The 2024 Election - Preliminary Thoughts

No question about it.  I was shocked by the outcome.  It should have been a Blue Wave result.  Instead, Republicans made significant but important gains.  Trump won a second term.  Republicans won control of the Senate.  The balance of power in the House is not yet determined.  But the odds favor the Republicans retaining control and perhaps picking up a few more seats.

Put simply, it should not have happened.  The Harris people ran what many consider a flawless campaign.  Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was a mess.  That should have resulted in an easy win for the D's.  The preliminary take by various talking heads boils down to  "Democrats were out of touch".

This translated to complaints about how they handled the economy, immigration, and a host of other issues.  But Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, have been excellent stewards of the economy.  And Trump scuttled a border bill.  And so on.  As one example, let's take a look at the economy that Democrats supposedly screwed up.

Trump handed Biden a mess caused by COVID and Trump's horrid response to it.  Biden got our COVID response straightened out quickly.  He could have done better.  The reason he didn't was due to Republican intransigence.  Did the Republicans pay any price for their bad behavior?  NO!

Biden also put a lot of cash into the pockets of poor and middle class people.  In just one example, he sent a monthly stipend to every family with children.  This is the poster child for government actions done right.  It was simple, direct, and almost entirely bureaucracy free.  And it worked.  It cut child poverty roughly in half and gave poor and less well off families a needed financial breather.

By every measure it was a success.  Did Biden get any credit for pulling this near miracle off?  NO!  Were Republicans punished for killing it?  Also, NO!  And the whole program immediately disappeared down the memory hole.  As a result of this and other purely Democratic initiatives, most people emerged from the pandemic with more money in their pockets than they had started with.

As we emerged from the shadow of the pandemic people started spending like drunk sailors.  Prices soared.  Then the supply chain got overloaded and seized up.  This caused prices to soar even more.  The result was inflation of a type not seen in thirty or more years.

Biden moved swiftly and decisively on all fronts to get things straightened out.  He was remarkably successful remarkably quickly.  Everything is now working smoothly, and has been for over a year.  And this has led to inflation dropping precipitously.  Biden was blamed for the inflation even though it was not his fault.  On the other hand, he was given no credit for his successful efforts to reign inflation in, something he was responsible for.

He also supported workers in their efforts to raise their income.  He simultaneously supported efforts to bring manufacturing, and the good jobs manufacturing produces, back to the U.S.A.   He promised to "build the economy back from the bottom up and from the middle out".  He delivered the best economic results of any G-7 country.  Best economic growth.  Most income growth.  Lowest inflation.

His "build back better" slogan was the centerpiece of his reelection campaign.  He relentlessly promoted his very real successes.  But he was unable to get his message to land with voters.  With his most powerful message failing to gain traction, his campaign was going nowhere when he participated in the disastrous debate between himself and Trump.

When Harris took over she dropped the economic message and pivoted to messages she thought would work better.  Ultimately, they didn't.  Trump got roughly the same number of votes in 2020 and 2024.  Harris got substantially fewer votes in 2024 than Biden got in 2020.  People yet again showed up for Trump.  People who had voted for Biden in 2020 sat 2024 out.

The question is why, and I think I have some of the answer.  And it can be boiled down to one word:  fear.  People have come to fear Democrats while becoming comfortable with Trump.  I think that both the fear and the comfort are misplaced.  But a whole lot of voters disagree with me.  The exit polls are clear on this.

Truth be told, the current Republican party is a clown show with Trump fulfilling the role of clown-in-chief.  Why would people be comfortable enough to vote for the clown-in-chief and the rest of the clown car he tows behind him, when they should instead be afraid, very afraid?  Why should they discount Democratic efforts to, for instance, improve the lot of poor and middle class people, while ignoring Republican policies that do the opposite?

The answer goes back a long ways, to Ronald Reagan.  He popularized what he called his eleventh commandment:  "Thou shalt speak no ill of any fellow Republican".  Seems like a standard political ploy of no great import, doesn't it?  And it would have been if it was just Reagan doing it.  But it soon became the way all Republicans, conservatives, and their supporters behaved.

A high profile example of one of those supporters was (and is) the New York Times columnist David Brooks.  For many years he joined left leaning Mark Shields for a weekly discussion of recent political developments.  Shields would praise politicians for whatever he liked and criticize them for whatever he disliked.  He treated Democrats and Republicans the same.  Brooks, on the other hand, would praise or criticize Democratic politicians in an even hand manner.  But when it came to Republican politicians, he would either praise them or keep silent.

Over time the result was more criticism of Democrats than Republicans.  A casual observer could easily find themself inclined to believe that Republicans were better, or at least less awful, than Democrats.  This represented another step in the wrong direction, but a small one.  Then Bush Limbaugh came along.

I don't know what Limbaugh's actual politics were when he started.  What I do know was that he was driven by the desire to make a lot of money, and he wasn't going to let little things like honesty and ethics get in the way.  In looking over the media landscape he made several astute observations.

His first one was that by this time technology had passed AM radio by, so getting into that game would be easy.  But AM radio was cheap and easy for a good reason, audiences had shrunk.  And you can't make big money if you are only reaching a small audience.  He would have to do something that would break through, get him noticed, and generate large audiences.

Anybody with any media experience knows that sensationalism the key to getting a lot of people to pay attention to you.  All he had to do was figure out just what flavor of sensationalism would best suit his needs.  For that he looked for where a large concentration of suckers could be found.  It didn't take him long to decide that they could be found at the conservative end of the political spectrum.

He would give them what they wanted, and he would do so in the most sensational manner he could get away with.  And it worked.  It didn't take him long to build up a giant audience.  Sponsors love reaching a giant audience, so the ad revenue soon started flowing in.  He got rich quick.  He also got powerful quick.

Abandoning editorial standards was part of the plan from the start.  They would interfere with the kind of sensationalism that he planned to pursue.  Fact checking, treating everyone fairly, and the like would hold him back in his pursuit of a large following.

Instead, he made wild accusations based on dubious or non-existent evidence.  These were all aimed at Democratic and liberal targets.  Meanwhile, he fawned over conservatives and Republicans.  To hear him tell it, they could do no wrong.

Conservatives like Reagan and Brooks who populated the pre-Limbaugh era behaved like gentlemen.  They made no wild accusations about their opponents.  They depended on a long succession of small drips to slowly get the job done.  Limbaugh was in too much of a hurry for that.  He proudly boasted of his bare knuckle, take no prisoners approach.

He also did something else that would turn out to be a key to the current success of Right Wing media.  He said "I'm telling you what the other guys won't.  So, you can't trust them."  Of course, the "exclusive" content he was talking about was nonsense, or the next closest thing.

But his listeners never seemed to figure that out.  Whatever he was selling, they were buying.  And, in the same way that Limbaugh sped up the slow drip effect of Reagan's eleventh commandment had in delegitimizing Democrats and their supporters, he was quickly able to make inroads in his plan to delegitimize the mainstream media.

Now, neither Democrats nor the mainstream media are pure as the driven snow.  They have lots of warts, and those warts should regularly be pointed out.  But conservative leaning mainstream outfits, and especially the Right Wing media needs to be subjected to the same scrutiny.  But it isn't.  Republicans and conservatives were using a different playbook than Democrats and the mainstream media.

Democrats feel that it is important to hold both friend and foe to account.  Republican feel that it is important to only hold the other side to account.  The fact that this should be obvious doesn't mean that people recognize what's going on and take it into account.  The election is, in fact, strong evidence, that lots of people haven't even noticed.

And if it had just been Limbaugh and his fellow AM shouters, maybe it wouldn't have made much difference.  But then Rupert Murdoch came along.  He used the same playbook that Limbaugh used.  In fact, I think he got there first.  In one of their few differences, Limbaugh picked AM radio while Murdoch picked newspapers.

But Murdoch picked newspapers for the same reason Limbaugh had picked AM radio.  Newspapers were a declining business when Murdoch first got involved.  That made it cheaper and easier to get in.  They also presented the same problem as AM radio had, a declining audience.  Not surprisingly, Murdock adopted the same solution as Limbaugh had, right wing sensationalism.  And forget about journalistic ethics.

He made a lot of money in newspapers in his home country of Australia before moving on to newspapers in the United Kingdom.  In the U.S. he did also buy the Wall Street Journal, a storied newspaper with national reach.  But it was not the right vehicle for his usual makeover.  So, other than the editorial page, he has mostly left it alone.  That experience caused him to decided that he needed a different vehicle.

The vehicle he eventually settled on was cable news.  Specifically, he founded Fox News and adjacent properties like Fox Business.  Fox Business has only become moderately successful.  It trails its competitors, CNBC and Bloomberg, in the business news market.  But Fox News has been a big success.  It regularly bests its competition, CNN and MSNBC, in the ratings wars.

Fox News with its large audience has long been a giant cash cow for Murdoch.  And for a long time, it was so successful that it could make or break conservative politicians.  For better or worse, Trump eventually managed to turn the tables on them.  Fox News now sings Trump's tune, rather than the other way around.

