Daily Archives: March 7, 2017

A Plan Set Up To Fail

So now we know what Republicans have to offer as an Obamacare replacement. Let me try to avoid value judgments for a few minutes, and describe what seems to have happened here.

The structure of the Affordable Care Act comes out of a straightforward analysis of the logic of coverage. If you want to make health insurance available and affordable for almost everyone, regardless of income or health status, and you want to do this through private insurers rather than simply have single-payer, you have to do three things.

1.Regulate insurers so they cant refuse or charge high premiums to people with preexisting conditions 2.Impose some penalty on people who dont buy insurance, to induce healthy people to sign up and provide a workable risk pool 3.Subsidize premiums so that lower-income households can afford insurance

So thats Obamacare (and Romneycare before that): regulation, mandates, and subsidies. And the result has been a sharp decline in the number of uninsured, with costs coming in well below expectations. Roughly speaking, 20 million Americans gained coverage at a cost of around 0.6 percent of GDP.

Republicans have nonetheless denounced the law as a monstrosity, and promised to replace it with something totally different and far better. Which makes what theyve actually come up interesting.

For the GOP proposal basically accepts the logic of Obamacare. It retains insurer regulation to prevent exclusion of people with preexisting conditions. It imposes a penalty on those who dont buy insurance while healthy. And it offers tax credits to help people buy insurance. Conservatives calling the plan Obamacare 2.0 definitely have a point.

But a better designation would be Obamacare 0.5, because its really about replacing relatively solid pillars with half-measures, severely and probably fatally weakening the whole structure.

First, the individual mandate already too weak, so that too many healthy people opt out is replaced by a penalty imposed if and only if the uninsured decide to enter the market later. This wouldnt do much.

Second, the ACA subsidies, which are linked both to income and to the cost of insurance, are replaced by flat tax credits which would be worth much less to lower-income Americans, the very people most likely to need help buying insurance.

Taken together, these moves would almost surely lead to a death spiral. Healthy individuals, especially low-income households no longer receiving adequate aid, would opt out, worsening the risk pool. Premiums would soar without the cushion created by the current, price-linked subsidy formula leading more healthy people to exit. In much of the country, the individual markets would probably collapse.

The House leadership seems to realize all of this; thats why it reportedly plans to rush the bill through committee before CBO even gets a chance to score it.

Its an amazing spectacle. Obviously, Republicans backed themselves into a corner: after all those years denouncing Obamacare, they felt they had to do something, but in fact had no good ideas about what to offer as a replacement. So they went with really bad ideas instead.

The big news from last nights speech is that our pundits is not learning. After all the debacles of 2016, they swooned over the fact that Trump while still lying time after time and proposing truly vile initiatives was able to read from a teleprompter without breaking into an insane rant. If American democracy falls, supposed political analysts who are actually just bad theater critics will share part of the blame.

But that aside, I was struck by Trumps continued insistence that hes going to bring back coal jobs. This says something remarkable both about him and about the body politic.

He is not, of course, going to bring back coal mining as an occupation. Coal employments plunge began decades ago, driven mainly by the switch to strip mining and mountaintop removal. A partial revival after the oil crises of the 70s was followed by a renewed downturn (under Reagan!), with fracking and cheap gas mainly delivering the final blow. Giving coal companies new freedom to pollute streams and utilities freedom to destroy the planet wont make any noticeable dent in the trend.

But heres the question: why are people so fixated on coal jobs anyway?

Even in the heart of coal country, the industry hasnt really been a major source of employment for a very long time. Compare mining with occupations that basically are some form of healthcare in West Virginia, as percentages of total employment:

Even in West Virginia, the typical worker is basically a nurse, not a miner and that has been true for decades.

So why did that state overwhelmingly support a candidate who wont bring back any significant number of mining jobs, but quite possibly will destroy healthcare for many which means jobs lost as well as lives destroyed?

The answer, Id guess, is that coal isnt really about coal its a symbol of a social order that is no more; both good things (community) and bad (overt racism). Trump is selling the fantasy that this old order can be restored, with seemingly substantive promises about specific jobs mostly just packaging.

One thought that follows is that Trump may not be as badly hurt by the failure of his promises as one might expect: he cant deliver coal jobs, but he can deliver punishment to various kinds of others. I guess well see.

For obvious reasons. Evidently the McCartney empire has been scrubbing almost all online versions; hope this lasts long enough for people to enjoy

Update: Searle, not Seattle. Damn spellcheck (or maybe the AI was making a Microsoft joke?)

