Matt Yglesias

The Death of Democratic West Virginia

I was too doped-up Saturday night to go out, so I got to spend some quality time looking at historical presidential election outcomes, and one really striking trend to emerge is the sharp decline in the Democratic Party Presidential vote in West Virginia. Since the underlying political conditions shift from year to year, this is best seen in terms of the difference in the Democratic vote in West Virginia from the overall level of support for the Democratic candidate.

To wit:

Which is just to say that in the very recent past, West Virginia was a considerably more-Democratic-than-average state. We’re not talking about the distant past or Harry Truman Democrats or whatever. Even post-civil rights, post-Roe, post-Reagan, post-”wedge issues,” post everything Michael Dukakis Democrats were more popular in West Virginia than they were in the country at large. By contrast, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama have all been less popular in WV than they are nationwide. And increasingly so.

And while I’m sure on some level this is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, on another level it’s not. In recent electoral cycles the Republican Party has been willing to pretend that there are no important negative externalities associated with mining and burning coal, whereas on a national level the Democratic Party has been inclined to acknowledge reality. And in West Virginia coal is seen as a key pillar of the economy.

No profound insights there. But I think more attention needs to be paid to this sort of thing. When liberals write about “politically influential mass membership organization[s] dedicated to the economic concerns of the middle class” they mean as opposed to the interests of richer people. But in many cases people middle class people have a sector vs sector view of the economy rather than a class vs class view. And I think that in a mature, prosperous country in which people have advanced specialized skills this is more and more the way people see the world.

Douthat Proposes “Modify Modestly” As an Alternative to “Repeal and Replace”

Ross Douthat urges that conservatives try to take a more constructive tack on modifying the Affordable Care Act than the current mantra of repeal it or defund it:

To address the first problem, Republicans should work to deregulate the new health care exchanges, so that high-deductible, catastrophic coverage can be purchased as easily as comprehensive plans. To address the second, they should propose capping the subsidies for the uninsured, so that they don’t dramatically exceed the value of the existing tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance.

The mandate is a harder puzzle, since it works in tandem with the requirement — popular enough to have many Republican supporters — that insurers cease denying coverage to customers with pre-existing conditions. If you repealed the mandate without repealing that requirement, people could simply wait until they were sick to buy insurance, driving everyone’s prices up.

But Republicans could propose dealing with the same problem in a less coercive way. [...]

I’d certainly hope to see this as the future of the health care debate. The Douthat approach starts from the premise that the goal of universal subsidized regulated private health insurance is legitimate. And it agrees that to get there you need what the ACA offers, namely a solution to the problem of adverse selection, a regulatory definition of “health insurance,” and taxpayer financed subsidies to make it affordable to everyone. If you assume a world in which this ACA tripod is generally accepted, political disagreement then takes the form of one side wants to get ambitious with the definition of “insurance” even though this means more expensive subsidies and another side wants to restrict the cost of subsidies even though this means accepting a more modest definition of insurance.

The upshot of that wouldn’t be my health care utopia, or even a policy I’m totally thrilled with, but I think it would be a decent outcome and it would be one in which universal coverage and the basic framework of the Affordable Care Act becomes entrenched. And this, or something like it, is the ultimate outcome of health care policy debates in most countries. Obviously left-wing and right-wing parties disagree about tax rates and spending levels, but they generally work inside a common framework.

The Exquisite Sadness of the Businessman

As well as illustrating why I don’t particularly like the term “neoliberal,” which tends to just serve as a vague term of abuse, I think Mike Konczal’s post on narcissistic business elites is absolutely brilliant:

It seems that there is an increasing sense among certain types of neoliberal business elite that Obama hasn’t been favorable enough to the business community, and that he needs to reconcile this fast in order to fix the economy. Look at Peter Baker’s article on Obama’s job’s programs, which doesn’t mention housing but does stop by the Chamber of Commerce to note: “But Obama’s periodic forays into populism made it personal. He couldn’t seem to decide whether he was going to take Wall Street to task for its irresponsible behavior or cajole it into freeing up money to get the economy moving. One day he derided “fat-cat bankers” who caused the recession; another day, he soothed them by saying that he and the American people “don’t begrudge” multimillion-dollar bonuses.”

