Between Hell and High Water

By Mike Koetting    May 15, 2018

This post relies more on pictures than words.

While the pattern isn’t perfectly consistent, it is clear enough. The former Confederacy, joined pretty consistently by a band of states up the middle of the country to Canada, Indiana and Arizona have a different set of values than the reminder of the country. (Kansas was a slave state although there were no slaves there, Indiana home to the Ku Klux Klan and Arizona broke away from New Mexico on the idea it would become a slave state.) Wisconsin and a few other Rust Belt states often join them, although their orientations have floated more over time. Continue reading “Is This Really One Country?”

By Mike Koetting      May 6, 2018

Without question, slavery was America’s original sin. But right behind that in the sin category was the Democrats’ 100-year affair with the conservative South. Democrats argued that the alliance allowed them to pass laws, opposed by Northern Republicans, that improved the economic lot of American workers. True—but mostly for white workers and, largely by accident, some black workers who had made their way North. For that, Southern Democrats were allowed to continue their backwards, racist social order at the state level.

Proof of what was important to the Southern Democrats was readily found when Lyndon Johnson and Northern Democrats tried to extend those gains to black workers. The South turned solidly Republican quicker than Richard Nixon could say “states’ rights”.

To be sure, the current cultural wars are not solely about racism and are not limited to the South. But even the most cursory review of the history of post-Civil War America shows that cultural values are deeper than any nominal loyalty to political parties or the policies they ostensibly stand for. The Trump phenomena has proved that again. The vast bulk of the Trump base has no more loyalty to the Republican Party than Dixiecrats had to the Democratic Party. Their loyalty is to a way of life, one that is as unfathomable to me as I presume my way of life is to them. There is no respect in either direction. Continue reading “Politics and the Culture Wars”

                                   By Mike Koetting          April 24, 2018

This post wraps up, at least for now, my on-and-off again posts on what I consider the three most pressing issues facing us—inequality, the environment and the nature of work. Since I think these are the most important issues for our time, I am sure I will return to them. But before I jump to other topics, I wanted to make sure the connections among these three issues were spelled out, especially given the fragmentary way in which I have posted them.

To me, these are not separate issues that can be addressed independently. One of the many reprehensible things about current Republican positions is that they set these issues against each other—attacking environmental standards claiming it is necessary to create jobs, or suggesting that increasing inequality actually creates jobs. Continue reading “All Together Now”

       By Mike Koetting              April 15, 2018

My last post returned to the evolving nature of the labor economy and continued to argue that we needed to change the overall framework in several respects.  This post continues that line of discussion.

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In theory the American economy is at one of its lowest percentages of unemployment in recent years. But there’s an appropriate reluctance to celebrate too much. It doesn’t feel like America is at full employment because we know that simply having a job is no guarantee of making a sustainable wage, that a material number of people have withdrawn from the labor force, and that there are imminent threats to automate or offshore more jobs.

One can think of incremental responses to each of these issues separately but the problem may be more fundamental. Why should we expect that the economic framework that got us to this situation is likely to get us out of these concerns? Continue reading “Planning for Jobs”

        By Mike Koetting            April 4, 2018

I am resuming my series of posts suggesting that the biggest problems facing the world are mitigating inequality, protecting the environment, and reconceptualizing work. In the last post I made before my fall break, I argued that the historic capitalist view of jobs was outdated. https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2017/09/08/reconceptualizing-work/   This post returns to that discussion. 

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My first formal empirical activity was in 1956 when I clipped a series of articles in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about what life would be like in 1980 with the intent of keeping them for evaluation in 1980. I carried out my plan. This led to a more general interest in evaluating the accuracy of various futurecasts. Over the years I have developed several generalizations about futurecasts.

• If they imagine a technology, it will probably happen.
• It will almost always take longer than predicted.
• There will still be unanticipated developments that have very big impacts.
• There is very little ability to see how society will react to technological changes, largely because authors are stuck in their own social frames.

This is the context in which I look at claims about the future impact of automation. Continue reading “The Impact of Automation on Jobs”

By Mike Koetting     March 19, 2018

If it accomplished nothing else, last year’s attempt by Republicans to “repeal and replace” the ACA dramatically increased support for a single payer system. Last June, a Pew Survey found 33% of all Americans in favor of single-payer. By the end of 2017, several different polls were showing a small majority of all Americans supporting single-payer. Support among Democrats is particularly strong. A majority of House Democrats have signed on to the Medicare for All bill, as have a number of high profile senators who might be 2020 presidential candidates. There has even been discussion of making support for “Medicare for All” a litmus test for Democratic candidates.

I think there is great danger in over-investing in Medicare for All at this time. Continue reading “What to Do About Healthcare”

By Mike Koetting        March 8, 2018

Six months ago, healthcare was the issue of the land. Now, the issue pops up in disjointed fragments of policy and rhetoric. I read two or so healthcare blogs most days and I still find it hard to follow.  So I figured it might be useful to offer my own recap of what I think is the current state of healthcare policy in America.  It is, after all, on its way to eating up a full 20% of the GDP. (https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20180214.597384/full/ ).

The short version is that for all the sound and fury, the basic ACA structure is much less damaged than we feared a year ago, but the Trump administration has given individual states more latitude to mau-mau the ACA. Of course, even in the absence of broad-scale collapse, some individuals have been hurt. Continue reading “So, What Happened to Healthcare?”

By Mike Koetting           February 27, 2018

I wasn’t planning on another post on immigration, but a question from a friend made me realize I really didn’t understand how immigration to the US works, or at any rate, is supposed to work.  Once I looked it into it, I realized that this post should have preceded—or perhaps replaced—my previous post.

On the other hand, I also realized that some of the details here are relevant to the current political discussions and I might not be alone in not understanding how the system is supposed to work.  Continue reading “More Immigration”

By Mike Koetting           February 15, 2018

In the last post I allowed that countries have good reasons to put some bounds on the amount of immigration.  It’s not obvious how to do that and this post can’t answer that question.  But it does address some of the considerations that bear on this problem, which is currently very much under discussion. Continue reading “A Scattering of Immigration Issues”

By Mike Koetting

February 5, 2018

The last two posts have raised questions about the American vision.  Then government was shut down because the Republicans were so opposed to letting the Dreamers stay in America.  (Or, if you prefer, because Democrats were so committed to insuring the Dreamers get to stay.)  All of which got me wondering:  how should a country think about immigration?  Obviously, this is a more complicated topic than a single post.  This post will explore just one facet of the issue—assimilation., which I think is at the ideological core of the discussion. Continue reading “Immigration and Assimilation”