The Limbaugh/Murdoch formula is not that hard to figure out and duplicate.  So, you now have lots of imitators.  The children of Limbaugh have mostly moved on from AM radio to the internet in their quest for fame and fortune.  A notable example is Alex Jones and his "Infowars" internet show.  Direct competitors to Fox News have also sprung up.  A typical example is Newsmax.

What hasn't changed is the basic formula.  Dump on liberals and Democrats.  Praise conservatives and Republicans to high heaven.  Spread the "you can't trust the 'liberal' (which is not actually liberal) media, so only listen to us" mantra.  The result is a large group of people who are deeply distrustful of liberals and Democrats, and who believe conservatives to be much more worthy of their trust and support.

And with the advent of Limbaugh and Murdoch, we now have a truly scarry phenomena.  These essentially propaganda outlets are self supporting.  Limbaugh, Murdoch, and many of their imitators are running profitable, often extremely profitable, businesses.  Propaganda usually costs money.  From a business, perspective, it's a failure.  People do it not to make money but for the side benefits.

But when your propaganda achieves your side benefits and makes money, it just doesn't get any better.  And that's where the Right Wing media is at this point.  And make no mistake about their complete lack of ethics.  Alex Jones was hit with a judgement amounting to hundreds of millions for lying about the Sandy Hook massacre.  (For those who have forgotten that's where a nut job with a gun killed a bunch of elementary school children along with some teachers and staff.)

Fox has had to cough up $787 million for lying about Dominion voting machines.  Rudy Giuliani owes over a hundred million for lying about a couple of public spirited poll workers.  In each and every case, what these people and businesses have been caught doing was despicable.  But millions of people now believe them to be a trustworthy source for news and information.

So, on issue after issue after issue, Democrats find themselves starting out in a deep hole, a hole dug for them by Right Wing media.  They are forced to dig themselves out of the hole before they can even start to address the issue at hand.  Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, start with a bounty of positive support.  This is again provided by Right Wing media.

I discussed the state of the economy above.  Biden and his fellow Democrats have a lot to be  proud of.  But if it's "we did these things and they worked for a lot of people but not for all people" versus "they screwed up in a few places and we have no plan for doing better", and the "no plan" people get the benefit of the doubt over the people who actually did a lot of good, then you get the election result we got.

I am only going to dig deeply into one more example of how this plays out, the Palestinian refugee issue.  The Gaza situation is horrible.  I recently devoted an entire post to the subject (see Sigma 5: The Israel/Hamas War), so I'm going to skip over all the details and just summarize the situation as "bad guys versus bad guys".  The bad guys on the Palestinian side are Hamas.  The bad guys on the Israeli side are Prime Minister Netanyahu and his toadies.

A lot of Palestinians, and the many college students who have joined their cause, are unhappy with Biden, and by extension, Harris.  It is a legitimate concern.  But this is a case where context is everything.  The first important piece of context is a sordid one.  There are a lot of Jews in this country, and they vote.  Coming down too hard on the Palestinian side risks alienating them.  But wait.  There's more.

There is a well established pro-Israel lobbying group called AIPAC.  Like everyone else, Israel sometimes fails to live up to its own ideals.  That should open them up for legitimate criticism.  But AIPAC long ago decided that any criticism of Israel was illegitimate.  They started labeling any critic an antisemite, or worse.  In my opinion this maximalist approach has hurt Israel.  Nevertheless, it is a fact that politicians, particularly Democratic politicians have to deal with.

So, what's the Trump position on all of this?  All Netanyahu all the time.  Netanyahu is now talking about ejecting all of the Palestinians from Gaza and returning the land to Israeli control.  With Trump in the White House he can expect cooperation rather than opposition from the U.S.  So, where does this leave the Palestinians and their supporters?  SOL.

Biden and Harris have done what they could for the Palestinians, given the political constraints they are forced to deal with.  Their position is far short of what Palestinians would like.  But it is also far superior to what Trump will deliver for (or more accurately to) them.  But instead of the enthusiastic support they should have given Democrats, Palestinians and their supporters have opposed them, or chosen to stay home.

And so it goes on issue after issue.  Democrats fall short everywhere.  The Right Wing media focus relentlessly on these shortcomings, be they real or fictitious.  They also relentlessly support and promote conservatives whether that support is deserved or not.  But the actions of conservatives regularly demonstrate that they are indifferent or outright hostile to the issues and causes voters claim to care the most about.

On issue after issue many voters are unaware of Democratic positives and Republican negatives.  And that's just how the Right Wing media wants things.  And the results of the current election show just how successful they have been at getting what they want.  So, why haven't Democrats and liberals tried to build a Left Wing media.  They have.  It was called "Air America".  It flopped.

It turns out, however, that liberals are skeptical.  They believe in journalistic integrity.  They expect to hear facts backing an opinion.  Liberals being liberals is interesting.  But they don't all march in lock step with each other.  And that means that one person's take on something is different from another person's.  And liberals notice this.  That makes it hard to get everyone fully behind any one single person or agenda.

And that meant that this or that commentator on Air America attracted a decent sized following.  But nobody was able to attract a large enough following to turn Air America into the kind of cash cow the Limbaugh show turned into.  In fact, Air America was never even able to get into the black.

So, it got shut down.  Every once in a while some people will look into trying again.  But no one has come up with a "fix" that looks credible enough to attract actual investors.  So, there has been no successor.  And the basic problem is structural.  The very things that make a financially viable Right Wing media possible, are the exact same things that make a financially viable Left Wing media impossible.

Take any issue.  Then take any proposed solution.  It will have plusses and minuses.  If there is a perfect solution to an issue then it gets implemented and that issue quickly becomes a non-issue.  That means that in the real world we are forced to pick from a list of various flawed solutions.  We seek to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs.  But there will always be costs.

Except for the magic perfect solution.  The perfect solution has no costs.  It's all benefit.  It also doesn't exist.  Not in the real world.  That's why I call them magic perfect solutions.   In the real world, if one side proposes a specific solution (it doesn't matter which one it is) and the other side criticizes it for having costs then does not propose an alternative solution, they are taking advantage of a common flaw in people's thinking.

All too often People don't notice that the opposition did not propose a specific solution.  Instead, without thinking it through they give the opposition credit for having come up with a magic perfect solution.  But to repeat, magic perfect solutions don't exist in the real world, at least not for any length of time.  And even if one did, the opposition did not propose it.

In a contest between a real "warts and all" proposed solution and a non-existent magic perfect solution, too often fantasy trumps reality.  It gripes my butt when many voters think Trump and the Republicans somehow could have come up with a magic perfect solution to avoid, for instance, the post-COVID inflation bump.  If they did, why didn't they tell us what it was?  In the real world it is because the only ideas they had would have made things worse, not better.  

But what gripes my butt even more is a situation like the Palestinian problem.  Trump is on record as being wildly hostile to Palestinian interests.  But that was not enough to bring Palestinian supporters around to supporting Harris.  Here, an actually real and known to be worse solution beat a poor but better than the alternatives solution.  Sometimes, "better than the alternatives" is as good as its going to get.

There are many other "failures" that various people now ascribe to the Harris campaign.   But most of them fail if you compare apples to apples.  If we make a serious effort to determine Trump's actual response to an issue then things immediately look much better for Democrats.  But people don't do that.  They let themselves believe that Trump and his fellow Republicans are on their side.  The group most responsible for this kind of thinking is the Right Wing media.

Yet the Right Wing media has completely escaped blame so far.  The mainstream media continues to act like they are a valuable part of the news ecosystem.  They are not.  They are propagandists, and extremely effective ones at that.

Palestinian supporters claim they were not heard.  They were heard loud and clear.  People who feel left behind economically feel not heard.  But it was Joe Biden who was the one who was not heard.  He was listening closely and trying hard to take care of them.  They were the ones who were not listening.  A Democratic politician who squeaked out a win in a right leaning district says she was not heard.

One of her complaints was that the decorations in the Vice Presidential residence were fake when the real thing could have been supplied by businesses in her district.  And that's critically important why?  More on point, did the Trump people use the real thing from her district when they were in office?

As I recall, during the Melania era, White House Christmas decorations used a lot of fake and not much real.  I suspect that the decorations in the Vice President's residence followed a similar pattern.  And I suspect that this Democratic politician was never invited to either the White House or the Vice Presidential residence during the first Trump Administration.  I don't expect that to change this time around.

Democrats must spend vast amounts of time and energy countering the narrative relentlessly pushed by the Right Wing media.  If leaves less time to listen to the very people who claim to have been slighted.  And even if Republicans and conservatives do talk to these people, they then go behind their backs and do them wrong.

Could Democrats message better?  Sure.  Could they listen better?  Sure.  Can they promote themselves better?  Sure.  But that's true of everybody.  And the press, who should care deeply, gives the Right Wing media a pass by pretending they either adhere to the same journalistic standards they do (Fox, Newsmax, etc.) when they don't.  Or that they are not news media at all (Alex Jones and his ilk).  But this latter group has a profound effect on what people believe and who they trust.

That leaves the heavy lifting to Democrats.  But as noted above, Democrats start out at a disadvantage.  And when a Democrat attacks it is immediately dismissed as politics, even if the attack is accompanied by a vast amount of compelling evidence.

