A Thought Experiment

Thought Experiments are one of the more interesting but underappreciated tools Scientists use.  It has come into modern use through the Germans.  Their term "Gedankenexperiment" is literally a mashup of the German word for "thought" (gedanken) and the word "experiment".  The term and procedure first became popular among German scientists in the 1800's. Its international use became popular as a result of its frequent and very effective public use by Einstein.  But the concept actually dates back to the ancient Greeks who called the same process "deiknymi".

But okay.  None of us in the room are theoretical physicists.  So how it this relevant to us?  Like most scientific techniques anybody can use it.  And anybody can find it useful in surprising ways.  In fact, one of the principle attributes are the surprising things we can learn from a well constructed thought experiment.  And that's what I am going to do.  I am going to walk through the process of doing a thought experiment.  I hope to demonstrate that using your imagination, which is all a thought experiment really is, a disciplined use of our imaginations, can be surprisingly useful.

So what are we going to do?  We are going to build a large and complex piece of infrastructure.  But since we are only doing it in our minds it will be quick, cheap, easy, and generate no pollution.  And we can get a long way even though none of us really has the expertise to build the real thing.  Trust me!  It's going to be fun.  So what are we going to build?

Before doing that, let's take a digression and figure out why what we are going to build is useful.  We as a society have a problem.  Well, we have lots of problems but I am going to focus on just one.  We use a lot of electricity.  Most of it comes from "the grid", a complex and elaborate set of equipment that shuttles electricity from here to there.  In general the grid's job is to connect producers (power plants, etc.) to consumers (homes, businesses, etc.)  You can all relax.  I am not going to go into how all this works.  I am just going to note one thing.

The whole thing has to work instantly.  The producers have to produce exactly the right amount of electricity right now to meet the needs of consumers right now.  Handling this very difficult problem is extremely difficult.  But it has to be done.  Why?  Because batteries suck.  Fifty years ago they really sucked.  Now they only suck.  Anyone who has had their smartphone die because the battery has run out of juice knows what I am talking about.  Manufacturers are very aware of this.  If they could put a much better battery in, they would.  And its not a matter of cost.  A battery that is much better than the ones they currently use literally does not exist.

I am going to use "battery" as a generic term for anything that can store electricity.  In some cases the thing you use to store electr4icity is not literally a battery.  But for the purposes of this discussion I am going to call all electricity storage devices batteries even if they are actually something else.

So something that would help with the whole "instantly" problem would be to hook a giant battery up to the grid.  Then when you had extra capacity you could generate a little extra to charge up the battery and when you were short of capacity you could run the battery down to make up the difference.  That would make the job of the people who manage the grid much easier.  The problem is that batteries suck.

We know that the little batteries in our smart phones suck.  But they must be small and light.  So can we fix the problem with something that is big and heavy?  No!  Batteries suck.  Look at Teslas and other electric cars.  Why doesn't everybody buy an electric?  Well the obvious problem is that they are expensive.  Why?  Enough batteries to do a decent job cost a lot of money.  And they are heavy and take up a lot of space (not a problem in our "grid" situation but still . . .).  But Tesla has to do a lot of tricks to get their cars to go as far as they do.  And it takes forever to recharge them.  If you could "fill up" the battery in a car in the time it now takes to gas up then go 400 miles between fill ups (and the car was affordable) we'd all be driving electrics.  But we can't.  Why?  Batteries suck.

But we're still not talking industrial scale.  But the Tesla experience is illuminating.  Elon Musk, the Tesla guy, is trying to get into the electricity storage business using warehouses full of batteries.  But the batteries are really expensive and they can't store industrial scale amounts of energy.  Remind me again why it's a good idea to be able to hook a big battery to the grid.

Well, the cost of renewables has plunged.  Solar panel farms and wind farms can and do produce industrial scale quantities of electricity.  But they have a problem.  They are intermittent.  Wind farms can't produce electricity if the wind is calm or if the wind is blowing so hard the wind generators can't handle it.  Solar panel farms can't produce electricity at night or when it's dark.  And output is reduced by bad weather, the time of year, and other factors.

There is a clunky kind of solution.  Buy lots.  Then run only as many of them at a time as you need at that time.  That, for the most part, is what the electricity industry does now.  But this is inefficient.  You have to build two or three or possibly more times the capacity you really need.  This problem would go away if we had a good battery.  We could run everything all the time.  When we had more power than we needed we use the extra to charge the battery up.  When we are short we drain the battery to make up the difference.  If we have a good battery we need enough capacity to handle the average load plus a little more as an insurance policy.

So that's the problem.  We need a ginormous battery.  Now so far I have talked about "battery" batteries.  These are chemical reactions at heart.  That's why we refer to "lead acid batteries", traditional car batteries, or "carbon batteries ", old batteries for electronics, or "alkaline batteries", newer batteries for electronics, or "lithium batteries", modern batteries for electronics, cars, and (Musk would have you believe) industrial scale grid storage.  Is there another way?  Yes, of course there is.

This problem has been around a long time and smart people have been trying to fix it the whole time it has been around.  You can transform back and forth between electricity and other forms of energy.  So people have suggested using big heavy flywheels.  You use a motor to spin them up (storage) and you hook them up to a generator to run them down (drain) by hooking them to a generator.  And it turns out that compared to even a lithium battery flywheels work pretty well.  They are relatively cheap, we know how to make them, and they store a lot more power than a similar amount of lithium batteries.  But people haven't figured how to do flywheels at industrial scale.

Another idea people have had is to seal up a big cave.  Then you pump air in to raise the pressure (charge).  Later you discharge the compressed air through a turbine (first cousin to t jet engine) that is hooked up to a generator (drain).  No one has actually tried to do this at industrial scale.  There are lots of other ideas.  But, like flywheels and caves full of compressed air, people for the most part haven't figured out how to make them work.

So is there anything that has been tried and works at industrial scale?  Yes.  It goes by the generic term "pumped storage".  I live in a part of the country that has lots of hydroelectric dams.  You dam up a river.  Then you periodically drain the water through a penstock (a fourth cousin to a turbine) and hook that up to a generator.  It works great if you have a nice river to dam up.  And this has been done lots of times and works well.

There is a variation you can do.  What if you have a lake high above a river?  If you drain the lake into the river you can do the dam thing and make electricity in exactly the same way.  But eventually the lake goes dry.  But what if you use surplus power to pump water up to the lake when you have more capacity than you need?  Then you can keep the lake from running dry.  That's the idea behind pumped storage.  There's an example of this not too far from me called Banks Lake.  When there is extra capacity water is pumped from a nearby river up to Banks Lake.  When capacity is short they drain the lake through the same kind of setup that is used for a dam and electricity comes out the end.

So problem solved, right?  Unfortunately, no.  You need just the right setup for an installation like Banks Lake to work.  And there are only a few places where just the right setup exists.  As a result only a few pumped storage facilities have been built anywhere.  A Wikipedia article on the subject states that the total pumped storage capacity of the European Union is only 5% of total generating capacity.  And 97% of US "grid-scale energy storage" is pumped storage.  So at this time there is really no alternative to pumped storage when it comes to grid-scale, what I have been calling industrial scale, energy storage.

Enough already.  We are finally ready to start work on our thought experiment.  The Banks Lake pumped storage project is part natural and part artificial.  The river and the lake were provided by nature.  The artificial part, the pipes, pumps, generators, etc., had to be added before it would all work.  As a thought experiment, let's build a completely artificial pumped storage facility.  To do so we need to make some decisions.  but first let's talk about the givens.  We need a "high" reservoir that we pump water up to and a "low" reservoir that the water can drain down to.  These will be big water tanks.  We as a society know how to build big tanks so we'll just take it as a given that these tanks can and will be built.  Then we need the between machinery.  It will be the same sort of equipment that is used in the Banks Lake facility.  So we will also take it as a given that this machinery can and will be built.

So what do we have to decide?  We have to decide what the capacity will be.  I am going to arbitrarily decide that the plant will have a capacity of one megawatt-hour.  That means it can put out a million watts of power for a hour.  So how much is that?  My recent electricity bill says I used a little less than 1,200 kilowatt hours over a two month period.  That's a rate of consumption of roughly a kilowatt-hour per hour.  So out plant would be capable of powering about 1,000 homes like mine for an hour.  That seems like a lot.  But in 2010 the US had over 20 gigawatts of pumped storage capacity.  So our plant's capacity would be 20,000 times less.  Put that way. it seems like not very much.

But what I have in mind for my thought experiment is to come up with something that could be turned out in large numbers assembly line style.  It turns out there are about 50,000 wind turbines in the US and the average capacity is about 1 megawatt per turbine.  So our plant would be a close capacity match to one wind turbine.  Is that a good choice?  I don't know.  But it is a starting point.  And the nice thing about thought experiments is that you can easily tweak them.

So what else do we need to decide?    We need to decide on the height difference between the two tanks.  The height difference between the two reservoirs at Banks Lake is 280'.  I'm going to go with 100 meters or about 330 feet.  It is a nice round number.  Is it the right number?  I don't know.  But as it is close to the Banks Lake number it follows that the kind of machinery necessary to do the pumping, draining, generating, etc. is readily available.

If we know this then we can size the tanks, pipes, pumps, etc.  We also need some water.  But this is a closed system.  We move the water around.  But once the system has been loaded up all we need to do is replace small losses.  So we can't site our installation out in the middle of nowhere completely away from any water at all.  But once we have done the initial fill we only need access to a little water.  So lots of places can work.  And we don't need drinking quality water.  We are just going to pump it around.  We don't want the water to be so nasty that it rots the machinery.  But with the right kinds of paint and that sort of thing the water can be pretty nasty and still work just fine.

And we are building the whole thing from scratch.  We are going to put the high tank on a tower so we don't need dramatic landscape.  If we have dramatic landscape we can take advantage of it to reduce costs.  But even flat landscape should do.  The idea is to have a basic design that with little or no modification can be put pretty much everywhere.

A key item is how much it is going to cost.  And I don't know the answer.  But someone like a civil engineer who has experience with large construction projects should be able to quickly and inexpensively come up with a rough number, a "back of the envelope estimate".  And for our thought experiment that's all we need.