Izabella Kaminska has a thought-provoking piece on the real effects of technology on wages, in which she argues that much recent innovation, instead of displacing manual workers, has displaced high-paying skilled jobs. As it happens, I sort of predicted this 20 years ago, in a piece written for the Times magazines 100th anniversary (authors were asked to write as if it was 2096, and they were looking back.)

I argued then that menial work dealing with the physical world gardeners, maids, nurses would survive even as quite a few jobs that used to require college disappeared. As it turns out, big data has led to more progress in something that looks like artificial intelligence than I expected self-driving cars are much closer to reality than I would have thought, and maybe gardening robots and post-Roomba robot cleaners will follow. Still, the point about the relative displacement of cognitive versus manual jobs seems to stand.

An aside: given the way Google Translate and such work, Seattles Searles Chinese Room Argument doesnt look as foolish as I used to think it was.

Anyway, Kaminskas point about the disruptiveness of such technological change is something we should take seriously. After all, it has happened before. The initial effect of the Industrial Revolution was a substantial de-skilling of goods production. The Luddites were, for the most part, not proletarians but skilled craftsmen, weavers who constituted s sort of labor aristocracy but found their skills devalued by the power loom. In the long run industrialization did lead to higher wages for everyone, but the long run took several generations to happen in that long run we really were all dead.

So interesting stuff. Id note, however, that it remains peculiar how were simultaneously worrying that robots will take all our jobs and bemoaning the stalling out of productivity growth. What is the story, really?

The WSJ reports that the Trump administrations budget planning assumes very high economic growth over the next decade between 3 and 3.5 percent annually. How was this number arrived at? Basically, they worked backwards, assuming the growth they needed to make their budget numbers add up. Credibility!

But the purpose of this post is mainly to explain why such a number is implausible not impossible, but not something that should be anyones central forecast.

The claimed returns to Trumpnomics are close to the highest growth rates weve seen under any modern administration. Real GDP grew 3.4 percent annually under Reagan; it grew 3.7 percent annually under Clinton (shhh dont tell conservatives.) But there are fundamental reasons to believe that such growth is unlikely to happen now.

First, demography: Reagan took office with baby boomers and women still entering the work force; these days baby boomers are leaving. Heres UN data on the 5-year growth rate of the population aged 20-64, a rough proxy for those likely to seek work:

Just on demography alone, then, youd expect growth to be around a percentage point lower than it was under Reagan.

Furthermore, while Trump did not, in fact, inherit a mess, both Reagan and Clinton did in the narrow sense that both came into office amid depressed economies, with unemployment above 7 percent:

This meant a substantial amount of slack to be taken up when the economy returned to full employment. Rough calculation: 2 points of excess unemployment means 4 percent output gap under Okuns Law, which means 0.5 percentage points of extra growth over an 8-year period.

So even if you (wrongly) give Reagan policies credit for the business cycle recovery after 1982, and believe (wrongly) that Trumponomics is going to do wonderful things for incentives a la Reagan, you should still be expecting growth of 2 percent or under.

Now, maybe something awesome will happen: either driverless or flying cars will transform everything, whatever. But you shouldnt be counting on it.

Everyone knows that stocks and interest rates have soared since the election; at the same time, if you arent worried about erratic policies from the Tweeter-in-chief, youre really not paying attention. So are markets getting it all wrong?

Ive been wondering about that and yes, in the first few hours after the election I thought, briefly and wrongly, that a crash was coming quickly. But anyway, I decided to crunch a few numbers and surprised myself. I still think markets are underrating the risk of catastrophe. But Im not as sure as I was that theres a huge Trump bubble buoying markets because when you actually look at the data, the market action has been much smaller than the hype.

Look first at stocks. Yes, theyre up since the election. But how does this rise compare with past fluctuations? Not very big, actually:

What about real interest rates? Ive been arguing that the widespread belief in serious fiscal stimulus is wrong, which means that a really big rise in real interest rates wouldnt be warranted. But it turns out that the movement isnt that big:

There was an overshoot early one, but at this point its only about 30 basis points, consistent with fiscal stimulus of maybe 1 percent of GDP. Still high, I think, but not yuge.

Inflation expectations are also up, but that may reflect various non-Trump things like growing evidence that we really are close to full employment.

I still think that markets are too sanguine. But the truth is that they havent moved nearly as much as the hype suggests, so the case for either a huge Trump effect or a huge Trump bubble is a lot weaker than you might think.

What Trump has done or tried to do over the past two years wait, its really only been two weeks? is incredibly bad. But spare a bit of attention to what doesnt seem to be happening. Has anyone heard anything, anything at all, about domestic policy development?