Think about that. Why is Obama once calling members of the financial sector “fat-cat bankers” – while they were rolling the taxpayer, paying huge bonuses out of TARP and the Federal Reserve – important for an article about jobs? Is the idea that business leaders feel sad and offended important for why demand is down and unemployment is high? The government can act, through monetary and fiscal policy, to get jobs going again, but that leaves business elite not in charge of the economy.

I wrote about this for a recent TAP online column, and I agree with Konczal entirely. The notion that economic growth depends crucially on the subjective feelings of the business executive class is one of the most pernicious ideas to take hold over the past 12 months. One should distinguish this hypothesis from the accurate point that rational expectations matter in the economy. Expectations do matter. But this is often confused with the idea that if the waiters at Davos are rude this year the economy will go into a recession, but if Obama gives a CEO a really sensual back rub growth will return.

The fact of the matter is that businessmen like conservative politicians. If you ask them “how do you feel about the incumbent politicians these days” they say “I feel great” if and only if the incumbent politicians are conservatives. Economic growth was better in the 1990s than in the 2000s, but businessmen liked George W Bush better than Bill Clinton. Growth was better under FDR than under Eisenhower, but businessmen liked Ike. And that’s fine, businessmen are free to like or dislike whomever they want. But their subjective view of politicians doesn’t cause or hamper economic growth.

That’s all just repeating what Konczal said. But to add another thought, I really do think progressives need to try harder to claim the mantle of growth for ourselves. Conservatives like to talk about the importance of economic growth, but they’re not only bad at delivering it in practice, they’re remarkably hostile to the idea of boosting growth. They favor certain labor- or ecology-crushing measures that are said to increase the economy’s growth potential, but they’re unremittingly opposed to the idea that the government should, in fact, try to run the economy at its potential level of output. The esoteric idea, I think, is that actual prosperity would make people sort of soft and flabby while recession makes austerity “necessary” as a matter of budgetary math.

Sex Offender Blockbusting

Steve Randy Waldmann conveys an interesting money-making possibility from Scott Wentland:

Still, for all the finance and economics I encountered at the conference, Wentland is the only person whose work suggested a way to actually turn a profit. Wentland presented a paper at the conference. I missed the presentation, but read the paper after the fact. It is empirical work very nicely done, and it tweaked the antennae of my inner, amoral arbitrageur. I now think of registered sex offenders as roving Groupons for home flippers. Wentland and his coauthors provide strong evidence that you could make a lot of money persuading an ex-cellmate to move near a nice, four bedroom home in rural Virginia, and then to move away after you’ve bought the home.

Maybe when the real estate market picks up again people will start doing this. Indeed, I sort of hope they do since my impression is that these sex offender databases should probably be done away with and screwing with people’s real estate value seems like the most likely way to make that happen.

Acronym Mania

I wholeheartedly agree with Sarah Arnquist here:

Littering a paper with acronyms serves only to turn it into alphabet soup and guarantee readers will remember nothing substantive and only how hard that was to read. A development agency report I read recently used 23 acronyms in ONE paragraph! I know you’ve heard this before but it’s worth repeating. My editors used to make me delete an acronym at least once a week. Do you have an editor monitoring your acronym littering?

I find this at its most egregious in military circles. This may derive from the fact that in the relatively recent past minimizing the number of characters in a communication was, in fact, an important element of telegraph-era warfare. But I see that otherwise very competent writers tend to not only accept, but embrace and positively revel in the military’s acronym-happy culture. This helps marks them as “insiders” to America’s most socially validated institution. But it’s difficult to believe that all this stuff, whether in defense or development or any other field, really does much to improve communications or is even intended to do so.

Union Power

Kevin Drum says:

If, right now, you were to offer corporations and the rich a choice between (a) passage of EFCA or (b) a return to Clinton-era tax rates on high incomes, they wouldn’t even blink. If you put a gun to their head and they had to choose between one or the other, they’d pay the higher taxes without a peep. That’s because, on the level of raw power, they know how the world works.

That’s definitely true. But in large part that’s because if you allowed more unionization in exchange for some tax cuts, the stronger unions would just turn around in the future and create a political dynamic that’s friendly to tax hikes. Which if you ask me would be great. But I think labor-friendly writers sometimes don’t do the best possible job of distinguishing between unions qua social and political institutions and collective bargaining as a labor market institution. Something like EFCA is the only way to revive collective bargaining as a major force in private sector labor markets. But I don’t think it’s correct to see EFCA –> union density as the only conceivable form of politically influential mass membership organization. Unfortunately for progressives the best example I’ve got of a non-union politically influential mass membership organization is the NRA, but that just goes to show that you can, in fact, get a lot done if you’ve actually got a bunch of people who really care deeply about something.