Consider, for instance, the January 6 Committee.  The amount of evidence they collected and presented to the public was massive.  And it came from highly credible sources, Republicans, Trump Administration officials, and authenticated documents.  It made an unimpeachable case that Trump was guilty of fomenting an insurrection.  Republicans and conservatives never presented any evidence to the contrary even though there were many ways (e.g. Fox News) they could have done so.

It was all dismissed with a wave of a hand.  And speaking of a wave of a hand, Republican accusations are treated seriously, even though the the supporting evidence they come up with too often consists of nothing more substantial than a wave of the hand.

Now, let's consider a hypothetical.  Suppose Democrats and liberal were able to stand up a Left Wing media operation.  It would play by the same rules as the Right Wing media does.  And, since we are supposing, suppose it was a profitable operation, so it could be sustained indefinitely.

Where would that leave the country?  Caught between two propaganda operations, neither operating in the best interests of the country or its citizens.  To me, that sounds worse than the current situation.

All the suggestions I have seen concerning what Democrats should do differently next time seem insignificant next to their big problem, the Right Wing media.  Frankly, I have no idea how to tame this beast.  All I have is one suggestion.  Talk to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Why Arnold and not some Democrat or liberal?  Because he has a particular set of skills, to steal the tag line of a franchise that Arnold was not a part of.  He is a Republican, but he is a Republican who endorsed Harris.  And he did so because he didn't like what he was seeing coming out of the Trump campaign and the Right Wing media.

Schwarzenegger has been successfully managing and manipulating his public image since before he came to the U.S., and that was a long time ago.  As a movie star he became extremely effective at promoting his movies.  He knows the difference between image and reality.  But besides his media savvy he has political savvy.

He was written off by many (but not by me) when he ran for Governor of California.  He won that election, and went on to easily win reelection.  He did so by being a "let's fix this thing" kind of guy.  When he first got into office he started out by doing the natural thing, working primarily with his fellow Republicans.

He assumed that they worked like he did.  It took him a while to figure out that he was wrong.  They were all noise and no action (or wrong action - sound familiar?).  He then switched up his game and started working extensively with Democrats.  He found them to be good partners.

With a large percentage of the Democratic delegation, and a significant percentage of the Republican delegation, he started getting things done.  His record of achievement resulted in him leaving office with high approval ratings.  He knows what it actually takes to get things done, especially in a contentious political environment.

If there is anyone who knows how to talk to the currently disaffected, it's Arnold.  I want to see his issues list, and what he thinks the right approach to solving each of them is.  But most of all I want to know how he thinks the stranglehold the Right Wing media has on our politics can be broken.

His long and successful time in Hollywood should provide him with valuable insight.  Maybe he's not interested.  Maybe he doesn't have a clue as to how to proceed.  But then maybe he does.  The only way we can find out is by asking him.

An Election Paradigm Shift?

 All modern elections have been turnout elections.  Far more than by winning over undecided voters, the result is generally determined by which side is more effective at turning out their base.  The Democratic base as been far larger than the Republican one for a long time.  But Republicans have proved to be far more effective at turning their base out than Democrats have.

Pundits shorthand this as "the enthusiasm gap".  It has been the key to Trump's success.  Trump supporters are rabid.  They turn out no matter what.  Hillary should have won in a walk in 2016.  But she was never able to generate any enthusiasm among the Democratic base.  So, she lost in a squeaker.

Biden was more successful in 2020.  But most of the Democratic enthusiasm was centered around defeating Trump.  Far less of it was due to enthusiasm for Biden.  This became increasingly clear as the 2024 campaign unspooled.

Biden had lots of money.  He had a crack campaign staff.  They did all the right things.  But it became increasingly obvious that what they were doing wasn't working.

There was never any indication that Trump was gaining supporters.  But there was lots of evidence that Biden was losing supporters.  And that worried other Democrats who were up for reelection.  Pressure built until Biden ultimately decided to step aside in favor of Harris.  Enthusiasm immediately bounced back on the Democratic side.

Would it be enough?  Pollsters and pundits agree that it will be a close race.  So, maybe, maybe not.  So far, all this has been conventional wisdom.  And if I agree with the conventional wisdom, I don't bother to write a post about it.  So, why am I writing this post?  Because I think something important is happening that the conventional wisdom is missing.

Ignoring the Indians, what Canadians rightly call "the first peoples", this country has always been run by men.  More specifically, it has been run by white men.  And still more specifically, it has been run by rich white men.  In the early days of the United States voting laws specified that only white men who owned real property were eligible to vote.

Real property is land, or sometimes other substantial assets.  That disenfranchised many white men.  If you were a working stiff who did not happen to own his own home, you were excluded.  Farmers, assuming they were not share croppers, qualified.  But hired hands, clerks, servants, assistants, apprentices, and many others didn't.

The franchise has slowly broadened in the intervening centuries.  It broadened first to include all white men, even those who didn't own real property.  Then black men were included, at least theoretically.  Many impediments, the so called "Jim Crow" laws, for instance, were put in the way of black men who wanted to vote.  Those impediments have largely but not entirely been done away with over time.

And, of course, women have been able to vote for over a century now.  But when it came to the balance of electoral power little has changed right up to the present.  Men have been able to remain in charge.  That may change this year.  

People vote in secret.  So, theoretically, women could vote however they wanted to.  They did not have to respect the wishes and desires of the men around them.  In spite of this, many women did.  They voted the same way the men around them did.  In 2016 I did not understand how any woman could vote for Trump.  And that was before the "Access Hollywood" tape came out.

But in 2016 52% of white women voted for Trump.  And it wasn't like they lacked a viable alternative.  Clinton was intelligent, competent, experienced, and a woman.  And she led in the polls for most of the campaign.  If she had secured 55% of the votes of white women she would have won the election.

But in that election far too many white women voted for the interests of the men around them instead of their own.  And she lost.  2020 was a mano-a-mano contest.  That is, it was the usual brawl between two white men, unusually old white men, but white men nevertheless.  Biden portrayed himself as a viable alternative to Trump.  That turned out to be enough.

The fact that he did a great job of running the government was not front of mind with voters in 2022.  Democrats did relatively well, but they did not do nearly as well as they should have based both on the executive record (Biden) and the legislative record (slim Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate).  

And that brings us to 2024.  The fiasco that is the legislative record of House Republicans does not seem to weigh heavily on the minds of voters.  The Senate is gridlocked.  But that's mostly due to the fact that bills need to also make it through the Republican controlled House.

House Republicans can't even get their own agenda, such as it is, passed through their own chamber.  But they are unanimous in their desire to block any initiative coming out of the Senate that has even a whiff of Democratic support, so they do.  As a result, conventional wisdom tells us, ad nauseum, that control of both houses will be a close run thing.

We have seen this movie before, so that's not what is the potential game changer in this year's election.  What is a potential game changer is the campaign the Harris people are running.  They are going after the woman's vote in a big way.  And it's working, at least according to the polling.  Women favor Harris by wide margins.  Of course, in order for the overall polls to be close, that means men heavily favor Trump.

No one has ever tried a "women first" campaign before.  So, why Harris?  Remember, not only is she a woman, she is a minority.  And part of her heritage is black.  For a lot of reasons I am not going to get into, it is common for black families to be headed by strong black women.

Being surrounded by strong, black female role models is not the experience of any previous presidential candidate.  Even in Barak Obama's early life, the important women around him were white.

The Harris campaign staff is also loaded with women and people of color, often people who are both.  Campaigns, particularly Democratic campaigns, have often had lots of non-white non-male staff, even in key positions,  But not to the extent that the Harris campaign is using them.  The campaign does not look like any campaign that has come before it.  And that applies to both the public facing and the private side of the campaign.

If it works, it will be a game changer, a paradigm shift.  As recently as 2016 there was good reason to believe that a woman-centric campaign was unlikely to work.  Hillary did not try it.  But she should have been heavily favored by women voters without having to have made an explicit pitch to them.  The facts were self evident, weren't they?  The election result showed that they were not.

Trump is the quintessential "bro" candidate.  It's his whole schtick.  He channels macho at every opportunity.  This is not unique.  Teddy Roosevelt did the same thing a hundred years ago.  In Roosevelt's case it was real, while in Trump's case it is fake.  But Trump's supporters don't care.  And if he is concerned about losing the woman's vote, he gives no indication of it.

And experience, his own experience, tells him that he is right not to worry.  He gave women excuse after excuse after excuse in 2016 for them to vote against him.  But they didn't.  He lost in 2020, but the loss was not attributed (at least by the pundits) to a shift in how women voted.

He campaigns like he expects that the same thing will happen to him this time around too.  Enough women will stick with him to enable him to win.  Or, again according to conventional wisdom, he is planning on stealing the election, so the actual vote totals don't matter.  But sticking with the potential election results and not with Trumps response, or lack thereof, to them, there is another path to a win for him.

There is a weak variation of Newton's law that applies to elections.  Newton's law states that, "for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction".  In the politics version, there is an opposite reaction, but it is not necessarily equal.  Politicians often gain more votes by favoring one faction than they lose by disfavoring a different faction.

