Trump's Most Baffling Policy (Or, yet another chapter in Trump's on-going battle with the future)

We beat the Nazis because we had better manufacturing and research capacity. We invented the atom bomb before they did. We made tanks and planes faster than they could.

Near the end of the war, FDR asked Vannevar Bush to explore how wartime research efforts could be transformed into peace time efforts to create new technologies and jobs and to increase life expectancy. Out of Bush's recommendations, captured in Science, the Endless Frontier, came the National Science Foundation which has steadily grown since, providing funding for the basic research that is life-changing over generations.

Bush had great insight into the importance of research and how it is best conducted. Speaking of basic research that doesn't immediately translate into a new product, he wrote about how medical research could be supported within medical schools and universities.

Apart from teaching, however, the primary obligation of the medical schools and universities is to continue the traditional function of such institutions, namely, to provide the individual worker with an opportunity for free, untrammeled study of nature, in the directions and by the methods suggested by his interests, curiosity, and imagination. The history of medical science teaches clearly the supreme importance of affording the prepared mind complete freedom for the exercise of initiative. 

As the United States acted on recommendations such as Bush's, our country clearly took the lead in the creation of new technology, industries and companies. The National Science Foundation is both reality and symbol of our on-going support for research. Bush saw in research the basis for our economic progress as well: 

Where will these new products come from? How will we find ways to make better products at lower cost? The answer is clear. There must be a stream of new scientific knowledge to turn the wheels of private and public enterprise. There must be plenty of men and women trained in science and technology for upon them depend both the creation of new knowledge and its application to practical purposes.

As it turns out, support for research is non-partisan. Since its creation, leaders of both parties have steadily increased the amounts they've asked for to fund the National Science Foundation. Until now.

Trump is the first president to cut average funding from his predecessor. (Or more precisely, request that the average be lowered during his administration. Presidents make a request and Congress makes the appropriation.) Add to his list of leadership qualities, "Not a fan of scientific progress. Facts? I don't need research for that. I can make those up."

Among the institutions he's trying to erode is this most basic tool for progress. His desire to cut even research funding might be the most baffling of his attempts to retreat from the modern world.

Basic research matters. We rightfully pay attention to the Fed's policy when it comes to setting interest rates because that can change investment and spending. The National Science Foundation doesn't just affect investment but actually is an investment in intellectual capital, which is the basis for new technologies, industries, companies, jobs, and wealth. Research takes longer to work than interest rates, but has a bigger effect. I would argue that a slowdown in research funding results in a slowdown in productivity and wage growth. But of course something with a 20-year lag struggles to get much attention in this world of 20-second attention spans.

The amount we fund the National Science Foundation seems paltry to me. Even at its peak, it never even hit even one-tenth of one percent of GDP and it has averaged 4/100th of one percent of GDP in its lifetime. It seems to me that we could hardly err by making it larger each year. Much larger. But alas, the man who looks at our economy and concludes that the rich are not rich enough and the poor are not poor enough has also decided that we know quite enough already. That hardly seems the case to me. 

Trump as Trickster

Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World  is a brilliant look at how trickster gods from cultures on every continent seem to be a constant, the gods whose mischief and disdain for the systems that order daily life disrupt those systems. Sometimes the chaos they unleash is destructive, sometimes creative, and sometimes merely affirms the need to restore the status quo.

Loki

The tricksters Hyde cites include Krishna and Coyote, from two different Indian cultures; Monkey,  and Eshu from two different African cultures; Hermes from the Greeks and Loki from the Scandinavians. Hyde calls them boundary crossers whose disdain for norms both help to change norms and to define them.

Hyde writes that prophecy is not about prediction in the sense that it predicts that the stock market will fall in October. Rather, prophecy reveals truths that will still be true in the future.  This section of his book from 1998 is prophetic about Trump.