The Mystery of Tight German Money

To agree with John Quiggin, the mystery to my mind of current European Central Bank policy is why are they insisting on money that’s too tight for German interests? It’s easy to see why the ECB isn’t implementing policy that as loose as would be optimal for Spain or Ireland. And it’s true that on some level there’s simply no way to set ECB policy in a way that works for everyone. But what they’re doing is too tight even for Germany where, for all the bragging, the actual output recovery has been kind of unimpressive.

After all, if the German industrial dynamo was really firing as robustly as sometimes people say you’d expect to see factories expanding operations and hiring workers away from the German service sector. Then unemployment Spaniards and Irishmen would migrate to work German service jobs. It’s true that Europe’s labor markets are imperfectly integrated, but they’re not that unintegrated either. If there was a true boom in Germany, people would make there way over there.

Pain Relief

Physical pain is a fairly common occurrence in life, so I suppose everyone walks around figuring it’s a sensation they’re familiar with. But something I learned over this past week is that there was a whole new level of pain far beyond anything I’d previously experienced. In my case, it was caused by a small cyst growing beneath one of my wisdom teeth that was pressing on a nerve in my jaw. And, fortunately, it was easy for an oral surgeon to remove. But it hurt a lot while it lasted, and the experience was terrible.

It made me think back to complaints I’d read and briefly acknowledged over the years about how the “war on drugs” has interfered with medical efforts to treat pain. As Mark Kleiman put it:

Physicians and their regulators are naturally concerned about the risk of iatrogenic (treatment-induced) drug dependency. Consequently, they have tended to be sparing in their use of opiate and opioid pain relievers, even when the pain involved is extreme and the patient’s short life expectancy, as in the case of terminal cancer patients, makes addiction a largely notional problem. Better professional education has made more recent cohorts of physicians less afraid of over-prescribing painkillers than their older colleagues, but the upsurge of prescription-analgesic abuse (especially of hydrocodone [Vicodin] and oxycodone [Percodan, Oxycontin]) has generated a backlash. [...]

Current policies are scaring physicians away from treating pain aggressively. Many doctors and medical groups now simply refuse to write prescriptions for any substance in Schedule II, the most tightly regulated group of prescription drugs, including the most potent opiate and opioid pain-relievers and the potent amphetamine stimulants. The opiate-and-stimulant combination the textbooks recommend for treating chronic pain is almost never given in practice for fear (a fear well in excess of the actual risk) of disciplinary action and criminal investigation for a physician prescribing “uppers and downers” together. It’s time to loosen up.

This is terrible. One of the most interesting findings from the happiness research literature is that human beings are remarkably good at adapting to all kinds of misfortunes. Chronic pain, however, is an exception. People either get effective treatment for their pain, or else they’re miserable. Adaptation is fairly minimum. The upshot is that from a real human welfare perspective, we ought to put a lot of weight on making sure that people with chronic pain get the best treatment possible. Minimizing addiction is a fine public policy goal, but the priority should be on making sure that people with legitimate needs can get medicine.

Pay Attention to Details in Land Swap Proposals

Mark Landler has a New York Times article about some new maps from the Washington Institute’s David Makovsky that aims to propose some land-swap concepts for drawing a border between Israel and Palestine:

The goal, Mr. Makovsky said, is to “demystify” the territorial hurdles that divide Israelis and Palestinians, and to debunk the notion that there is no way to reconcile the Palestinian demand for sovereignty over the West Bank with the Israeli demand for control over a majority of the settlers.

“In my view, it is definitely possible to deal with each other’s core demands,” he said. “There are land swaps that would offset whatever settlements Israel would retain. The impossible is attainable.”

I’m not sure why Makovsky thinks these maps lead to that optimistic outcome. Certainly it’s true that if you zoom out it’s possible to come up with a solution that’s “fair” in the sense that the numbers add up:

But look at the practical consequences this has in the vicinity of Jerusalem:

Only 10-20 miles separate Ramallah north of Jerusalem from Bethlehem south of Jerusalem, but this map creates salients of Israeli territory that would force massive detours and break up what ought to be a contiguous Arab conurbation of Ramallah/East Jerusalem/Bethlehem. It would be as if the only way to get from Silver Spring to Tyson’s Corner involves driving through West Virginia. You could make this work, of course, by making the Israeli/Palestinian border very porous but that doesn’t seem like something Israel would want to do.

