A number of terrorist incidents have taken place in this year alone. This doesn’t even begin to cover the controversies over police shootings (both of civilians and officers) or the number of violent episodes that go unnoticed by the public and unreported by the media. With the constant news of blood and horror on this earth, it is easy to think that the world is ready to implode. However, here is a little data-based pick-me-up on the state of violence in the world. In response to Hannity’s disbelief over President Obama’s speech at the White House Summit on Global Development toward the end of July, Reason writes,
Obama has made similar remarks before, and what he’s talking about is the fact, documented by Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that humans are, broadly speaking, less likely to die violent deaths than ever before in recorded history. Contrary to what Hannity apparently thinks, that long-term trend—which includes deaths by war, genocide, terrorism, and other forms of mass killing as well ordinary homicide—is unaltered by whatever Fox News report happens to be uppermost in Hannity’s mind at any given moment. Updated graphs that Pinker published last year show, among other salutary trends, that the U.S. murder rate has fallen sharply since the early 1990s, that the worldwide death rate from genocide and other mass killings fell from 10 per 1 million people in 1996 to 1 in 2013, that the number of battle deaths per 100,000 people in 2013 was close to the all-time low since 1945, and that the number of civil wars worldwide, although up since 2010, was far lower in 2013 than in the ’90s.
Looking specifically at deaths from terrorist attacks in Western Europe, which Hannity sees as a refutation of Obama’s claim, there was a spike last year, but the total was still lower than in 2004 and far lower than the averages for the 1970s and ’80s. Worldwide, according to a 2015 report from the Institute for Economics and Peace, the total number of deaths from terrorism has been rising since 2011, with five countries—Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria—accounting for 78 percent of those deaths in 2014. But deaths from terrorism represent a small percentage of all deaths by homicide: less than 3 percent worldwide in 2012, based on data from the United Nations and the National Center for Counterterrorism. They represent an even smaller share of all deaths, and for Americans the risk of dying in a terrorist attack pales beside the risk of dying from a host of quotidian causes that get much less attention from Fox News.
So, the next time you feel an overwhelming sense of despair regarding the direction of the world, check the numbers. You might feel better.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how important it is to vote. Supposedly, if you vote for alternative Candidate X, then it is a de facto vote for Candidate Y. This Candidate Y could be either Trump or Clinton depending on the ideology of the one spewing this rhetorical nonsense. Nevermind that this line of argument places way too much stock in the value of a single vote. As political philosopher Jason Brennan points out, the disutility of driving to cast your ballot (i.e., the risk of harming others via an automobile accident) is higher than the actual utility of your single vote (i.e., the chance it has of changing the election outcome).[ref]See The Ethics of Voting, pgs. 19-20.[/ref] The value of a single vote is vanishingly small, even in swing states. You have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 100+ times in a row than you do of casting the tiebreaker in a presidential election.
But when only 9% of the American public is behind the nominations of Trump and Clinton, shouldn’t we encourage more people to vote? I suppose that depends on how your political preferences match up with that of non-voters. So what are the preferences of non-voters? According to a 2014 Pew study, non-voters are a largely younger, poorer, uneducated, racially diverse group. More important, however, are their political affiliations and views: while the largest portion identified as Independents (45%), 29% identified as Democrats, leaving only 18% for Republicans. Furthermore, 51% indicated that they “lean Democrat” with only 30% “lean[ing] Republican” (20% said they had “no lean”). Fifty-three percent of non-voters held unfavorable views of Republicans (35% favorable), while only 40% held unfavorable views of Democrats (48% favorable). Their views on the Affordable Care Act were mixed (44% approved, 49% disapprove). Their views on government efficiency (54% think government is almost always inefficient, 43% think the government deserves more credit) and aid to the poor (44% said it did more harm than good, 51% said the opposite) were a bit more divided.
