Barry Zuckerkorn

This shifts balance from unelected officials who can be fired by the president (administrative officials) towards unelected officials who can’t be (judges). It doesn’t actually reduce regulatory power, just puts that regulatory power under the supervision and review of even less accountable officials.

Rage isn’t sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump’s base.

Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.

In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we’ve seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80’s, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.

Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it’s unquestionably a lower quality product they’ve displaced.

Across the beverage industry as a whole, you’ve got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.

So that’s a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.

We’re angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn’t feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.

The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.

No, the Florida law prohibits voting by felons convicted in other states, when that other state prohibits voting. So Florida would follow New York’s lead. And the New York law prohibits felons from voting only until they’ve served their full prison sentence.

So if Trump doesn’t get sentenced to any prison time, then he’ll be eligible to vote in New York (and therefore Florida).

Great article. It’s long, though, so to summarize the main points for those of us who don’t have a ton of time:

• State constitutions protect individual rights, just as the federal constitution does. Many of these rights are the same rights listed in the federal constitution, but state supreme courts can interpret them in a manner that is more strongly protective of those individual rights. (They can’t meaningfully interpret their state constitutions as less protective than the federal constitution, though, because if something is protected by the federal constitution, a state constitution can’t un-protect that.)
• And State constititons can protect rights that have no federal analogue, while also being relatively easy to amend. Once abortion rights got de-constitutionalized at the federal level, a lot of states have gone on to explicitly protect a right to abortion in their own state constitutions.
• This is a critical time for this strategy, as we now have a US Supreme Court that is interested in dialing back individual rights protected by the constitution. So state courts need to step up, using this “judicial federalism” idea that traces back to when the 1970’s Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Burger, started its conservative turn against the 1960’s Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice Warren.
• Of course, this history of the movement attracts criticism that it is inherently a progressive/liberal doctrine, which has some kernels of truth, but many conservative legal scholars believe it to be important, too.
• Specific examples of legal issues that can be constitutionalized at the state level have been LGBT rights, election/voting rights, conditions of incarceration, and a rising movement to use state constitutions to mandate policies fighting climate change.
• But there are challenges to litigating these issues in states rather than the federal level. One issue, obviously, is that the impact is limited to a single state at a time. Other issues include the difficulty of funding that kind of litigation, as the federal rules for civil rights litigation actually can get the cases funded by the losers (which also makes it easier for nonprofits and donors to put up the up-front cost of litigation), which is an arrangement that basically doesn’t exist in state courts. Plus, state courts are much more clearly partisan and political than the federal courts (often with judges elected to fixed terms in partisan elections), staffed up with judges with life tenure appointed by past administrations, so there have been several examples of state supreme courts reversing themselves just a few years after an earlier decision.
• Still, it’s better than nothing, and successes at the state level can build momentum for national movements.

I also speak post college level English. And I can recognize dumb ideas written in English. Mises was a hack.

I’m too old for school shooter drills, but I’m like basically the perfect age for being terrified of velociraptors after watching Jurassic Park in theaters. Not only do I know how to barricade a door, but I also know how to use mirrors to visually trick people into seeing hallways that aren’t there!

If you think that society was friendlier to trans people in 1999 compared to 2024, you are mistaken.

The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts.

Yes, and partisan affiliation is a big chunk of that shift during late 2020 and early 2021. Republicans went from generally positive to strongly negative when Biden was elected, while Democrats didn’t flip as strongly from strongly negative to still pretty negative. You can tie it to vaccines, but, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and point out a more significant shift that happened at the same time.

I don’t think the lived economic experiences of Republicans and Democrats of the same income levels are all that different, but the cross tabs in these surveys show very different perceptions.

So I stand by my general view that a lot of the mismatch stems from people’s feelings being poorly correlated with even their own experience.

Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.

I’m not trying to formulate any kind of political strategy. I’m just observing people and trying to explain what I see with a predictive/explanatory model, not formulating some kind of message. And my model is simple: Republicans will never be happy about the economy under a Democratic president, and most of the rest of the sentiment is just driven by gasoline prices, and to a lesser extent, food prices.

nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy

The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey that is basically the standard on this sentiment analysis seems to be heavily correlated with gasoline prices, far more than gasoline prices actually affect the economy.