To me, Makovsky’s cartographical undertakings simply illustrate the problem here. Israel’s core interest is to have a Jewish state in the historic Land of Israel with secure and internationally recognized boundaries. The Palestinians’ core interest is to have an economically viable Palestinian State in historic Palestine. These demands are very compatible, but they’re not compatible with Israeli efforts to hold on to all these Jerusalem-area settlements. Some measure of land-swapping is a very reasonable alternative to total dismantlement of all Israeli settlements, but raw quantities of land aren’t everything.

Public Opinion and the Deficit

David Leonhardt explains the confused public:

The new Times/CBS News poll highlights the problem, by asking more specific questions about taxes and spending than many previous polls have. (See questions 33 through 45 here.) Not surprisingly, when given a straight-up choice between broad spending cuts and tax increases, Americans say they would prefer to reduce the deficit mostly through less spending. It’s not even close: 62 percent for spending cuts, 29 percent for tax increases.

A few questions later, though, our pollsters offered a different choice. Would people rather eliminate Medicare’s shortfall through reduced Medicare benefits or higher taxes?

The percentages then switch, becoming nearly a mirror image of what they had been. Some 64 percent of respondents preferred tax increases, while 24 percent chose Medicare cuts. The same is true of Social Security: 63 percent for higher taxes, 25 percent for reduced benefits.

What I think we ultimately need to see is Universal Medicare rather than Medicare for old people only. But it would be Medicare operating under a global budget and with a dedicated source of tax revenue. People won’t be happy with the rationing that results from the global budget, but they also won’t be happy with the idea of raising the tax rate, and the balance between the two will be a very reasonable thing for political parties to argue about. Personally, I’d favor focusing on catastrophic coverage and preventive services, while leaving routine care up to individuals, but reasonable people will disagree about exactly how many social resources should be devoted to health care overall. Currently, though, the public debate is distorted by widespread misunderstanding of what’s happening (Jeb Hensarling doesn’t help) and by the sharp divergence in how we treat people above and below the age of 65.

Troikas

Ken Auletta on Google:

Was Eric Schmidt pushed or did he jump? Both. According to close advisors, the Google C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not hide his belief that Google should stay in the world’s largest consumer marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that he provided “adult supervision,” and was never shy about interrupting the founders at meetings to crystallize a point. In the eleven interviews I conducted with him for my book on Google, he freely told anecdotes about the founders, sometimes making gentle fun of them, never seeming to look over his shoulder. Yet he always made clear that they were “geniuses” and he, in effect, was their manager. After a bumpy first couple of years after he joined Google as C.E.O. in 2001, they had developed a remarkable relationship. But also a weird one. How many successful organizations have a troika making decisions?

I guess not that many, but maybe more should. After all, are there are lot of organizations out there that are more successful than Google? Is the one CEO supervised by a large and diffuse Board of Directors model really such a stunning success? There doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with the troika idea other than that it’s unusual. Admittedly in ancient Rome this form of government mostly led to civil wars, but under Roman conditions just about everything seemed to lead to civil wars, right?

The Era of Big Government

I agree with Jon Chait that Jim Kessler from Third Way has hit upon some good advice here about the State of the Union* address:

The President ought to make long term economic growth the theme of his State of the Union. He should declare that with the passage of health care reform, America’s 85-year quest to weave a strong safety net is now complete. From there he would describe a clear, tangible, and compelling destination for the nation – that of American excellence. It is a destination where America has the strongest, most vibrant, and most advanced economy on earth.

This isn’t precisely how I would put it, but Kessler is write about this. When Bill Clinton pronounced that “the era of big government is over” in 1995, he was clearly wrong. And since that time we’ve gotten SCHIP, Medicare started covering prescription drugs, and now we have the Affordable Care Act. So the era of big government wasn’t over in 1995 and it’s not over in 2010, but what is over is the era of big government liberalism. That’s not to say there will be no new changes to health care policy or to education policy or any of the rest of it. But there aren’t any major new fundamental commitments to be undertaken and there isn’t any more money to undertake it with.