We are not going to actually build it.  We are just trying to answer two basic questions.  The first and most important one is "can it be built at all"?  The second question is "how much would it cost"?  And this second question is actually two questions rolled into one.  The first is "what is the construction cost"?  And that is a question I really can't answer.  The second question is "what is the operating cost"?  Based on operations like Banks Lake the operating cost, exclusive of the energy costs is "very low".  It should require very little effort to operate and the maintenance costs should be low too.

But this energy cost is important.  To answer it we need to know the operating efficiency.   The science of thermodynamics says that nothing ever operates with 100% efficiency.  There are always losses.  And that is true of pumped storage facilities.  Most of them seem to operate with an efficiency in the 70% to 80% range.  That is if you spend 100 kilowatts pumping water up you will get 70 to 80 kilowatts back when you run it down through the turbines.  So between 20% and 30% of the energy you put in will be lost.  But the idea is that excess wind farm capacity or solar farm capacity otherwise goes to waste.  If we use this capacity to charge our pumped storage facility  we will be ahead on costs in the end.

Given all the "I don't know"s we have racked up as we have worked through our thought experiment it would seem at this point that the whole thing was a waste of time.  But surprisingly it is not.

Our thought experiment has shown that there is a proven method for creating as much grid-scale energy storage capacity as we want.  That's good to know.  It has never been clear that enough chemical battery based energy storage could be built to make a difference.  The same is true of the flywheel, compressed air, and other approaches I have seen.  Knowing that a problem has a solution is valuable information.

And a civil engineer could quickly come up with a "back of the envelope" quality estimate for what such a facility would cost.  This number, whatever it turned out to be, also turns out to be useful information.  Let's say the facility would cost ten million dollars.  What that does is give us a benchmark against which to judge other potential solutions.  How much would a similar sized chemical battery facility cost to build?  If the answer is "a lot more" then we should forget about chemical based battery solutions.  The same thing applies to other approaches.  If it is obvious that they would cost a lot more they are not worth looking into further.

Now I just made the ten million dollar number up.  What if the number was actually a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars?  It is still easy to use whatever number eventually turns out to be the right one as a benchmark against which to measure other alternatives.  Certainly the lower the cost of our "back of the envelope', "thought experiment" design is, the worse it makes possible alternatives look.

And what if the number looks expensive but not wildly expensive.  Then it might just be a good idea to actually build one.  The cost of wind turbines has dropped dramatically as more and more are built.  The same is true of solar panel farms and many other things.  If it turns out that out that the rough estimate of the cost of our first facility is high but not completely out of the question high it may turn out that the hundredth or the thousandth one might be quite inexpensive.  So another thing this cost experiment does is give us a starting point for deciding whether the "artificial pumped storage" idea deserves a serious look.

And that's how it often goes with thought experiments.  You can figure out a lot without having to invest a lot of time, effort, and money.  And you often find out surprising things.  And you can easily imagine doing something that would be either dangerous or flat out impossible.  After all, it's all made up anyhow.  Scientists often ask questions like "if I was inside a worm hole what would it be like"?  Scientists who actually asked that question decided the answer was "I wouldn't know because I would be killed instantly".

So what that particular thought experiment told us was "don't bother even trying to figure out how to put people through worm holes because if you succeeded it would kill them".  In our far less dramatic example we can safely conclude that "there are better approaches than warehouses full of chemical batteries or flywheels or tunnels full of compressed air" for solving the grid-scale energy storage problem.  That's something that is important for the officials in government, industry, and the investment community to know when they are making the decision on whether to fund a project or not.

And thought experiments don't have to be technical or esoteric.  They can be things like a "what would it be like if I want to Mazatlán on vacation?" thought experiment.  This can be compared to a "what would it be like if I want to Paris on vacation?" thought experiment.  Or it could be applied to picking a car or deciding on the route you are going to take to work today or any number of other things. 

And the nice thing about a thought experiment is you are not confined to the practical or even the possible.  You just come up with a scenario and try to answer "what would happen" or "what would it be like" type questions.  Often a lot can be learned by getting an approximate idea of how things stack up.  And the specifics of the thought experiment can be tweaked instantly.  It's not like you are already in Mazatlán or Paris or wherever your thought experiment takes you.  In a thought experiment if you change your mind all you are out is a little time and effort.  And that's their beauty.

Fake Boobs

Yes, I'm talking about breast implants.  And since there is a political angle on everything today I'm sure there is one for this one too.  But I am going to leave that part of the story alone and look at the subject from the perspective of Science.  And, as is my custom, I use history as an organizational tool.  Where to start?

I am going to start with the invention of the bra.  There are a lot more "origin stories" about this item of clothing than most people realize.  But I am going to stick with the one that is popular in the US.  I choose it because it involves a direct line from invention to the manufacture and distribution of a commercially successful product.

The story goes that in 1910 Mary Phillips "Polly" Jacobs, also known as Caresse Crosby, was getting ready to go to a debutante ball.  She initially struggled into a whalebone corset.  This device cinches in the waist and pushes the boobs up and forward.  If you add a bustle (think a fabric version of Kim Kardasian's butt) the result is an "hourglass figure", full through the bust and hips, thin at the waist.  This had been the height of fashion for some time but we were about to move into the "flapper" era.

Anyhow, Polly was apparently a full figured gal so she didn't need any help up top.  And the whalebone reinforced corset was very uncomfortable to wear.  So she took two handkerchiefs, some ribbon, and a needle and thread, and fastened together a garment that provided coverage but not much support.  It turned out to be an ideal match to the sheer gown with a plunging neckline she was wearing.  And it was an instant smashing success (apparently both the gown and her invention).

The popularity of the garment was apparent from the start.  This led her to get a patent for the design in 1914 and to begin to manufacture them.  But her interests were elsewhere so she sold the rights to the Warner clothing company.  Initially Warner did not make much of a success but they were smart enough to license it widely.  In the hands of others it quickly became popular.

It became so popular so quickly that it became a standard of apparel for women in no time.  Dorothy L. Sayers casually mentions one in a "Lord Peter Wimsey" murder mystery she wrote in the mid thirties.  She was English and the book was set in London. As a murder mystery with a male lead the book did not concern itself with the minutia of women's fashion.  But twenty-five years after the patent was issued everyone took it for granted that British women wore them as a matter of course.  And so it quietly played its role as part of the ambience of a book whose focus is most decidedly elsewhere.

We would not recognize the initial design.  But the standard band, cups, and straps design emerged quickly.  Another innovation that showed up early was the underwire.  And that sets the stage for the next subject I want to cover.

Not every woman is built like Polly.  But many women feel it is important to put on a show, to appear to be built like Polly.  The addition of the underwire made another innovation possible, the padded bra.  Foam rubber, first manufactured in 1929 but widely available by the late '30s, could be used to fill the void between what nature provided and what a bra with a fuller cup presented to the outside world.  And foam had the great advantage of being far lighter than the materials nature used.

So a woman could comfortably and inexpensively and inconspicuously wear a padded bra under the now more conservative clothes that came in when the flapper era ended with the end of the '20s.  And a lot of women did.  This was especially true of Hollywood actresses of the '50s.  Clever work by skilled costume designers could even make it possible to maintain the illusion of a "full figure" in what would otherwise seem like quite skimpy outfits.

And this got taken to extremes.  Mamie van Doren was a Hollywood fixture in the '50s and '60s.  She was as well endowed or even better endowed than Polly had been.  But in some situations "there's no such thing as too much".  So she often appeared in a specially made padded bra that made her bust size appear to be not just substantial but literally awe inspiring.  But the times, they were starting to change.

During this same period, the padded bra era, strip tease enjoyed a considerable degree of success.  The problem was that the artists ended up wearing so little that a padded bra was not feasible.  But there were always enough "full figured girls" who "came by it naturally" to provide a sufficient pool to fill the demand for ecdysiasts, as strippers were called in polite circles.  But what if a less well endowed girl was interested in entering the business?

Carol Doda, initially a waitress at a club in San Francisco called "The Condor" was just such a person.  She actually had a pretty good figure.  But again on the theory that "there's no such thing as too much" she let herself be talked into being the first person to try a new procedure.  Initially the new procedure took her bust measurement from 34 to 44.  So she got the result she was looking for.  But the procedure she underwent looks pretty barbaric from the perspective of the present.

She had silicone injected directly under her skin and into the breast area.  Why silicone?  Was this some kind of underhanded plot by scheming corporate executives?  The exact opposite was true.  No one in the business of manufacturing medical devices or producing silicone for use in medical procedures even knew what was happening.  Instead people in the entertainment business were looking for a way to give strippers or potential strippers bigger boobs.  A little research showed that medical grade silicone had a long track record of being safe.  And it wasn't particularly expensive.

It was also obvious quickly that just injecting it was a bad idea.  It didn't cause medical problems but it did tend to wander.  So "shapely" quickly turned into lumpy, and lumpy in strange places.  The solution was obvious and quickly adopted.  Put the silicone in a bag and insert the bag.  The bag would keep the silicone in place.  This turned out to work very well and women started getting silicone breast implants in large numbers.

But it is important to note that even in this period when breast implants were flying off the shelf the companies that were making the implants saw the business as a small sideline.  It was never a big moneymaker.  They were just meeting a demand and making a few bucks along the way.  But then some women noticed they all of a sudden were having strange medical problems.  And these medical problems seemed to start when or shortly after they got breast implants.  So it must be the fault of the implants, right?

Now a real problem did surface with a significant number of women who got implants.  Their bodies manufactured scar tissue around the implant.  This made their breasts hard and in some cases detracted from their visual appeal.  But this scarring did not cause any serious medical problems.  It was just not the result they wanted.

But what about all these mysterious medical maladies?  The first thing to recognize is that many women had serious medical problems that were completely real.  So the question was not:  "had they suffered a serious medical problem?"  It was:  "was the cause of the serious medical problem the implants?"

Given the history of implants no serious research or testing had taken place.  Putting the silicone in a bag was an obvious improvement over just injecting it.  And both the silicone and the bags were materials for which a lot of experience existed.  There was no reason to believe that they would cause problems.  So the companies just went ahead and provided the product the public demanded.  So early on there was a plausible argument to be made that the implants were the cause.

But it quickly turned out that women experienced a variety of problems.  It wasn't just one thing.  And all these problems were of the type that had always been happening.  But they had only been happening to a few women.  So the rarity of occurrence of any one of these illnesses had made it hard to draw much interest or attention to the illness.  So there was not much known about them.  That is before they all got lumped together and blamed on breast implants.

