hudebnik

In case anyone hasn't seen it,



I watched a discussion last week between Paul Krugman and some energy analyst who pointed out that if wind, solar, and battery technology keep improving at the current rate for another twenty years, they'll be so cheap we'll be saying "what do we do with all this electricity?" A world in which usable energy is not scarce -- not only has that never happened in US history, not in human history, but not even in the history of life on Earth. And we could easily live to see it.

And thank you, Donald Trump, for pushing the world in that direction. Prices of gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, etc. will drop slightly when the shooting stops in Iran (whenever that is), but newly-flowing oil through the Strait of Hormuz won't reach its destinations for at least a month after that, and oil wells that were shut down due to the war won't be fully up and running for at least a month, and it'll take at least a year to rebuild the physical damage to wells and refineries done by the war. So those prices won't return to "normal" for at least a year.

This war has made clear to every nation on Earth (except the US) that depending on fossil fuels is a sucker's game, making your economy hostage to random events and unpredictable autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and the United States. The nations that have made the most progress reducing their dependence on fossil fuels (Iceland, Tajikistan, Costa Rica, Norway, Sweden, China, Paraguay, Ethiopia, Denmark, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, UK, Germany, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan...) will thrive in the coming year, and those that haven't will scramble to catch up. If Donald Trump is still President, the US will be one of the last nations to acknowledge this reality; we'll be last in line to buy the technology from the Chinese (since we stopped building it ourselves) while the rest of the world enters a golden age of abundance.

Politicians have been imposing import tariffs for many centuries, for a number of different reasons.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a theory called "mercantilism" held that the most successful country was the one with the most gold and silver within its borders. Selling stuff to foreigners gives you gold and silver; buying stuff from foreigners costs you gold and silver; so obviously you should sell as much as possible and buy as little as possible across national borders. And one obvious way to do this is to charge a high tariff on anything made abroad that anybody tries to bring into your country.

Mercantilism is (or should have been) obvious nonsense. Possessing gold and silver doesn't improve your life much, unless you trade them for things that actually improve your life like food, clothes, entertainment, etc. -- and as soon as you do so, according to the theory, you've made yourself poorer.

In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, there was a different reason to impose import tariffs: to support the survival and growth of a particular domestic industry. This happened for two main sub-reasons: either a politician has lots of supporters in that industry, and wants to ensure the workers have jobs and the bosses make profits, or an industry is seen as "national security critical", and the government wants to make sure there's adequate domestic production capacity that won't suddenly disappear in an international conflict. (I've been told that even earlier, the Protestant Reformation retained Catholic fish-days in order to keep British fishing fleets in business, thus ensuring a supply of trained sailors and shipwrights who could also serve the navy.) In either case, it gives an advantage to domestic producers in a particular industry compared with their foreign competitors, at the expense of domestic consumers. But it typically takes years for an entrepreneur to buy land, build a factory, hire workers, and start doing business in a new location. As a result, no entrepreneur will undertake such a project without confidence that the tariff will be in place for many years. Which is one reason that the Constitution grants taxing power only to Congress, through the time-consuming process of making and amending laws. Any tariff imposed unilaterally by a President, particularly if it changes every few weeks, cannot possibly have much effect on where industry happens.

In his first term, Trump imposed a bunch of import tariffs, US farmers lost a bunch of foreign markets, and he paid them off with more money than the tariffs brought in, blowing up the budget deficit (even before Covid). In his second term, he's taken it much farther, and it's never been clear why, or what he wants to achieve. As mentioned above, it can't be to encourage companies to set up more production in the US, because that would require long-term predictability, e.g. if the tariffs were enacted into law with bipartisan support.

One possible reason is that he believes in mercantilism, 250 years after Adam Smith eviscerated it in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He measures his own worth by how much money he has, so it comes naturally to him to do the same for the United States. Selling abroad is "winning", buying abroad is "losing", even buying something that can't be made domestically at all. If the goal is to prevent gold and silver (or rather dollars) from leaving the US, imposing 50% tariff rates on Lesotho and Myanmar and similar poor countries makes perfect sense: they still can't afford to buy anything from us, but at least we can stop buying anything from them.