Future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered. Right now Medicare is projected to cost more money than Democrats are willing to tax, and yet Republicans are positioning themselves as defenders of the program against the ACA’s insidious cuts. The future of American politics is really about how to square this circle. How to find the revenue in viable ways, and how to streamline these services to maximize value to citizens and minimize rent-seeking. Big government isn’t over, or going away. It’s utterly victorious and yet at its limits.

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Pushing Sprawl Through Flawed Congestion Analysis

One crucial distinction in regional planning is between approaches to commuting that simply look at moving people as far as possible as fast as possible and approaches that look instead at moving people from where they are to where they’re going as fast as possible. For example, consider the Texas Transportation Institute’s new report on congestion in America which lists DC as tied for first for hours wasted in traffic, in the context of how their methodology actually works:

The TTI report narrowly looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves. Consider two hypothetical cities. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn’t bad.

On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work.

Which city is more congested? By TTI’s methods, it’s Denseopolis. But it’s the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation.

The point is that if you simply want people to be inside fast-moving vehicles, that will always bias policy toward sprawl. If you make each house sit on a large enough lot and build reasonable wide roads, then traffic will always move very quickly. But it will move quickly in part because everything’s so far away. Living in downtown DC where things are very close together, it’s most practical for me to commute to work via the incredibly slow method of walking. But I love only 0.8 miles from my office, so the trip only takes 10-15 minutes and by any sensible estimation it’s a very pleasant and convenient commute.

Olbermann

Like everyone, I’m a bit puzzled/shocked/distressed by this Keith Olbermann news. It’s not every day a TV network sacks its highest rated host. It had seemed to be the case that Olbermann’s success was leading MSNBC to walk further and further down the road of recognizing that there’s a market niche for progressive cable television programming. Are they now walking away from that?

America’s Housing Shortfall

“Everyone knows” that massive overbuilding of housing during the boom years is a crucial contributing “structural” factor to current unemployment, but Scott Sumner looks at the actual data and finds little evidence of housing oversupply:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Here’s my assumption. Housing construction normally seems to fluctuate between one and two million units. Let’s take 1.5 million as roughly the trend rate which keeps up with population. Yes, it’s true that we exceeded that number every single year from 2002 to 2006, and the total excess production was about 1.87 million units. That’s a lot. But over the next four years there was a shortfall of about 2.6 million units. So why do we seem to have a hugely excessive number of homes, if we are actually 730,000 short?

Now of course some of these units are mislocated relative to demand. And severe regulatory restrictions on density mean that lots of this investment is non-optimal. But there are plenty of people in this country who, given decent aggregate demand conditions, would be forming new households and occupying this housing stock.

Endgame

There’s not much for me there:

— TED talks throughout history.

— Robyn converts Katy Perry to feminism.

— I don’t endorse this full analysis, but it’s definitely true that the cash/benefits mix for federal workers is out of whack.

— Everyone is unpopular.

— Stephen Breyer and Ted Kennedy are neoliberal sellouts.

— Excellent profile of Phillip Weiss.

— What Beijing learned from the neocons.

Yeasayer, “Madder Red”.

Why Do People Agree to Give SOTU Responses?

My first reaction to the news that Paul Ryan has been designated to give the Republican response to the State of the Union address was to fulminate a bit about the unseriousness of it all. After all, Paul Ryan’s written a famous “budget roadmap” that does an excellent job of showing what it takes to balance the budget without raising taxes—massive, massive, massive cuts in Medicare. But since massive Medicare cuts are unpopular, the GOP leadership doesn’t want to get behind Ryan’s plan for massive Medicare cuts. Indeed, they don’t even want to bring it up for a vote. But instead of facing the fact that the GOP is not, in fact, willing to endorse the kind of massive Medicare cuts that are the only way to make their tax policies work, they’re going to . . . put Ryan up as their speaker so everyone can pretend there’s a plan here.

It’s enough to drive a person crazy.

But I’m enjoying a Percocet mellow today, so let’s think about a different issue. Is the SOTU response gig anything other than a quick way to trip up a rising star in one’s party? The Bobby Jindal experience is the most vivid cautionary tale, but he’s hardly alone. The vast majority of people given this task do a bad job of it. And even those who do well, like Jim Webb, don’t accrue much in the way of anything in the way of real benefit.

Could Vermont Do Single-Payer?

An interesting AP story earlier this week explained a report produced by Harvard economist William Hsiao for the Vermont state legislature about ways the state could save money by shifting to a single-payer health care system.