Trump in 2016 did many things that should have put women off.  If we characterize these actions as "pro men" then the opposite reaction should have made women pro Hillary.  And no doubt there was some of that going on.  But, while the reaction was opposite, it was not equal.  Trump gained more, presumably from men, than he lost from women.  So, he came out on top in the end.

The Harris campaign is trying to do the same thing, except working the law from the other end.  They are trying to gain more votes from women than they lose from men.  There is widespread reporting about the gains and losses, especially the losses.  

When it comes to losses, more black men are voting for Trump than ever before.  The same is true for Hispanic men.  And for young men.  So far, the gains and losses the Harris campaign is experiencing are roughly balancing out.

But that's where turnout matters.  Women are saying they will vote for Harris, at least they are according to the polls.  But will they?  Men are saying they will turn out to vote for Trump.  But will they?  We don't know now, but we soon will.

Everything (the pundits and the polls) points to a lot of enthusiasm on the Democratic side (high turnout) and not so much on the Republican side (low turnout).  But Republicans are notorious for turning out even when they are not expected to.  The Democrats, not so much.

And we have repeatedly tested the question of what women will do in the face of a "bro" candidate.  We have never put the question of what men will do in the face of a "me too" candidate to the test.

If the "me too" candidate wins, and especially if she and the Democrats win by a bigger margin than expected, elections will definitely have gone through a possible paradigm shift.  It will have to happen more than once before it becomes an actual paradigm shift.  But more women are registered to vote than men.  And more women vote than men.

So far, this idea of explicitly structuring a campaign to be woman-centric is not something that has garnered much attention and comment by the chattering class.  I hope they continue to mostly ignore it.  If they start making a lot of noise, men who haven't figured it out all on their own, might catch wind of it.

That might cause them to climb out of their Barcalounger and go vote when they otherwise wouldn't bother.  I'm rooting for them to stay home.  They have already done more than enough harm.

Science and Magic

 A couple of weeks ago I was perusing my book shelves and ran across a book.  I had picked it up at a local Little Free Library a couple of years earlier and enjoyed reading it.  It looked like it would be a pleasant reread, so I did.  And it was every bit as enjoyable a read the second time around as it had been the first time.  The name of the book was The Incomplete Enchanter.  And its title suggested the subject of this post to me.  I'll eventually get back to the book, but in the mean time . . .

I remember my first encounter with Science Fiction very clearly.  One year when I was a kid I found two books waiting for me under the Christmas Tree.  Both were designed for young readers.  One was a Hardy Boys book.  It concerned itself with the adventures of two young brothers.  They were the sons of a Private Detective and, not surprisingly, took up detecting.

The Hardy Boys books were very popular among the younger set and I liked them.  They covered the male part of the target demographic.  A similar series, the Nancy Drew books, covered the female part.  Even though they were for girls, I read several Nancy Drew books and liked them.

But the book that most strongly attracted and held my interest was the Tom Swift book.  Technically, it was a Tom Swift Jr. book.  Why Jr?  Because he was the son of Tom Swift Sr.  And Sr had been the subject of a previous generation of very popular books aimed at young readers.  The first Sr book had come out in 1910.  The first Jr book, which was designed to replicate the popularity of the original series, came out in 1954.  Both generations of books (as well as the Hardy Boys books, Nancy Drew books, and others) were the brainchild of something called the Stratemeyer Syndicate.

The Sr series was not Edward Stratemeyer's first bite at the apple.  But it was one of his more popular ones.  His daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, was what we would now recognize as the book equivalent of a show runner.  She came up with the idea for the Jr books and helmed all of the later production of the syndicate.

As the showrunner for the Jr books, she developed and maintained the "bible" on the characters and other continuing elements.  In many cases, she also produced a plot outline.  The process of actually writing each book was then turned over to a contract writer.  The series bible provided an efficient method for the various contract writers to get up to speed.  They could then maintain the requisite level of plot and character continuity and maintain a consistent style from book to book. 

The Jr books, starting with Tom Swift and his Flying Lab, were a combination of science and action.  Much of the science was grounded in reality, but fantasy elements were added to spice up the action and the WOW factor.  I was seven in 1954, so I don't think I read it when it first came out.  But I am pretty sure I read it before 1957.  That's the year the Russians put Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, into orbit.

This first book hooked me and I continued to follow the series for many years.  I remember eventually becoming disenchanted.  After the first few books the WOW factor started diminishing a little more with each subsequent book.  And the books all started blurring together.  So I dropped the series altogether at about volume 15 (Tom Swift and his Spectromarine Selector, 1960).  Whatever the shortcomings of the series, it did successfully hook me on Science Fiction.

I branched out and started reading books by pre-Star-Trek (the TV series first aired in 1966) authors like Asimov and Heinlein.  These were much more substantial and, therefore, much more satisfying to my now more mature mind.  Heinlein introduced me to the concept of "Future History".  The fly leaves of his books had an outline covering thousands of years of future history.  His various books were slotted into key turning points identified in the flyleaf outline.

Heinlein also introduced me to an extremely subversive idea, the idea that a religion can be invented.  A number of his books took us behind the scenes as an individual, or small group, literally invented a religion.  His most well known example of this is Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).  It is the retelling of Christ story, just transported to a different time and place.  In Stranger Christ is played by a secular and otherwise normal person.  He doesn't believe in religion or messiahs.

But he grew up on Mars where he learned how to perform several apparently superhuman feats from the Martians.  I was a practicing Catholic at the time I first read the book.  But, in spite of the fact that the Bible is supposed to be revealed truth while Stranger never pretended to be anything other than out and out fiction, the events described in Stranger seems far more plausible, sensible, and coherent than those laid out in the Bible.  Religion and I parted ways permanently shortly thereafter. 

Asimov is, of course, the Robot guy.  His "Three Laws of Robotics" has migrated into our common cultural heritage.  His Robot stories started out as short stories published in the "pulps", various Science Fiction magazines published on pulp paper.  Later, they were collected into anthologies.  And Asimov eventually wrote several full-length novels that were set in the world he had originally created as background for his short stories.

And Asimov famously followed in Heinlein's Future History footsteps with his Foundation series. Originally a set of three books (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation), Asimov eventually emulated Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, and tacked several full-length novels onto the end of the original trilogy.  They covered the future evolution of the Foundation universe.  These add-ons weren't Asimov's best work.  But they were better than some of the follow-on volumes Herbert penned.

But this is all background, and probably way more background than I really needed to provide.  So, let's get back to the main point, at least for the moment.  The Incomplete Enchanter was written by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, two well respected authors from that same pre-Star-Trek era that included Heinlein and Asimov. It was first published in installments in the 1940-41 time frame.  The book version that I read and reread was first published in 1941.  My copy was a reprint published in 1950.

In this period there was, at least among readers, a sharp distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Science Fiction tried to stay relatively close to established Scientific fact.  Fantasy operated under no such restriction.  To steal the famous line from Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, "Rules?  There are no rules," when it came to Fantasy.

Fantasy authors were allowed to invent anything they wanted to.  Of course, they had to come up with a compelling story and interesting characters.  But that's just the first law of writing a successful book.  But in spite of protestations to the contrary, Science Fiction has always incorporated fantastical elements.

In reality, the difference between the two genres was mostly in their focus.  There never was a hard and fast boundary between them.  For instance, the Lensman series, penned by E. E. "Doc" Smith (he had a PhD in food chemistry), was universally considered to be mainstream Science Fiction.

However, the series completely ignored the Relativity discoveries of Einstein and posited the existence of purely mental forces that could shred what little remained of the various Scientific laws the books purportedly paid homage to.  A neutral reading of the books would tag them as Fantasy rather than Science Fiction.  But they were published as Science Fiction and embraced by fans of Science Fiction, so they became categorized as Science Fiction.

Heinlein also posited the existence of psychic powers in several of his books.  In one he allowed twins to psychically communicate over vast distances instantaneously.  Asimov's "Positronic brain", the intelligence guiding his essentially human robots, had nothing to do with the positron, an actual subatomic particle.  The name just sounded cool, and Scientific.

The same thing was true of the inventors of Superman.  They turned the element Krypton, a real thing and one of the Noble Gasses, into Kryptonite, a solid and a made-up thing.  Why?  Because Kryptonite sounds cool and Scientific.

And almost all Science Fiction of this period owes a great debt to Jules Verne.  He posited a scientific advance:  a powerful submarine, a cannon that could shoot a projectile to the moon, various flying machines that operated along the lines of a Zeppelin, and more.  He then built up an exciting tale of romance and adventure around it.  But if Verne, or any of the authors that followed in his footsteps, got into a bind, they just fantasized whatever then needed to give their hero an out.

So, what has any of this got to do with Science?  It turns out that Scientists operate in a manner that is more similar to Fantasy and Science Fiction authors than is generally understood.  Both groups spend a lot of their time trying to come up with something that violates the laws of nature as they are currently understood.

From there a Science Fiction author has to turn that something into a story people will want to read.  Scientists have a different and far more difficult job to do.  They have to come up with evidence that shows that their new something results in an improvement in the Scientific understanding of how the universe works.  Often this requires Scientists to have an imagination that is far wilder than that of a Fantasy or Science Fiction author.