Remember, after the election Wall Street decided that we were going to see a big push on infrastructure, tax cuts, etc.. Some analysts were warning that progressives should be ready for the possibility that Trump would engage in reactionary Keynesianism. Worrying parallels were drawn between Trumpism and autobahn construction under you-know-who.

But if theres a WH task force preparing an infrastructure plan, its very well hidden; maybe theyre waiting to figure out how to turn on the lights. Seriously, Ive been saying for a while that there will be no significant public construction plan. Wall Street economists, at least, are starting to catch on.

Meanwhile, that Obamacare replacement is still nowhere to be seen, with GOP Congresspeople literally running away when asked about it.

Big tax cuts and savage cuts to social programs are still very much on the Congressional Republican agenda, and they could put it all together, hand it to Bannon, and have Trump sign it without reading. But Im starting to wonder: surely they planned to unveil things during the Trump honeymoon, with the public prepared to believe that it was all done with the little guys interests in mind. Even pre 9-11 Bush could count on media goodwill and supine Democrats to ram through his tax cuts.

But now? With massive public distrust, and media fully willing to do real reporting on the distribution of tax cuts, not Democrats say that the rich are the big winners? With the media infatuation on Serious, Honest Paul Ryan at least temporarily dented by his avid support for Muslim bans and all that? Maybe theyll do it anyway, but it seems a lot less certain than it did in November.

At this point Im starting to wonder whether there will be any real movement on economic policy, as opposed to random insults aimed at allies.

Its odd that the markets are, so far, not reflecting any of this; theyre basically unchanged from the levels they reached after the initial Trump Boom euphoria. But surely the odds have shifted, and theres now a real possibility that on domestic policy, at least, were in for a period of sound, fury, and tweets signifying nothing.

Cant imagine what made me think of this.

Peter Navarro, the closest thing Trump has to an economic guru, made some waves by accusing Germany of being a currency manipulator and suggesting that both the shadow Deutsche mark and the euro are undervalued. Leaving aside the dubious notion that this is a good target of US economic diplomacy, is he right?

Yes and no. Unfortunately, the no part is whats relevant to the US.

Yes, Germany in effect has an undervalued currency relative to what it would have without the euro. The figure shows German prices (GDP deflator) relative to Spain (which I take to represent Southern Europe in general) since the euro was created. There was a large real depreciation during the euros good years, when Spain had massive capital inflows and an inflationary boom. This has only been partly reversed, despite an incredible depression in Spain. Why? Because wages are downward sticky, and Germany has refused to support the kind of monetary and fiscal stimulus that would raise overall euro area inflation, which remains stuck at far too low a level.

So the euro system has kept Germany undervalued, on a sustained basis, against its neighbors.

But does this mean that the euro as a whole is undervalued against the dollar? Probably not. The euro is weak because investors see poor investment opportunities in Europe, to an important extent because of bad demography, and better opportunities in the U.S.. The travails of the euro system may add to poor European perceptions. But theres no clear relationship between the problems of Germanys role within the euro and questions of the relationship between the euro and other currencies.

And may I say, what is the purpose of having someone connected to the U.S. government say this? Are we going to pressure the ECB to adopt tighter monetary policy? I sure hope not. Are we egging on a breakup of the euro? It sure sounds like it but that is not, not, something the US government should be doing. What would we say if Chinese officials seemed to be talking up a US financial crisis? (It would, of course, be OK with Trump if the Russians did it.)

So yes, Navarro has a point about Germanys role within the euro. And if he were unconnected with the Bannon administration, he would be free to make it. But in the current context, this is grossly irresponsible.

Ive noted in the past that I get the most vitriolic attacks, not when I denounce politicians as evil or corrupt, but when I use more or less standard economics to debunk favorite fallacies. Sure enough, lots of anger over the trade analysis in todays column, assertions that its all left-wing bias, etc..

So maybe its worth noting that Greg Mankiws take on the economics of DBCFT is basically identical to mine: subsidy or tax cut on employment of domestic factors of production, paid for by sales tax. Greg and I disagree on whether replacing profits taxes with sales taxes is a good idea, but agree that all of this has nothing to do with trade and international competition because it doesnt.

I suspect, however, that Greg is being nave here in assuming that were just seeing confusion because border tax adjustment sounds as if it must involve competitive games. Theres some of that, for sure, but one reason the competitiveness thing wont go away is that its an essential part of the political pitch. Lets eliminate taxes on profits and tax consumers instead is a hard sell, even if you want to claim that the incidence isnt what it looks like. Claiming that its about eliminating a dire competitive disadvantage plays much better, even though its all wrong.