These women went to court and told their tale.  The companies involved were big companies that had a lot of money.  When it came out that the companies had done little or no "due diligence" and that the women were suffering horribly from one affliction or another juries awarded the women a lot of money.  All of a sudden the companies involved found it in their interest to find out what was what.

By this time literally millions of women had gotten implants.  So the first question to ask was "are these women getting sick more often than women without implants?"  It turns out that the answer was no.  The next question was "is there any evidence that the illness is being caused by the implants?"  Here too the answer was no.

But big companies misbehave frequently.  And the women really were sick.  So juries kept making large awards.  So the companies and others dug in and did more research.  The research kept coming up with nothing.  But the public was not interested in some scientific study.  This was especially true if the study was funded by a big company.  Over a period of years various large well done and very expensive studies were done.  Nothing.  And the jury awards kept rolling in.

Finally in desperation the companies replaced the silicone with saline, salt water.  Eventually this put an end to the law suits.  Everybody knows that disinfected salt water is not dangerous.

But then a funny thing happened.  Women found they did not like the saline implants.  They didn't jiggle right.  So first a few and then more and more women said "I don't care if it is dangerous.  I want my silicone."  And people finally noticed that the vast majority of implant customers did not have any of the horrible problems that had started the whole circus.

Things have changed slightly.  In the old days plastic surgeons made a large slit and inserted the bag with the silicone already in it.  Various techniques were employed to hide the scar.  But the size made it hard to conceal completely.  So some doctors started inserting an empty bag.  This could be done using a small incision which was far less noticeable in the first place and much easier to conceal.  It was also easier on the body which improved the healing process.

They would then inject the silicone somewhat in the manner used on Carol Doda.  But this time the silicone went into the bag.  It was inflated just like a balloon.  There had also been leaking problems with early implants.  That problem was also fixed.  But none of these "fixes" made implants any more or less dangerous.  They just improved the user experience of women getting implants.

The result was that ultimately the science prevailed.  Everybody figured out eventually that implants are safe.  And the occasional law suit that someone still tries to file is routinely thrown out without even a hearing.  And implants, who has them, are they safe, etc. is not something that gets anybody riled up anymore.

Science won, eventually.  And it's the "eventually" part that is troubling.  We are still going through the same kind of thing with the anti-vaxers.  The science is in.  Vaccines are safe and they do a lot of good.  As was (and is) the case with implants, people get sick, sometimes horribly sick, at the time of or shortly after they get the procedure.  But as was the case with implants it doesn't happen very often.  And the science has looked thoroughly into the issue and concluded "it's a coincidence".  This is exactly what was going on with implants.  The difference is that with vaccination we haven't gotten all the way out from under the issue.  There are still a lot of people who believe that the anti-vax people are right.

But whether a woman gets implants or not just affects the woman in question.  But when parents fail to vaccinate their children the child can get very sick and perhaps die.  That's bad.  But there are others who for one reason or other can't or have not gotten vaccinated.  And these people can also get very sick and perhaps die.  So the anti-vax people hurt not only themselves and their loved ones but they hurt innocent strangers.

The breast implant controversy and the anti-vax controversy are part of a larger anti-science movement.  The implant controversy hurt some companies and their stock holders.  It amped up the anxiety level of a lot of women.  But it ultimately had a small impact on society as a whole.  The anti-vax movement has had a bigger negative impact on society as a whole.  But the anti-science movement is a much bigger problem.

I wish I knew what to do.  But people have proved over and over that they will find a way to believe what they want to believe.  And they are proving every day that they are impervious to anything short of applying a two by four vigorously to side of the head (or so the old story about mules recommends), when it comes to what will change their minds.

Women's Lib: A plan

In my last post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/01/womens-lib.html) I made the case that women in large numbers believe that they are and deserve to be second class citizens.  The core of my argument had to do with the last election.  In this context the contrast could not have been more stark.

On the one hand you had a competent capable candidate who was a woman and who had a long record of advocating for and supporting the proposition that women are and should be first class citizens.  On the other hand you had an incompetent and incapable candidate who was a man and who in both his behavior and his rhetoric treated women as second class (or perhaps even lower) citizens.  Women should have voted for Clinton and against Trump in large numbers.  But roughly half of them voted for Trump and that allowed Trump to win the election.

I can think of no stronger argument in favor of the proposition that large numbers of women, something on the order of half or more, believe that Trump was right.  Since the election we have seen a flurry of activity.  But it has appeared misguided and ineffective to me so far.  The people on the Trump side figure it will all die down and amount to nothing in the end.  It will eventually turn out to be the proverbial "tempest in a teapot".  I am concerned that they are right.

But let's for the moment assume that they and I am wrong to this extent.  Let's assume that effective action is on the way.  What would it look like?  Not what I have been seeing so far.  So what are the alternatives?  Here's what I would suggest.

It all boils down to who wins and who loses elections.  The 2016 elections should have been a very good year for Democrats.  It wasn't.  Hillary lost in the place where it counts, the Electoral College.  And it wasn't like she was an anomaly.  Democrats should have won big in the House and the Senate.  They didn't.  "Staying competitive" in an election that was an uphill battle for them counts as a big win for Republicans.  They did this at the national level.  But they also did this at the state and local level.  A friend of mine says Hillary lost because she ran a poor campaign.  I disagree but she ran a good enough campaign that she would not have dragged candidates in down ballot races down with her.  But relatively speaking Republicans did well all down the ballot.

And it is now important to set some context.  Neither Hillary nor Donald holds anomalous views compared to those of their parties.  Both parties have a long track record on the subject of whether they believe women are first class citizens or not.  Democrats say they are and Republicans say they are not.  But particularly in red states Republicans did just fine when it came to the women's vote.  And they have been doing just fine with the women's vote for a long time.  If something is going to change then women need to understand this and act accordingly.  Voting patterns suggest that they don't understand this.  So how does that get fixed?

As I said in my previous post, this is NOT a problem men can fix.  It is a problem women can and must fix on their own.  That is unless, of course, you are on the Trump side of the argument.  Then everything is fine and nothing needs to be done.  But, as I said before, we are going to take it as a given for the purposes of this post that Trump and his supporters are wrong.  How do women change the situation?

I have long been a student of revolutions, successful and otherwise.  One of the techniques people in power use to maintain control is to disrupt attempts by the opposition to organize.  Disorganized revolutions never succeed.  A classic example of this can be found in the 1960 movie "Spartacus" which concerned an attempt by slaves in the old Roman empire to revolt.  It failed.  And one technique the Romans used was to continuously decapitate potential leaders.  They literally killed them by crucifixion in the movie. 

Turning this around, successful revolutions need secure channels of communication so they can organize and find competent leaders.  And one technique that has worked in multiple cases is to find a communication channel that flies below the radar, a channel that the powerful don't pay any attention to.  In my previous post I outlined a number of these communications channels that are available to women.  So that's not a problem.  And the message is obvious.  Women need to be convinced that they are first class citizens and that they should behave accordingly, at least in the ballot box.  And the best people to do the convincing are other women.

But this will take a lot of organizational muscle.  It's fine to have a slogan.  But it won't be convincing unless there is a lot of detail to support it.  Someone needs to go down the line with issue after issue.  They need to do the analysis that demonstrates how an issue or a policy promotes or maintains women as second class citizens.  They need to draw the line showing how support for a specific candidate or party results in women being put into or maintained in a disadvantageous position.  And the argument needs to be structured so that ordinary women can understand it and can see how it applies to them personally.

Does this sound like the kind of work a lawyer does for her client when working in a court room in front of a Jury composed of ordinary citizens?  Yes it does so lawyers are a good place to look for people who can do this sort of thing.  And law schools are now turning out more female lawyers than they are male lawyers.  So a large pool of women capable of doing this kind of work well exists.  There have to be organizations for women lawyers out there.  That is where to go to find the people you need to put together and run what amounts to a think tank. 

There are plenty of women who are lawyers and are just the kind of people to put together the case for women as first class citizens.  There just aren't enough of them to carry the message to every nook and cranny of the country.  And female lawyers do not come across enough women and a broad enough cross section of women to reach women in the numbers necessary for this to work.  So is there another group of women that is larger and better suited to this task?  Yes, and it's a surprising one.

When you think of Sororities, what do you think?  Just what is their mission?  Sororities are the bastard stepchildren of Fraternities.  The first Fraternity was formed in 1750 but the movement really took off in the early 1800's.  They have evolved over time into the usual networking operation for the getting of and the maintenance of power.  And by their very natures Fraternity membership is limited to men.  No women allowed!  Sororities were a "me too" response that began in the 1850's and grew as more women started going to college.  But they never had the power Fraternities were able to acquire over time so they had to seek other goals.  For a long time they seemed primarily focused on helping women get an MRS (get married to a rich and powerful man).

Sororities today still lack a well defined and compelling mission.  So whatever they tell themselves it may be that their main mission still is assisting Sorority sisters in their pursuit of an MRS.  Women who believe women are first class citizens aim higher.  This means a lot of women either don't join a Sorority in the first place or stop participating as soon as they graduate.  This leaves Sororities weak and, therefore, ripe for a takeover.

Only a modest amount of concerted effort would be necessary for a new group to succeed in taking control of the Sorority system away from its current leadership.  And if their mission was changed to "support and advance the proposition that women are first class citizens" I think they could attract and hold the support of a much larger percentage of college women than they now are able to.

And there are Sororities and Sorority Sisters everywhere.  They are particularly strong in just the areas where it is most important to turn the tide, the South.  And they could open up auxiliary memberships for women who had not belonged to the Sorority in college or perhaps didn't even go to college at all.  This would greatly increase their reach.

There are lots of events like Tupperware parties and the like.  And anything will do:  the PTA, church groups, exercise classes, watching the kids, etc.  It doesn't matter what the occasion.  The only criteria is that it is an event involving only women or at least mostly women.  Then Sorority members could make sure the conversation regularly comes around to one or more of the ways this politician or that party or program holds women back.  And the backbone of their case would be the simple proposition:  "do you think you are and deserve to be a second class citizen?"  If the answer is "NO" then everything else follows smoothly from there.  If the answer unfortunately is "yes" then the more basic problem must first be rectified.