For context, let me state the fundamental law of science:

Whatever works is right.

There is a corollary:

Whatever doesn't work is wrong.

And then there is he fundamental Scientific conjecture:

Nature operates according to rules and at least some of them are discoverable.

Scientists and Science popularizers rarely, if ever, say any of this.  When asked, their response is usually some variant of "it's so obvious it doesn't need to be said."  But I think it needs to be said.  Science advances on two fronts.  There is the obvious way, the one that everyone focuses on.  Science is the accumulation of facts, data, theories, etc. that contribute to the broad advancement of knowledge.

That is what most of the discussion that surrounds Science focuses on.  This theory is right, or wrong.  This piece of data is true, or false.  And so on.  But this diverts attention from the second front, what I will call the "process" front.  Science as a process is usually dated from the publication of The New Organon by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620.  This was the first serious effort in western culture to get a handle on what "whatever works" means.

Previously, whatever works was often determined by authority.  Someone, Aristotle for instance, was held up as an authority.  From there it was a short step to "whatever he says, goes".  Bacon in The New Organon said "nope, that's wrong".  He emphasized the overriding importance of what was known, i.e. the data.  If the data contradicted the authority, the thinking of authority was to be discarded and replaced by whatever worked better.

The next step was to use the data as the basis of a theory.  The validity of the theory was to be judged solely on how well it accounted for the data, all of it.  That led to the concept of doing directed experiments to probe a theory for possible flaws or improvements.  If that sounds familiar, it's because this latter behavior is frequently put forward as the way that Science operates.  And it sometimes actually does operate that way.

But it also operates in a lot of other ways.  But the common organizational principle is that of finding ways to determine whether or not something, usually a theory, works or not.  The "process" advances that Science has made since Bacon's time all revolve around finding out that this technique has a flaw that some other technique doesn't have.  Or that a technique, which was previously thought to be unreliable, can be made reliable if the certain additions or changes are made.

Returning to the subject at hand, what has any of this to do with magic?  Magic falls into the broad category of things that are considered unscientific.  Here there be Science.  But on the other side of this boundary be all kinds of things that are beyond the ken of Science.  That is a clear statement of what's usually going on when people talk about the limits of Science.

Religion, for instance, is generally said to be beyond the reach of Science by many of its adherents.  Traditional and complementary medicine is another example.  The psychic powers posited by Smith and Heinlein in fictional settings are assumed by many to be real, and beyond the reach of Science, by many believers in such things.

But these people are ignoring the "whatever works is right" principle that is fundamental to Science.  Religious believers believe that their particular religion (and often many others) is "right".  Traditional and Complementary medicine believers are believers because they think traditional and complementary medicine works.  The same is true for those who believe in various and sundry psychic powers.

But, if it's a question of whether or not something works, then it is a question that Science can tackle.  In fact, that's what Science was designed to tackle.  It's what Science does.  And the real problem is that Science has tackled all of the topics I have listed above, and many others, and found them wanting.

For hundreds of years most Scientists were also Christians.  They were very familiar with the "Genesis" story in the Bible.  Science has spent a lot of time investigating how our world came into existence.  And what they have found differs substantially from Genesis.  In short, Genesis doesn't work.  And, therefore, it is wrong.

And many of these Christian Scientists were true believers.  They weren't professing to adhere to Christian beliefs in order to get along.  Instead, for the most part, they were true believers.  And as true believers in both, they were not about to use one belief system to sabotage the other belief system.  Newton was one such Scientist.

At the end of Optics, his masterful study of light and its characteristics, he devotes a whole section to the idea that there is Scientific truth.  But there is also "revealed" truth, truths that the Bible and his religious beliefs tell him.  Beyond that, he believed that there is a third and greater truth that was a combination of the two.  Each complimented rather than contradicted the other.

And the combination of the two would yield a truth that was greater than a simple sum.    That is what he sincerely believed throughout his entire live.  We know this because he wrote extensively about it.  And Newton was not unusual.  You can find Scientists who are devout Christians, or devout adherents of other faiths, all over the place.

They generally follow the Newtonian idea that the combination is greater than the sum of its pieces and that the two modalities compliment each other rather than contradicting each other.

They are a minority.  But they exist.  And the reason they are a minority is that most scientists look at the evidence and decide that there is overwhelming evidence that religion is wrong.

For a Scientist, the important thing is that the evidence decides.  So, what if evidence emerged that magic works?  Would that be a problem for scientists?  No!  The first thing to understand is what the word "natural" means in the context of the conflict between Science and non-Science.

Something is natural if it aligns with our expectations based on our everyday experience.  If you apply this definition to what people who throw the word around are saying then what they mean will become much clearer.  People find much of modern Science unnatural because many modern Scientific Theories don't align with our everyday experience.

You can't see germs or viruses without that infernal Scientific device, the microscope.  Bad air often smalls bad, so it seems like a much more reasonable explanation for how people get sick.  If we drink an elixir that contains alcohol or narcotics we immediately feel better.  It makes sense that Chinese medicine should work.  After all, people have been relying on it for a very long time.

If plants like Ginseng didn't work then why have people been swearing by them for so long?  All this business about RNA and attenuated viruses sounds like nonsense.  Finally, would a famous person that I like lead me astray?  And so it goes.

People prefer natural explanations to unnatural ones.  But none of this natural business has anything to do with whether or not something can be subject to a rigorous Scientific treatment.  And more importantly, whether it works.

Science has validated many natural remedies.  Aspirin is but one example.  Unfortunately, lots of other natural remedies have been tested and found wanting.  The only to tell which category a specific natural remedy falls into is to subject it to Scientific testing.

So, is magic like natural remedies?  Can various kinds of magic be the subjected of rigorous Scientific study?  They can if they purport to follow specific rules, even if we don't know what those rules are.  Interestingly enough, magic systems in modern Fantasy often follow specific rules.  One of the most well known proponents of this approach is Brandon Sanderson.

He was always interested in magic systems.  At some point he became a fan of rules based magic systems.  His books became wildly popular.  That made other authors sit up and take notice.  And he teaches writing.  Not surprisingly, his acolytes, several of whom have become popular in their own right, are sold on his approach.  And its a good one.

Good fiction is drama.  And drama depends on conflict.  Imagine a protagonist who is a magician.  And imagine there is no limit to the magical feats he is capable of.  Then where's the drama?  Whatever the bad guy does, our hero can just pull some new, more powerful magic out of thin air and defeat him.

In drama we talk about stakes.  What is the hero putting at risk in his efforts to defeat the villain?  If the answer is nothing, then the stakes are low.  And low stakes translates into little or no drama.  And a lack of drama translates into little reader interest.  And that translates into low sales.  And that results in the author being forced to find a new line of work.

Sanderson's approach returned drama to Fantasy.  And that has caused Fantasy as a genre to spike in popularity.  And Sanderson's approach has always been there lurking in the shadows.  Imagine a pre-Sanders Fantasy work.  Often it featured a magician consulting some old and obscure tome.   Aha!  There were rules.  It's just that we the reader (and likely also the author) didn't know what the rules were.  But it was always true that if you followed the recipe in the book correctly the magic worked.  In short, there were rules.

Now, Scientists would have an easier time if they had access to the book.  They could analyze the various spells and try to determine the underlying rules that governed their effectiveness.  Lacking access to the book then long and careful observation of the magician at work, even if they were not allowed to observe spells being concocted, would be illuminating.

And it is worth noting that in all of the Science Fiction and Fantasy works I have read I have never seen any fantastical element that was anywhere near as weird as what modern Science tells us is true.  Consider the solar system.  It has been studied since antiquity.

After hundreds of years of study the Ptolemaic system was developed in about 150 AD.  It posited that the Earth was the center of the universe.  That seemed reasonable to anyone who has spent a lot of time looking up at the night sky.  Ptolemy posited that the Earth was surrounded by clear spheres which held up the Sun, the Moon, and various planets.  This was a bit far fetched, but no one came up with a more sensible idea.

The model might have been unconvincing except for one thing.  It was accompanied by a mathematical model that predicted the locations of the heavenly bodies well into the future.  The predictions were reasonably accurate.  Importantly, there was no competing model that could deliver accurate predictions.  Over the years, various refinements (cycles and epicycles) were added.  These increased accuracy while preserving the essential aspects of the model.

A part of the model was the idea that there were one set of rules that governed activity on the surface of the earth and another set that governed the heavens.  Down to Earth spheres wouldn't have worked.  That demanded that the heavenly spheres follow unearthly rules.  The freedom to posit whatever rules were necessary to get the heavens to work became a necessity.  The other thing that helped was a failure of imagination.  No one could imagine how a different system would operate.

One of the things that limited the imagination of the ancients was the power of the Greek idea of perfection.  Greek philosophy demanded that any exploration start with the idea of "what is the perfect . . ." and go from there.

In geometry the Greek exemplar was the circle.  So, any model of the heavens must be based on the circle.  Anything else was a deviation from perfection and God wouldn't allow that sort of thing.  So, the Ptolemaic model was based on circles.  After all, a sphere is just a three dimensional circle.

