Gyles Brandreth on the UK's Brexit referendum

Gyles Brandreth hilariously explains the EU referendum on HIGNFY.

On the war against competence

Iris Meredith has an interesting essay on The attack on competence.

Chistian Nationalism: The Good and Bad News

Nope Brigade | Ph.D. Candidate has a video up on YouTube looking at The Good and the Bad News About Christian Nationalism.

 

Unfortunately, it mostly seemed bad.

Anti-Intellectuals on the Left

An interesting video by Nope Brigade on how Leftists Can Be Just As Anti-Intellectual as the Right.

 

This is from the video description:

If you have a critique of academia and academics, great. Me too. What is NOT a critique are simplistic sweeping statements based in reactivity, a profound lack of critical thinking and a refusal to navigate nuance. How is this any different from what the Right does??? At least they’re honest about outright hating experts and knowledge.

Spot on! 

Why is Trump still so popular?

In this YouTube Short Professor Heather Cox Richardson explains to KatieCouric why Trump's approval rating is still so high (TLDR: Fox News lies):

 

No, Nazism isn't Socialism

Some in the right have been arguing that Nazis were socialists. Historians Matthew Fitzpatrick and A. Dirk Moses argue why this is false in Nazism, Socialism and the Falsification of History.

Are American political differences due to regional cultural attitutes of settlers

In The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line Colin Woodard argues that the divide in American politics can best be explained by the different European cultures that settled various areas of the USA.

Sectionalism isn’t, and never has been, as simple as North versus South or an effete and domineering East against a rugged, freedom-minded West. Rather, our true regional fissures can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States, and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into.

38 Ways To Win An Argument

Schopenhauer's 38 Stratagems, Or 38 Ways To Win An Argument

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896.

I don't endorseany.

Media treatment of industrial action

In A Different Strike Story Victoria Rollison compares how the media reported and framed a strike by Fairfax journalists and strikes by employees of other organisation.

When reporting on industrial action the media usually frames the unions as being the villains and the customers and employees the victims.

By contrast:

So, how are the journalists framed in the story? Are they villains for disrupting newspaper consumers? Nope. Are they framed as villains for disrupting the profit-making venture they work for and for hurting the company’s capacity to keep other staff employed, thereby threatening more job losses? Nope. They are framed as the victims. The victims of the job cuts. The victims of terrible business decisions. The victims of a workplace dispute which has led them, unhappily, to have to strike to have their (incidentally, already very powerful) voices heard. And better than that – they are also framed as the heroes, for standing up for their rights, for not letting the company get away with doing something wrong, for, yes, you guessed it, showing the brave, respected characteristic of solidarity.

The failure of asset recycling

In Asset recycling may look new and exciting. But it's the last gasp of a failed model John Quiggin explains why asset recycling is a dud.

Viewed from the other side of the planet, asset recycling may look new and exciting. In reality, however, it was the last gasp of a failed model. The government’s asset recycling fund, established in 2014, was shut down in 2016, with barely half of its budget allocation spent.

The core problem with the “recycling” idea is that income-generating assets were sold to finance new investments that did not generate income. Rather like selling your house to buy an expensive car, this is a trick that can only be done once, and leaves governments with increased net debt.

Kansas vs California: a tale of tax

In Donnie, We’re Not In Kansas Anymore David Cay Johnston compares the impact of tax cuts in Kansas and tax rises in California on their respective economies.

Since the tax changes, the California economy has grown 1.7 times faster than the Kansas economy. Perhaps even more significant, California grew its share of the national economy from 13.8 % of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product to 14.2%. Kansas stayed flat at 0.8% of national GDP.

...

Further west, in tax-raising California, jobs increased much faster. While jobs grew in Kansas by 3.8%, in California the lift was 11.8%.

Fake News and Pizzagate

In Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal Amanda Robb examines the "web of conspiracy theorists, Russian operatives, Trump campaigners and Twitter bots who manufactured the 'news' that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring".

Globalisation vs Tribalism

In Lure of globalisation battles our instinctive tribalism Ross Gittins cites the book Choosing Openness by Dr Andrew Leigh in arguing that we tend to have a distrust of outsiders because for most of human history people have lived in small groups of up to 150 people.

Drawing on the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, he argues that "for most of history, humans lived in groups of about 150 people" – a figure known as "Dunbar's number".