These threats on both sides, to the shameless person and to the world around him are, I think, what sometimes lead people to ask if the trickster isn't really a psychopath. Certainly there are parallels. Psychopaths lie, cheat, and steal. They are given to obscenity and, as one psychologist puts it, exhibit "a confusion of amorous and excretory functions." [Think pee tape.] They're not just antisocial, they're foolishly so (they "will commit thefts, forgery, adultery, fraud, and other deeds for astonishingly small stakes and under much greater risks of being discovered than will the ordinary scoundrel"). While they are often smart, they have a sort of "rudderless intelligence," responding to situations as they arise but unable to formulate any coherent, sustainable, long-term plan. They are masters of the empty gesture, and have a glib facility with language, stripping words of the glue that normally connects them to feeling and morality. Finally, they lack both remorse and shame for the harm and hurt that trail behind them. One way or another, almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters. [p. 158 of Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, 1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY.]

Why, if this definition of trickster so aptly describe him then, is Trump so popular?  That's like asking why are the trickster gods so compelling that they have shown up in so many cultures? Perhaps it is because tricksters like Trump mock what people reverence. You can't really hope that a trickster will abide by norms. He defies them. Hyde quotes another author, Rickets, who shows how trickster stories can be read as parodies of shamanism.

In shamanic initiation, for example, the spirits kill and resurrect the initiate, often placing something inside the resurrected body - a quartz crystal, for example - which the shaman can later call forth from his body during healing rituals. If someone in your group claims such powers, you might find wry humor in stories which have Coyote, when he needs advice, calling forth (with much grunting) his own excrement. ... Trickster's failure implies that shamanic pretensions are daydreams at best, fakery at worst. [p. 294 of Hyde's Trickster Makes This World.]

If experts are our modern shamans, then Trump is continuing with this tradition of mocking shamans in a hundred ways that are variants on his appointing Rick Perry as Energy Secretary; Rick Perry who - in a debate - could not even remember the name of the Energy Department he wanted to eliminate. Only a trickster would make a person who thought so little of an agency that they both wanted to eradicate it and couldn't remember its name as the leader of that agency. Trump thumbs his nose at the experts who pretend to understand and predict the systems - from weather systems that define our climate to the financial systems that create booms and busts or even the government agencies he is supposed to manage - that define our world. He thumbs his - well, whatever - by bragging about the size of his penis in a presidential debate. He's shameless and his supporters love him for this for at least a couple of reasons. If the experts deserve mocking rather than reverence then even the non-experts can feel superior - or at least equal - to those experts. And once the standards have been mocked by the trickster Trump - whether when he has sex with porn stars while his wife is home with a new baby or when he shares conspiracy theories with Alex Jones - there is no longer a credible basis for calling them deplorable.

That said, past generations paid a great price for the transition to something new. Trump may be the price we pay and if so, he may be a bargain by contrast.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the 6 year-old Republican Party's first president. The new Republicans laid in place a set of policies that helped the country catch the wave of the industrial economy.  After the Great Depression, the modern Democratic Party - from FDR to Kennedy and Clinton - created a set of policies that helped the country to catch the wave of the information economy. Waves don't come out of calm seas and the chaos of the Civil War and the Great Depression and the second world war seemed - in retrospect - to mark a transition from an old to a new economy. During Lincoln's time we had a literal battle between Union soldiers and Confederates, two groups with very different ideas about whether we lived in a world contained by states or nations.  The transition ushered in with FDR's engagement in the second world war and Clinton's signing of NAFTA and WTO trade agreements was from national to international economic and political realities. Republicans made us bigger than states; modern Democrats made us bigger than a nation. Chaos in the form of bloody wars and assassinations marked these messy transitions into something new.