A 2012 Pew study highlighted the policies preferred by non-voters. At that time, Obama held a favorable view among non-voters (64%), 59% of which said they preferred him as their presidential candidate. The majority of non-voters believed that government should do more to solve problems (52%), should raise tax rates for incomes above $250,000, remove troops from Afghanistan ASAP (67%), allow same-sex marriage (49%), and legalize abortion in all/most cases (54%). They were more mixed on the United States’ stance toward Iran’s nuclear program (45% said take a firm stand, 40% said to avoid military conflict) and the growing population of immigrants (27% said it is a “change for the better,” 34% said it is a “change for the worse,” 34% said it “hasn’t made much of a difference”).
In 2013, the political scientists Jan Leighley, of American University, and Jonathan Nagler, of New York University, published the results of a study that compared, among other things, the political views of voters and non-voters, dating back to 1972. On most social issues (abortion, L.G.B.T. rights), there was no measurable difference between them. Non-voters were more inclined toward isolationism. (Leighley and Nagler thought this might be because non-voters knew more soldiers than voters, and were more reluctant to see them sent into conflict.) The difference on economic matters was much more dramatic. Non-voters, Leighley and Nagler found, favored much more progressive economic policies than voters did. They preferred higher taxes, and more spending on schools and health care, by margins that hovered around fifteen per cent. “The voters may be representative of the electorate on some issues,” Leighley and Nagler wrote, “but they are not representative of the electorate on issues that go to the core of the role of government in modern democracies.” That non-voters had the same partisan preferences as voters only seemed to strengthen the finding—they wanted more redistribution regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans.
These results have been substantiated elsewhere. As reported in The Atlantic,
Four questions from the American National Elections Studies (ANES) data show a stark divide on issues related to economic inequality. Nonvoters tend to support increasing government services and spending, guaranteeing jobs, and reducing inequality—all policies that voters, on the whole, oppose. Both groups support spending on the poor, but the margin among nonvoters is far larger. Across all four questions, nonvoters are more supportive of interventionist government policies by an average margin of 17 points.
Similar results were found with numbers from Pew and YouGov comparing “registered voters with the non-registered population. These polls were not taken close to elections, so registration can serve as a rough proxy for the voting and nonvoting population. The polls show the same dramatic differences. In every instance, net support for greater government intervention in economic affairs was higher for the non-registered populations—sometimes dramatically so. For instance, while net support for free community college was 7 points for the registered population, it was 46 points within the non-registered population.”
In short, non-voters tend to be more ideologically liberal than voters.
Positive numbers indicate that nonvoters are more liberal than voters. (Source: Griffin and Newman, 2005)
If you’re wanting to galvanize non-voters, you should know your audience. Liberals may have a more vested interest in doing so than conservatives. Libertarians will likely have mixed feelings.
I’ve mentioned the populist trade problem before. GMU economist Bryan Caplan has published on the irrationality of voters, demonstrating that voters tend to suffer from biases that disagree with the findings of actual economists. Given our current political climate, consider what he calls “anti-foreign bias”:
Harvard’s Greg Mankiw writes in The New York Times,
Voters clearly aren’t listening to economists. In a recent poll, an overwhelming number of leading economists agreed that Brexit would most likely lower incomes both in Britain and in the rest of the European Union.
Similarly, in the United States, most top economists agree that “past major trade deals have benefited most Americans” and that “trade with China makes most Americans better off.” But those aren’t sentiments we will be hearing anytime soon from Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton.
In one respect, it is easy to understand why. According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted last month, only 35 percent of registered voters thought the United States gained from globalization, while 55 percent thought it lost. On issues of international trade, the current crop of candidates is following public opinion. (Henceforth the president, rather than being our elected leader, may be called our elected follower.)
So why are voters so out of touch with the evidence? Mankiw explains,
In particular, Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz, professors in the political science department of the University of Pennsylvania, have written a pair of research papers exploring attitudes toward free trade and offshore outsourcing. This work gives some clues about what may be happening inside the minds of today’s voters.