One of his stated reasons is revenue to the Federal government, and it really does have that effect. Of course, the vast majority of the revenue comes from domestic consumers, so it's really just a way of raising taxes without admitting he's doing so (because Republicans don't do that, y'know). This too doesn't make much difference unless the tariffs are in place for a substantial time.

But given what else we know about Trump's psychology, I think the most likely explanation is "tariffs cause pain to other countries, and thus allow me to extort them in exchange for removing the pain." For this approach, long-term predictability isn't necessary; indeed, chaos and unpredictability are part of the negotiating strategy. This is what he's done with law firms and Universities and media companies: threaten them with something painful (for which he has no legal authority or evidence, but he could still cause a lot of pain in the interim before a court overrules him), then demand obeisance and apologies and White House oversight and protection money in exchange for not applying the pain... yet. The "antisemitism" and "DEI" excuses, the oversight to prevent "anti-conservative bias", even the protection money are secondary to the fundamental goal of putting other powerful institutions into a submissive posture.

In surprisingly many domestic cases, it's working. The heads of major corporations, law firms, and Universities have kowtowed to Trump and literally paid him protection money in hopes that (a) he'll turn his attention to somebody else for now, and ideally (b) he'll come to consider them "on his side" and never threaten them again. (a) is likely, but "for now" may mean only a matter of months. (b) is less likely: even the most vociferous of Trump supporters never know when they'll be thrown under a bus.

It's working less well with other countries. A few countries have reached written trade deals in the past six months, not by cutting their own tariffs on US goods (which were mostly very low already, a result of the US-led free-trade consensus of the past seventy years), but by promising other things, such as investment in US-based companies, which requires that they have dollars to invest, which requires that we run a trade deficit with them! Once a "deal" is vaguely agreed-upon, Trump unilaterally changes the numbers in his own favor and announces the deal as completed, then changes the numbers yet again; you can't negotiate with somebody like that. Some other countries have "come to the table" to negotiate, but it's hard to negotiate when neither side knows what the US wants other than submissiveness, so what's been achieved so far are mostly agreements to continue negotiating. Many countries have had popular nationalistic backlashes against the US: it's become almost impossible to buy or sell US-made consumer products in Canada. And every country that the US antagonizes, China immediately approaches with offers of help and cooperation.

OK, we all knew Trump was fond of bribery —- both giving bribes to public officials like Pam Bondi when he wanted them to not investigate his University and similar schemes, and even better, taking what appear to be bribes himself now that he’s a public official. But this Times interview lays out how mind-bogglingly, unprecedentedly, openly corrupt the Trump family’s crypto dealings are.

Yes, there have been lots of corrupt Federal officials before, but they usually tried to hide their corruption, while Trump is completely open about it: he knows that the only way he can be held accountable is through impeachment, which won’t happen as long as his party controls at least one house of Congress. And the scale is probably at least an order of magnitude beyond all previous Federal bribery scandals combined.

It raises some interesting questions: assuming Trump left office and we still had a vaguely functioning republic, how would we even begin to fix this?

(1) Overturn the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and make clear that somebody who uses Presidential powers to commit a crime can be prosecuted for that crime. For example, the President has nearly unlimited pardon power, but granting a pardon in exchange for money would still be prosecutable as bribery. This would require either a SCOTUS decision or, better, a Constitutional amendment.

(2) Put teeth in the emoluments clause. We can’t expect the DoJ to criminally charge a sitting President, but we could impose a 100% income tax rate on the fair market value of any gift the President (or any other Federal officer) receives in violation of the emoluments clause. This could be done by act of Congress, and signed into law by one honest President.

(3) Make impeachment slightly easier —- say, a 3/5 majority in the Senate rather than a 2/3 majority. Again, this would require a Constitutional amendment. Trump’s second impeachment failed to convict by a vote of 57-43, not quite a 3/5 majority, but the margin would have been much less comfortable, and three more Republican Senators might have voted to convict if they had thought it possible to come out on the winning side.