To be fair, these tax-and-trade issues are kind of two-ibuprofen stuff at best. But confusions persists even longer than usual when they serve a political purpose.

Cardiff Garcia has a nice piece trying to figure out what might happen to the economy under Trump, taking off from the classic Dornbusch-Edwards analysis of macroeconomic populism in Latin America. Garcia notes that surging government spending and mandated wage hikes tend to produce a temporary sugar high, followed by a crash. Nice idea but I suspect highly misleading, because Trump isnt a real populist, he just plays one on reality TV.

The Dornbusch-Edwards essay focused on the examples of Allendes Chile and Garcias Peru; an update would presumably look at Argentina, Venezuela, and others. But how relevant are these examples to Trumps America?

Allende, for example, was a real populist, who seriously tried to push up wages and drastically increased spending. Heres Chilean government consumption spending as a share of GDP:

Thats huge; in the U.S. context it would mean boosting spending by almost $1 trillion each year.

Is Trump on course to do anything similar? Hes selected a cabinet of plutocrats, with a labor secretary bitterly opposed to minimum wage hikes. He talks about infrastructure, but the only thing that passes for a plan is a document proposing some tax credits for private investors, which wouldnt involve much public outlay even if they did lead to new investment (as opposed to giveaways for investment that would have taken place anyway.) He does seem set to blow up the deficit, but via tax cuts for the wealthy; benefits for the poor and middle class seem set for savage cuts.

Why, then, does anyone consider him a populist? Its basically all about affect, about coming across as someone wholl stand up to snooty liberal elitists (and of course validate salt-of-the-earth, working-class racism.) Maybe some protectionism; but theres no hint that his economic program will look anything like populism abroad.

In which case, why would we even get the sugar high of populisms past? A tax-cut-driven boom is possible, I guess. But there wont be much stimulus on the spending side.

Not the usual concert joint with the NOW Ensemble, with Elliss (the songwriters) classical-trained roots very much on display. But still a great experience; their sound is like nobody elses, and theres really nothing like live performance. And the new album, which Ive been listening to (blogging has its privileges) is great. Shot on my smartphone!

Trump tantrums aside, you may be finding the whole border tax adjustment discussion confusing. If so, youre not alone; Ive worked in this area my whole life, I co-wrote a widely cited paper (with Martin Feldstein) on why a VAT isnt an export subsidy, and I have still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax border adjustment that sort-of-kind-of constituted the basis for the Mexico incident.

But I have what I think may be a (relatively) easy way to think about it, which starts with the competitive effects of a VAT, then analyzes the DBCFT as a change from a VAT.

So, first things first: a VAT does not give a nation any kind of competitive advantage, period.

Think about two firms, one domestic and one foreign, selling into two markets, domestic and foreign. Ask how the VAT affects competition in each market.

In the domestic market, imports pay the border adjustment; but domestic firms pay the VAT, so the playing field is still level.

In the foreign market, domestic firms dont pay the VAT, but neither do foreign firms. Again, the playing field is still level.

So a VAT is just a sales tax, with no competitive impact.

But a DBCFT isnt quite the same as a VAT.

With a VAT, a firm pays tax on the value of its sales, minus the cost of intermediate inputs the goods it buys from other companies. With a DBCFT, firms similarly get to deduct the cost of intermediate inputs. But they also get to deduct the cost of factors of production, mostly labor but also land.

So one way to think of a DBCFT is as a VAT combined with a subsidy for employment of domestic factors of production. The VAT part has no competitive effect, but the subsidy part would lead to expanded domestic production if wages and exchange rates didnt change.

But of course wages and/or the exchange rate would, in fact, change. If the US went to a DBCFT, we should expect the dollar to rise by enough to wipe out any competitive advantage. After the currency adjustment, the trade effect should once again be nil. But there might be a lot of short-to-medium term financial consequences from a stronger dollar.

I think this is right, and I hope it clarifies matters. Oh, and no, none of this helps pay for the wall.

Its hard to focus on ordinary economic analysis amidst this political apocalypse. But getting and spending will still consume most of peoples energy and time; furthermore, like it or not the progress of CASE NIGHTMARE ORANGE may depend on how the economy does. So, what is actually likely to happen to trade and manufacturing over the next few years?

As it happens, we have what looks like an unusually good model in the Reagan years minus the severe recession and conveniently timed recovery, which somewhat overshadowed the trade story. Leave aside the Volcker recession and recovery, and what you had was a large move toward budget deficits via tax cuts and military buildup, coupled with quite a lot of protectionism its not part of the Reagan legend, but the import quota on Japanese automobiles was one of the biggest protectionist moves of the postwar era.