And consumer sentiment about the economy has been moving upward over the past few months, while gasoline prices have been low. Did anything change between November and now, to bring it to the highest level of the last 3 years? I’d argue the only real change we’ve seen in the economy over the past few months is low gasoline prices. All the other long term structural things are still present.

The article tries to cite specific metrics to counter the headline metrics, but I’m not sure they paint a picture supporting the author’s points.

Those days are long gone. Today’s typical American working household has several earners, sometimes in multiple jobs.

Following the first link shows an article that paints a picture of life being better for dual earner households:

This shift towards a dual-earner model presents challenges like fewer hours for home production, but also benefits like improved work-life balance satisfaction for husbands doing more housework. Personal savings rates have fallen from 15% to 5%, yet 71% of dual-earner families contributed to 401(k) accounts in 2015.

Following the second link shows that multiple jobholders as a percent of the economy has been trending downward for decades, hitting a record low during the height of the pandemic, and climbing back up to around the average for the previous decade.

The article continues:

If one earner loses a job while the others keep theirs, she may leave the workforce for a time; there is the option of making do with less, and for some there is early retirement. She will not, in that case, count as unemployed—however difficult her life. A low jobless rate can mask a great deal of stress in such households.

This is strange, because the hypothetical person in this category would be counted in metrics like U-6, which has also been at near record lows since the pandemic recovery.

The employment-to-population ratio is still a bit below where it was in 2020, and far below where it was in 2000

Well, the percentage of the population over 65 is much, much higher than it was in 2000. If you look at prime age labor force participation, the number is higher than it has been the previous 2 decades before that.

The author should’ve focused on other metrics (housing prices, food prices) rather than choosing metrics that don’t actually support his hypothesis, or metrics that are themselves presented in this context. To that point, he could’ve expanded on how it is that individuals experienced what he describes as “sawtooth” economic fortunes, rather than just the brief mention he gives them: pandemic era relief actually went to real people, especially households with children.

I mean, I actually like the author. He’s shaped a lot of ideas that formed my own political identity and view towards economic issues over the past 25 years. I just think this particular article is a miss.

So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing

This is true, but it’s true for many, many more places than just politics, or even messaging about politics coming from politicians. And it swings in both directions.

Social media (including the Activity Pub driven fediverse) takes off with some narratives that are just wildly inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with how a substantial number of people feel. But the nature of how we experience the world now is that our feelings are driven increasingly by little threads of online interaction that may or may not actually resemble the world we are experiencing offline.

Is Taylor Swift a good musician? Is the best cell phone an iPhone? Am I considered strong if I can bench press 220 lbs/100 kg? Do electric cars help the environment? Is it a red flag that my date refused to tip more than 20%?Your answer to these questions depend heavily on who you talk to, and the discussion around these topics can get pretty heated, even when they’re ultimately low stakes issues.

The Internet has a way of catastrophizing little things, ignoring big things, and mixing it all together that it’s almost inevitable that how we feel becomes disconnected with actual metrics, even the metrics within our own life. Negative feelings like anger, fear, resentment, and hopelessness can fester even with people who are thriving.

In other words, while I agree that the correlation between economic metrics and personal feelings has loosened a lot, I’m not entirely convinced that the feelings are correct while the metrics are wrong.

Open and auditable source code is a laudable goal, and one I generally endorse.

But the more important issue is an open audit trail.

The implementations I’ve seen that make the most sense are electronic machines that validate and mark ballots that are both human readable and machine readable. The input validation can prevent overvotes (accidentally voting for more than one candidate) and add a verification step for undervotes (choosing to leave a particular choice blank), while the voter gets a verifiable visual feedback that their ballot has been properly created. Then they drop it in the box.

At the end of the night, the paper ballots are fed into tallying/counting systems, which should entirely distinct from the input validation systems. That way they get a machine count that night, but still have an auditable paper trail.

Given the choice between a direct voting machine that’s open source, or a closed source machine that creates the paper trail in that way, I’d choose the auditable process.

I’m specifically saying that even if groceries (or rent) are up by a lot, the math of what I’m describing still works out. So when you say “this is not the case in my area,” you’re effectively saying that you’ve made zero changes in how you shop for groceries, in response to the price increases. I think that’s probably not true for you in particular, and almost certainly not true for people in your area. Most people respond to prices with changed behavior.

I agree with that, as a measure of price changes over time. I think the CPI correctly ignores substitution bias month to month, so that we can get a better picture of the price changes.