(4) How to deal with cryptocurrency? The basic problem is that it enables anybody who wishes, anywhere in the world, to put large amounts of money directly into the President’s pocket, anonymously but verifiably if the donor wishes to prove it to the recipient in private. If you were designing a system to encourage bribery, you couldn’t do much better. And the Trumps are currently using it in several different ways, as the Times interview points out:

(a) direct gifts from the donor’s “wallet” to the recipient’s,

(b) purchases of assets from which the recipient receives a transaction fee,

(c) purchases of floating assets of which the recipient holds a lot, driving up their price, and

(d) purchases of stablecoins from the recipient, which are allegedly backed by actual dollars but the purchase still amounts to a zero-interest loan to the recipient (who can invest the money in something interest-bearing).

For all of these, the novel problem is anonymity: the public, the IRS, and law enforcement have no way of knowing who gave the President (or other public official) how much money when. If we could fix that, at least for a limited class of recipients (high-level Federal government officials), the usual mechanisms of accountability would at least have a chance to do their jobs.

Existing law requires certain categories of government officials (including the President and Vice President) to file financial disclosure forms, within 30 days of taking office and annually thereafter, identifying the sources and amounts of income, gifts, and reimbursements. In a crypto account, some income, gifts and reimbursements are likely to be truly anonymous, and you can't report what you don't know -- but you can still report the total amounts of anonymous transfers, and you can report the account numbers of any such accounts that you own, so the information can be verified. And the tax code could be amended to apply a 100% income tax rate to the total value of such anonymous receipts beyond an annual threshold.

That would work for dodges (a), (b), and (d), but not for dodge (c), the “driving up the price” trick, unless applied to every purchaser of the asset, even those with no interest in bribing public officials. Fortunately, this is the most unwieldy, inconvenient trick of the four: it costs the donor a lot of money, depending on market demand, to drive up the price of a publicly-held asset sufficiently to affect the recipient's behavior, and the recipient can't realize the gains except by selling large amounts of the asset, which pushes the price back down.

Thirty years ago or so a chiropractor X-rayed my hips and informed me I had a 6mm leg-length difference, which he said wasn't enough to see with the naked eye but was enough to put my pelvis at an angle and my spine into a slight S-curve, so he prescribed a heel insert. Which I used for a few years, and I think it helped with back pain, but over the years I lost the habit (particularly when wearing sandals), and then forgot which heel it went in. I've looked in a bunch of my old shoes for inserts, and found one pair in which the left shoe has a full-length after-market insole and the right shoe doesn't, so I'm guessing it was the left heel. So on my way home yesterday I stopped at a dollar store (they're really going to suffer from Trump's tariffs, since almost everything on the shelves is made in China!) and got some gel heel pads a few mm thick. I put one in the left heel of each of two pairs of shoes that I wear commonly; we'll see what difference it makes.

From this NY Times article ,

“Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said in a call with reporters Friday that “disastrous” timber and lumber policies “drive up construction and housing costs and impoverish America through large trade deficits that results from exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil dumping lumber” into the U.S. market.”

Wait: if Canada, Germany, and Brazil are “dumping” lumber on the US market, wouldn’t that drive construction and housing prices down, not up? It might cost some US lumberjack jobs, in exchange for creating more US construction jobs. (Not to mention jobs making things that we export to Canada, Germany, and Brazil.)

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Allen v. Milligan, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't further eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as amended in 1982): by a 6-3 margin, the Court agreed with a Federal appeals court that the Alabama map of Congressional districts wrongly denied its 27% black population a fair voice in electing Representatives. I haven't read the details of the appeals-court or Supreme court decision, but the case appears to involve the usual "packing and cracking": putting most of the state's black voters in one district, which almost always elects a black Democrat, so that the remaining six districts have a white Republican majority and almost always elect white Republicans.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, complains that the Court cannot force a state to use race as a criterion in drawing district boundaries; racism is racism, even in the interest of a minority. Of course, his criticism on this point is one-sided and hypocritical: he seldom objects when a state uses race as a criterion in favor of a white majority, as long as they're not so foolish as to put it in writing. But what if the state didn't use race as a criterion in favor of a white majority? Would he have a legitimate point?