If you stick to circles and spheres it is hard to come up with anything that works better than what Ptolemy came up with.  Even the "fixes", the addition of cycles and epicycles, just called for the addition of more circles and spheres.  And the first successful effort to break away from Ptolemy relied on circles and spheres.

The Copernican model put the Sun at the center of the universe.  The Moon continued to orbit the Earth.  But all the other planets, including the Earth, orbited the Sun.  It was an improvement, but not by much.  Cycles and epicycles would have to be added to the Copernican model it it was to make truly accurate predictions.  A lot of the people at the time argued "why bother".

Kepler was the first notable European astronomer to abandon the circle/sphere.   He built on the work of Brahe, who made the most detailed and accurate astronomical observations made in the pre-telescope era.  Brahe's observations, particularly of Mars, showed a pattern of systematic errors in the predictions made both by the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican one.  The "fix" was to replace the circle/sphere by the ellipse and it's three dimensional counterpart.  At the time the ellipse was seen as an unnatural replacement for the natural circle.

But from a Scientific perspective, Ptolemy and Copernicus were wrong and Kepler was right.  In other words, Science could easily handle the change.  Scientists proved sufficiently imaginative to imagine a universe constructed from ellipses rather than circles.  That made some people very uneasy.  But more and worse was to come.  Newton revolutionized Celestial Mechanics, as it came to be called, with the introduction of Calculus.

Calculus depends on something called an infinitesimal.  It is a number that is smaller than any number you can think of, but still greater than zero.  How can such a thing exist in the real world?  It can't.  And Calculus depends on another trick, the continuous refinement of approximations.  Every approximation yields the wrong answer.  But every approximation brings us closer to the correct result.  Nowhere along the way is the latest approximation is exactly right.  Yet by "taking the process to the limit" the exactly correct result emerges.

Again, this is not possible in the real world.  It is only possible within the imagination of mathematicians and Scientists like Newton.  Calculus forces us to imagine the unimaginable then treat it like every other tool.  In short, it is completely un-natural.  But that's not the end.

As celestial measurements got more and more accurate thanks to larger and better telescopes, discrepancies emerged between Newtonian predictions and reality.  The poster child for this was the planet Mercury.  The problem was solved by Einstein's Special Relativity.  Special Relativity requires us to believe that time does not flow at a fixed rate.  Instead, it varies in speed depending on how you observe it.  Compared to Calculus, this is way farther out.  In short, it required even more imagination.

And we are not done yet.  A decade later Einstein came out with General Relativity.  It requires us to believe that space itself can be warped and twisted.  Is there nothing that is sacred?  On the other hand, maybe we can power Science Fiction space ships with a Warp Drive.  Sounds revolutionary, and cool.  But Einstein got there fifty years before Roddenberry did.

I could go on.  Quantum Mechanics requires us to believe that electrons (and positrons) aren't particles.  They are some kind of probability field.  And that's not right.  They are some kind of square root of a probability field.  And, thanks to entanglement, that the fundamental characteristics of two particles can be intrinsically linked even though the particles are separated by a hundred miles, or possibly even greater distances.

The natural world is unbelievably weird according to Science.  And it is weird in ways that are far harder to wrap our heads around than whatever wild ideas Fantasy writers have come up with.  And compared to all that, plain old, boring old Magic is nothing special.

And that's the approach that was taken by the authors of The Incomplete Enchanter.  They took a hard nosed Scientist, in this case a Psychiatrist of all things, and thrust him into a magical world.  Specifically, it was the world of Norse Myth.  He immediately set about observing how magic worked and turning what he saw it into rules he could use to do his own magic.  He only needed to figure out a few simple rules in order to become better at magic than many of the local mages.

He returned to Earth.  There he picked up a friend and the two of them traveled to another magical world, this one full of castles and princesses.  The two of them immediately set to work in tandem.  Again, it wasn't long before they had dissected the magical system well enough for both of them to become highly proficient.  They were soon more proficient than the locals.

In both cases the magical system had rules, rules that were not hard to unearth using standard Scientific methods.  Once they understood the rules it was an easy step to being able to use them to do things that the locals, who were restricted to the few techniques that had been handed down to them by previous practitioners, were incapable of doing.  It had simply not occurred to any of the locals that magic could be studied rigorously.  In short, the Scientific approach was beyond what they were capable of imagining.

And the idea behind The Incomplete Enchanter was not a new one.  Back in 1889 Mark Twain had pulled off a similar feat in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  Twain's story did not rely on magic.  Instead, it relied on an idea popularized by Arthur C. Clark, a prolific Science Fiction author and the man behind the script for the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

One of Clarke's "Three Laws" was that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".  The "Yankee Ingenuity" of Twain's hero met the "sufficiently advanced" test.  So, the people living in King Arthur's time were unable to distinguish it from magic.

So, to succinctly answer the question I posed above, as long as there are rules to magic, Science will have no problem understanding it and incorporating it into its understanding of how the natural world works.

The Homeless Crisis

 There has been a lot of talk about homelessness in the past few years.  It's a problem.  There's no doubt about that.  Where the conflict comes in is when people start talking solutions.  At one end of the spectrum are the "ride them all out of town on a rail" people.  At the other end of the spectrum are the "Governments should spend tons of money on either new construction or housing subsidies for the poor" people.

The former strategy has been employed with modest success in the past.  It drove numbers down, at least temporarily, and only in some places.  What it mostly did was move the problem around without actually eliminating it.  The later strategy has also been moderately successful in the past.  It too drove the numbers down. at least in some places.  And it had the virtue of not moving the problem around.  But it too did not eliminate the problem.

These two strategies are only two examples of the many strategies that have been tried in the past.  That means that we can look to history for guidance as to the likelihood of success of any strategy we might now consider.  And that means, as anyone who has read my previous work knows, it's time for a dive into history.

For my historical dive I am going to stick with Seattle's history on the subject.  The historical experience of every city and every region is distinct.  Seattle, for instance, featured a large "Hooverville" encampment during the Great Depression.  The homeless congregated in large numbers on then undeveloped land.

Hooverville was the historical equivalent of the "Tent Cities" we now see, but on a much larger scale.  Back then the homeless built shacks out of tarpaper and scrap lumber rather than scrounging up cheap tents.  And they congregated in one place.  But the idea was the same.

Not every city had a Hooverville, but many did.  It was one of many common patterns that have emerged and reemerged over the years in response to the periodic bouts of homelessness the country has suffered through.

Seattle's experience with homelessness has some unique components.  But there is enough commonality of experience to permit Seattle to stand in for all those other places without loosing anything essential.  And away we go.

And I am going to start with a simple question?  Seattle didn't always have a homeless problem, did it?  And the answer is NO.  Seattle didn't always have a homeless problem.  That's why history, which is almost always helpful, is even more helpful than usual. We can see how things were when there wasn't a problem.  Then we can see what changed to cause the problem, and to make it go away.

And we know there is a solution:  go back to the way things were when homelessness was at most a minor concern.  So, let's start with the way things were during some of those periods.  Early in Seattle's history it had something called "Skid Road".  Over time this phrase morphed into the now widely used term "Skid Row".  A skid row is a neighborhood full of cheap, crappy housing.  As a result, poor people live there.  They do so because that's the only place they can afford to live.

Skid Road came about because of Seattle's early connection to the timber industry.  '49ers flooding into San Francisco and surrounding areas in search of gold set off a local construction boom.  The completion of the first transcontinental railroad a decade or so later caused the San Francisco metropolitan area to continue to flourish for more decades.  That extended the construction boom.  Both events also cemented San Francisco's position as the financial capital of the west coast until well into the twentieth century.

But for our purposes what's important is that the wood used to build all of those buildings in the then booming metro San Francisco area had to come from somewhere.  And a major source for that wood was the Puget Sound region.  The headquarters of the regional timber industry was Port Townsend, now a sleepy tourist destination, but then a very big deal.  But Seattle, in the form of the Yesler Sawmill, got in on the action.

The big industry in Seattle in the early years was cutting down trees, milling them into lumber, then putting them onto ships bound for San Francisco.  Seattle had, and still has, steep hills.  Back then the hills were covered with trees.  If Seattle was to grow into a metropolis the trees had to go.  Luckily, trees were valuable due to the San Francisco construction boom.  This allowed the timber industry to power a lot of Seattle's early growth.

But it is harder than one would think to get the trees down Seattle's steep hills and into the mill.  So, something called a "log flume" was constructed.  Instead of water, the thing a flume normally moves, Seattle's flume moved logs.  And it was, in essence, a giant slide.  The process of cutting down the trees, turning them into logs, putting the logs into the top of the flume, letting them slide down into the water at the bottom, then floating them to the sawmill, was called "skidding".

And after all the trees had been cut down the flume no longer had a purpose, other than being an eyesore and being in the way, that is.  So, it was then taken apart and the timber it had been constructed from was fed into the sawmill.  What was left was a road.  But before that Skid Road was a neighborhood.  It was an undesirable neighborhood.  No one wants heavy logs flying by their house.  And, of course, there was always a chance that a log would pop out of the flume and crash into someone's house.