Such groups were big enough for some specialisation, but small enough for everyone to know and trust everyone else. People were born, mated, hunted and died within their small community.

However, many of us now live in much large communities.

But while hunkering down in the face of difference might have been a useful evolutionary strategy in the past, the growth of cities changed the equation, Leigh argues.

Cities are bound together by not by familial relationships, but by rules and norms of acceptable behaviour.

For hundreds of years, the most productive cities have been those that welcome visitors. In a primitive tribe, a dislike of difference can keep you alive. In a city, it's likely to just make you poorer.

"In this sense, a distrust of diversity is a bit like wisdom teeth – an evolutionary vestige that once helped us grind up plants, but now are more likely to take us on a trip to the dentist's chair."

Gittins and Leigh argue that the some populist politicians stoke our natural distrust of outsiders for political gain.

In a seminal study of the politics of hatred, the Harvard authority on urban economics Edward Glaeser noted that the key to building a powerful coalition around hate is to focus voters' anger on an "out group" that is sufficiently large to be taken seriously as a threat, but too small to be electorally decisive.

They argue that one of the four main drivers of the growth of populism is inequality.

First, slow growth in living standards when the proceeds of economic growth haven't been shared.

"In societies where prosperity is broadly shared, a cosmopolitan outlook steadily replaces traditional values of religion, deference to authority, and an exclusive focus on the security of our family and tribe," he says.

The rise of the alt-right

In If you want to know how the alt-right upended American politics, read Kill All Normies Sean Illing interviews Irish academic and author Angela Nagle on her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.

The GOP and Authoritarianism

Jonathan Chait on how The GOP’s Age of Authoritarianism Has Only Just Begun. Note this was written before Trump won the US election.

Wayne Swan on the blindness of affluence

Wayne Swan writes about The blindness of affluence and the need for a more inclusive form of prosperity.

The three party system

John Quiggin explains The three party system.

Looking at the way politics has evolved over the past 25 years or so, in the English-speaking world and beyond, I have developed an analysis which is certainly not original, but which I haven’t seen set down in exactly the way I would like. Here’s the shorter version:

There are three major political forces in contemporary politics in developed countries: tribalism, neoliberalism and leftism (defined in more detail below). Until recently, the party system involved competition between different versions of neoliberalism. Since the Global Financial Crisis, neoliberals have remained in power almost everywhere, but can no longer command the electoral support needed to marginalise both tribalists and leftists at the same time. So, we are seeing the emergence of a three-party system, which is inherently unstable because of the Condorcet problem and for other reasons.

Why aren't people protesting against gerrymandering?

Brian Klaas poses the question Gerrymandering is the biggest obstacle to genuine democracy in the United States. So why is no one protesting?

Most of the 2016 USA election results were pretty typical

In Why did the 2016 election look so much like the 2012 election? Ezra Klein reports on work shoing that most voters in the USA vote according to partisan identity, not policies or candidates.

A few months ago, I stopped by Larry Bartels’s office at Vanderbilt University. Bartels, alongside Christopher Achen, is the author of Democracy for Realists, which I’d become a bit obsessed with. The book argues that decades of social science evidence has shattered the idealistic case made for how voters in democracies act, and the reality is that “even the most informed voters typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology, but on the basis of who they are — their social identities.”
I sat down with Bartels shortly after the 2016 election, and I had a dozen ideas for how his book helped explain the unusual results. But he wasn’t buying my premise. To him, the election looked pretty typical.
The Democratic candidate won 89 percent of Democratic voters, and the Republican candidate won 90 percent of Republican voters. The Democrat won minorities, women, and the young; the Republican won whites, men, and the old. The Democrat won a few percentage points more of the two-party vote than the Republican, just as had happened four years before, and four years before that. If you had known nothing about the candidates or conditions in the 2016 election but had been asked to predict the results, these might well have been the results you’d predicted. So what was there to explain?

Most of Trump's supporters were well off

Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu write in It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class that most of Trump's supporters were relatively affluent:

Among people who said they voted for Trump in the general election, 35 percent had household incomes under $50,000 per year (the figure was also 35 percent among non-Hispanic whites), almost exactly the percentage in NBC’s March 2016 survey. Trump’s voters weren’t overwhelmingly poor. In the general election, like the primary, about two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.