Good Things from Trump's Win

Two (sort of) good things from Trump's win:

1. Reading Bill Kristol with a bit more openness to his opinions, since he's a never-Trump.
2. Also George Will, and agreeing with him on civil forfeiture and felon voting.

I think it sort of validates James Madison's insights: multiple interests and viewpoints mean interesting overlaps on the Venn diagrams, resulting in safeguards against demagoguery and extremism.

The Soybean and Grain Embargoes

I remember Jimmy Carter's embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union.  IIRC farmers didn't like the later, and it played a role in Carter's defeat.  Until I googled, I didn't remember Nixon's embargo on soybeans which was part of his economic maneuvers against inflation, etc.   Earl Butz ate crow over it, according to this piece.

Problem for Trump is that farmers know that patterns of trade can change.  If China puts tariffs on soybeans and switches to other suppliers, even if a trade war is averted, or quickly settled, the effects may be long lasting. 

Four Is the Number

Breaking news:  important--Augusta National now has four female members according to this ThinkProgress post.  That's 100 percent increase over 7 years.  At this rate, adding 2 members every 7 years, it will be about 2095 for half the members to be female.

Good News from Afghanistan

My title is four words, very surprising to find them in the same phrase.  Someone, I think Noah Smith, recently wrote there's an imbalance of news on Twitter; not enough attention is paid to good news.

The World Bank has a piece on how Afghanistan's healthcare system has improved over the past 15 years.  (Basically the government contracted with NGO's to handle care for specific regions, which has worked, and importantly Aghan professionals have been replacing the personnel who began with the NGO's.

MLK Remembered

Kevin Drum posts a chart showing Gallup's results for approval of Martin Luther King.  He notes the rising approval over the years from 1966 to the present. 

I was reading newspapers by the time of the Montgomery protests over segregated buses.  As I commented there, it's been interesting to see the evolution of his image. 

• when he was alive, there were a number of major figures who were competing and cooperating in civil rights.  Malcolm X, Stokeley Carmichael, Roger Wilkins, Julian Bond, and many others.  In the beginning he was just one voice among many, gradually emerging as the preeminent voice. His competitors did not always welcome his contributions or support his efforts, and vice versa.  With his death he became the martyred figure we know today whom no one remembers disliking.
• he had more failures (Albany, GA, and Chicago, among others) than we realize today

Vox has a post/interview with Jeanne Theoharis from which I'll quote this:

[Reagan (and America) created a fable of MLK which included these features:]

The first is the focus on courageous individuals, not movements. The second is the idea that King and figures like Rosa Parks shone a light on injustice, and [said injustice] has since been eradicated. The third is the act of putting the movement and the problem of racism in the past. And the fourth is the idea of American exceptionalism — the belief that the civil rights movement demonstrates the power of American democracy.

Humans Can Be Evil

From Techmology Review piece on robotics:

But the trickiest foe these robots face while out in the world could be the most difficult to predict: teenagers. Hitch says teen shoppers have been known to kick the robots in Walmart, or even slam into them with a shopping cart.

Contrarian on the Census

I can't resist being a contrarian on the census.  We liberals dislike the decision to include a question on citizenship in the 2020 census.  The fear is that such a question will increase fear of the government among immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented ("illegal").   That fear seems reasonable. The result would be that immigrants would be undercounted.  Because population counts are the basis for determining electoral districts, immigrants would be underrepresented, and because the counts also are used for distribution of government dollars under some programs, immigrants would suffer.

I've no problem with this logic, so what's my contrarian take?

The Trump administration points out that the American Community Survey (an effort conservatives once tried to scuttle IIRC) has always asked about citizenship. The survey gets very detailed, and its results are used in sociological research and government programs.

My contrarian question is this: if immigrants would be fearful of government questions about citizenship, aren't they already fearful of the ACS?  If so, doesn't that impair the validity of the survey?  And if so, why hasn't the Census Bureau fixed the problem?  And if they have, why wouldn't that work for the 2020 census? 

If the problem can't be fixed, do the users of the ACS know of the distortion?

1968 Remembered

Fifty years ago in January I moved to DC to work at USDA.  In February I was assaulted and robbed. Also in February the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive, hitting a road I had traveled a year before, and changing politics in the US. In March LBJ announced he wasn't running for reelection. In April Martin Luther King was murdered and DC was one of many cities with riots, which I traveled through. In June Robert Kennedy was killed. Meanwhile the US had the continuing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and student protests over race and college governance issues. And the US was in relatively good shape compared to the Prague Spring events in  Czechoslovakia with the Prague Spring, student unrest in France   and other nations. 

It was an interesting time.

Importing Brains, Exporting Ideas

A quote from a Bloomberg piece:

Of the 1 million foreign nationals enrolled at U.S. schools, nearly one-third are from China -- double the number of any other country. Chinese students receive 10 percent of all doctorates awarded in the U.S., most of them in science and engineering. Some 80 percent of Chinese doctoral holders stay in the U.S. and work after they earn their degrees. There are more Chinese engineers working on artificial intelligence at U.S. technology companies than in all of China.
From Bloomberg

IMHO it's better for us to export our intellectual property to China while importing and keeping their best brains.

Janesville and Liberal Government

This book just won a prize for nonfiction writing.  If you don't want to read the whole thing, this New Yorker piece of last year will substitute.

I'm still reading it, but I want to note one failure of government: Obama came, promised help, his man visited, listened, did nothing before leaving for a better paid post.  It's an old lesson of bureaucracy--you need unrelenting pressure from the top to accomplish the difficult.  President Nixon, despite his flaws, knew this and his administration was successful in removing the WWI "tempos"

now the site of "Constitution Gardens". 

Much as I like Obama, and my regard for him as a person is only increased by comparison with his successor, I don't see him as a good manager of the bureaucracy.  (The most glaring failure was, of course, healthcare.gov.)

Liberals believe in the power of government to help, but Janesville is disappointing in that respect.  The conventional wisdom is that job retraining programs are a necessary part of global free trade and/or fighting recessions.  The results from Janesville don't support their efficacy.  The job retraining seems to have worked somewhat like farm programs, easing the transition from a good past to a dimmer future.