- There is apparently a university in the US which is considered a paradise for conservatives. If you ask me, this kind of bubble sounds more like a nightmare. I’m sure most liberal academics who read this will agree, but instead of making fun of this university, they should ask themselves how different from it their own environment really is.
- The National Review published a good article on muslims who leave islam in the US and Canada. Similar things could be told about the situation in Europe. I will probably come back to the topic of apostasy in islam at some point.
- Kimberley Strassel argues in the Wall Street Journal that, unlike the tea party, the anti-Trump movement is unlikely to be effective and could even be counter-productive. She points out that, given how far left the grassroots have moved compare to some Democrats in the Senate who are up for reelection in 2018, they could be replaced by ideologically pure candidates who are unlikely to do well.
- On the same topic, Politico has a good piece on the problem that Trump poses to Democrats, some of whom are starting to realize that outrage may lose whatever efficiency it has when it never stops. I would add that, by pretending to be outraged all the time and inflaming their base, they make things such as what happened in Berkeley last week more likely and this will obviously play right into Trump’s hands. Not all Democrats seem to have understood, however, judging by the quote at the end of the article by Dan Malloy, the Democratic governor of Connecticut, who compares the situation to Vietnam. He says that, just as Vietnam was only resolved when the US left Vietnam, the current hysteria will only be resolved when Trump leaves Washington. It may well be right about this, but it doesn’t mean that the hysteria will accelerate the process. Indeed, he should remember that, when the anti-war grassroots took over the Democratic party at the end of the 1960’s, the result was McGovern’s trouncing in 1972…
- Sandy Baum makes what strikes me as very good points on the so-called student debt crisis. I haven’t researched that issue, so if you disagree with her and know of evidence that contradicts her claims, please don’t hesitate to write a comment.
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Student debt crisis: Baum is right that students don’t default at a rate that warrant claims of a crisis. She mentions, for instance, that most of the debt is carried by graduate students. These are mostly medical students and law students. The federal loan limits reflects this fact. The aggregate lifetime loan limit for medical students is $224K (https://www.aamc.org/advocacy/meded/79232/federal_student_loans.html). It’s a lot less for those pursuing other fields.
But default rates aren’t the only way to assess whether student debt levels are healthy/sustainable. I think a greater concern is how debt is affecting college and career choices. For instance, there is, unsurprisingly, a correlation between the median debt for medical students (c.$195k) and the aggregate lifetime borrowing limit. As one goes up, so does the other, and the causal relationship between the two is less than clear. As debt has increased, physicians are avoiding primary care in favor of higher paid specialities. Some even refuse medicare and medicaid since the reimbursement rates are too low to allow them repay their debt and live a reasonable life. (I’m currently in the Cornell Medical Library in NY, so you should be able to guess who I am.)
Why is this a problem? There are areas of the country in such short supply of primary care physicians that they are allowing unsupervised graduates treat patients. Making things worse is that the ACA has lead to physicians retiring early (check the AAMC). Who knows what happens if the US stops being attractive to foreign doctors. Since student debt is deterring new physicians from primary care, debt levels indirectly make the shortage of primary care physicians worse. There is no obvious solution to the shortage that doesn’t tackle debt levels. Increasing the number of doctors won’t help. Why would they work in fields that won’t let them repay their debt? Dems and Reps talk about lowering health care costs (not merely insurance), but that means someone will get paid less. And unless medical debt is tackled, doctors won’t accept lower pay.
There are many others ways that debt affects students. Some are so debt averse that they pursue majors that seem to have an obvious pay off regardless of whether the major suits their talents/interests. Some refuse to borrow to pay for a summer class even if doing so might allow them finish earlier. Still others insist on working as many hours as they can to avoid debt regardless of how holding down a job threatens their academic performance. I know students who fall in each of these categories and I imagine my university is not unique.
The Student Aid website is worth spending time on: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/
Thanks for the comment, this is interesting. Baum has written a book where she discusses student debt, so perhaps she gets into that sort of considerations, but I don’t know because I haven’t read it.
I plan to post something about health care costs in the US soon, because I have read something really interesting about this recently, which really changed my way of thinking about this.
Also, you mention that some doctors refuse patients insure through Medicare/Medicaid, which I hear a lot but I have no idea of widespread it is. Do you know of any data about this?
There is a lot written about it. Here is a study from 2011: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/31/8/1673.abstract
Things have changed since then. But Merritt Hawkins did a study in about 2014 about medicaid you could google. I think the problems with medicare are less pronounced.