…In actuality…people’s attitudes about free trade and offshore outsourcing are unrelated to the characteristics of the industry in which they are employed. After analyzing their survey data on individuals’ attitudes and attributes, these political scientists conclude that voters embrace policies based on the broader national interest…The data analysis of Mr. Mansfield and Ms. Mutz suggests that skepticism about trade and outsourcing is closely related to three other sets of beliefs.
These beliefs are:
Isolationism: the belief that “the United States should stay out of world affairs and avoid getting involved in foreign conflicts. They are not eager for the United States to work with other nations to solve global problems like hunger and pollution.”
Nationalism: the belief that “the United States is culturally superior to other nations. They say the world would be better if people elsewhere were more like Americans.”
Ethnocentrism: the belief that the world is divided “into racial and ethnic groups and think that the one they belong to is better than the others. They say their own group is harder-working, less wasteful and more trustworthy.”
Mankiw concludes,
As Mr. Mansfield and Ms. Mutz put it, “trade preferences are driven less by economic considerations and more by an individual’s psychological worldview.” They also report that this isolationist, nationalist, ethnocentric worldview is related to one’s level of education. The more years of schooling people have, the more likely they are to reject anti-globalization attitudes…In the long run, therefore, there is reason for optimism. As society slowly becomes more educated from generation to generation, the general public’s attitudes toward globalization should move toward the experts’.
This book got off to a kind of rough start for some of the same reasons that Harry Markopolos had such a hard time getting the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff in the decade leading up to Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme finally publicly immolating: he’s kind of an abrasive character who comes across as arrogant, confrontational, and self-promoting. I’m glad I stuck with the book, however, for two reasons. First of all, the grating tone is smoothed out substantially as you realize that–while perhaps a little melodramatic–Markopolos seems to be entirely sincere in his intentions and oblivious to his abrasiveness. Second, because–as far as I could tell from the book, which is laden with supporting material and testimony–he was exactly right. He did determine early on that Madoff was a fraud, he did everything in his power to bring it to the SEC, and the SEC did absolutely nothing to follow up on his claims, even though there were incredibly quick and easy ways for the fraud to be validated.
In Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama makes a vibrant, international case for the importance of strong state institutions. Although he is associated with the American right, Fukuyama eschews the conventional more/less government for an emphasis on quality rather than quantity of state institutions. He spends a lot of time looking at what is required to make state institutions effective: a delicate balance of autonomy and accountability. It’s impossible to have read that book recently and not see connections again and again to the SEC as described by Markopolos.
For example, Fukuyama emphasizes the importance of professionalism–often accomplished through objective, standardized testing–in helping state institutions retain independence (because rigorous testing confounds political appointments) and high morale (because the testing acts as a kind of filter to create a cohesive social group within the institution) in addition to the more obvious benefits of competence and knowledgeability.
Markopolos makes the exact same points although–lacking Fukuyama’s framework and context–he doesn’t quite connect all the dots. He notes that the SEC is staffed primarily by lawyers with no quantitative expertise or practical industry experience and that this makes the incompetent and overly deferential to the businesses. He also faults the SEC for being far too deferential to industry and afraid to do its job and go after major fraud and abuse. He doesn’t quite make the connection between the two, however, noting that the low standards for SEC employees not only lead to inexperience workers, but also foster the subservience and passivity of the SEC directly.
Francis Fukuyama Professor of International Political Economy at the KUB University of Braband at Tilburg Netherlands Photo: Robert Goddyn/UPA Photo
One of Fukuyama’s broader points is that, in the arena of modern liberal democracies, the United States has always lagged behind in terms of quality of state infrastructure. This is mostly because our democracy emerged before our institutions modernized, which historically is a recipe for disaster. The US was able to right the ship in the second half of the 19th century when a wave of progressive reforms professionalized the federal civil service and we ended up with fairly respectable institutions, although still nowhere near the quality (in terms of professionalism and efficiency) of states like Germany or Japan that modernized before they liberalized or states like the UK that–due to unique class structure–were able to fairly painlessly push through reforms in a matter of years that took the US a major national movement and decades to emulate.