Im a bit uncertain about the actual fiscal stance of Trumponomics: deficits will surely blow up, but I wont believe in the infrastructure push until I see it, and given savage cuts in aid to the poor its not entirely clear that there will be net stimulus. But suppose there is. Then what?

Well, what happened in the Reagan years was twin deficits: the budget deficit pushed up interest rates, which caused a strong dollar, which caused a bigger trade deficit, mainly in manufactured goods (which are still most of whats tradable.) This led to an accelerated decline in the industrial orientation of the U.S. economy:

And people did notice. Using Google Ngram, we can watch the spread of terms for industrial decline, e.g. here:

And here:

Again, this happened despite substantial protectionism.

So Trumpism will probably follow a similar course; it will actually shrink manufacturing despite the big noise made about saving a few hundred jobs here and there.

On the other hand, by then the BLS may be thoroughly politicized, commanded to report good news whatever happens.

Trumps inaugural speech was, of course, full of lies pretty much the same lies that marked the campaign. Above all, there was the portrayal of a dystopia of social and economic collapse that bears little relationship to American reality. During the campaign Trump got away with this in part because of slovenly, craven media, but also because of persistent misperceptions. The public consistently believes that crime is rising even when it has been falling to historical lows; it believes that the number of uninsured has risen when it has also fallen to historic lows; Republicans believe that unemployment is up and, incredibly, the stock market down under Obama.

The interesting question now is whether fake carnage can be replaced by fake non-carnage. How many people can be convinced that things are getting better under the Trump-Putin administration even as they actually get worse?

Will they actually get worse? Almost surely. Unemployment will probably rise over the next four years, if only because it starts out low historically the unemployment rate has a strong reversion to the mean, and it probably cant go much lower than it is now but can go much higher. The number of uninsured will soar if Republicans repeal Obamacare, whatever alleged replacement they offer.

Crime is less clear, since we really dont know why it fell. But big further declines dont seem highly likely; certainly we wont see an end to the prevalence of urban war zones, because, you know, they dont exist in the first place.

Oh, and this team of cronies is unlikely to help raise real wages.

But can Trump voters be convinced that things are getting better when they arent? The truth is that I dont know. Views on many issues are driven by motivated reasoning, and when people say that things got worse under Obama, what they may really be saying whatever the actual question was is I hate the idea of a black man in the White House.

Go here to read the rest:

Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman - The Conscience of ...

Outside contributors' opinions and analysis of the most important issues in politics, science, and culture.

Iowa state Sen. Mark Chelgren wants to tweak the dossier that candidates submit when they apply to teaching jobs at the states universities. In addition to a CV, sample syllabuses, and some writing samples, hed like one other thing: their party registration.

Im under the understanding that right now they can hire people because of diversity, he told the Des Moines Register. And where are university faculty less diverse than party registration? Thats the theory behind the proposed bill Chelgren has filed, which would institute a hiring freeze at state universities until the number of registered Republicans on faculty comes within 10 percent of the number of registered Democrats.

Bills proposed in state legislatures are easy fodder for outrage some wacky proposals get introduced every year. But Chelgren who, it should be noticed, claimed to hold a degree in business that turned out to be a certificate from a Sizzler steakhouse is not an outlier. In North Carolina, a similar proposal was introduced and then tabled earlier this month. And at CPAC, the conclave for conservatives held in Washington last month, newly appointed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos zeroed in on college faculty. She warned college students in the crowd to be wary of attempts to indoctrinate them: The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.

Fear of a liberal university faculty has been a feature of modern conservatism for decades, woven into the very foundations of the modern conservative movement although the attacks on universities have not always taken the form of legislation or calls for ideological diversity. The adoption of the language of diversity and pluralism serves mainly as a new way to skewer the left using its own vocabulary.

But no matter how often conservatives call attention to the ideological imbalance in the professorate, they fail to affect the makeup of college faculties. Indeed, faculties are markedly more liberal today than they were when the fight began. But persuading sociology departments to hire more Republicans is not really the point. Instead, these attacks have turned into a tool for undermining higher education, part of a far more serious and far less conservative project of dismantling American universities altogether.

It began with the communists. (Almost everything about modern conservatism begins with the communists.) At the dawn of the cold war, the Red Scare snaked its way through American universities, targeting left-leaning professors who found that not even tenure could save them from political persecution. The scare turned conservatives and liberals alike into happy red-hunters, as administrators and professors entered a contest of patriotic one-upmanship: loyalty oaths, hearings, purges.

