivity effects come from increased TFP and human capital. High-skilled migrants contribute to productivity directly, including through innovation, and indirectly through their positive spillovers on native workers. Low- and medium-skilled migrants can also contribute to aggregate productivity, to the extent that their skills are complementary to those of natives, promoting occupational reallocation and task specialisation.
…Our analysis finds…that the gains from immigration are broadly shared across the population. Migration increases the average income per capita of both the bottom 90% and the top 10% of earners, even though high-skilled migration benefits more top earners — possibly because of a stronger synergy between migrants and natives with high skills. Moreover, the Gini coefficient — a broad measure of income inequality within the bottom 90% of earners — is not affected by the migrant share.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order as early as Monday stating his intention to renegotiate the free trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico, a White House official told NBC News.
Economist Brad Delong commented recently, “The economic case against the two agreements that passed [NAFTA and China into WTO], and the one that did not [TPP], doesn’t hold water. It’s clear, however, that candidates can make an effective political case against trade agreements — and that scares me.” For those of you who may have missed the last year of posts, here’s a few highlights that demonstrate why anti-trade, anti-globalization populism is empirically wrong:
Trump’s proposed policies would likely lead to a trade war.
And what should appear this past week? A new study arguing that the interaction of openness to imports and deregulation can boost economic growth:
Enthusiasm for reducing domestic regulation, or ‘red tape’, has been gaining momentum in some OECD countries, and there are many reasons to think that reducing such red tape – including at local levels – could be beneficial for productivity growth by encouraging firm entry, competition, and efficiency gains. Evidence from an analysis of firms and industries in panels across OECD countries suggests that this is indeed the case (OECD 2017). Easing the strictness of regulation in network industries (e.g. energy, telecommunications, and transport) especially, as well as in retail and professional services, would improve productivity and competitiveness in downstream sectors, not least manufacturing, which use services from these upstream industries as inputs for their own production.
…In a recent paper that examines the productivity growth of firms in a dozen or so OECD countries, we find that the benefits of domestic deregulation depend both on sectoral openness to imports and firms’ technological advancement (Ben Yahmed and Dougherty 2017). The results show that firms in sectors with higher import penetration have higher productivity growth, if these firms are close to their sectoral technology frontier. The most productive firms appear to enjoy a significant increase in productivity when foreign competitors’ pressure is high; in contrast, import penetration does not incentivise firms far away from the technological frontier, or if so only weakly.
In addition, the pro-competitive effect of international trade depends on domestic regulatory stringency. Our results indicate that, among the most productive firms, the positive effect of foreign competition is inhibited for firms operating in a country with stringent regulation such as higher barriers to entry. Domestic and foreign competitive pressures are found to be complementary: firms’ incentives or abilities to improve their productivity to cope with foreign competition are stronger in countries with less stringent regulation.
Trade and deregulation
Apparently, our political leaders need to take a long hard look at all of this.
I couldn’t bring myself to include an image of Trump. So here’s Betty and her sloth.
I’ve been feeling Trumped-out since before the election, and I had hoped post election (perhaps naively even after he won) that the Trump obsession would dwindle to a hum. I’ve been dissapointed to say the least (please, Facebook, bring back memes about cats and tacos, I’ve had enough Trump.) I have, however, managed to come across some articles within the Trumpian madness that are actually worth the read.
First, from the NYT, an Italian confronts the similarities between Trump in America and their own media tycoon, Berlusconi, who was prime minister in Italy for a total of nine years. His suggestion on how to combat Trump: stick to policies, ignore the person (Please, ignore the person!).
Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character.
From the Cato Institute, a critique of Trump’s inaugural address, that ignores the style of the address and worries about the substance. The author notes that words indicating an adherence to or respect of the Constitution were missing.
Still, I wish the speech had used the word “Constitution,” or “law” in a way beyond the phrase “law enforcement,” or “Framers” or “Founders,” or “Declaration” or “Amendment” or “individual” or perhaps “rights.” The one occurrence of “right” was in a passage about “the right of all nations to put their interests first.”
From Politico, an indictment of journalistic temper tantrums that describes how journalism should behave (hint: let the facts speak for themselves, oh, and shut up about crowds (and tweets)), and recalls similar (though stylistically different) issues brought about by the Obama administration.
As I’ve hypothesized before, there is a method to Trump’s tweets. Whenever he finds the noose of news lowering over his thick orange neck, he takes to Twitter to change the subject. The more outrageous and self-serving (or should I say “self-dealing”?) the tweets are, the better his results…
Consider the Obama presidency. As former Politicos Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote in 2013 in a piece titled, “Obama, the Puppet Master,” he was “a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.” … Obama, VandeHei and Allen explained, took “old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting).” In doing so, “Media across the ideological spectrum [were] left scrambling for access.”
And a, clearly biased, take on Betty White’s thoughts on the current political climate (it’s her birthday and I couldn’t find any less biased articles that focused on this point instead of the fact that she is 95!) from IJR. Even if the article/headline is a stretch, I think Betty has great advice for all of us. Includes a video of Betty and her sloth doll (PS: my son got the same sloth for his birthday.)
I think that’s the time to buckle down and really work positively as much as you can. Instead of just saying, “This is terrible. He’s terrible.” Just think, “Alright, there’s nothing I can do about that right now but I can do the best in my little circle. So if I do that, maybe you’ll do your best and we’ll get through this.”