Given all that, it is no surprise that the only people who lived in that particular neighborhood were poor people who had no better option.  So, the association between a Skid Row neighborhood and poor people dates back to the origin of the term.   And the term originated in Seattle and nowhere else.

Back in those early days there were no zoning laws.  If someone wanted to build a log flume in the middle of town there was no law against it.  In fact, it was encouraged.  After all, it would bring money into the local economy.  Similarly, if someone wanted to throw up crappy housing that only poor people could be induced to live in, there was no law against that either.  That's how things worked back in the day.

People always had a place to live.  It was substandard, dangerous, and often uncomfortable, but it was.  It put a roof over the head of almost everybody.  When it came to housing poor people, and thus keeping them off the street, all that was necessary was to have Skid Row type neighborhoods in your city.  Poor people found hanging out in the more desirable parts of the city could be herded into the less desirable parts.

And it worked.  Cities were cut up into neighborhoods.  The poor people lived in the slums, i.e. the Skid Row parts of town.  Rich and powerful people lived in the fancy parts of town.  There were usually gradations in between.  Some parts of the city were closer in nature to the slums.  But they were a step up from the worst slums.  Some parts were quite nice, just not quite as nice as the nicest parts of town.

Eventually, this got formalized in the form of zoning laws.  City Governments started putting rules in place to designate the boundaries of the various neighborhoods.  And they started mandating construction standards.  These varied from pretty much anything goes in the slums to allowing only high quality construction in the fancy parts of town.

Codes for the fancy parts of town might mandate minimum square footage, both of the house and of the lot, forbid activities like multifamily dwellings, manufacturing, retail, warehousing, and the like.  Other neighborhoods permitted all of the activities prohibited in the fancy parts of town, and were silent on things like minimum square footage and the like.

These zoning laws worked.  There was a place for everybody and everybody knew their place.  One modern twist on this idea was called Redlining.  Supposedly, lines on a map were used to delineate the boundaries of the various neighborhoods.  Red lines were used to delineate the boundaries of the neighborhoods set up for the undesirable groups, Asians or Blacks, for instance.  They weren't allowed to cross the "red line" and move into the rest of the city.

Seattle, had a Chinatown, for a long time the only place where people of Chinese extraction were allowed to live.  It was eventually joined by Japantown (Japanese), Little Saigon (Vietnamese), and others.  Each maligned group got its own ghetto.

The term "ghetto" was coined in Europe.  It referred specifically to the neighborhood Jews were confined to.  But the usage of the term was eventually broadened by Americans.  In the U.S. it was most commonly used in association with the neighborhood were Black people were forced to live.  In Seattle, the Black neighborhood was called the "Central District".

One feature of ghettos of all kinds is that housing prices are lower there.  One popular excuse for creating and maintaining ghettos is that "those people drive housing prices down".  The point of ghettos was to discriminate against the people who were forced to live there.  That made living in or near a ghetto unpopular.  And popularity is really what determines the desirability of a particular location.

There is only a modest correlation between the actual desirability of a location and its price relative to land in other locations.  There are intrinsic factors that go into how desirable a specific location is.  They are things like convenience, the view, amenities like being on the waterfront, and so on.  But a study of these intrinsic factors only gets you so far when it comes to predicting a piece of property's market value.

Subjective factors also figure into the calculation.  If we study actual land values for a typical U.S. city in the 1950s, a city like Seattle, then we can subtract the intrinsic factors to determine the how much subjective considerations affect a property's value.  It turns out that subjective factors are very important.  Land in a "rich" neighborhood was highly overvalued while land located in a ghetto was highly undervalued.  Zoning had a large influence on land values.  But that, after all, was the point.

Since then, a number of forces eventually substantially diminished the ability of zoning to distort land values.  Two big ones were suburbanization and civil rights.  Suburbanization had two effects.  First, a lot of middle class and rich people moved to the suburbs.  That siphoned off a lot of the people occupying the top financial tiers.  This made it harder to maintain inflated land values in pricier neighborhoods.

In Seattle's case the metropolitan population was growing just enough to exactly offset suburban flight.  As a result, migration to the suburbs did not cause Seattle's population to decline.  On the other hand, it didn't grow either.  Instead, it remained essentially unchanged for several decades.  That meant that enough rich and middle class people continued to live in the city to keep prices stable, or increasing slowly, in rich and middle class neighborhoods.

To this day there are lots of neighborhoods in Seattle that are filled with nice houses occupied by middle class people.  These kinds of neighborhoods provide more than half the housing currently available in Seattle.  And these neighborhoods have seen little change.  Change has been confined to the poorer neighborhoods.

The other impact of suburbanization eventually had an equally large effect.  Seattle got hemmed in.  The last time Seattle expanded its borders was in the '60s.  That meant that Seattle couldn't implement the "sprawl" strategy used by cities like Huston and Phoenix.  Given a choice, people preferred to live in detached single family homes.

But there was just no place inside Seattle's city limits to build more.  So, Seattle built high density housing, apartments and condos.  This should have caused the population to increase.  But there was a countervailing trend.  The number of people living in the typical house declined.  In Seattle's case, these two opposing trends balanced out.  It wasn't until the '90s that the high density trend got the upper hand and Seattle's population started growing again.

Initially, suburban living was very desirable.  Cheap land allowed suburban developments to be reasonably priced.  Huston, Phoenix, and other similarly situated cities, were able to grow by annexing more and more land, which they filled with suburban sprawl.  But that sprawl eventually meant that new suburbs kept getting farther and farther away.  And that has caused the commute to anywhere interesting to get longer and longer.  So these new outer suburbs have gotten less attractive over time.  As a result, they now attract poorer and poorer people.

What civil rights did, starting in the  '60s, was to make discriminatory zoning practices like redlining illegal.  Initially, these anti-discrimination laws were honored in the breach.  But over time enforcement slowly ramped up.  Eventually, this made it harder and harder to use zoning to enforce the rigid boundaries that used to characterize neighborhoods.  The eventual result was gentrification.

People started viewing neighborhoods not by who traditionally lived in them but by the intrinsic factors they provided.   Previously undesirable neighborhoods started becoming sought after.  Take, for example, Seattle's aptly named Central District.  As the name implies, it is centrally located.  That is a very desirable feature.

Gradually, many of the Blacks that had traditionally lived there were pushed out by white people with more money.  And besides being able to pay more in the first place than many Blacks could afford, they had the money to fix up the housing they found there.  Early adopters took advantage of what had been undesirable, and therefore cheap, to snap up properties that they otherwise couldn't have afforded.  These properties eventually became desirable, and therefore valuable.

Over a period lasting more than thirty years all of the less expansive parts of Seattle have gotten gentrified.  And what that meant was that all of the cheap housing got replaced by expensive housing.  Contemporary Seattle no longer has a Skid Row.  And that means that there is no place in Seattle for the poorest people to live.  Seattle used to have a bunch of SRO (Single Resident Occupancy) hotels.  These were essentially flop houses where even very poor men could afford to live.  They are now all gone.

Seattle is an extreme case.  But the general trend is universal.  Not every city has lost all of its "flop house" quality housing the way Seattle has.  But pretty much every city has far less of it now than it had fifty years ago.  And pretty much every city has lost a lot of the housing that people occupying the bottom few rungs of the economic ladder could afford.

Seattle used to be an easy place for a person making the minimum wage, or perhaps a little above it, to find housing that was both affordable and decent.  That kind of housing is now effectively nonexistent.  Again, the near universal trend is for people in those income brackets to find it very hard to find a place they can afford to live in, even if they live in a place that is thousands of miles away from Seattle.

That has put a lot of people into a severe squeeze when it comes to finding housing they can afford.  Then there are drugs and mental health.  We are more than fifty years into the War on Drugs.  It has been a failure all along the way.  But one side effect is that people who end up with serious drug problems too often find that they have little access to effective treatments.  As a result, a lot of them end up on the street.

People having mental health problems also have trouble getting effective treatment.  Their illness causes them to have poor judgement.  And that leads to the kinds of actions that lead to them also finding themselves out on the street.

Finally, there are the otherwise squared away people who for one reason or another have hit a serious financial problem.  That is often enough to put them out on the street.  The street has become the dumping ground for all the problems that society does not want to deal with.

Tents are cheap.  Sleeping bags are cheap.  Grocery carts are cheap.  Derelict cars and motor homes are cheap.  The result is a lot of people living on the street, in a tent tucked back somewhere, or living in a junker vehicle.  Things have gotten out of hand.

There are several problems here that need to be fixed.  We tried dealing with drugs by locking lots of people up.  What we ended up with was a fantastically expensive prison industry and no relief on the drug front.  We used to have mental hospitals.  But we got rid of them and decided that "community based" treatment was the way to go.  That too has been a failure.

If we give the squared away people a helping hand they will take it and soon be off the streets.  But the number of helping hands are far fewer than the number of people who could use the help.  At the other end of the spectrum are the people who have become comfortable living on the street.  They steadfastly refuse all offers of help.  I have no interest in making their lives easier.  In fact, I am okay with some of the yesteryear tactics that were designed to get them to go elsewhere.