Ray Ginger, a historian at Harvard Business School, was forced to resign in 1954 when he refused to take the loyalty oath Harvard demanded of him and his wife. They had to leave their home; his wife, nine months pregnant at the time, was forced to give birth as a charity patient. The marriage soon fell apart, and alcoholism claimed Gingers life at age 50. Rutgers fired two professors and allowed a third to resign after they refused to testify before the Senate red-hunt committee. No US university would hire them, and two were forced out of academia altogether.

The university scare more closely resembled the Red Scare in Hollywood than the one within the federal government. With the government, the fear was straightforward espionage: spies and blackmail and treason. With entertainment and education, it was the more nebulous fear of brainwashing, a worry that there was a softness in the American mind that could be exploited by nefarious filmmakers and professors.

For conservatives, anxieties about communist professors co-existed with anxieties about liberal ones. Indeed, a significant part of the conservative theory of politics was that the slippery slope toward communism began with New Deal-style liberalism. In his 1951 book God and Man at Yale, written in the midst of the university scare, William F. Buckley Jr. had little to say about communists. He instead made the case that Yale University had become infested with liberal professors who, in promoting secularism and Keynesian economics, had torn the school from its traditionally Christian and capitalist roots.

As McCarthyism waned, Buckleys argument became more prevalent on the right. Thanks to growing affluence and the GI Bill, millions more students were entering Americas colleges and universities. They were unlikely to become communists, but Keynesians? That was far easier to imagine.

In a 1963 piece for his Ivory Tower column in National Review (a regular feature on higher education underscoring just how much the state of Americas colleges worried the right), Russell Kirk dismissed concerns with communist professors. People who think that the Academy is honeycombed with crypto-Communists are wide of the mark, he wrote. At most, never more than 5 per cent of American college teachers were Communists. The real threat, Kirk maintained, came from liberal groupthink.

And how had the academy become so biased toward liberalism? Because administrators promoted liberals and demoted conservatives. That was the common conservative critique, anyway. William Rusher, publisher of National Review, laid out the plight of these conservative scholars: They face many tribulations. Advancement comes hard. They are victimized by their departments. Passed over for funds to support their research, Rusher argued, these conservative professors became a neglected generation of scholars.

The arguments that folks like Buckley and Kirk and Rusher were advancing in the 1950s and 1960s are nearly indistinguishable from those conservatives make today. But while the arguments have remained the same, something crucial has changed: the case for what to do about it.

Conservatives are certainly correct in their central claim: In the professoriate at large, and particularly in the humanities, the number of liberals and leftists far outstrip the number of conservative. This varies by field (you will find conservatives in in economics departments, business schools, and some sciences) and by school (Hillsdale College and Bob Jones University are hardly hotbeds of liberalism). But in general, the ivory tower indisputably tilts left. Whether this constitutes a problem that needs solving is open to debate, but even among those who feel it is a problem, solutions are hard to come by.

In God and Man at Yale, Buckley held that left-leaning faculty should be replaced by ones more in line with the universitys more conservative traditions. The best guardians of those traditions, he argued, were not faculty or administrators but alumni, who should be given the power to determine the colleges curriculum. They would do this through the power of the purse: withholding donations until the university administration became so desperate that they restructured the curriculum and changed up the faculty to meet alumni demands.

Whats important here is not the mechanism for change Buckleys alumni model was unworkable (it assumed Yale alumni all agreed with his goals and had more financial leverage than they did) but the theory behind it. Buckley was opposed to Yales liberal orthodoxies not because they were orthodoxies, but because they were liberal. He believed the university should be indoctrinating students; he just preferred they be indoctrinated in free-market capitalism and Christianity.

Over time, conservative efforts shifted from changing the liberal makeup of the university to building alternative institutions and safeguarding conservative students. Organizations like Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute became gathering spaces for young right-wingers, while a swath of new think tanks were erected for the purpose of getting conservative research and ideas into circulation. By the 1980s, anti-liberal student magazines like the Dartmouth Review served as feeders for Buckleys National Review and other conservative publications.

But what of the professors? They came under fire again in the 1990s and 2000s. Books like Allan Blooms Closing of the American Mind and Dinesh DSouzas Illiberal Education popularized the idea that professors infected their students with relativism, liberalism, and leftism, laying the intellectual groundwork for a new effort to limit the influence of liberal scholars.

But when those attacks came, they came wrapped in an entirely new logic and language: ideological diversity.