What would a truly race-blind redistricting system look like? It could use not geography, but something with no correlation with race or political party, such as your Social Security number or your birthday (as a number from 1-366). If your Social Security number, divided by 7, has a remainder of 1, you're in district 1; a remainder of 2, district 2; and so on. Absolutely and utterly race-blind, and disastrous for minority representation, because every district in the state would be 27% black; considering the importance of race in Alabama politics, it would be rare to ever see a black representative elected at all.

In Justice Thomas's dream world, the end of overt racism by government would lead to race becoming irrelevant to politics, people would win elections on individual merit, unaffected by race, and in the long run the percentage of black elected officials might resemble the percentage of blacks in the population. But in the real world, that could be a very long run indeed, and it's not clear that Alabama society would actually move in that direction at all; in the interim, black Alabamans would have even less representation than they have now.

The fundamental problem actually isn't about race; it applies to race, political party, sexual orientation and identification, and any other characteristic (call it X) that voters see as politically important. Single-seat, winner-take-all elections amplify majorities. If 60% of voters have characteristic X, an X-blind electoral map will generally give at least 60%, but usually far more than 60%, of the seats to candidates with characteristic X.

You can try to fix this with X-based redistricting, ensuring that only about 60% of the districts have pro-X majorities, but that has several problems. First, it leads to weirdly shaped, unnatural districts, such as the one that gave "gerrymandering" its name. Second, it requires government to explicitly consider X, and to discriminate on the basis of X, in its official proceedings, and that feels wrong, even if saying so puts me in agreement with Clarence Thomas (which also feels wrong). Third, it intentionally involves creating districts in which the general election is a foregone conclusion, and all the real action happens in primaries, which are dominated by more-extreme members of the respective parties. And fourth, what if political decisions depend not only on X, but on unrelated characteristic Y? Do we need to draw districts representing every possible combination of X and Y values?

Some democracies have tried to resolve this using proportional representation by party: if Party Z gets 30% of the votes, Party Z gets roughly 30% of the seats in a legislature (or one house of a legislature, or something). Unfortunately, this (a) fails to recognize any politically-important characteristic that isn't (yet) associated with a political party, and (b) gives political parties an official status in the (state or Federal) Constitution, whereas I would prefer to burn political parties to the ground.

A better answer is a voting system that tends to produce proportional representation (in a state's Congressional delegation or its state legislature), not only by race or party but by whatever characteristic voters feel is important. This cannot happen as long as each district elects a single winner independently; you need either a way for votes in one district to affect outcomes in another, or (more plausibly) multi-seat districts. And you need a way for each voter to express a preference, not only for a single candidate, but for a whole class of candidates who have characteristics that voter considers important (race, party, sexual orientation/identity, musical talent, business acumen, etc; the voter doesn't need to say or even consciously know what the characteristics are). That could in principle mean voters rank the candidates from first to last, or assign each candidate an independent numeric score from 1 to 10, or check off all the candidates they "approve" of, but you definitely need more than a single name per voter.

There are a lot of voting systems out there, each designed to solve a different problem and placing different priorities on the desirable properties of a voting system. I know of one designed specifically to achieve proportional representation, without pre-judging what characteristics voters will find important: Single Transferrable Vote, which is reminiscent of Instant Runoff but applied to multi-seat districts. Each voter ranks all the candidates in the district, and the system first looks at all the first-place votes. Any candidate with at least a threshold number of first-place votes is elected, and the ballots that listed that candidate in first place are removed from the pool, those voters having had their say. (There are variants involving redistributing the "surplus votes" over the threshold.) Of the remaining candidates, some with especially small numbers of first-place votes are eliminated, and we look at the second-place candidates on the ballots that chose them first. This continues in multiple rounds until all the seats are filled.

