The Trump Score Card

Four-and-a-half months into his presidency, Donald Trump has been better than I thought he would be. He  has appointed Betsy De Vos to head the education department, and I believe that Gail Heriot still has a crack at the Office of Civil Rights post.  He has repudiated a climate change treaty that deserves rethinking on Constitutional grounds, as Seth Lipsky points out in his blog in yesterday’s New York Sun.  Moreover, the president still seems serious about regulatory reform.    However, as I point out on Mr. Lipsky’s blog, he has made his best contribution in the way he has rankled the press, baiting them into one absurd impeachment cry after another. 

I rarely watch TV news, but I work out in the Route 28 Gym in Woodstock, NY, and the local lefties inevitably have the TV tuned to MSNBC and Chris Matthews’s mug.  The stridency of his and the other announcers’ carping, caviling, and cussing about President Trump has turned what once could have been fairly called a biased press into one that is shrill and hyperbolic.  The silly Russian story is less serious than the racketeering in which Hillary Clinton engaged, but the MSNBC announcers harp on it and assume that their calls for impeachment will make a difference.   They are discrediting themselves and eliminating any hope for resuscitation of their profession.

Perhaps Trump has encouraged this by design—as someone on Facebook put it, he may have succeeded in goading the media to confusedly charge, much like a bullfighter waving the muleta or red flag at the bull.  If that's not so, the end result will still turn out well.

The press now behaves much like the parties to any social dementia, such as the Salem witch trials, the Negro Plot of 1741, the Red Scare during World War I, or the public reaction to Orson Welles's War of The Worlds.

MSNBC’s Matthews is like the farmer who waved his pitchfork at Welles’s flying saucer.  What we may be seeing is the discrediting of television news and the end of the mid-to-late 20th century's centralized, broadcast news system. If so, Mr. Trump will have done more than a little good on that score alone.

Right to Work Laws Increase Wages

 The academic field of industrial relations is, as I pointed out last year, biased in favor of monopolistic unionism and regulation so that much industrial relations research amounts to partisan advocacy, and the claim that real disposable income is higher in forced unionism states is a case in point.

Advocates of forced unionism claim that nominal per capita income is lower in right to work states than in forced unionism states.  They then make a leap of false logic: They claim that right to work laws reduce real wages.

One frequent and major omission from labor research is an adjustment for state or local differences in cost of living.  The cost of living in a forced unionism state like California is 53.4% higher than in a right to work state like Indiana.  On average, the cost of living in the 24 forced unionism states^[1] is 21.9% higher than in the 26 right to work states.  (The data cited here and below are not weighted for differences in state population size.)

While nominal per capita disposable personal income is significantly higher in forced unionism than in right to work states ($45,595 versus $39,914), when I apply an index of the cost of living in each state, the cost-of-living-adjusted disposable personal income is higher in right to work states ($42,450) than in forced unionism states ($40,140). The 2016 interstate cost of living index is published by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center.

In order to assess why real after-tax purchasing power per capita is roughly 6% higher in right to work states than in forced unionism states, it is necessary to consider several important demographic differences between the two groups of states.

Although the mean populations of the forced unionism and right to work states are not terribly far apart (6.9 versus 6.0 million), the forced unionism states tend to be more urban.  The average size of the largest city in the right to work states is 527,800, but it is 1,038,500 in the forced unionism states.  Several large forced unionism states such as California, New York, and Illinois skew the mean.

Today, large cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York have highly educated workforces, but their college-educated populations have grown relatively slowly in recent years. The demographic evidence indicates the primary reason cities like the Big Apple are now much more educated than the U.S. average is massive out-migration of people who do not hold at least a bachelor’s degree.

One reason why forced unionism states are relatively attractive to the highly educated is that high-status service firms such as law, advertising, high-tech, and investment banking firms are found mostly in large cities.  (There is evidence indicating such high-status service industries are now, as other economic sectors like manufacturing have already done, shifting to right to work states, but the shift for high-status services remains today only at an early stage.)  The centralized urban settings that are, at present, more commonly located in forced unionism states reduce interest groups’ costs of organizing; that is, large-city settings facilitate successful lobbying by special interests. For instance, centralized urban settings reduce the cost of travel to group meetings and to political officials’ offices.  The concentration of highly educated workforces residing in forced unionism states and a heavier labor regulation load in forced unionism states may skew real wage levels, distorting comparisons of right to work and forced unionism states over and above the cost of living adjustment.