I think that we're now moving from an information to entrepreneurial economy and such a transition seems inevitably messy. It is unsurprising that a trickster has shown up at this time of transition. Tricksters are boundary crossers, creating and thriving on the chaos that marks transitions. Trump might just be the trickster who is disrupting the status quo enough to make it easier to create the next, new thing. We always pay a price for moving into the new; we still don't know the final tab for the Trump presidency but it could be one of the lowest we have ever paid, which seems to me just one more sign that we're making progress even if Trump - who as trickster belongs to earlier, more archaic worlds - is not.

General Intelligence and General Stupidity - Smart People Know the Difference

As an old guy I've given up on the notion of meeting someone who is brilliant. So, if I'm told that someone is brilliant, I want to know in what. Because while I know that the most we can hope for is having one thing that we're really good at - if we're lucky, even great at. That's what we can hope for , being pretty good or even great at at least one thing. But the only guarantee we have is that there will be at least half a dozen tasks and activities that make us look like complete idiots when we try them.

So it is too simple to say of someone, "He's brilliant," or "He's an idiot." You have to be more specific and clarify on what task is he brilliant or an idiot.

The ideal politician would be brilliant at two things: politics and policy. Politics makes you successful at the ballot box, it gets you elected. Policy makes your community successful - your average person able to make more money and live longer. Ideally a politician would be great at getting elected and enacting effective policy. I think FDR is an example of this. FDR got elected president four times. He helped the country navigate its way out of the Great Depression and through World War II. He wasn't ideological but was open to experimentation, trying whatever he thought would work to lower unemployment from the 25% it was when his presidency started. And he knew that the Nazis were not just "their" problem but were ours. He had press conferences twice a week and his willingness to answer questions on the host of issues the country faced gradually won over even hardened journalists. He also gave a weekly radio address; years after he'd died, his wife Eleanor said that people would approach her to say how much they missed having him explain "their government" to them. By the end of his presidency the country - indeed - the world was a better place. That's the simplest measure of effective policy.

You haven't heard of the worst politician. Not only can this guy not get elected or get any media coverage, but he has truly bad ideas. He might be ranting to some long-suffering friends in a coffee shop diner somewhere but he's not winning any elections. Bad at politics and bad at policy.

View from Adlai Stevenson College at UC Santa Cruz

My college was named after Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president in 1952 and 1956. I don't pretend to know much about him but by all reports his policy solutions were thoughtful and ahead of his time but he ended up running against Eisenhower, the man who led the Allied troops against Hitler. Stevenson was seemingly gifted at policy but not terribly effective at politics - at least at the national level.

Which brings us to Trump. He might understand the media better than anyone in my lifetime. He continues to dominate news coverage of every cycle, regardless of what seems to be going on anywhere else. He was so good at politics that he was able to get elected without having held any office before and having been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. It seems highly probable that he had help from Putin but the punchline is that he won the election. He won by offering to make the country more like the former Confederacy, his base. The states whose lifestyles, decisions and policies put them at the bottom of every meaningful list - from household income to life expectancy - all thought he had the best ideas (well, 8 of the 10 poorest states) and the states at the top of every meaningful list (well, 9 of the 10 richest states) all voted against him. He wants to renege on trade deals, lower immigration, and build walls in a time when the most prosperous counties, states, and countries are more tightly integrating with the rest of the world rather than sealing themselves off from it. Trump is an idiot savant, a man brilliant at politics and an idiot at policy.

For my nickle, this makes him the most dangerous man in politics. If he were this bad at policy but just as bad at politics, he might have a talk radio show but he wouldn't have the White House. If he were as naturally gifted at policy as he is at media coverage and politics, it would be a joy to have him in the White House.

Which brings me back to the claim that no one is generally intelligent at everything. We all have our weaknesses, our areas of absurd inadequacy and stupidity. There is, though, one way to not make this evident. People who are aware of their areas of weakness and don't do that thing they do so poorly - whether it be choose their own clothes or tell jokes or dance or calculate equations or analyze data - are people who seem really with it. A person who knows his limits is a person who can leave a great impression; you don't see him look foolish.