And this can all be done quietly.  "It's just us girls having a friendly chat".  And women don't have to be convinced to confront their husband or march into their boss's office.  They just have to be convinced to change the way they decide how they will vote.  And if they feel the need to lie about how they voted, they should be told it is okay to do so.  "Loud and proud" is not necessary.  All they have to do is cast their secret ballot appropriately.  They can always choose to leave the noise making to others.

No one would notice if the Sorority system gets taken over by a new generation with a different attitude.  Everybody is used to the Sorority system not being a power player in society at large.  So if some kind of upheaval takes place it might or might not get covered.  But the upheaval, if it was covered at all, would not be covered as important political news.  So a bunch of women lawyers getting together to do some think tank work would likely pass unnoted.  And a takeover of the Sorority system would probably garner a little coverage.  But seriously, how do you think that coverage would rank with whatever outrageous Tweet The Donald just made.  So these changes would have little or no trouble flying under the political radar.

But it is important that the movement have a front organization whose job it is to make noise.  Well, it turns out that there is a ready made organization for that too.  It is called the Daughter's of the American Revolution.  This is another women's group.  And it has long had a conservative bent.  And it has not had much political clout since Eleanor Roosevelt was fist lady before World War II.  It has long been seen as a hide bound organization catering to little old conservative ladies.  And this is a case of perception matching reality.  It is now way more sclerotic than even the Sorority system.  That will make it easy pickings for a takeover by a rebel faction.  All that is needed is to organize the rebel faction.

And the DAR has a presence in Washington, D. C.  I am reminded of this a couple of times a year when the announcer on the popular TV quiz show "Jeopardy!" tells us that one of their tournaments is coming to us from "DAR Constitution Hall".   So first the DAR is taken over by a rebel faction.  Membership is governed by bylaws and a new leadership team can change the bylaws.  So they open up membership to say any woman who is a US citizen. The specific mission of the new DAR would be to make noise.

They would provide the fireworks that would create political cover for the rest of the movement.  Others could say "At least we aren't as radical as those New DAR nuts.  So go along with us and we will eventually be able to reign them in."  That sort of thing.  They would be the IRA to Shin Fein, as an example.  The idea would be that the New DAR would be a relatively small organization consisting of women that wanted to speak out, that didn't mind attracting a lot of attention.  They would make the noise that would allow mass change to take place quietly in the shadows.

And if you want a "stretch objective" take over the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  This organization only dates back to 1894.  But it is the organization that traditionally has provided political cover in the South for the perpetuation of the worst of the Confederate excesses.  Many Civil War monuments commemorating various Confederate heroes or battles won by the Confederate Army were built by the UDC.  But the organization has less than 20,000 members.  So it wouldn't take a large operation to take it over.  And it is located almost exclusively in the areas most in need of being turned.  Taking over the UDC would NOT pass unnoticed.  But I think it could be done.

So in short the plan would be for groups of women lawyers to operate like a think tank.  They would develop the policies and hone the arguments.  The national Sorority system would be taken over.  The Sorority system would be reoriented toward supporting the goal of women as first class citizens.  Their job would be to do the one-on-one or small group work necessary to convince women that they need to change how they vote.  The front line agitation group responsible for ginning up publicity for the cause would be a New DAR, the current DAR with new leadership and a new mission.  It could possibly be joined by a New UDC operating in parallel.

The first two groups, the layers and Sororities, would maintain a low profile.  The third and possibly fourth group would be the "loud and proud" component that would put a face on the movement.  They would be the ones specializing in the kind of good TV that gets you in the news these days.  But they would emphasize their small numbers.  This would allow the opposition to discount them as a minority that can safely be ignored.

I think doing this will take a while.  So it would not be realistic to expect results before the 2022 "off year" elections.  But I would like to believe that this kind of thing has a very good chance of success.  And of course if it did have a large degree of success in 2022 the cat would be out of the bag.  But then the question would become whether the movement could sustain itself.  And that would depend on whether women were capable of a sustained effort.

Finally, let me point out that this whole post is an example of a guy telling women what they should do.  That's a fair complaint.  But women did not manage to figure out what to do and how to do it effectively in the 2016 election.  And the 2016 election was the columniation of a long trend.  Women have had plenty of time to figure this out by themselves.  They manifestly haven't.  It's not too late. I invite women to come up with something better.  I am results oriented so "better" means "works" in my book.  So I'm all ears.

I would be happy if women all on their own come up with something better and make it work.  But short of that I would settle for them just doing a good job of implementing the plan I have laid out.  The next few years will tell us if even that is too much to ask.

And anger directed at me is misdirected anger.  And we already have way too much of that sort of thing flying around.  Anger is good.  It is more than good.  But it needs to be directed in a direction that will actually result in things changing for the better.

Women's Lib

Is it possible to successfully liberate a group that does not want to be liberated?  History says no.

The classic example of this is the experience of T. E. Laurence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.  In the run up to World War I Middle Eastern Arabs had been under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire for a long time.  As part of a plan to weaken an opponent Lawrence was sent by the British into the area to foment revolt.  He was spectacularly successful.  The 1962 film, "Lawrence of Arabia" does a reasonably accurate job of portraying events.  Lawrence himself penned a memoir called "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" that also covers this period.  Finally, there have since been a number of "revisionist" histories written about these events.  But in all cases the basics of the story remain the same.  And we are still dealing with the aftermath.

The liberation of the Arab peoples was not a spontaneous event initiated by the Arabs themselves.  The Ottoman empire was weak and Lawrence was able to cobble together enough support among various factions to stage some stunts.  The stunts were successful.  This generated more support and support from more factions.  Things escalated until the Ottoman Empire crumbled and the Arabs were liberated.

But by and large the Arabs had no skin in the game.  So we ended up with countries like Saudi Arabia.  It is run by the al Saud family and there is enough oil money around to buy off the opposition.  So it keeps rolling along like it's a real country.  But it has now been badly governed for nearly a century.  A country like Egypt should be a substantial regional power.  And at times in the past it has been.  But it is currently a mess.  And "currently a mess" is the best you can say about many Arab countries in the region.

As a counter example look at Cuba.  There we had an indigenous revolution.  We like to throw rocks at the Castro regime.  But it has delivered generally good governance for a half a century.  Cuba may be poor.  But it is one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries and its population is in many ways more healthy than that of the U. S. and way healthier than most of the populaces in the neighborhood.

And that brings us to the Women's Movement.  A case can be made that it has been going on for more than a century.  And that is certainly true if you look for instances of women playing an influential role in national policy.  Women are generally credited for civilizing the west, for actually taming the frontier.  In the bad old days, the story goes, it was all "wild west" with saloons and gunfights and what law and order there was came from the barrel of a Smith and Wesson or a Colt revolver.  But this perception is mostly the creation of "dime novels" and later movies and TV.

Lost in all this is the fact that many frontier towns had very restrictive gun laws.  And there were few if any actual "quick draw" shootouts on main street.  Cattle men were business men.  They wanted to transact their business safely and with some confidence that there was enough "law" around to ensure contracts to buy, sell, and ship cattle could be enforced.  Farmers saw things the same way.  They wanted to make sure that their land titles were upheld, that things like farm equipment could be procured from far away, and that their crops could be shipped to the big cities that were also far away, and that everyone paid what they owed.  Probably the most civilizing influence on the old west were the railroads.

So what were women up to during this period?  They had two main issues at the time:  the vote and prohibition.  They eventually got both.  They have now had the vote for over a hundred years.  Let's just assume that is a good thing and move on.  How about prohibition or temperance or whatever you want to call it?  The movement was definitely originated by women and largely driven forward by women.  There argument was simple.  "Men were beasts when under the influence of alcohol".  And an unspoken corollary was necessary.  "Men couldn't be trusted to moderate their drinking."

Everything would be so much better if men were deprived of the ability to get a drink.  And most bars and saloons were either the exclusive territory of men (ignoring the "saloon girl" staff and we all know what immoral hussies they were), or women had at best only very limited access to them.  It was therefore deemed important to close them down.  And even in the home, where the woman's touch was ever present, men drinking at home was also considered to be a big problem.  So the only truly effective solution was to shut production down.  And everybody knows that (with the exception of the afore mentioned hussies) women are always the soul of dignity and propriety.  So this drinking business is exclusively a men's problem.

Well women got their wish.  The whole country went dry.  And it got less civilized rather than more as a result.  Crime became rampant.  Everybody drank.  And they drank more than they had before prohibition.  And they switched from soft liquor like beer and wine to hard liquor like bathtub Gin.    And the money injected into the criminal element by prohibition unleashed a spectacular wave of lawlessness.  Everybody knew that everybody was being bought off.  So the reputation of the criminal justice system sank like a rock.  Prohibition was a spectacular failure.  It had exactly the opposite effect from that predicted by its proponents.

Does this mean that all women's ideas are dumb?  No!  But it means that women are like men.  They have some smart ideas and some dumb ideas.  Pay attention to whether the idea is smart or dumb not to whether men or women think it up.  So that's the historical perspective.  During this period the argument was about what was good for society as a whole.  It was not, or not primarily, about whether society treated women appropriately.  That argument started in the '60s and acquired the nickname "women's lib".  Hence the title of this post.

And here the argument was a simple one.  It can be summarized by a song from the 1946 Broadway musical "Annie Get your Gun".  The show featured a song called "Anything you can do".  Annie sang "Anything you can do, I can do better".  The "Annie" in question was Annie Oakley, a star of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show that toured the country in the late 1800s.  Her contention was that she could do anything better than Frank Butler, a competitor.  By implication she was arguing that she as a woman was just as good at doing what needed to be done as he, as a man was, maybe better.  If men were first class citizens, and they were, then women deserved to also be first class citizens.

But is that true?  In at least one way it demonstrably is not.  Men are better at sports.  And success in sports generally depends on being stronger and faster.  There are lots of "strength" sports.  There is weight lifting, shot put, and even things like the pole vault that ultimately depend to a great extent on strength.  In no case are women competitive with men in a "head's up" competition in any of the sports that depend heavily on pure strength.

What about speed?  Well there is the hundred yard dash (or hundred meter dash, if you want to be part of the rest of the world).  Men are faster.  And there are innumerable variations (fencing anyone?) on this theme.  Men are faster in the other variations too.  But what about sports that require effort over a longer duration?