The SEC was not one of the agencies that Fukuyama chose to focus on, but it could have been. His analysis would have fit perfectly with Markopolos’s, both in terms of the content and also in terms of the conclusion: America’s national institutions are once again in a period of deep corruption, inefficiency, and impotence.
One of the key points that Michelle Alexander makes in The New Jim Crow is that mass incarceration is primarily the result of the War on Drugs (rather than violent crime):
As numerous researchers have shown, violent crime rates have fluctuate over the years, and bear little relationship to incarceration rates, which have soared during the past three decades regardless of whether violent crime was going up or down. Today, violent crime rates are at historically low levels, yet incarceration rates continue to climb.
Moreover, whites and blacks violate drug laws at basically equal rates, but it is the black population that bears the overwhelming burden of suspicion, policing, prosecution, incarceration, and life with a criminal record while the white population–equally as likely to consume drugs–is blissfully ignorant and immune to the pointy end of the War on Drugs.
The question is: why? The laws and policies that constitute the War on Drugs are colorblind, not racist. One possible explanation is sheer racial animus: the police and prosecutors and legislators who enact and define the War on Drugs hate black people, and they deliberately–but covertly–use the War on Drugs to attack them. This is not plausible, however, and instead Alexander focuses on unconscious racism and incentives.
For example, the federal government–in an effort to win points by looking to be tough on crime–through massive resources into encouraging the War on Drugs by offering money to police departments that showed high numbers of drug convictions. And so:
It is impossible for law enforcement to identify and arrest every drug criminal. Strategic choices must be made about whom to target and what tactics to employ. Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs, and some initially opposed it, but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we’re going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner? That question was not difficult to answer, given the political and social context.
Miller Center of Public Affairs flickr page, Charlottesville, VA
The incentives made it clear that arrests would happen. The question was just: where would they take place? And the answer, inevitably, was “among populations with the least ability to fight back politically.” Thus, the War on Drugs is not an effect of pre-existing racism as much as it is a cause of racism. This does not make the War on Drugs unique, however. If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn from studying the history of racism in the US, it’s that racism is always instrumental. The first consideration is always power. Racism is a servant of that quest for power. And this goes back to the very beginning. The slave trade was initially not very racist, in that the gap between white indentured servants and black slaves was fairly minimal. Slavery was, for example, not hereditary. A black child was born free, not slave. After Bacon’s Rebellion, however, when white servants and black slaves rose up together to fight against the elites, slavery was reformed as an institution to make it racially defined. Why? Because that allowed elites to split the coalition of poor whites and poor blacks. So: the quest for power created the racial aspect of slavery which, in turn, created race.
The point is that power and class warped the War on Drugs so that affluent (predominantly white) neighborhoods are left in peace and poor (predominantly black) neighborhoods are treated like warzones. There’s crime everywhere, but it only gets enforced where it makes political sense to do so.
White collar crime is the mirror image of the War on Drugs, and that’s where the connection to No One Would Listen comes in. Markopolos makes it clear that Madoff was far from unique: the entire financial sector is riven with dishonest and blatant criminality. Here’s one example:
My younger brother had had similar experiences. At one point he was hired by a respected brokerage firm in New Jersey to run its trading desk. On his first morning there he walked into the office and discovered that the Bloomberg terminals that supposedly had been ordered hadn’t arrived. Then he found out that the traders didn’t have their series 7 licenses, meaning they weren’t allowed to trade. And then he learned that the CEO had some regulation 144 private placement stock which legally is not allowed to be sold. But the CEO had insider information that bad news was coming, and he wanted to sell the stock. My brother explained to the CEO, “You can’t sell this stock. It’s a felony.” The CEO assured him he understood. My brother went out to lunch with the Bloomberg rep to try to get the terminals installed that he needed to start trading. By the time he returned to the office, the unlicensed traders had illegally sold the private placement stock based on insider information. My brother had walked into a perfect Wall Street storm.