Medicaid has been moving to a valued based payments rather than procedure based basements. That’s causing some significant tension now. You can get an overview of how physicians are thinking about the field here: https://www.merritthawkins.com/physicians-foundation-survey.aspx
I didn’t download the full report.
The AAMC (for med schools) and the AMC websites have decent info about the medical field. The ‘New England Journal of Medicine’ also publishes articles on the changing state of the profession.
Post the link to whatever you were reading about health care costs. I don’t understand it and the media rarely reports on why it might be so costly. I find it interesting, for instance, how some costs might be baked into advanced treatments, e.g., the advent and use of phenomenal, but insanely expensive to produce, biologics. It may be impossible to produce these and personalized drugs/treatments cheaply, which raises cool questions about what, if anything, a state should do about health care.
Thanks for the references, I’ll look this up when I have time.
As for health care cost, I just saw that the guy who wrote the post I was referring to, which is 2 years old or something like that, had written a series of posts to update it. I want to read them before I write a post about it explaining the gist of it, so it may take me a little bit of time, but I’ll get to it.
I still haven’t really seen any convincing evidence that constant hysteria will not be a successful political strategy for the left. It worked like gangbusters for the right over the past eight years, after all, and Trump is orders of magnitude worse than Obama, by any measure. As far as I can tell, big-picture sociological questions about which political strategies are optimal under what circumstances are far beyond the reach of present-day science, but that means we should be admitting we don’t have any real knowledge on the subject and practicing quietism, rather than dressing up wishful thinking (“the left will be most successful if it behaves exactly as I want it to!”) as strategic wisdom.
First, you keep saying that Republicans were also hysterical after Obama was elected, but I think they clearly weren’t nearly as hysterical as liberals today. I don’t recall seeing conservatives destroying property, blocking highways and airports, etc. in 2009. You may say that it’s a minority of liberals who do that, which is true, but that’s completely irrelevant to my point. You’re also mischaracterizing my point as being that any form of hysteria is wrong in any political context. But I didn’t say that. My point is that, given who the Democrats need to swing back to them in order to win in 2020, this strategy is unlikely to be successful. It’s also not true that there is no evidence that this kind of antics have a negative effect on voters. See for instance this paper which provide at least some evidence for that claim: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2911177. It’s true that it’s difficult to assess that sort of questions, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t make educated guesses. I’m pretty confident that I’m not taking a huge leap of faith when I say that white professionals in Midwest towns aren’t too happy when they see activists block the highway they take on their way to work or destroying a Starbucks… Anyway, I wasn’t even trying to make an argument, I was just offering a brief comment on a piece I found interesting. I plan to write something about the election in which I will offer a deeper analysis, but this post didn’t intend to do that.
I agree that there’s evidence that black blocs will be counter-productive– counter-productive from the perspective of ordinary liberals, anyway, the black blocs are getting exactly what they want– but that’s not the sort of hysteria we’re talking about. What I want to see is evidence that a constant drumbeat of criticism of Trump (the less rooted in reality, the better) and obstruction of every policy he introduces would not prove to be just as successful for the left over the next four years as it was for the right during the Obama administration. Trump spent years accusing Obama of being a Muslim Kenyan, secretly in league with the terrorists, and you see where that got him? Maybe the next president will be someone who calls Trump a fascist sexual predator with every breath. It’s… not an ideal outcome, but that’s where the right and its madness has taken our country.
I don’t think there’s any room to doubt that the right spent the last eight years mired in hysteria and delusion. Here are some fine examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_religion_conspiracy_theories
If you’re looking, specifically, for law-breakers who were lionized by the right, here are some of those too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge
Anarchists aren’t the only problem. It’s not anarchists or not just them who block highways/aiports. This has become mainstream among American liberals and it will backfire on them. And it is what we’re talking about or at least part of what we’re talking about. If the Democrats and the media are constantly demonizing Trump, you will inevitably get that kind of things, because a lot of people will believe the nonsense.
But, even short of that kind of stunts, I think constant hysteria will be counter-productive. Again, the people Democrats need to swing back to win in 2020 are mostly uneducated whites in rural areas or small/medium towns, who don’t seem to be particularly moved by the usual accusations of racism/xenophobia/etc. against Trump. Indeed, there are plenty of polls which show that people in that demographics overwhelming support restrictionist immigration policies, don’t care much for political correctness, etc. Yet those issues are systematically at the center of the hysteria about Trump. It’s also worth noting that hysterical name-calling against Trump is exactly what the Democrats have already done during the campaign and we’ve seen where it got them… Will this become more efficient with repetition? I guess it’s possible, but I don’t see any particularly good reason to think so.