When money started flowing into women's sports a discussion arose to the effect that female physiology might be better suited than male physiology in the specific case of the marathon.  And initially there was some evidence to support this.  The finishing times of female marathoners initially started improving dramatically.  But then they plateaued at a level of performance substantially lower than that of comparable men.  Today many marathons are run each day.  And in a large number of these men and women compete on the same course at the same time.  And men perform better than women.

Well, what about a situation where raw ability is not enough?  "Smarts" is also involved.  A classic example of this situation is Tennis.  Positioning yourself on the court and knowing where to place your shots is absolutely critical to success.  Well there is an interesting example of a Tennis match between a man and a woman. And in this particular case the woman won.

In 1973 Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King squared off in "The Battle of the Sexes".  King won the match handily.  The match was played under standard professional tennis rules and both were professional tennis players.  So that means that at least when it comes to professional tennis "anything a man can do a woman can do better", right?  Well, not exactly.  In 1973 King was the top ranked female professional tennis player.  Riggs had held the top rank among men at one time.  But at the time of the match it had been more than twenty years since he had even competed as a pro.  So in actuality the match had been won by a first class female tennis player competing against a third class male tennis player.

Okay so maybe women bring something else to the table that qualifies them to be first class citizens.  That was the argument made by the "women's lib" movement.  And there is some support for the argument.  I note that today more women than men graduate each year from law school and more women than men pass the bar exam.  That is a substantial achievement.  There are more.  But what happened to women's lib?

Phyllis Schlafly happened.  The most important aim of the women's lib movement was to get the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted into law.  And for a long time it looked like it would happen.  But it didn't.  And the opposition to the ERA was headed by Phyllis Schlafly.  And, to state the obvious (because something it is necessary to state the obvious), Phyllis Schlafly was a woman.  In fact she is the poster child for the "anything you can do" argument.

She proved herself to be extremely competent and effective.  She demonstrated that she "could do better" by actually doing better.  The ERA was defeated, although it came extremely close to being enacted.  And Schlafly was a major reason why it was defeated.  And there is absolutely no evidence that she was pressured or coerced or anything else.  It was obvious to everyone that she sincerely believed that the ERA was a bad idea.  And she demonstrably had the ability to come to her own conclusion based on her own analysis.

With Schlafly to point to as the as standard bearer for the anti ERA movement, opponents were able to successfully make the argument that a lot of women thought the ERA was a bad idea.  And if women, the group it was designed to benefit, thought it was a bad idea, it must be a bad idea.  That was the argument the anti-ERA people used to defeat it and they made it work for them.

So the whole "women's lib" thing and the whole ERA fight can now only be seen in the rear view mirror.  They are part of our historical legacy.  What's going on today?  Well we just finished up the latest round of the ERA battle and it was the recent Presidential Election.  Say what?

There has been a lot of bad analysis of why Clinton lost and why Trump won.  The official consensus is that the key demographic was working class white men in the rust belt states of the Midwest.  But they should not have mattered.  And the reason they shouldn't have mattered is because women represent 52% of the electorate.  They are a majority not a minority when it comes to who votes.  So, if women tilt heavily one way or the other, whichever way they tilt will determine outcome of the election.  And when it came to gender issues, this election featured the starkest contrast in history.

Hillary Clinton is a woman, a very accomplished woman.  And she has been promoting and supporting women's issues for her entire long political carrier.  Donald Trump was publically hostile to women for the entire duration of his campaign.  And he has no political carrier prior to running for the office of President of the United States.  Women are supposed to be the civilizers.  Trump ran an extremely uncivil campaign.  Clinton should have opened a wide lead on Trump from the time of the conventions and then maintained it through to the elections.  She did not.  And the reason she did not is because she was unable to open and maintain a wide lead among women.

She ultimately won the women's vote by 54% to 41%, a 13 point spread.  But that was not enough.  And the reason is simple.  Trump won Republican women by 89% to 8%.  He did only slightly better with Republican men, winning that group by 90% to 6%.  Trump's success with Republican women is perhaps explainable but not to me.  So I'm not even going to try.  But among Independent women Clinton only beat Trump by only 4 points (47% to 43%).  She should have beat him by 20, 30, 40 points.  Together, Independents and Republicans represent 64% of the vote so the big margins Clinton ran up among Democrats, both men and women, was enough to win her the popular vote by a substantial margin but not enough to win her the Electoral College vote.

The only conclusion I can derive from all this is that about half of all women and almost all of Republican women think women are and deserve to be second class citizens.  Phyllis Schlafly was an active Republican.  Republicans are pretty evenly split between men and women.  Republican men constituted 17% of all Presidential voters while Republican women constituted 16%.  On women's issues like equal pay, access to health care, education, etc., we see a consistent pattern of Democrats being in favor of the "pro-woman" side of the issue and Republicans being in favor of the "anti-woman" side of the issue.

If you are pro-woman you should be a Democrat and not a Republican.  But there are a lot of Republican women.  The only conclusion to be drawn is that many women are opposed to the pro-woman agenda.  And that leads directly to the conclusion that many women believe that women should be treated as inferior to men, that they should be treated as second class citizens.

Now let me address the intimidation factor.  Men are stronger than women.  In a physical confrontation women are correct to be fearful of men and to act accordingly.  But women have been voting for a hundred years.  And ballots are cast in secret.  A woman who is feeling intimidated can tell her husband or boyfriend or whoever that she voted one way while actually voting the other way.  This will keep her safe because there is no way whoever she is afraid of can find out what she actually did.  And women are in the best position to know whether they are being intimidated rather than being given an equal shot.

Then there is the communication problem.  It is hard for an oppressed minority to throw off their shackles.  (The argument here is not that women are actually an oppressed minority but that due to intimidation they act like an oppressed minority.)  Spontaneous revolts without any organization are only possible in a fantasy world.  In the real world revolutions need competent leadership.   And developing and maintaining competent leadership requires secure communication.  The 1960 film "Spartacus" chronicles a failed revolt.  Roman slaves revolted but the Roman government had successfully disrupted communication and was quick to identify and kill potential leaders.  As a result, the "Spartacus" revolt ultimately failed.

An example of a successful revolt is the Solidarity led revolt in Poland in the late '80s.  Here a key factor was the ability of the Catholic Church to facilitate communication out of view of the government.  This allowed the leadership of the Solidarity union to morph into the leadership of the revolution.  Communication allowed the movement to organize.  But it also allowed a diverse group of people to evaluate potential leaders and pick the ones with skill and talent.  And the revolution succeeded.

So is the women's movement more like Roman slaves or like Poland in the '80s?  On paper it is the former.  Everything is out in the open to see, right?  While this is theoretically true it is false from a practical point of view.  It's not whether communications channels can be monitored.  It's whether they actually are monitored.  The religious right has been a political force for a long time now.  Theoretically their means of communication can be monitored.  But in actual fact they usually are not monitored.  So they have been able to repeatedly spring surprises like their impact on the results in the 2004 Presidential election.

Women have had their own channels of communication for more than a hundred years.  Ladies magazines are as old as the hills.  Ladies' Home Journal started publishing in 1883.  Magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan have been around for ages.  Ms Magazine, the bible for the original woman's lib movement, has been around since 1972 and is still around.  Then there are the daytime TV shows.  There is "The View" and "The Chew" and many others.  Before them there was "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and before that there was "The Phil Donahue" show.  All these and many more provide a communications conduit for women to communicate with women.  And while in theory all of them can be monitored in fact they are not monitored for political content.

So women had the power.  They could communicate reasonably securely.  The facts were easily accessible.  And yet they chose to vote for Trump in large numbers.  Apparently Trump saying about women that "you can do anything" to them including "grab them by the pussy" was not enough to cause them to change their vote, a vote they would be casting in complete anonymity.  So I'm done.  If women think so little of women why should I as a man think any better of them?  So from here on out women are going to have to demonstrate to me that they really believe they belong among the ranks of first class citizens before I lift a finger.

As I have tried to demonstrate this is not something that can be fixed from outside.  I as a man have tried to be helpful in the past.  But that's all over now.  Women need to fix this problem women have.  And they need to do it all by themselves.  They need to put skin in the game, a lot of skin in the game.  Until they step up second class citizens they are and second class citizens they shall remain.  Or maybe Phyllis Schlafly actually had it right all along and women always were and should always remain second class citizens.

Is the Stock Market Wrong?

Since Donald Trump won the election the stock market has shot up.  Is the market making a big mistake?  I no longer think so.  I think earnings and profits at large American corporations will go up at least for a while.  Here's why.

The biggest component of the economy is consumer spending.  It represents something like 70%.  If consumer spending goes up then overall economic activity goes up.  We have seen this play out in the crash of '08.  When the economy cratered consumers pulled their horns in and stopped spending.  This made a major contribution to the downward spiral that followed the crash.  Since then things have recovered but consumer spending has not been robust so the economic recovery has been anemic.  Let me dive a little more deeply into this.

It has been widely and correctly reported that the incomes of those below the top 10% have stagnated or dropped.  People can't spend money they don't have, right?  Wrong!  They can spend borrowed money.  And they borrowed and spent at high levels before the crash.  The belief was widely held that consumers had racked up way too much debt and that this was bad.

This was true to the extent that when the economy contracted consumers had a very difficult time keeping up with debt service.  But a key component is the whole economic contraction part.  If consumer income had been rising steadily, which it was not, and had stayed at a high level, which it definitely did not, then consumers would have had enough money to keep up and there would not have been a problem.  But those ifs were not true and we had a big problem.

And that leads to a key fact that seems to never be newsworthy.  Debt is good for the economy as long as there is sufficient capacity to service the debt.  Debt only becomes a problem when there is insufficient capacity to service the debt.  We lost a lot of debt service capacity in the crash of  '08 and debt immediately became a big problem.

We currently see consumer income rising slowly.  If consumers continue to maintain the same level of debt they have post-crash then the consumer component of the economy will grow slowly and the stock market will have gotten it wrong.  But what if consumers increase their spending by increasing their debt?  Then the rate of economic growth goes up and the stock market looks smart.  And the willingness to incur more debt depends on psychology.  If consumers think things will get better then they will start the virtuous cycle of more spending producing a better economy producing more consumer income, etc.

These psychology induced increases in consumer spending can only go on for a short time without the need for actual economic growth happening to support it.  One of the thing s that has happened during the recovery is that small bursts of increased consumer spending were not matched by substantial economic growth so they petered out.  But I see a real possibility of an increase in the rate of economic growth.  It can't all be consumer driven, however, so let me move on to the second component.