He called me in a panic, “What do I do?” I said, “These are felonies. The first thing to do is write your resignation letter. The second thing you do is get copies of all the trade tickets. Get all the evidence you can on your way out the door. And the third thing you do is go home and type up everything and send it to the NASD.” That’s exactly what he did. The NASD did absolutely nothing. These were clear felonies, and the NASD didn’t even respond to his complaint.
So Markopolos’s brother witnesses felonies, gathers the evidence, and alerts the NASD and then… nothing. Just as Markopolos realized what Madoff was doing, gathered the evidence, and alerted the SEC and then… nothing. He sent them at least three or four major document dumps over a decade. Later on, he put together 20 other whistleblower cases, tied them up with a bow, and delivered them to the SEC for prosecution and again: nothing. Every one was rejected.
Poor blacks are convenient targets. Police departments and municipal governments essentially extort them by unequal application of laws. Rich white investment bankers are inconvenient targets. Gov’t agencies assigned to regulate and monitor them essentially act as their servants by unequal application of laws. As Markopolos points out, the SEC and other agencies would go after fraud cases now and again, but only small fish. They’d never touch the big guys, the rich guys, the influential guys.
Putting together Markopolos, Fukuyama, and Alexander doesn’t lead to a cheery or rosy view of the state of the United States, but I do think it’s a useful view. And besides, one lesson of Fukuyama is that political decay can be reversed. Institutions can be revitalized. One lesson of the Civil Rights is that human dignity can be broadened and justice can move forward. And–while Markopolos did not succeed in convincing the SEC to stop Madoff before he his scheme had ballooned from $7B to $60B, he did become a professional fraud-fighter after that, and so even in his case there is the potential for good to come out of bad situations. I think we all sense that the nation is not in a good place, but having an accurate understanding of what is wrong is the first step to finding truly effective solutions, and these books–to me–seem to work together to provide a substantial piece of that understanding.
Multiple books[ref]For example, see David Aikman’s Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power and Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang’s A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China.[/ref] over the last decade have focused on the rise of Christianity in China. In the newest edition of First Things, there is an incredible essay by Chinese writer and activist Yu Jie titled “China’s Christian Future.” Jie points out that “in 1949, when the Communist party defeated the Nationalists and founded the People’s Republic of China, Christians in China numbered half a million. Yet almost seventy years later, under the Chinese government’s harsh suppression, that population has reached more than sixty million, according to Fenggang Yang, a sociologist at Purdue University. The number grows by several million each year, a phenomenon some have described as a gushing well or geyser. At this rate, by 2030, Christians in China will exceed 200 million, surpassing the United States and making China the country with the largest Christian population in the world.” Jie names two major events that led to this rise: “the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and the Tiananmen Square massacre instigated by Deng Xiaoping in 1989. Countless innocent lives were lost as a result of these two cataclysms, and the people’s belief in Marxism-Leninism and Maoism was destroyed. These events opened up a great spiritual void, and the Chinese began searching for a new faith.”
Following the 1989 massacre, “Deng Xiaoping thought the key to keeping the regime in power was to make a select few wealthy. He made their economic dream of getting rich come true while sacrificing the political dream of many to live in a free society. Like a drug, however, money’s hold on people could only last so long. Man cannot live on bread alone. Beyond his material needs lie spiritual ones as well. Government leaders sensed a crisis, too. They started rummaging through the Confucianism and Buddhism they had tossed out, hoping to reclaim the former moral authority of these traditions for the party.”
