Many moving parts

I'm on Brad DeLong's email list, and I find the Berkeley prof of economic history often has worthwhile insights. Here's a link to a recent post of his which needs copy editing and also consists of a grab bag of disparate thoughts that don't always work together very well. Still, it gives us some starting points for trying to figure out what exactly is going on right now. Yes, people who believed things that simply are not true voted for the Dumpster, whereas people who believed true facts voted for Harris. We've been there before but here's a highly edited summary from BD:

 

Violent crime rates are about the same as they were in the 2010s, and perhaps 1/3 of what they were in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet many [The Reuters/Ipsos Core Political Survey] believed crime rates were at or near all-time highs. They supported Trump 26%-point margin. Those better informed about the actual crime statistics, by contrast, broke for Harris by a 65%-point margin.

The United States achieved its “soft landing” with respect to inflation some 18 months ago. The inflation problem caused by the plague and the rapid-recovery ... is no longer a significant issue. Yes, overall prices are about 20% higher because of the inflation episodes, but so are incomes. And no big redistributions of wealth were generated by the process. The key and salient indicator of gasoline prices has returned to its pre-plague levels. Those who undersood that the inflation rate has fallen back to near-normal supported Harris by a margin of 53%-points. Those who believed inflation remained high broke for Trump by a 19%-point margin.

The American media report on the stock market multiple times a day. They have decided it is the summary scoreboard for the economy as a whole—god alone knows why. Over the past nine months, the stock market has reached an all-time high on about one out of every four days. Near ubiquitous coverage of the stock market's performance should makes it difficult to avoid being aware of this. Those who had listened and remembered at least once broke for Harris by a margin of 20%-points. Those who were misinformed went for Trump by a 9%-margin.

And then there is the border: those who knew that unauthorized border crossings were at a low relative to the past few years gave a 59%-point edge to Harris, while those who thought that claim was false gave a 17%-point edge to Trump.

The recent election was extremely close. In such a close vote, each small factor made the decisive difference. But misinformation and its correlation with voting intentions is not a small but rather a very big factor.

It may be that beliefs about the world shape who people decide to vote for. But it also may be that people hold beliefs because of who they have already decided to vote for. If the second is the case—if people decided to vote for Donald Trump because they liked his presentation-of-self on The Apprentice and since as a real asshole, and concluded that he would as president be mean to people and they liked that—then the present and future of the United States and indeed of the world is very depressing indeed.

But I think that is unlikely. I think people voted for Donald Trump because they believed what Fox News and others of that ilk put in front of their eyes on their screens. They knew that their one's own neighborhood and personal circumstances were relatively good, with low crime rates, gas prices at normal, and their incomes having kept pace with inflation. But they were shown that a lot of people were struggling, that the system was broken, and that we needed to do something to shake government into a better configuration—and the driving asshole boss that the Reality TV film editors on The Apprentice created out of a mass of low-quality footage appeared to be what America needed. Voting for change, not out of personal necessity but out of concern for the greater good, demonstrates a commendable civic-minded perspective focused on solving societal challenges, rather than just focusing on one's own immediate situation that case, the state of the American voter is good. 

 

Well, I'm afraid I don't agree with his conclusion. And that's because what he argued before all this convinces me that it is wrong. That's for next time.