Most of consumer income comes from wages.  If wages go up or more people become employed, or even better, both go up then consumer income goes up.  But corporate management has a lot to say about this.  If they increase salaries or hiring then they generate more income for consumers who, in turn, can buy more of their goods and services.  This grows the economy and the markets the business serves.  It's all good.

But businesses have adopted the Walmart model.  They operate on the theory that some other company should hire more people and/or raise wages.  If most companies don't follow the Walmart model then those companies that do will fare very well.  And Walmart did very well for a long time.  But if every company keeps costs down by suppressing investment and wage increases then no company's market grows and we all do badly.  And that's what we have seen during the recovery.  Companies have used aggressive cost cutting, layoffs, and financial tricks to keep their profits high while their fundamental business grows slowly or not at all.

As the economy has recovered we have had a slow but steady growth in jobs.  The unemployment rate is way down.  But the new jobs pay poorly compared to the old jobs so overall consumer income growth has been anemic at best.  We have finally seen the job market tighten enough to force wage increases in the last few months.  We seem to be at the point where this trend of wage increases is likely to continue.

And corporations have psychology just the same as consumers.  Corporations have believed that markets will grow slowly at best.  This has justified a layoff and cost cutting strategy that has created a self fulfilling prophecy.  But what if corporations change their psychology and decide that there are market opportunities out there?  That will cause them to increase their rate of investment and to be less aggressive at holding salaries down.  If they do that then consumer income will go up.  And that means that an increase in consumer debt makes perfect sense.  And that will contribute to an increase in the rate of economic growth.  And we will have a virtuous circle going.  Moving on . . .

The next most important component is government spending, particularly Federal government spending.  If neither the consumer nor business is spending the government can step in and fill the void.  This was done early in the Obama Administration with the "stim", a little over 800 billion dollars in Federal spending that was designed to stimulate the economy.  And contrary to Republican talking points, it worked.  But the effect was modest.  In part this was due to the fact that it was poorly constructed.  But the components that were a bad idea were explicitly put in to attract Republican support.  That failed.  And most economists felt that it was too small.  Finally, mostly what it did was halt the hemorrhaging.  It did not grow the economy.  It merely halted the decline.

And Republicans ramped up their "debt and deficits are bad" meme.  Somehow debt and deficits are not a problem when a Republican is in the White House.  Reagan and both Bushes ran up huge deficits which pushed our national debt to astronomical levels.  Carter kept deficits under control.  Clinton took us from a deficit situation to a surplus situation.  Obama halved the deficit between the early years when the economy was severely damaged and large deficits were inevitable to the last few years when the economy was reasonably healthy.  I expect the debt to balloon under Trump.

So, ignoring their inconsistency, are Republicans right?  Again the issue is not how much deficit and debt there are.  It's whether the capacity exists to service that debt.  And let me freely concede it's a Ponzi scheme.  The Federal government issues new debt to repay old debt.  Supposedly all Ponzi schemes are bad.  But this assumes that the debt needs to be repaid eventually.  And that is incorrect when it comes to immortal entities like governments.  And the Federal government is in a unique situation.  It could literally print enough money tomorrow to pay off the entire national debt.  So ultimately it can repay the debt.

The problem is that printing enough money to repay the debt would render US money worthless.  And that's bad for everybody.  So printing that amount of money is not a practical approach.  We end up yet again with psychology.  Investors believe that the Federal government is a sound institution from an economic perspective.  So they buy new debt even though they know its a Ponzi scheme because they believe that they will ultimately be able to get their money back because someone else will buy government debt in the future.  And that will allow the Federal government to make good on the current debt it is issuing.  So the real question is "what would critically damage that trust?"

Republicans have claimed whenever there is a Democrat in the White House that the trust is on the verge of being lost.  This justifies drastic measures like cutting the deficit.  (Somehow the other option, raising taxes, is a bad idea for [insert reason here].)  Whenever a Republican is in the White House the bad thing that was about to happen magically goes away.  And this is in spite of the fact that Democrats have a long record of fiscal responsibility and Republicans have a long record of fiscal irresponsibility.  Go figure.

Anyhow, Republican have succeeded in keeping Federal spending depressed during the entire period of the Obama Administration.  So there has been no pressure on the economy to grow at a fast rate from the Federal government.  This leaves the final component, the banking system in the form of the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is the only one that has been actively trying to get the economy growing and growing at a good rate.  But this is not something the Fed has the appropriate tools for.  They have been forced to resort to extraordinary measures.  These measures are often lumped into something called "Quantitative Easing".  But these tools are indirect and don't work very well.  So the best the Fed has been able to manage given that they have received no help from consumer spending, corporate spending, and Federal spending, is modest growth.

But if consumer spending goes up because consumers feel good and corporate spending goes up because corporations are feeling optimistic and the Federal deficit goes up because that's what Republicans do when there is a Republican in the White House then the Fed can get out of the business of using extraordinary measures.  A modest tilt toward the good by the other three components would be way more effective than what the Fed has been able to do.  In this scenario economic growth can easily perk up at the same time the Fed is shutting down its extraordinary measures.

Notice that Trump's only contribution so far is engineering a change in psychology.  He doesn't have to actually do or not do much of anything.  In fact, he can't actually do or not do anything until inauguration day.  Trump has promised massive tax cuts.  Since Republicans like that idea and they control both houses of congress he is likely to get his wish.  He has also promised lots of spending.  That may or may not happen.  Congressional Republicans seem to be of two minds on this.  They may sort it out and go along with massive spending.  That's what history predicts.

Or Trump may find himself uninterested.  Who knows.  But a big increase in the deficit leading to big increases in the debt seem baked in.  And as long as investors retain confidence in the Federal government's ability to pay the Ponzi scheme will continue humming along.  I think it is unlikely that investors will lose enough faith to change their behavior in the short run.  Who knows what will happen in the long run.

So I see smooth sailing for the stock market in the near term.  I see corporate profits growing.  I also see compensation packages for senior executives growing.  And that's all that is necessary to justify the stock market's current optimism.

But I don't see the situation for the rust belt blue collar workers who put Trump into office improving.  There is another group of people who are likely to be hurt.  That's the people who rely on the social safety net of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Republicans seem bound and determined to scale all three programs back.  And that's if they can't figure out a way to privatize them or eliminate them.  Many of these people voted for Trump because he promised to protect or enhance these programs.  It seems unlikely that he will do so.

Besides the 1% I do see some people doing well.  I think the trend toward knowledge work will continue.  STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) people obviously fall into this category.  But I also see creative people doing well.  There is a lot of art involved in a good web design and I think artists in general are going to do surprisingly well.  We'll see.

Another group that will do well are older people with some money of their own.  Back in the day a little old lady could buy a few shares of AT&T or a utility company.  The investment was safe and paid a good return.  And this investment was available to people of middling means.  The modern equivalent is government bonds or bank CDs.  But as of a few months ago these investments, while safe, paid essentially no return.  Several months ago a 30 year Federal bond paid just over 2%.  The more popular 10 year bond paid around 1%.  And government guaranteed bank CDs paid even less.  You could keep your money safe but you couldn't get any income from it.

Since Trump's election interest rates on government bonds have shot up.  The income is still well below historic levels but it is much better than it was only a few months ago.  The Fed is likely to increase interest rates this month (December, 2016).  If economic growth kicks substantially up then interest rates are likely to continue to climb.  This will cause the rates on government insured bank CDs to also go up.  Whether and how long it will take to get back to historic rates is a question I am not qualified to answer.  But things are definitely looking up for people who have some money of their own.  And these people tend to be older.

If the economy perks up then I have absolute confidence Trump will find a way to take credit for it.  And if people credit Trump for getting the economy growing more quickly, whether he deserves it or not, they will be willing to forgive him for many sins.  Of course, he has it within himself to do something so catastrophic that it actually derails economic growth.  And even if I am right I think it likely that many Trump supporters will be left behind.  Before the election I would have believed that they would figure out they had been conned and turn on him.  But he ran as such an obvious fraud then and people put their faith in him anyhow, I really don't know what it would take at this point to change their minds.

Mr. Robot

"Mr. Robot" is a TV series airing on the USA cable channel.  It's second season aired last summer but I only got around to watching it in the last few days.  It is not for everybody so this is not a "go see it now" commercial disguised as a blog post.  But even though its appeal is limited I think it is worth talking about.

Mr. Robot conforms to a now popular model.  It is in effect a novel broken into one hour episodes analogous to chapters in a book.  In the old days TV shows consisted of a number of stand alone episodes.  That's not what's going on here.  Each episode advances the story.  To completely understand what's going on you have to have seen earlier episodes.  The most visible example of this sort of thing is "Game of Thrones", airing on HBO.  Game of Thrones is based on the "Song of Ice and Fire" books by George R. R. Martin.  Each season is a condensed version of one of the volumes in the series.  But in this case there is no book underlying "Mr. Robot".  So what's it about?

At one level it is the ever popular "David versus Goliath" story.  Instead of a single individual we have a small band of plucky nobodies taking on the large and powerful "E" Corporation.  At least from the point of view of the show, our band is the good guys and E Corp is the bad guy.  And oh boy does E Corp fit the role of villain.  They do pretty much every bad thing a corporate villain is supposed to do.  They are powerful and completely unscrupulous.  They literally kill people by poisoning the environment.  They buy and sell politicians.  And in true villain fashion they occasionally straight up assassinate people.

The case for our plucky band being heroic is mush less straightforward.  They seem like good people but they end up doing a lot of bad things.  In one case one of them actually kills someone on purpose.  They do other bad things because, you know, "the ends justify the means".  The moral ambiguity (to put it politely) makes for better drama and we definitely get lots of drama.

And you will probably be less than totally surprised to find out that there is a chief good guy.  His name is Elliot and he is played by Remy Malek.  And, this being a modern drama, Elliot is a hacker par excellence.  Season one revolves around the team's efforts to pull off a giant attack on E Corp.  BTW, the E Corp logo looks a lot like the logo for Enron.  The nickname for E Company in the series is Evil Company.  This nickname would have fit Enron very well.