My colleague Igor Volsky runs down some of the hurdles and possibilities offered by federal law:

Hsiao said that Vermont faced “no fewer than 15 hurdles before it would be able to implement the plan,” not the least of which are some of the new requirements and regulations in the Affordable Care Act. The Vermont Congressional delegation has introduced an amendment that would expand a provision in the law that allows states to propose their own pilot health care programs and seek a waiver from the federal health care law so that they can pursue their own approaches to health care reform. The current law allows states to pursue these waivers in 2017; the amendment would move this waiver date up to 2014. A companion measure has also been introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Scott Brown (R-MA) in the Senate, but it remains to be seen how cooperative HHS will be in granting waiver and allowing the state to pursue these reforms.

In political terms, it seems to me that being generous about the state customization possibilities is probably the best way to start shifting the Affordable Care Act out of the toxic partisanship box and regularize its place in the firmament. Among other things, this provides something of an exit pathway for politicians like Scott Brown who don’t want to embrace ACA but also don’t want to repeal it.

Free Market Health Care

Rep Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) sings the praises of the healthcare status quo and explains the problems with a government takeover of the health care system:

The American people don’t want it. It’s personal.

Here’s my story, two days ago, I was in San Antonio, Texas, and my mother had a large tumor removed from her head. They wheeled her away at 7:20 in the morning, and by noon, I was talking to her along with the rest of our family. It proved benign, thanks to a lot of prayers and good doctors at the Methodist hospital in San Antonio. My mother’s fine. I’m not sure that would be the outcome in Canada, the U.K., or anywhere in Europe.

No disrespect to our President, but when it comes to the health of my mother, I don’t want this President or any President or his bureaucrat or commissions making decisions for my loved ones. Let’s repeal it today, replace it tomorrow.

Hensarling is 53 years old, so his mother is, of course, eligible for Medicare. And it’s true that Medicare, for all its flaws, is an excellent system of coverage. It’s also a system of universal taxpayer-financed government-provided health insurance. Indeed, it’s basically the same as Canada’s system of universal health care, which is probably why the Canadian program is also called “Medicare.” The biggest difference is that in Canada you get Medicare whether you’re 8, 18, 38, 68, or 88 whereas in the United States Medicare is only available to senior citizens. But seniors like Medicare! And so do their kids! Of course when it was first introduced Ronald Reagan warned that it would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, but he was wrong. Just ask Rep Hensarling!

Gender and the Service Economy

Earlier this week, Grist’s Dave Roberts was going on one of his twitter-jihads against opponents of “industrial policy” and one key point he’s making is where on earth are middle-skilled middle class jobs supposed to come from if not from manufacturing.

I think this is a crucial question to ask, especially because it’s really not as closely related to issues about trade and industrial policy as many people think. The fact of the matter is that the long-term trend in US manufacturing output is up even as the trend in employment is down. And that’s precisely because greedy for-profit firms don’t like to hire lots and lots of people for high-wage labor-intensive work. So over time, they’ve gotten better and better at replacing people with machines. The edge Chinese workers have over Americans is that they’re so cheap (so far) that they’re not worth replacing with machines. But their time will come, and the future of mid-skill employment will necessarily entail a loto fo work in human service fields where demand is growing and automation hasn’t made much progress.

Meanwhile, yesterday I was in a chair in the oral surgeon’s office getting ready to have some prep done and the surgical assistant went to put some gloves on. But after reaching for a pair from the dispenser in the room, he had to run out briefly and get another pair from someplace else. He explained that it’s a “female-dominated field” so they never have enough gloves that are big enough for his hands around. And, indeed, as the day went on it was clear that aside from that guy and the (male) surgeon himself, all the nurses and assistants and whatever else they’re calleds working in office were women. Which is the kind of thing that’s so normal you don’t even notice it until someone’s talking about glove sizes. I’m not sure exactly why that is, but I guess there’s a perception that this kind of “caring” work is less manly than working in a factory. But the various forms of nurse (or advanced nurse) and physician assistant type jobs out there are precisely the type of middle class work for which there’s certain to be growing demand in aging, increasingly wealthy societies. Someday probably someone will come up with a way to build robot nurses, but that seems a ways off at this point.

All of which is to say that while there’s a lot that while in the short-term the economy mostly just needs more demand, over the longer-haul I think part of what we’re going to need is a shift in gender norms.