Lets pause here for a second, because this is important. In the 1990s, there was a real shift in American culture and politics, centered on multiculturalism and the postmodernism. Multiculturalism held that diversity was a positive value, because people from different backgrounds brought with them different perspectives, and a wide range of perspectives was good for intellectual debate. Postmodernism, a more academic idea, held at least in some of its guises that truth was inaccessible, perhaps nonexistent, that everything might be relative, everything might be perspective.

Conservatives didnt like either one of these shifts. Social conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Bill Bennett saw multiculturalism as a thinly veiled attack on the West (read: white European culture). Likewise, the rejection of knowable truths was an affront to believers in a fixed moral universe based on shared values. Multiculturalism, postmodernism these were anathema to their conservatism.

Except multiculturalism was also incredibly useful. If diversity of perspectives was good, and if universities valued that diversity enough for it be a factor in hiring, then surely the paucity of conservative professors was a wrong to be remedied?

Enter the pro-diversity conservatives, who have taken the arguments of the left and turned them into tools to expand conservatives presence in university faculty. The most visible early proponent of this approach was a former leftist, David Horowitz, who in 2003 founded the Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education (later renamed Students for Academic Freedom). The very name of the campaign suggested that Horowitz was committed to a pluralistic model of higher education dedicated to equity and balance.

The central project of Students for Academic Freedom was the Academic Bill of Rights. In its definition of academic freedom, the Academic Bill of Rights homed in immediately on intellectual diversity. It never mentioned conservatism, but rather advocated protecting students from the imposition of political, ideological, or religious orthodoxy. Given that Horowitz had widely criticized the one-party classroom and the liberal atmosphere of the academy, this equation of academic freedom with intellectual diversity amounted to a call to protect conservative professors and students.

That same framework could also be found in the 2009 book The Politically Correct University, published by the American Enterprise Institute. It included a chapter laying out the route to academic pluralism and another that claimed the academys definition and practice of diversity is too narrow and limited, arguing instead for a more inclusive definition of diversity that encompasses intellectual diversity.

In some rare cases, conservatives borrowed the language not just of diversity but of postmodernism. Horowitz asserted that the reason there needs to be more ideological diversity on campus is that there are no correct answers to controversial issues. This is a long way indeed from conservatives traditional rejection of relativism. Indeed, one could fairly wonder whether there was anything conservative about it at all.

So conservatives found a new argument for hiring more conservative professors. What they had not found was a way to convince universities to actually hire them. And this is the perennial problem with conservative critiques of higher education, the reason they scurried away into think tanks or places like Hillsdale college: There doesnt appear to be any mechanism to make universities hire more conservative faculty members.

This is in sharp contrast to the rights power to shape precollege education. Through school boards and state legislatures, conservatives have had real impact on public school curricula around the nation. They have won wars over textbooks, standards, even Advanced Placement guidelines. But that power smacks into a wall when it comes to higher education, where traditions of academic freedom and shared governance between faculty and administrators create real limits to external meddling.

Which is why conservatives are so often left lobbing rhetorical bombs at universities, and why bills like those in Iowa and North Carolina usually wind up quietly tabled. There is no legislative fix for ideological imbalance in the classroom, nor any general agreement that it is a problem that should be fixed.

The most interesting work being done on the topic on liberal academic groupthink is at Heterodox Academy, directed by the NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The organization brings together scholars from across the country who are committed to promoting greater viewpoint diversity on campuses. But look through the list of solutions Haidt and his colleagues provide, and you wont find a single piece of legislation among them. Indeed, what youll find reading lists, student government resolutions, college heterodoxy ratings is aimed almost entirely at students, not at hiring committees.

The right is still intent on undercutting what they see as the liberal political power of the university. But theyre taking a different tack, pursuing their goals in more structural ways: weakening tenure, slashing budgets, upping teaching loads. It would be easy to dismiss this as simply a result of austerity programs, which have cut public services to the bone in states across America. But in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, however, the cuts have been accompanied by rhetoric that makes the true goal clear: attacking curriculums and professors who seem too liberal, and weakening the overall power of the university.

Take North Carolina. Since Republicans took over the state government in the Tea Party wave of 2010, the states universities have been under constant attack. Centers on the environment, voter engagement, and poverty studies have all been shuttered by the Board of Governors, which is appointed by the state legislature.

No sooner had Pat McCrory come into the governors office in 2013 than he began making broadsides against the university, using stark economic measures to target liberal arts programs, like gender studies, with which he disagreed. His stated view was that university programs should be funded based on how many of their graduates get jobs.