I am firmly of the opinion that throwing money at this particular problem is a mistake.  Government, no matter what level you want to talk about, doesn't have enough of it.  Nor am I convinced that an infinite amount of money, should it become available, would be effective.  Even if a lot of money was available, this is the kind of problem where the need will always expand by the amount necessary to consume however much resource is thrown at it.

But the problem is not insolvable.  It didn't used to exist.  It can be made that way again.  History tells us that the proper approach is a legal/regulatory one.  Before discussing the main change, let me address some changes in the law that would not solve the problem, but they would help.  Current law make sit almost impossible to deal with junker vehicles and the people living in them.

The law should be changed so that it is illegal to park a vehicle on a public street that is not "street legal".  All vehicles parked on city streets would have to conform to all safety standards and the like; and they should be required to have current "tabs".  This would get the worst of the junker vehicles off of public streets.  If people want to allow people to live in junker vehicles parked on their private property, okay.  But not on public streets.

It should also be illegal for someone to pitch a tent on a sidewalk, in a public park, etc.  Again, if people want to allow other people to pitch tents on their private property, that's another thing.  Will these changes make it harder for homeless people to find a place to lay their head?  Yes.  But it will also free up a lot of resources that are currently playing whack-a-mole.  That's not enough to fix the problem.  But it is a start.

Then there's the big one, zoning.  Zoning is the most powerful tool in the government toolbox.  Lots of zoning changes have been made over the last few decades that have increased the minimum standards for major remodels or new construction.  This has made it illegal to construct slum housing.  A tight housing market has made it a good idea for owners to upgrade cheap housing to the point where it is no longer cheap.  What has been done can be undone.

But there is no political will to do this.  And for a very good reason, NIMBY.  I own my house.  It has increased tremendously in value since I bought it.  I like that.  And a significant contributing factor to its increase in value has been tight zoning.

Tight zoning floats all boats.  Even if you don't fix your house up the fact that the housing market is tight means that prices have been going up and up and up.  It has also made deciding to fix up your house (and maybe flip it) into a no brainer for anyone owning a house at the low end of the market.  (Flipping houses has now been a thing since This Old House went on  the air in 1979.)  All of this has had a positive impact on my net worth and the net worth of the pretty much every other home owner in Seattle.

The single largest class of housing in Seattle is single family residences.  All those people have a vested interest in keeping prices increasing at a good clip.  They are the silent majority in this discussion.  They don't say much, but politicians hear them anyhow.  These voters want the homeless problem fixed.  But they want it fixed in a way that doesn't interfere with the steady rise in the value of their house.

That kind of thinking blocks the best way to fix the homeless problem.  If cheap, slum-quality housing was readily available then lots of people would move off the street.  If developers can make a profit building cheap slum-quality housing, they will build it.

But nobody (meaning all the people who own single family homes in Seattle, and many of the ones who live in multi-family units) wants a bunch of slum-quality housing being built in Seattle.  And the resistance is especially fierce to building such housing nearby.  Not.  In.  My.  Back.  Yard.

Most slum-quality housing comes about as a side effect of the real estate cycle.  Prices go up and builders build.  They keep building and building as long as demand is strong.  Then something happens.  Demand dries up.  But construction involves long lead times.  They can't just stop on a dime.

When the market turns by the time all the projects that were in the pipeline complete a substantial housing surplus has built up.  This causes the value of some properties to drop by a lot.  This drop puts downward pressure on the entire housing market.  In a declining market often the only way landlords can keep their financial heads above water is to turn some of their property into slum-quality housing.

In this scenario nobody has any real say in the matter.  Market pressures overwhelm people's normal inclinations.  So, the fact that some people (those still hanging on who live near the newly created slum-quality housing) object vigorously to what is happening doesn't matter.  They don't have the leverage necessary to stop it from happening.  So, it happens.  The market now has slum-quality housing and poor people have some place to get off of the street and out of the weather.

Historically, this is what has happened in Seattle.  The Roaring Twenties turned into the Great Depression.  That produced a lot of cheap housing.  Besides the creation of Hooverville, a significant number of large houses that had been occupied by a singe family got turned into boarding houses.  The landlady maintained some public spaces in common, living room, dining room, etc.  Tenants got a room of their own.  But that was it.  They shared a bathroom down the hall and did all their entertaining in the shared public areas.

There are no rooming houses in contemporary Seattle.  Nor are there any apartments where tenants share a bathroom.  And nobody now lives an a unit where their bed swings down from behind a door in the wall (a "Murphy" bed).  Most people would find these kinds of accommodations appalling.  Not surprisingly, current zoning laws make these types of units illegal.  But they are how we used to have cheap housing.

The closest we come in the modern era is the Tiny House.  These feature a minimum of amenities and very little in the way of square footage.  Tiny Houses initially violated all kinds of Seattle's zoning laws.  I think a loophole has since been introduced that makes them legal, but I'm not completely sure about that.  And, of course, nobody wants Tiny Houses in their neighborhood.  And heaven forbid that anyone would propose the apartment equivalent of Tiny Houses.

So we continue to go in circles.  The thing that would actually work gets vetoed.  And, as I pointed out above, it gets vetoed for good reason.  It is also important to note that people who buy newspapers or who watch the local news on TV are the people doing the vetoing.

And it is bad business to alienate the people your business depends on.  So, the people who write for the newspaper, or report the news on local TV, go out of their way to avoid pointing out the obvious.  But I don't own a newspaper or TV station.  So, there it is.

Not surprisingly, I don't expect anything to change any time soon.  Lots of whining.  No effective action.  Before leaving the subject, let me make a couple of additional observations about what does not work.  The first one is rent control.  New York City is the poster child for rent control gone badly awry.

NYC has a lot of apartments, and has had them for a long time.  Not surprisingly, landlords sometimes get up to mischief.  About a century ago NYC put in some laws that were supposed to reign in this mischief.  But times changed and markets evolved.  NYC kept updating and updating their rent control laws in an attempt to stay ahead of the situation.

In spite of cycle after cycle of updates the regulations could never keep up.  Eventually, the rent control rules were so byzantine that nobody could understand them.  Support for rent control in its then current state slowly collapsed.  That led to successful efforts to roll back and simplify rent control regulations.  NYC still has rent control.  But the current system is a shadow of its former self.

The point is that in the long run it didn't work.  It got so bad at one point that NYC had more slum-quality housing than any other type.  At that point nobody was happy.  Rent control is one of those things that sounds like a good idea.  And it can work pretty well for short periods of time.  But in the end it doesn't deliver the desired result, enough low cost housing to satisfy demand.

What does deliver large quantities of low cost housing is zoning.  With proper zoning laws the market can deliver housing in quantities sufficient to make a difference.  Builders will build if they can do so profitably.  But right now they can't build cheap housing profitably.  That is unlikely to change any time soon for the reasons listed above.  But it needs to be said.  Rent control discourages construction.  Over time, it makes things worse.

Another idea that keeps getting proposed is to severely restrict the ability of landlords to evict tenants.  This idea comes from a good place.  Lots of landlords have engaged in discriminatory practices of one kind or another in lots of places and at lots of times.  Restricting the rights of landlords to evict tenants seems like a good way to fix this problem.

It too is another problem that can work well in the short run.  Seattle had an eviction moratorium during COVID.  As a short term measure it kept people housed in a time of severe economic distress for many.  But to see how things play out over the long term when a landlord's ability to evict is severely constrained we need to look no farther than Cabrini Green.

Cabrini Green was a large public housing development that was built in Chicago.  Its goal was to humanely house poor people at a price they could afford.  It was part of a federal program that reached its peak in the '60s.  And in the early years Cabrini Green was a big success.  It consisted of a series of large apartments that provided decent housing at subsidized prices.  A lot of God fearing and law abiding families moved in and were initially happy.

But it soon became almost impossible to evict anyone from Cabrini Green.  The ostensible reason was to avoid discrimination as most of the tenants were Black.  But over time an unintended consequence surfaced.  In a population as large as the one at Cabrini Green there were bound to be a number of bad apples.

They formed gangs and things soon got out of control.  That led to a situation where nobody was safe.  And it became impossible to deal with vandalism.  Later, drug use, drug dealing, and shootings became rampant.  Eventually Cabrini Green became one of several projects that gave public housing a bad name.  It was eventually torn down.  By that time it had degenerated into a lawless slum.

Appropriate eviction regulations are not something where a black-and-white solution is possible.  Landlords need to be able to kick bad apples out.  Discrimination needs to be controlled.  There is no simple solution that delivers both objectives simultaneously.  Only a nuanced approach can do that.

People like bright-line laws and regulations.  This is where some behaviors are always permitted and other behaviors are always prohibited.  But that kind of approach has been tried many times and has failed every time.

We need to allow the enforcers to exercise a degree of discretion.  Then we need to monitor the enforcers to make sure they are using that discretion wisely.  That's not something that we as a society are good at.

If we continue to avoid doing what works when it comes to homelessness, remember that there is another way to fix the problem.  We can just have another Great Depression.  Maybe continuing to bump along ineffectually is not such a bad idea after all.