But this supposed renewal of Confucianism isn’t what it seems:
Today…party officials clutch at Confucius like a drowning man clutches at straws. Without ever having apologized for what they did to destroy Confucianism, they now set up so-called Confucius Institutes around the world, no expense spared, to foster their agenda. The institutes offer financial assistance to scholars of China in the West, inviting them on luxury tours of the country in exchange for favorable reviews of the Chinese government. By the same token, they blacklist those critical of the administration and send their names to Chinese embassies around the world, which in turn deny them visas. The Confucius Institutes are political tools for maintaining power, not genuine sources for cultural renewal. Had the Communists not dug up his grave, Confucius would be spinning in it.
The growth of Christianity has made the Chinese president see it as “a threat: It is the largest force in China outside the Communist party. In China, home churches outnumber government-sponsored churches three to one. Against home churches that refuse to cooperate, the government has waged a large-scale cleansing campaign in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, particularly in the city of Wenzhou, known as “China’s Jerusalem,” where 15 percent of the population is Christian. In two years, more than two hundred churches in Zhejiang have been demolished, over two thousand crosses removed. The scene of the cross being removed from a church in Ya village, Huzhou city, on August 7, 2015, was typical.”
Yet, the transforming power of the Christian gospel is nonetheless continuing to spread throughout China. It has changed the lives of both the essay’s author and millions of others throughout his native country. Check out the rest of this powerful story in the full article.
[Trump] sees [trade] not as a form of cooperation where everyone wins but a contest where someone must lose for someone to win. “We already have a trade war, and we’re losing badly,” he declared last month.
It’s not just Mr. Trump who has embraced economics as a bleak zero-sum game; so have Democratic activists. Their platform this year calls the economy “rigged” in favor of the 1%, at the expense of everyone else.
In shifting their attention from how income grows to how it’s divided, the parties think they’re catering to reality.
However, this seems to be out of touch with most voters:
The author concludes,
Yet less trade and less legal immigration will hurt U.S. growth and the average worker, not help them. Moreover, the median voter seems to get that: Net support for free trade is solidly positive, according to the latest WSJ/NBC News poll, while support for immigration among Democrats and independents is growing (it remains low among Republicans). Voters worry far less about inequality than whether they personally are getting ahead financially.
That is the irony: In a year when both parties are rallying their partisans by portraying the economy as a win-lose proposition, most Americans still think it’s win-win.
We study trends in the partisanship of Congressional speech from 1873 to 2009. We define partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson’s party from a fixed amount of speech, and we estimate it using a structural choice model and methods from machine learning. The estimates reveal that partisanship is far greater today than at any point in the past. Partisanship was low and roughly constant from 1873 to the early 1990s, then increased dramatically in subsequent years. Evidence suggests innovation in political persuasion beginning with the Contract with America, possibly reinforced by changes in the media environment, as a likely cause. Naive estimates of partisanship are subject to a severe finite-sample bias and imply substantially different conclusions.
I’m a conservative. Over the last 9 months or so the Trump campaign has sent me from incredulous to enraged to dejectedly resigned, and I admit I’m still trying to figure out what just happened.
To hear some of my leftist friends talk, the Trump phenomenon is the inevitable climax of an increasingly out-of-touch, racist, backwards party, a predictable extension of the “extremism” of Bush.[ref]In general I think it’s a bad idea to let people who aren’t part of Group X–especially people who are hostile to Group X–explain what Group X thinks, feels, and wants. The explanation is usually pretty off-base.[/ref]
Those theories makes no sense to me. The conservatives I know who supported Bush hate Trump. In fact, Pew Research recently published a study showing the most religious and “very conservative” Republicans have been most resistant to Trump. This study echoes a Gallup poll last year that found the highly religious ranked Trump 12th out of 17 GOP candidates. But if the most religious and conservative Republicans dislike him, who has been supporting Trump from the outset?[ref]The WSJ had a great graphic explaining how Trump’s coalition differs from the traditional factions of the right-wing (what the WSJ dubbed the social conservative faction and the establishment faction).[/ref]
The interview is a fascinating read. Vance discusses a variety of sometimes opposing ideas in an empathetic but honest way. For example, he talks about how the anti-elitist streak in hillbilly culture helps those who achieve financial success stay grounded, but it also pressures people not to become successful in the first place. Vance talks about the problems with how, when it comes to the poor, there are opposing narratives suggesting either (a) the poor are helpless, with no power to affect their own lives or (b) the poor must simply bootstrap their way out of poverty. Both of these views fail to address important factors.