And this is might be Trump's biggest weakness of all. He understands policy and governance so poorly that he doesn't even understand how poorly he understands it. The final thing that makes him so dangerous? He doesn't even know that he's bad at what he's bad at. Sadly, Trump won't be the guy who leaves you with such a favorable impression because he only does what he's great at; instead, he insists on showing you how badly he does what he thinks he does so well.

The closest thing to general intelligence is the ability to discern what we are intelligent at and what we're stupid at and focus on the first and avoid the second. Sadly, we're led by a guy who doesn't even have enough intelligence to know the difference between what he's brilliant at and what he's stupid at.

Spending Our Way Into a New Economy

Conservatives argue that Roosevelt's Keynesian policies were ineffectual because it was not until the country mobilized for World War 2 that the economy turned around. The lesson that Christina Romer, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has drawn is that Roosevelt did not do enough. "The key fact is that while Roosevelt's fiscal actions were a bold break from the past, they were nevertheless small relative to the size of the problem," she said. "This is a lesson the administration has taken to heart."

Roosevelt made a puny attempt at stimulus spending, whereas World War 2 did, and Obama will, make an heroic attempt at stimulus spending. This should hearten us.

What if the truth of the World War 2 economic recovery was more complex? What if it was not just a simple matter of spending more money but was from spending money in a particular way?

After World War 1, the Allies could not even make sense of German patents without German engineers and scientists. War with the Nazis, decades later, was a stimulus of a specific kind. Americans did not just spend money on factories and production. We spent money on research and development, higher education, and furthering fields like computers , cybernetics, production systems, and chemistry. Our reaction to the advances of German engineering and science was a specific kind of stimulus: it helped to usher us into the information age and helped to create the management and production techniques that helped to make American corporations dominant in the business world and the institutions most emulated across the world.

The deficit spending of World War 2 did not just save the world from tyranny. It helped to create a new kind of economy.

It is not that the U.S. is no longer an information economy. It is that the American economy is now a part of a global information economy. This has changed things enormously.

The point is not to stimulate the old Information Economy, stimulating domestic consumption and investment that it likely to go into foreign production capacity and goods in this global economy. The goal instead should be to help to create a new economy, just as we did during World War 2.

At the risk of sounding trite, it is not time to repair the garment that fits us and our time less well. It is time to create a new garment that we've grown into. It is not enough to stimulate the Information Economy; we need to create a new Entrepreneurial economy instead. We probably do need deficit spending to do this. But not deficit spending mindlessly spent on what worked in the 1930s and 40s.

Obama, Kennedy & Voter Fraud

Current polls indicate that Obama will win about two thirds of the electoral votes. Pundits are talking about a landslide. This is not, historically, a landslide. FDR got 99%, Reagan 98% and Nixon 97% in victories. That is a landslide.

This chart shows how, during the last century going back to the 1908 election, the Republicans have won about 51% of the electoral votes, the Democrats about 47% and third-party candidates almost 2%. As you can see, the close elections that twice gave us George W. are really anomalies.

I've included Obama's latest poll numbers in this graph. You can see how it compares with the results over history. (Click on it to make it larger.)



Look at 1960. Although Kennedy won by a comfortable margin of victory in the electoral vote, his margin of victory in the popular vote was only .17% - not even two-tenth of one percent. Historians seem to agree that Kennedy won by voter fraud. Try this thought experiment. What if Nixon had won in 1960, been assassinated in 1963, and Kennedy had served two terms starting in 1969, at age 51? (You can decide whether his second term would have also ended in impeachment (likely for his conduct with an intern rather than breaking and entering into the Watergate apartments). It is hard to think of a better argument against voter fraud than that scenario.

DATA FROM GRAPH from Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
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At other blogs
Political Irony - Imaginary Voter Fraud
YouDecide2008 Voting Fraud Fears Grow
AskCherLock An Obama Landslide
Baseball Nooby The Evaporating Obama Landslide