In the show E Corp houses all the records on who owes money to who.  By wiping out E Corp's databases (and some other stuff that's necessary to make the plan work but is too complicated to go into here) our plucky band seriously injures E Corp.  But they also plunge the world (or at least the US) into chaos.  For reasons I never was quite able to figure out only cash and a Bitcoin-like payment service housed on smart phones continues to work after the attack.  E Corp somehow owns the phones but not the payment handling service.  But the payment service leaves digital tracks behind so anyone who has access to the right computer systems knows how you are spending every penny.

That's where season two starts up.  E Corp is wounded but still very much in business.  Lots of people are chasing after our band and it is obvious that "stage 2" is necessary to complete the job of defeating evil and raising up good.  I am mostly through the season and so far almost no progress has been made with respect to stage 2.  In a "behind the scenes" companion show one of the actors opined that the series might run 5 seasons.  So I will be very surprised if things are resolved by the time I finish watching the remaining episodes.  And if you want to know more about what happens you'll have to get your hands on the episodes and watch them.

But I want to step back form the twists and turns of a specific episode and look at what is happing at a more macro level.  "Mr. Robot" follows a pretty standard model, albeit in its own idiosyncratic way.  And the basic idea is that the "David" group exposes and documents the bad behavior of the "Goliath" group.  Then everybody recoils in shock and horror and the cops round up the perps and we all live happily ever after.

There is a specific example of this in season 2.  The good guys by nefarious means secure an audio recording of the bad guys doing bad things.  They, again by nefarious means, upload this audio file to the Internet then draw attention to it.  The audio is quickly copied far and wide so that the bad guys can't suppress it and everyone reacts in shock and horror right on queue.  Then the cops, or in this case a Senate committee, swoops in and starts reining the bad guys in.  This is pretty much standard stuff.

It happened that way in "Three Days of the Condor", a 1975 movie.  The last scene features Robert Redford in front of a The New York Times sign.  The implication is that he has provided all the information he has uncovered about bad behavior in the CIA to the paper.  They, in turn, will publish it and the bad guys will be punished accordingly.

And the poster child for all this is Watergate.  Dogged reporting, most prominently by Woodward and Bernstein, eventually exposed nefarious doings by the Nixon Administration.  Eventually Nixon was forced to resign and a number of people ended up in jail.  It is important to note that "Three Days of the Condor" came out only a few years after Watergate.

But the question that now haunts me is:  does this model still work?  The Nixon people worked very hard to keep their bad behavior out of the public eye.  They knew what they were doing was wrong and that even if it wasn't it would look wrong and that would be damaging.  But we have moved away from things working that way since.

Part of it has to do with the definition of what constitutes bad behavior.  In 1928 Al Smith was deemed an unsuitable candidate for President because he was a Catholic.  That rule held until Kennedy was elected in 1960.  In 1964 it was widely believed that Nelson Rockefeller was an unsuitable candidate for President because he had been divorced.  That rule held until 1980 when Reagan was elected.  In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was deemed an unsuitable candidate for Vice President because he had undergone certain treatments for a Psychiatric condition.  And then there's the whole Monica Lewinski thing with Bill Clinton.  President Clinton survived the whole impeachment process because the general public did not think that his behavior justified the punishment.

We now have something called Borking.  Judge Bork was a well respected jurist.  He was nominated for the Supreme Court.  His nomination was eventually blocked because too many Senators felt that his positions were too far out of line with mainstream judicial thinking.  It has since been forgotten that two Democrats voted for Bork and six Republicans voted against him.  (He had been nominated by Reagan.)  On numerous occasions afterward Republicans have accused Democrats of "Borking"  one Republican nomination or another.  This has the desired effect of deflecting attention away from the actual substance behind any opposition.  This allows any opposition by any Democrat to any Republican nomination to be characterized as "political" and, therefore, unworthy.  It should work the same way for Democrats.  They should be able to "Bork" Republican opposition to Democratic nominees.  But that never happens.  This tactic is one of many that has resulted in the increased polarization of politics.

That's bad enough.  Democrats in the Bork case presented substantial evidence to back their contention.  But it turns out that unsubstantiated attacks can work.  The classic example is birtherism.  When Obama first threw his hat into the ring there was a legitimate question as to where he was born.  So in 2008 he released his "short form" birth certificate.  Republican government officials in Hawaii immediately confirmed that it was authentic.  Various news organizations were quickly able to confirm that birth announcements had appeared in the two largest newspapers in Honolulu.  This all happened in 2008.  That should have been the end of that.

But then the most unlikely figure took up the cause.  Her name was Orly Taitz.  Look her up.  You wouldn't believe a person with her background and expertise could be seen as a credible source of information on the subject but she was, at least by some.  She was able to put on a good enough performance to justify repeat bookings on conservative radio and TV shows.  She never came up with anything substantial but that didn't diminish her popularity on these shows.  That resulted in Obama going through all the hoops necessary to obtain and release his "long form" birth certificate in 2011.  That only resulted in a change in the cast of accusers.  Donald Trump took up the cause.

Was any new information unearthed?  No!  Trump at one point announced that he had sent investigators to Hawaii but never released any results from the "investigation".  Nor did anyone else turn up anything else.  And let me repeat.  The matter was definitively settled in 2008.  President Obama was born in Hawaii.  Yet the "birther" controversy persisted until a few weeks ago.  Donald Trump made a short announcement that President Obama was born in the US.  Will that finally put this nonsense to bed?  If past is prologue then the answer is a resounding no.  But the President is leaving office soon.  This will remove the actual reason for all this bad behavior.  So I actually expect the issue to finally die the death it should have died all the way back in 2008.

What all this has in common is the inability of truth to drive out nonsense in public discourse.  Truth can be made invisible and falsehoods can be made visible if enough people want to disbelieve the true thing or believe the false thing and if enough effort is put behind it.  In our fictional universe does Evil Corp have the resources and the ability to make truth invisible and falsehood visible?  They sure do.  And, unfortunately, I am very concerned that the real world analogs of Evil Corp are be able to do the same.

We are seeing the success the Oil industry is having at creating and maintaining over a long period of time the fiction that there is a controversy over global warming and the extent to which human activities are responsible for it.  There is a long, well organized, and successful effort by biblical literalists to convince people that Intelligent Design is a reasonable and scientifically valid alternative to Evolution.  It is neither.  The "birther" nonsense has proved completely impervious to any and all applications of fact for almost a decade.

Finally, in the interest of fairness let me list some areas where lefties are either the prime movers or active co-conspirators in this kind of behavior.  Many on the left believe that GMO crops are wildly dangerous.  There is no evidence to back this up, only suspicions.  There has been an active and well funded search lasting many years for such evidence.  But no one has come up with anything yet.  However, that failure hasn't stopped the anti-GMO people from acting like vast amounts of evidence of harm has been collected and confirmed.

Then there is the anti-vaccination movement.  Vaccines have literally saved millions of lives.  The current vaccines in general use are incredibly safe.  Yet a single small and poorly done study that has since been entirely repudiated was enough to set off a craze that continues to this day.  The result is millions of parents, mostly liberals, failing to vaccinate their children.  People have died as a result.  But the anti-vaccination movement, while diminished, continues to motor on.

The final item on my list is nuclear power.  I should probably do an entire post on this subject.  But here's the Cliff's Notes version.  Nuclear power is dangerous.  But so are all the alternatives.  So the appropriate question is:  how safe is nuclear power compared to the alternatives?  And the answer turns out to be remarkably safe.  Coal kills lots of people by giving them black lung disease.  Coal mining trashes large parts of coal country.  Coal creates incredible amounts of incredibly dangerous byproducts.  By comparison, nuclear kills and grievously harms far fewer people.  It trashes far less land.  And it creates far smaller amounts of dangerous byproducts.  But by comparing nuclear to a theoretically perfect alternative that doesn't actually exist liberals make it sound incredibly bad.

I am not going to connect the obvious dots at this point.  I think you can all do that without me.

An Open Letter to Trump Voters

I understand why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump.  Those are not the people this letter is addressed to.  It is addressed to a specific group of people who voted for Trump.  With this group I frankly and freely admit I do not understand why they voted for him.  I'll lay out the reasons why I'm confused below.  But before I do that I want to be clear about exactly what group I am talking about.

Hillary Clinton lost a number of "rust belt" states.  The margins were extremely thin.  As of late yesterday (Thursday, November 10), the combined Trump lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan was just over a hundred thousand votes.  If Clinton had carried those three states she would now be the President elect.  Instead she is behind in all three and two of them have been called for Trump.  Mr.Trump did very well in these states with white men without college degrees, the classic "blue collar" demographic.

It is clear, at lest if you can trust reporting on the subject, that these people switched their votes because they felt abandoned by Clinton and that they decided Trump was their guy.  That's the part I don't understand.  The rest of this post is about the sources of my confusion.

If you have read my posts you know I often start with a historical perspective.  I'm going to run true to form once more.  From the '30s through the '70s blue collar workers in what is now nicknamed the "rust belt" were solidly in the Democratic camp.  In the '60s and '70s you could point to a large number of Democratic politicians who styled themselves as champions of the blue collar cause.

A typical example was Hubert Humphrey, who ran for President and was defeated by Richard Nixon in 1968.  In spite of the loss Humphrey continued to champion the cause of "labor".  He included blue collar workers in his "labor" category but also extended it to include the lower echelons of the white collar workforce.  And the thinking was that what was good for blue collar workers would also benefit white collar workers so the primary focus was on blue collar workers.

This played out as strong support for the labor union movement and for worker's rights.  Democrats championed a forty hour work week, paid sick leave, a minimum wage, and many other initiatives designed to improve the lot of the ordinary working man.  Labor returned the favor by voting for Democrats and labor unions provided a lot of the money and manpower necessary to run an effective campaign.  But something big happened in 1980.

A large number of these people voted for Ronald Reagan, the Republican.  He basically said "you are being taken for a ride and I will take better care of you".  They bought that argument.  But the first thing Reagan did was destroy the Air Traffic Controller's Union.  This was not an isolated incident.  His administration was uniformly on the side of management and firmly opposed to labor, organized or otherwise.  In short, he did the opposite of taking care of blue collar workers.  But substantial numbers stuck with him and have stuck with the Republican party since.

At one level the situation couldn't be simpler.  You either empower labor or you empower management.  If you empower labor they will see improved wages, benefits, working conditions, etc.  If you empower management you will see depressed wages (or wages growing more slowly than they otherwise would), downward pressure on benefits, poorer working conditions, etc.  Republicans have consistently sided with management and the results are now obvious.  The standard of living and the general plight of working men is much diminished compared to what it was in the '60s and '70s.  And this is just what you would expect.