The system has many of the same problems as IRV: it pays more attention to whom you vote for than whom you vote against, thus favoring divisive candidates over consensus candidates; it's sensitive to "butterfly effects", in that a handful of votes changing hands between minor candidates can have a cascading effect on major candidates; and it's non-parallelizable, in that you can't do any substantial part of the counting work at the precinct level, you have to do everything globally. And it's even more complicated, difficult to explain, and difficult to justify than IRV. Among other things, there's no single obviously-right way to choose the thresholds for "elected" and "eliminated", nor any single obviously-right way to decide which surplus votes to redistribute. But it does a very good job of producing proportional representation, if there are enough seats per district (ideally, a single district for the whole state).

Is there a way to achieve something like proportional representation, but with a simpler, easier-to-understand, easier-to-justify voting system? I'm a big fan of the Borda count for single-seat elections; maybe that could be adapted? In the Borda system, if you vote for 7 candidates, your first choice gets 7 points, your second 6 points, and so on. So if there are 7 seats to fill, it seems natural to give them to the candidates with the top 7 point totals. The result won't be as nearly proportional as STV would produce, but you would expect a coherent, disciplined minority party to be able to elect a few top candidates over lower-ranked candidates of the majority party. But I don't think that works. I'm still working through the algebra, but it looks as though a majority party can fill all the seats, no matter what minority parties do, simply by telling its voters to rank the majority-party candidates randomly and ahead of all the other-party candidates. Furthermore, the majority party's advantage increases with the addition of minor, long-shot candidates -- not because they take votes away from either "real" party, but because they decrease the point ratio between a party's top-ranked and last-ranked candidates, and whenever this ratio is less than the ratio in party allegiance among voters, the majority party wins.

You could perhaps fix the above problem by doing a Borda count in which the number of candidates you can vote for (and thus the maximum number of points you give any one of them) is substantially less than the number of seats to fill. But that defeats one of the appeals of the Borda system: the fact that you can meaningfully downvote a candidate by ranking it last, and downvotes matter just as much as upvotes. I think Borda just doesn't work for multi-seat elections.

try this story about NYC rent (and a real-estate app that's used nationwide, so this isn't just about NYC).

The immediate impetus for the current post is this quotation from Florida's new anti-CRT law:

An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.

(taken from this opinion piece about Governor Ron DeSantis's political trajectory)

That sounds at first like an unobjectionable, anti-racist, anti-sexist sentiment. Individual blacks shouldn't be pre-judged based on what other blacks have done, individual whites shouldn't be pre-judged based on what other whites have done, individual Moslems shouldn't be pre-judged based on what other Moslems have done, individual Catholics shouldn't be pre-judged based on what other Catholics have done, individual men or women or NB's shouldn't be pre-judged based on what other men, women, or NB's have done, etc. Who could object to that? (Leaving aside the irony that this law uses exactly the same language of "discomfort" and "psychological distress" for which conservatives often mock liberals as "fragile snowflakes".)

The fly in the ointment is the word "responsibility", which in my experience has at least three different meanings (in the "something went wrong and needs to be fixed" context), which I explored here. In brief,

• Who's (most) to blame? Who caused the the thing to go wrong?


• Who's (most) capable of fixing the thing?


• Who stands to benefit (most) from the thing being fixed?

If all three of these are the same person (or corporation or whatever), the thing is likely to be fixed, and unlikely to recur because the person who caused it this time paid for that mistake. If they're three different people, the thing is unlikely to be fixed, and likely to happen again.

It occurs to me now that in some cases there's a fourth person:

• Who benefited (or expected to benefit) from the thing going wrong?

So, let's look at the history of race in America, in particular its effect on socioeconomic inequality (which is tied up with educational inequality, neighborhood crime rates, etc.)

Who's to blame? Obviously, I didn't personally cause slavery in the 17th-19th centuries, or Jim Crow and lynching in the late 19th and 20th, or real-estate red-lining in the mid-20th. Indeed, only the most recent and ongoing examples of institutional racism (which really are much less bad than fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago) have anybody living who could be "blamed" for them. If we expect the problem to be fixed by those "to blame", it'll never be fixed because those people are mostly dead.

