Shelly Lundberg, Robert A. Pollak, and Jenna E. Stearns write,
We argue that college graduate parents use marriage as a commitment device to facilitate intensive joint investments in their children. For less educated couples for whom such investments are less desirable or less feasible, commitment and, hence, marriage has less value relative to cohabitation. The resulting socioeconomic divergence has implications for children and for future inequality.
How much of the decline in labor market fluidity is driven by the decline in geographic fluidity, and how much of the decline in geographic fluidity is driven by 2-income households? Especially when the two incomes are in different industries, the problem of trying to match 2 people in a new geographical location gets tough and the opportunity cost of 1 person requiring several months to find a new fit in a new location is large.
Intuitively, this would seem to be a big factor. I wonder what the trend is like in faculty mobility. I believe that there has been a large secular rise in the number of two-professor households, and unless at least one is a superstar, my guess is that mobility options are quite limited.
This theory predicts that overconfidence in one’s own beliefs leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger identification with political parties. Our predictions find strong support in a unique dataset that measures the overconfidence, and standard political characteristics, of a nationwide sample of over 3,000 adults. In particular, we find that overconfidence is the most reliable predictor of ideological extremeness and an important predictor of voter turnout in our data.
One of the most important cognitive biases is to over-weight your own experience and to under-weight the opinions of others who have different experiences. In a post last week, I talked about how I used to interview job candidates. One commenter correctly pointed out that people tend to over-estimate what they learn by interviewing job candidates relative to other sources of information.
I believe that overconfidence gets strongly rewarded in the realm of politics and punditry. Admitting that you might be wrong seems to hurt your credibility. Insisting that the other side is wrong is the best way to gain a following.
Mark Muro and Siddharth Kulharni write,
globalization, offshoring, and automation have since 1980 liquidated nearly 7 million manufacturing jobs in U.S. communities—more than one-third of U.S. manufacturing positions—as manufacturing employment plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million. Moreover, as the chart depicts, while the trend is longstanding, it actually accelerated in the 2000s.
The role of China’s expansion in this process is the subject of a Russ Roberts podcast with David Autor.
See comments by four of us here.
My comments on the podcast are below the fold. Continue reading
Wendy Rahn and Eric Oliver write,
Of course, authoritarians and populists can overlap and share dark tendencies toward nativism, racism and conspiracism. But they do have profoundly different perceptions of authority. Populists see themselves in opposition to elites of all kinds. Authoritarians see themselves as aligned with those in charge. This difference sets the candidates’ supporters apart.
Once again, I recommend the whole post.
I think of populism as a dangerously self-negating approach to politics. The problem is that the people attach themselves to a charismatic leader, and that leader is bound to have the sort of arrogance that populists supposedly resent.
Neil A. Abrams and M. Steven Fish write,
Scholars often treat the rule of law as a prerequisite for market-oriented economic policies such as liberalizing prices and trade and eradicating wasteful subsidies. They’re getting it backward. Instead, first eliminate the subsidies and purge the compromised bureaucrats who stand in the rule of law’s way. This is hard to do. It will provoke tremendous resistance from those who profit from the status quo. But it’s far more realistic and effective than simply encouraging countries to adopt the rule of law.
Read the whole thing. To me, one implication is that massive foreign aid is likely to hinder the appearance of the rule of law. To me, the poster child for that is the West Bank and Gaza. The once-entrepreneurial Palestinian society was replaced by criminal gangs, because there was more profit to be found in getting control over the distribution of aid than in business.
I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.
Call it the civilization-vs.-barbarism hypothesis to explain the increase in labor immobility. Pointer from Mark Thoma, who I am sure looks at this from the standpoint of a different axis.
French is commenting on a piece by Kevin Williamson. More coverage here.
“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces,” the NR roving correspondent writes. “[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves.”
Partisan identities have become increasingly aligned with religious and racial identities. Republicans tend toward Christian and white identities, and Democrats tend toward non-religious and non-white identities. With these highly aligned identities, people tend to be more sensitive to threats from outsiders, reacting with higher levels of anger than those with cross-cutting identities.
Read the whole post. I wanted to excerpt all of it. My one quibble is that I wish that she had not only used Trump supporters as examples of what she is talking about. I think she is saying that people on the left also react angrily to the identity threats posed by those with differing political beliefs and cultural traits, but my guess is that many of the readers of the post will miss that.
I have been interested in the issue of tribalism in politics for quite some time. See, of course, The Three Languages of Politics.
Most remarkably, by the most recent wave in 2011, almost half — 44 percent — of U.S. non-college graduates approved of having a strong leader unchecked by elections and Congress.
The chart in the post shows that 28 percent of college graduates agree. To me, this suggests that the problem is hardly limited to those without a college education. In fact, I am much more worried about the college graduates who do not believe in the Constitution.
For the most part, the post consists of “analysis” that tries to connect dots that I am not sure are connected–between low levels of education, conservative beliefs on social issues, and support for Donald Trump.
Raven Molloy and others, in a paper for a Brookings conference, show that there has been a largely unexplained decline in the rate of job switching and other measures of what they call labor market fluidity over the past three decades. Pointer from Nick Bunker via Mark Thoma.
My thoughts turn to the four forces, and in particular to globalization and the rise of the Internet. Think of three margins of substitution:
1. Substitute American workers for other American workers.
2. Substitute foreign workers for American workers.
3. Substitute capital equipment (including computers) for American workers.
If the elasticity of substitution has gone up for (2) and (3), might it not follow that we would see less of (1)? In more concrete terms, if a firm wishes to expand, nowadays it can increase production overseas or use more capital equipment, rather than hire more American workers. That would reduce (domestic) labor fluidity.