Vance uses his understanding of hillbilly culture to explain Trump’s popularity:
The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.
From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.
Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.
This part especially resonated with me:
The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation. It’s not just that he inflames the tribalism of the Right; it’s that he encourages the worst impulses of the Left. In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from so many of my elite friends some version of, “Trump is the racist leader all of these racist white people deserve.” These comments almost always come from white progressives who know literally zero culturally working class Americans. And I’m always left thinking: if this is the quality of thought of a Harvard Law graduate, then our society is truly doomed.
The graph above from researchers Chris Lawton and Robert Ackrill at The Conversation “shows the proportion of Leave votes for all local authorities in England and Wales (on the vertical axis) against the proportion of residents who stated that they had been born outside the UK in the 2011 census (on the horizontal axis). It shows that high proportions of Leave voters were overwhelmingly more likely to live in areas with very low levels of migration” (italics mine). “Of the 270 districts that had a lower proportion than average of people born outside the UK in 2011,” they continue, “in 229 (85%) the majority vote was for Leave. Of the 78 districts with a higher than average population born outside the UK, only 44% voted Leave.”
This seems to indicate that those with little exposure to immigrants have greater anti-immigration sentiments. However, this isn’t the whole story. Consider the graph below:
Consider the percentage-change in migrant numbers, rather than the total headcount, and the opposite pattern emerges (chart 2). Where foreign-born populations increased by more than 200% between 2001 and 2014, a Leave vote followed in 94% of cases. The proportion of migrants may be relatively low in Leave strongholds such as Boston, in Lincolnshire (where 15.4% of the population are foreign-born). But it has grown precipitously in a short period of time (by 479%, in Boston’s case). High levels of immigration don’t seem to bother Britons; high rates of change do.
[T]he answer is not simply that people are afraid of the unknown. Rather, resistance to technological progress is usually rooted in the fear that disruption of the status quo might bring losses in employment, income, power, and identity. Governments often end up deciding that it would be easier to prohibit the new technology than to adapt to it.
He uses the example of the Ottoman Empire forbidding the printing of the Koran for nearly 400 years. “By banning the printing of the Koran,” he writes, “Ottoman leaders delayed employment losses for scribes and calligraphers (many of whom were women who were glorified for their mastery of the art). But protecting employment was not their main motivation…[Religious knowledge] was both the glue that held society together and a pillar of political power, so maintaining a monopoly over the dissemination of that knowledge was critical to maintaining the authority of Ottoman leaders. They feared going the way of the Catholic pope, who lost considerable authority during the Protestant Reformation, when the printing press played a key role in spreading new ideas to the faithful.”
The list goes on, from English women petitioning against coffee in 1674 to American dairy farmers spreading misinformation about margarine in the 1800s to the resistance to tractors in the early 1900s. “People almost never reject technological progress out of sheer ignorance,” Juma concludes. “Rather, they fight to protect their own interests and livelihoods, whether that be operating a dairy farm or running a government. As we continually attempt to apply new technologies to improve human and environmental wellbeing, this distinction is vital.” The key in Juma’s mind is “inclusive innovation,” which seeks to help “those who are likely to lose from the displacement of old technologies are given ample opportunity to benefit from new ones. Only then can we make the most of human creativity.”
For example, Fukuyama emphasizes the importance of professionalism–often accomplished through objective, standardized testing–in helping state institutions retain independence (because rigorous testing confounds political appointments) and high morale (because the testing acts as a kind of filter to create a cohesive social group within the institution) in addition to the more obvious benefits of competence and knowledgeability.
Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has a 