And if we examine the period that followed the '80 election we see Democrat after Democrat who had been a traditional champion of labor lose elections to Republicans.  The Democratic party abandoned their aggressively pro labor stance because being pro labor did not win elections.  Instead we got Bill Clinton and "triangulation".

Clinton was a southerner and southerners have historically not been pro labor.  But what triangulation was all about was to try to find a common ground between traditional Democratic positions and traditional Republican positions and see if something that would do some good could get enacted into law.  So we saw welfare reform and criminal justice reform and NAFTA and "Don't ask - Don't tell".  All of these programs were a mix of Democratic and Republican ideas.  People now have a lot of bad things to say about all of these.  But what they are mostly unhappy about are the Republican components.  Clinton argued at the time that "he got the best deal he could under the circumstances" and there is plenty of evidence to support this position.

So why did he get such poor deals?  Because Republicans kept winning elections.  Clinton faced both a Republican House and a Republican Senate for much of the time he was in office.  And one reason Republicans won elections then and now is that they were able to pick up significant support from blue collar workers.  But Republicans never advanced a single piece of pro labor legislation or implemented a single pro labor policy during this entire time.  Instead they systematically championed the side of management.  And it is not surprising that as a result the economic prospects of the middle class, and particularly the blue collar component of the middle class, has stagnated.

Bill Clinton saw record numbers of jobs created and substantial increases in the take home pay of blue collar workers.  In spite of this, Al Gore, his vice president and a fellow southerner, and someone who would be much more pro labor than Bush, lost in 2000.  If blue collar workers had been solidly behind him then he would have won easily.

I won't re-litigate the Bush administration, except to note that he maintained the Republican tradition of being pro management and anti labor.  And this stance was not enough to cost him the election in '04.  Republicans became unpopular shortly thereafter but for other reasons.  And Obama was able to bring enough blue collar voters back into the fold to win in '08 and 12.  But Democrats did badly in '10 and '14 and an important reason for their losses can be traced to lackluster at best support from blue collar workers.

And, if anything, Republicans have amped up their attack on labor during the Obama years.  They have successfully blocked efforts to increase the minimum wage at the federal level.  They have blocked efforts to reign in health care costs.  Not a single Republican voted for the "stimulus" in spite of the fact that a lot of money went into the pockets of blue collar workers in Republican districts.  In fact, they engaged in a systematic deception.  They held dozens of public events where they took credit for bringing Federal money into their districts.  In fact, they had done the exact opposite.  The money was from the "stimulus" bill that they had voted against but they were successful in hiding that fact.

Meanwhile they attacked spending initiatives that benefit blue collar workers and protected tax loop holes that advantaged large corporations and wealthy individuals.  The most egregious example of this was the bailout of the auto industry.  It garnered no Republican support.  And, while it certainly helped a lot of senior executives, investors, etc., it also meant a lot of blue collar jobs in the rust belt were preserved.  They also attacked efforts to strengthen the hand of labor when it was dealing with management.  And there was certainly no outcry from the Republican side of the aisle to lock up fat cat bankers after the crash.

Now let me move from the general to the specific.  And the "specific" in this case is Flint Michigan, a classic rust belt city that has been hit hard.  A Republican governor single handedly caused the lead poisoning crisis in Flint Michigan.  Yet for the most part he was successful in deflecting blame to nearly everywhere else.  Neither the governor nor the Republican controlled state legislature has stepped up to make good the damage the governor caused.  Instead, they have consistently obstructed efforts to make permanent fixes.  Flint is still being hung out to dry.  And there are things the Federal Government could do.  But the Republicans have consistently obstructed and, in many cases, completely blocked efforts there too.

And the "fix" in Flint would create lots of "shovel ready" jobs for blue collar workers.  No high tech solution is necessary.  The work can not be outsourced.  So something that should be done, something that is a good thing, something that would improve the lot of blue collar workers and is strongly supported by Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular, is being blocked by Republicans.

And the Flint situation is the specific example that illustrates the general problem.  It is common knowledge that our infrastructure is in bad shape.  The Flint problem is an infrastructure problem.  President Obama has made proposal after proposal to invest in repairing and modernizing our infrastructure.  These proposals have broad and enthusiastic support from Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular.  They are very popular with the public in general and blue collar workers in particular.  And moving ahead aggressively would create large numbers of good blue collar jobs.  And all of them have been blocked over and over by Republicans.

This is the disconnect I see and which I just can't understand.

Hillary got involved with the Flint crisis and devoted significant effort to trying to improve things.  Trump did one "drive by" appearance and that was that.  More broadly, Hillary started her campaign with an extensive listening tour.  And she listened.  And based on what she heard she developed specific plans to help.  Trump made vague promises and left it at that.  And then there's Trumps business record with blue collar workers.  He repeatedly stiffed them as he did with small businesses.  And he was happy to buy his suits and other "Trump" merchandise from around the world.  He certainly made no effort to understand what was going on in the lives of these people so his plans were little more than slogans.

And what were the slogans?  He promised to reopen the factories and coal mines.  Basically he promised to roll the clock back many decades to the good old days.  But what if he actually tries to make good on these promises?  The big rust belt job killer has not been trade policy.  It has been a combination of a tilt toward management, allowing them to cut salaries and benefits, and automation.

Fifty years ago it took a lot of man hours to make a car.  So making a million cars produced a lot of jobs.  Now manufacturing is heavily automated and it takes far fewer man hours to make a car.  And so making the same million cars produces far fewer jobs.  And those jobs have much poorer wages and benefits associated with them than they did in the good old days.  Domestic industrial production has actually grown substantially in the last decade and looks to continue growing.  But automation means it will not employ people in the numbers it used to.

The same is true of coal.  The big killer of coal jobs has been fracking.  Fracked natural gas is cleaner and cheaper than coal.  Is Trump going to reduce the production of fracked natural gas?  Well, actually no.  Instead he plans to increase production.  So his promises to coal miners are every bit as empty as the ones he has made to blue collar workers in the rust belt.  Yet these promises have been enough to convince blue collar workers that Trump is their man.

Finally, there is a wide spread belief that blue collar workers are forgotten and invisible when it comes to Democrats in general and Clinton in particular.  Based on their behavior blue collar workers want empty promises repeated frequently in stump speeches.  Democrats, on the other hand, have made proposal after proposal that shows that they have thought hard about the plight of these people and are willing to roll their sleeves up and dig in.  But that has not resulted in many of these people coming home to the Democratic party and abandoning Republicans.  This has deprived Democrats of the clout necessary to get their proposals enacted into law.  That's extremely frustrating.  But is it really the fault of Democrats?

What have Republicans offered up in the Obama era?  Gridlock.  They decided that they would oppose everything Obama approved of, even if they originally proposed it.  The classic example is Obamacare.  It started out as a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation.  It then morphed into Romney-care under the sponsorship of the 2012 Republican candidate for President while he was the governor of Massachusetts.  Whatever flaws it has, many of them can be traced to its Republican roots.  Obamacare differs little from Romney-care.  It was a good idea when Romney, a Republican, implemented it.  It was a bad idea when Obama, a Democrat, implemented it.  But it is the same program.

I bring Obamacare up solely to explain how Republicans operate.  It looks like something similar is about to play out.  Trump has proposed a massive infrastructure program.  Obama has routinely proposed this sort of thing each year.  Republicans have made sure it goes nowhere.  Both Clinton and Trump have made it part of their agenda.  Trump's plan may go through.  Why?  Because it is a Republican initiative.  And then again it may not.  There is significant resistance from factions within the Republican party.  They may end up being successful in blocking it and we have no idea at this time how serious Trump is about the whole thing in the first place.

Obama was fairly successful in his first two years in office when Democrats controlled both chambers of the legislature.  But the Republicans' "just say no" strategy was successful enough that he was only able to get a few things done.  Then voters rewarded Republican obstructionism by tossing many Democrats out of office in the 2010 election.  The Republicans then shut down the government, put the full faith and credit of the government into question, and generally behaved irresponsibly.  Were they punished for this irresponsibility at the polls?  No!

The results of this election allow us to make some calls.  Divisiveness won.   Irresponsibility won.  Ignorance won.  Bad behavior won.  Macho won.  Secrecy won.  White privilege won.  Republicans who publicly opposed Trump and were up for re-election lost.  So the Republican party now owns the campaign that Trump ran.  And Trump owns the Republican party.  It is generally believed that a lot of Republicans would have lost without the boost they got from the Trump's win.

There are many people who believe that Trump is going to pivot and behave quite differently now that he will soon be President. There are many people that believe that what Trump said on the campaign trail was standard political rhetoric and he will govern responsibly and effectively.  We'll see.  If he can actually deliver increased employment and increased income to blue collar workers I and many others of his fiercest opponents will be impressed.  Certainly that's what the blue collar workers who voted for him expect to see happen.

And he has made many promises to many others on foreign policy, law and order, immigration, etc.  It will help that, if we go by the experience of the George W. Bush administration, he will get the active co-operation of Republicans in congress.  Campaigns, especially campaigns in which so many promises have been made, generate mandates and expectations.  I and many people like me believe that the agenda Trump laid out in his campaign is a bad one.  We also frankly do not believe he can actually deliver on most of it.

He will be able to wipe out most of Obama's achievements.  Executive orders can be reversed.  Republicans have railed against numerous Obama initiatives for years.  In January they will have all the power and control they need to do what they have so frequently and vociferously promised to do.  It looks like the Democrats are in no position to stop them.  At best they can slow them down.  I think doing this is a bad idea but my side lost.  And I think that many of the blue collar workers who voted for Trump will find that they are hurt badly by the absence of the very programs Republicans have been so successful at demonizing.  We'll see.

And then there is the agenda that is uniquely Trump's, the agenda that goes beyond just "roll this or that Obama initiative back".  We'll all get to see how that works out too.  Given the behavior of Republicans during the Obama administration and the dramatic differences between the agendas of the two candidates the Democrats are under no obligation to provide any assistance at all.  Trump and his Republican colleagues are on their own when it comes to delivering results.  The blue collar workers who voted for Trump think they will end up better off or at least no worse off than they are now.  I think they will quickly find themselves far worse off.  Maybe I'm wrong and they're right.  Either way, we'll see.