Who stands to benefit from the problem being fixed? One could argue that every member of society would benefit from reducing inequality, in that the resulting society would be stabler, more peaceful, with less crime, etc. But obviously those who stand to benefit the most are those on the losing end, those descended from many generations of people who were poor and/or uneducated largely because of their race. That's not me either.

Who's capable of fixing the problem? Again, almost everybody has something to contribute to solving the problem, but the people most capable of fixing the problem are, as always, those with the most socioeconomic power -- precisely the people who don't stand to benefit from the problem being fixed. And it's such a huge problem that no individual, no matter how wealthy, is likely to be able to make much of a dent in it, which allows most of us, even the relatively wealthy, to excuse ourselves from it.

And finally, who benefits from the problem? Even though it's "not my fault", I benefit from slavery and subsequent racial discrimination. According to Ancestry, I have several ancestors who owned slaves (mostly in eastern Maryland), and their wealth presumably affected the socioeconomic and educational status of their non-slave-owning descendants, including me. Both absolutely (in dollars and degrees) and relatively (to the rest of the US population, particularly the black population), I am almost certainly richer and better-educated than I would be if my distant ancestors hadn't owned slaves, and if subsequent generations hadn't been on the winning side of government policies and societal norms that explicitly favored whites over blacks, Native Americans, Chinese, etc.

So who's "responsible" for the socioeconomic problems of race in the US? If you think of "responsibility" in terms of blame, you're probably off the hook because you're alive today. If you think of "responsibility" in terms of ability to fix it, you're probably off the hook because you're not a billionaire or a government. If you think of "responsibility" in terms of incentive to fix it, most of the people reading this post are off the hook because they're above average in income and education. Only in qui bono terms do you bear any responsibility. So if your goal is to absolve yourself of responsibility, it's critically important to avoid any discussion of qui bono, and that's the purpose of the law.

On the other hand, if your goal is to fix the problem, discussing "blame" is irrelevant and useless: the only way to get a problem fixed is to somehow align the people most able to fix it (which in this case is those who benefit from the problem) with those with the most incentive to see it fixed.

With the start of the new US Federal fiscal year, we have new debt-and-deficit figures. And following the same methodology as for the past fifteen years, we get the remarkable result that the Federal budget deficit actually shrank during the Trump administration. It doubled during the first two years, was on track to double again for 2019-2020 before COVID hit, and actually quadrupled instead as a result of COVID. But the 2020-2021 deficit was completely erased by inflation: the national debt grew by slightly less than the rate of inflation. (It's possible that the deficit looks smaller than it "really" was because the Federal Reserve started taking "extraordinary measures", i.e. accounting tricks, towards the end of the fiscal year to avoid the debt limit. I haven't checked on that yet.)

That said, the Trump administration (including COVID) oversaw almost twice as much accrued debt per year as the G.W. Bush administration (including the 2008 recession). Likewise, the pre-crisis Trump administration (cutting off at December 2019) oversaw almost twice as much accrued debt per year as the pre-crisis G.W. Bush administration (cutting off at September 2008).

Among all the other news in the past week, the U.S. Federal Government started a new fiscal year on Oct. 1. So in keeping with Time Honored Tradition, I've updated my web page about Federal budget deficits.

In brief, before COVID-19 hit the U.S., fiscal 2019-2020 was already on track to have the second highest budget deficit in history (behind 2008-2009; all figures are inflation adjusted). That's what I get by extrapolating linearly from the first three months of fiscal 2019-2020, by the end of which China was getting hit hard but there wasn't yet a confirmed case in the U.S. And that deficit was already on track to be twice the 2018-2019 deficit, which was slightly larger than 2017-2018's deficit, which was twice 2016-2017's deficit.

But including the effects of COVID-19 (the tax revenue losses and the special spending), fiscal 2019-2020's deficit more than doubles again over the doubling it was already doing.