Notably, the McCrory campaign was bankrolled by Art Pope, founder of the Pope Center for Higher Education (now the Martin Center), an organization dedicated to increasing the diversity of ideas taught on campus. As its policy director, Jay Schalin, explained in 2015, the crisis at the university stems from the ideas that are being discussed and promoted: multiculturalism, collectivism, left-wing post-modernism. He wants less Michel Foucault on campus, more Ayn Rand.

But bills calling for the banning of works by leftist historian Howard Zinn or hiring professors based on party registration havent yet made it out of the proposal stage. What has? Steep funding cuts that have led to higher tuition, smaller faculties, and reduced access to higher education for low-income students.

That is the real threat to the professorate, and to the university more broadly. And as with the strategic conservative embrace of postmodernism, it also represents an erosion of a worldview that once understood the value of an advanced education beyond mere job preparation or vocational training. Unable to reverse the ivory towers tilt, many on the right are willing to smash it altogether, another sign of the nihilism infecting the conservative project more broadly.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginias Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Voxs home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

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Eternally frustrated by "liberal" universities, conservatives now want ... - Vox

Updated March 08, 2017 12:18:07

It is shaping as the Barnett Government's last roll of the electoral dice.

Later today, the WA Premier and Treasurer will front the media armed with their Treasury-assessed election costings, hoping to cast themselves as the trusted hand to guide the state back to a balanced budget and economic prosperity.

But for a government that pledged to fight the election on jobs and the economy, its campaign has looked more like lily-pad politics, skipping from issue to issue without a consistent message or clear core theme.

Some Liberals are understood to be increasingly frustrated by the lack of focus in their party's campaign message.

While Liberal campaign advertising has questioned the experience and credentials of Labor leader Mark McGowan, it has also traversed a wide range of issues from the renewable energy target to claims Labor is planning a swag of secret tax increases.

On the campaign trail, the messaging has been equally mixed. A joint media conference by the Premier and Treasurer last week seemed to flag a targeted attack on Labor's costings, and its unwillingness to submit them to Treasury.

But in the days preceding and following that media conference, the Premier's public pledges ranged from a tourist road to Balladonia and a boost to aquaculture, to sporting statues at the new stadium and an expansion of free public transport on public holidays.

Questioned about the Liberal campaign's apparent lack of focus, Mr Barnett denied it was out of touch with the voters' main concerns of jobs and economic security.

"No-one has made that comment to me, but can I say we have put out 70 policies. We have put out, from my experience, the most detailed agenda across every area," he said.

"A lot of that is about the growth in new sectors such as tourism, such as international relations, agriculture in particular."

By contrast, WA Labor has been relentless in its attack on the Barnett Government's plan to part-privatise Western Power, both in its advertising and on the campaign trail.

Mark McGowan was interviewed on the ABC 7.30 program on Monday night and appeared to be in a parallel universe as he all but ignored the questions from presenter Leigh Sales, and repeatedly returned to his campaign themes.

Asked about minor parties, he responded:

"Well, minor parties have always been around, and they've always attracted votes. But my role as the leader of the Labor Party is to set out a comprehensive agenda for Western Australia, and that's what we've done," he said.

"And it's based around jobs, not selling Western Power, our plan for health all of those sorts of initiatives are the sorts of things that we're standing for."

Asked about union election advertising, he responded:

"I don't know. I don't know the answer to the question."

"But there are important issues out there that all sorts of groups are advertising around. The sale of Western Power, which I oppose. Better funding for schools, which I support. Making sure that we have a decent approach to health and community safety and the like."

Mr Barnett spent most of the same day defending his party's preference deal with One Nation, and being increasingly frustrated by media questions about One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

"Look it is not what the West Australian public is talking about, the only people talking about Pauline Hanson, with great respect, are the media. No-one else is," he said.

Treasurer Mike Nahan dismissed questions suggesting the Liberal campaign had lacked an effective central theme to make up the ground on Labor in the last days before the election.

He said jobs and growth remain the Liberals key campaign issues and they would be reinforced with the release of the Liberal party election costings.

"It shows good government, focuses on what has to be done even if it's not necessarily popular. There's no flim-flam in our policies," he said.

He said the Liberals had a clear and credible plan to reduce debt and fund capital works through the part sale of Western Power, and would chart a path back to budget surplus by the end of the decade.

He said Labor had no plan.

"How do you reduce the deficit? How do you pay down debt? And how do you fund $5 billion in extra promises?" he said.

"If people fall for that, the warning I have for them is it's a one way street. After Saturday, they're stuck with him for four years."

Topics: government-and-politics, elections, wa

First posted March 08, 2017 08:44:19

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Analysis: Liberal lily-pad politics undermines efforts to cut through on Labor promises - ABC Online