Specifically, the percent of the 25-to-44-year-old population with a BA or greater is 34.0% in the forced unionism states and 28.0% in the right to work states. Moreover, the right to work states have less labor market regulation (excluding forced unionism) as measured by an index of labor market freedom published by William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens of the Cato Institute.  Education levels are higher and labor market regulation is more burdensome in forced unionism states, and these factors may affect disposable income, including wages.

To examine how those factors affect disposable income, I used a technique called multiple regression analysis that enables one to control for the effects of competing explanatory variables.  I included state-level measures for exports of manufactured goods per capita, overall state population, the population of the largest city, the percentage of 25-to-44 year olds with BAs or higher, labor market freedom not counting right to work laws (as measured by the Cato Institute), and the presence of a right to work law.  I also included controls for the states of New York, California, and Virginia.  I included Virginia because it is a right to work state with a large segment that works in the District of Columbia, which is not a right to work venue.

Of these variables, two rose to the level of statistical significance: the presence of a right to work law and the percentage of 25-to-44 year olds with BAs. Right to work laws raise cost of living-adjusted wages by $4,290, controlling for other kinds of deregulation, workforce education, and the other factors.  Other kinds of labor deregulation are not as important as right to work laws in improving per capita disposable personal income.  The only factor that has a greater effect is the education level.

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[1] Since 2016 income and cost-of-living data are being cited, Kentucky and Missouri, which adopted their Right to Work laws only this year, are counted as forced unionism states here.

La La Land

I just saw La La Land, which is one of the best musicals ever.  Looking at the AFI  rankings, I would say that it as number four, below Singin' in the Rain, West Side Story, and The Wizard of Oz.

1	SINGIN' IN THE RAIN	1952
2	WEST SIDE STORY	1961
3	WIZARD OF OZ, THE La La Land	1939
4	SOUND OF MUSIC, THE	1965
5	CABARET	1972
6	MARY POPPINS	1964
7	STAR IS BORN, A	1954
8	MY FAIR LADY	1964
9	AMERICAN IN PARIS, AN	1951
10	MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS	1944

The film is about careers. Musicians and actresses are in among the most competitive fields, but many lines of work involve the setbacks in the story of Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone).  This is the first HR musical.  

Several of the great musicals of the mid-twentieth century, such as Singin' in the Rain and A Star Is Born, were also about entertainment careers, but none had the realism of La La Land. 

"Someone in the Crowd," posted above, is a paean to networking, which I have discussed with my students for 26 years. Business values have become so infused in our culture that they have become the subject of our best art, just as heroic valor was the subject of the best classical art. 

Can College Students Learn to Disagree?

My op-ed “Can College Students Learn to Disagree? The Importance of Contrasting Ideology with Prudence” just came out in Frontpagemag.  It contrasts  recent experiences with my speaker program at Brooklyn College and the Mill Series at Lafayette College with the recent riots at Berkeley and elsewhere.

My friend and coauthor Dan Klein just emailed and mentioned that I mix up Karl Polanyi with Michael Polanyi.  The republic of science concept was in Michael Polanyi's article.  

  

Dan suggests that Russell Kirk's objection to ideology is misguided. Dan suggests using "fanaticism," "dogma," or "foolishness" in place of "ideology." Dan points out that we libertarians are as ideological as leftists.

I agree with Dan in terms of political tactics, although I don't think that colleges should play an ideological role.  There should be some effort to reflect the spectrum of views in American society.  The claim that "science is settled" is most often code for insistence on left ideological positions that are not only not settled but nonsensically tendentious.  

Universities' substitution of ideology for prudential debate will end in their diminished role, especially if the Republican approach proves to become more economically successful than the Democratic. 

With respect to politics, the ideological approach is more tactically effective than the conservative approach, which is why after many decades of both conservatism and leftism, the nation has changed just as the leftists have hoped: in  the direction of socialism. The conservatives have lost every step of the way.  Part of the reason is their rejection of libertarianism, without which they lack the numbers to win elections.  The Trump administration may overturn some of the Obama administration's gaffes, but he is unlikely to leave a legacy of an opposing ideology. In that he is like the Tafts, Goldwater, and Reagan.

The error of conservatism is that compromise inevitably leads to the end toward which an opposing party with a consistent, unitary aim favors.  Conservatism only works if there is a level playing field with diverse interests that counterbalance each other. Instead, America has a soft socialist progressivism that aims in one direction, with every other interest counterbalancing each other and compromising with each other. 

The result is that the one interest with a consistent, unitary aim wins over time, and the party or parties that are conservative and believe in compromise and gradualism lose  over time.  The approach of National Review and other conservatives to vote for the lesser evil in time leads to the greater evil anyway.  At some point socialism needs to be overturned with radical, ideologically motivated steps.