I’m also well aware of all the stupid shit that the right has said about Obama/Clinton since 2008, but those clearly didn’t have the same traction that anti-Trump nonsense enjoys among mainstream liberals today. For instance, even Fox News never endorsed the birther movement (although it flirted with it and arguably gave it a platform), to say nothing of stuff like the pizzagate. Today, you can hear people endorse the craziest views about Trump, such as the theory that is Putin’s Mandchurian candidate, on MSNBC or read it in the New York Times. (Krugman called Trump “Putin’s Siberian candidate” in print on several occasions.) Now, perhaps it’s in part because the media is overwhelmingly liberal and not just because liberals are more prone to believe nonsense about Trump than conservatives were prone to believe nonsense about Obama, but this doesn’t matter much. (Also, this is anecdotal evidence, but while I don’t personally know any intelligent conservatives who believed the most egregious nonsense about Obama, I know plenty of intelligent liberals who believe ridiculous shit about Trump. Several of them explicitly believe that Trump might round up muslims and put them in camps like Roosevelt did with the Japanese during WW2. Those are people with PhDs!)
Similarly, the law-breakers you mentioned weren’t lionized by mainstream conservative outlets, whereas at least some of the anti-Trump law-breaking has been defended in perfectly mainstream liberal venues. Perhaps more importantly, this kind of stunts were not nearly as common when Obama was President, than today under Trump. I have absolutely no doubt that I could already find more examples of anti-Trump law-breaking since he was inaugurated, than you could find examples of anti-Obama law-breaking between 2008 and 2016. I really don’t understand how people can make this kind of false equivalency, when it’s so obvious that the situation is different.
1. The constant criticism of Trump during the campaign apparently succeeded in making more than half of the country despise him (with a huge assist, of course, from Trump himself). So it may be that this is an effective strategy, and the only reason it did not ultimately win the presidency for Clinton is that the right had a twenty-year head start on smearing her.
2. I don’t think you get to dismiss the allegations that Trump’s campaign made illicit overtures to the Kremlin as conspiracy theories, anymore. Both Congress and the intelligence services are taking the accusations seriously enough to investigate them, and we know now that Trump’s NSA Michael Flynn had illegal contact with the Russian ambassador prior to the inauguration, and subsequently lied to both the Vice President and the public about it. I’m happy to suspend judgment on the the matter until the investigation plays out, but it is currently a live possibility that Trump or members of his campaign team may have betrayed our country to the Russians.
3. Fox News did, in fact, initially promote the Bundy gang as patriotic American heroically resisting federal tyranny:
http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/04/18/fox-champions-bundy-supporters-who-threatened-v/198947
They only reversed course when Cliven Bundy started musing about how black people were better off back when they were slaves. I agree with your larger point here, though: it does seem like the left is generally more supportive of civil disobedience than the right. On the other hand, rightists are a lot more likely to pick up guns and murder a bunch of people for having the wrong skin color or praying to the wrong God, so maybe this comes out as a wash? I don’t know.
1) I don’t believe that for a second, but I suppose we’ll know soon enough.
2) Actually, I totally get to dismiss those ridiculous accusations, because most of them are preposterous and the evidence in the public record is clearly insufficient to assert them. Again, I’m working on a very long post on this, in which I will make that case. The fact that people are forced to pretend that they are shocked because Flynn allegedly violated the Logan Act is actually a pretty good sign of how ridiculous weak their case is. The Logan Act has never been enforced and there isn’t a single person in Washington who actually cares about this. It was just the excuse to go after Flynn. It’s perfectly normal for members of the incoming administration to reach out to foreign government before they are sworn in to smooth the transition. And, as I argue in my latest post, even if Flynn suggested that Trump might lift the sanctions against Russia, then he should be praised for it, not criticized. Even if I were wrong about this, which I’m not, this would largely be irrelevant to the point I was making, because the media was presenting this Russia story as fact way before there was anything to support it except wild rumors in Washington. (I still think there is nothing to support those accusations, except those which are relatively benign, but at least now there is the appearance of something to support them, although even this is only true because journalists are incompetent and biased.)
3) You’re probably right that, at least in the US, right-wing extremists are more likely to kill people than left-wing extremists. But the right-wing extremists who kill people are well beyond the range of what is acceptable within the Republican party, whereas plenty of left-wing activists who engage in not as bad law-breaking are well within the mainstream of American liberalism and Democrats have no problem associating with them. No Republican official would have invited the Bundys to share the stage with him, but most Democrats have no problem inviting leaders of Black Lives Matter who shut down traffic on highways for hours on stage. My hypothesis is that people in fly-over-America don’t like that.