In terms of household effects, though, the substitution effect tends to slightly reduce the effect of high prices on household budgets, and that’s what I understood as the meaning of that particular sentence at the top of this comment chain.

And I don’t think of these particular examples of inferior or superior goods. The relative cost of chicken, pork, ground beef, certain cuts of steak, lamb, lobster, etc. is different from place to place, and not necessarily a reflection of consumer preference in all places.

My point is that groceries aren’t up equally, and groceries don’t all cost the same. Someone on a subsistence diet of lentils and rice might not have much room to adjust their food spending in response to prices, but the broader shifts of beef to pork, pork to chicken, chicken to eggs, meat to beans, reduction in sodas/chips/candy, etc., give a typical household some room to maneuver.

Put another way, if you ask people whether their grocery purchasing behavior has been affected by rising prices, most people will say yes. That behavioral shift is how we respond to price increases, to try to blunt the effects of a price increase.

The math behind what I’m saying means that the phenomenon naturally happens regardless of which items move up or down, and even if all items move up (so long as they move up at different rates).

Eggs in February 2024 are down about 29% for the year from February 2023, down from the very high January 2023 spike. Ground beef is up about 7.4% for the year. Chicken breast is down 6%.

So a typical household that does eat animal products would likely have shifted away from beef towards chicken in the past year, even as the index weights them the same as they did before, month to month. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t get captured until the relative weights index is updated.

That’s not what that sentence means.

People respond to prices by changing their purchase behavior. If prices go up for some things, people tend to buy less of those things, and if prices go down for some things, then people tend to buy more of those things.

Across the entire basket of stuff that people buy (measured by a weighted percentage of how people were spending their budgets the previous year), people tend to move away from the stuff that got more expensive and towards the stuff that got less expensive, so that the current household budget shifts less than the inflation measure does. It’s called the substitution effect, and the CPI intentionally pretends it doesn’t happen - so that the numbers can be more meaningful as a measure of price changes, at the cost of understating how households actually experience inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_bias

Just wanted to say though that it’s a bit unfair to compare Iraq to this.

I agree, but a key difference is simply the fact that Gazans aren’t allowed to leave, and power/water/food was cut before evacuations. A ground invasion in that context has to be understood with that heightened responsibility towards civilians.

As for the Afghanistan war, I think that rural versus dense urban settlement is also fundamentally different, and difficult to compare. Most of the controversy around civilian deaths in Afghanistan focus on mistargeted aerial bombardment, which I agree matches the initial operations in Gaza. But as the shift turns over to ground forces, Fallujah is probably the comparison I think matches most closely.

Peter Mansoor (a U.S. Army Colonel who was a big part of the strategic shift in Iraq around 2006 to a counterinsurgency doctrine) has written a bunch about the “clear, hold, build” strategy where U.S. troops took territory with a promise they would stay long enough to rebuild it and peacefully hand it over to the local government partners. You can find some of his writing published through the university where he teaches and publishes.

Counterinsurgency (also known as COIN in military circles) was a shift in emphasis, compared to the prior 3 years or so, where the civilian population was seen as partners and a “territory” of sorts to try to win. There was a lot of talk of “hearts and minds” being a key component to winning the war, because foreign occupiers would never have the same level of local knowledge as the actual locals, and having the general population on your side meant that insurgents couldn’t hide in the community.

It didn’t actually work out that way all the time (and frankly, my opinion is that the strategy utterly failed in Afghanistan, even if Iraq eventually stabilized). But that was the doctrine and that was the core strategy pursued by U.S. troops at least from 2006 onward. Civilians mattered, not just in that harming them should be avoided even while pursuing military objectives, but civilian well-being actually counted as a primary military objective in itself.

But even before COIN became the big buzzword in the U.S. military, the strategy did still emphasize the need to take responsibility for the well being of civilians in a war zone. Colin Powell famously warned George W. Bush of what Thomas Friedman would call the “Pottery Barn Rule” where “if you break it, you own it,” in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Powell was clear that he was specifically referring to the 26 million residents of Iraq looking to the United States in what would govern Iraq after the “regime change.” It was always understood, even among the most hawkish strategists in the U.S., that invasion carried a responsibility of rebuilding.

I’m not in any way an expert on Gaza, but from my casual observations it sure does seem like the Israeli military doesn’t put anywhere near the same priority of making sure that civilians aren’t unnecessarily harmed in their military operations.