Month: May 2023

My Defense of the A-Bomb

It’s not what you might think.

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in the end of World War II. Like many other commentators, I have defended the decision by President Truman to drop the bombs on utilitarian grounds. That case has been made by many, Richard B. Frank among them:

The critics [of the use of the A-bomb to defeat Japan] share three fundamental premises. The first is that Japan’s situation in 1945 was catastrophically hopeless. The second is that Japan’s leaders recognized that fact and were seeking to surrender in the summer of 1945. The third is that thanks to decoded Japanese diplomatic messages, American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation. The critics divide over what prompted the decision to drop the bombs in spite of the impending surrender, with the most provocative arguments focusing on Washington’s desire to intimidate the Kremlin. Among an important stratum of American society–and still more perhaps abroad–the critics’ interpretation displaced the traditionalist view….

[I]t is clear [from a review of the evidence now available] that all three of the critics’ central premises are wrong. The Japanese did not see their situation as catastrophically hopeless. They were not seeking to surrender, but pursuing a negotiated end to the war that preserved the old order in Japan, not just a figurehead emperor. Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood–as one analytical piece in the “Magic” Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts–that “until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies.” This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945. [“Why Truman Dropped the Bomb,” Washington Examiner, August 8, 2005]

Among the “countless lives” saved were those of Japanese as well as American nationals. I have in the past defended the dropping of the A-bombs because of the saving of “countless lives”. As a convert to the ranks of anti-utilitarianism, I now reject that argument. I cannot, in good conscience, assert with god-like authority that the killing of X people was worth the saving of Y lives, even where Y is vastly greater than X.

But I am nevertheless able to defend the dropping of the A-bombs because doing so very possibly saved certain lives. Six of my mother’s seven brothers served in the Navy and Coast Guard during World War II. (The seventh had been in service several years before the war, and was ineligible for further duty because his skull was fractured in a civilian accident in 1941.) Had the war continued, a long and bloody invasion of Japan would have ensued. One or more of my uncles might have been killed or injured seriously. My maternal grandmother, to whom I was greatly attached, would have suffered great emotional distress, as would have my aunts and many of my cousins. Their emotional distress and sadness would have become my emotional distress and sadness.

Beyond that, many Americans who had fought to defend the United States from the militaristic, authoritarian regimes in Tokyo and Berlin would have died. Their deaths would have affected many of my friends and their families, and would have made America a sadder and poorer place in which to live.

I empathize with the Japanese victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with the Japanese victims of other attacks by U.S. armed forces. I hate the thought of death and suffering — unless they are deserved as punishment for wrong-doing — regardless of the nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, social class, or political views of the victims. But I do not equate the lives of those nearest and dearest to me with the lives of those distant from me. Leftists, “liberals” (if there any left), and left-libertarians like to pretend that they do, but they are either fools or liars when they say such things.

"Inherit the Wind" in Retrospect

Rejecting sophistry.

I enjoyed immensely Inherit the Wind, a 1960 “message” film directed by Stanley Kramer, which I saw in the year of its release. The film starred two sterling actors of Hollywood’s true Golden Age: Spencer Tracy and Fredric March.

I enjoyed the film not only for the acting and literate script, but also because it portrayed Tracy’s character — Clarence Darrow in the guise of “Henry Drummond” — as the hero of the piece who demolishes his opponent at the bar — William Jennings Bryan in the guise of “Matthew Harrison Brady”.

“Drummond” defends “Bertram Cates” (John T. Scopes), who is on trial in 1925 for violating a Tennessee law that forbids the teaching of evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. “Brady” is one of the prosecutors, and the only one who figures prominently in the film.

According to the script of Inherit the Wind, Drummond/Darrow exposes Brady/Bryan as an ignorant religious zealot after putting him on the stand as a witness for the prosecution. Thus my enjoyment of the film, which I saw when I was a “sophisticated” junior in college and a recent convert from Catholicism to agnosticism.

Time passes, and the world seems much different to me now. I utterly reject the hatefulness of anti-religious zealotry, which has morphed into a key component of the vast left-wing conspiracy to suppress all dissent from America’s new totalitarianism. Thus my enjoyment of a piece by Mark Pulliam. Writing at Law & Liberty in “Inheriting the Wind, or Reaping the Whirlwind?“, Pulliam exposes Inherit the Wind as a piece of grossly inaccurate anti-religious propaganda. He ends with this:

In Inherit the Wind, Bryan/Brady is unfairly presented as a ridiculous fool—a pathetic figure. Bryan’s words show that he was thoughtful, decent, and—for his time—wise, albeit uninformed. And he won the case, beating the man regarded as one of the most formidable courtroom advocates of all time. Bryan was not so much an opponent of evolution as he was of Social Darwinism, and the Nietzschean philosophy he felt it represented.

Unfortunately, Bryan’s legacy as a man of faith has been besmirched by Hollywood’s willingness to distort history in the aid of promoting its agenda. The left’s disdain for religion and religious belief has only gained momentum since 1925. From simply mocking piety, the elite intelligentsia has progressed to banning prayer in public schools, forbidding aid to religious schools, removing religious symbols from public property, deeming Judeo-Christian morality to be “irrational,” and persecuting Christian bakers (and other vendors) for honoring their religious consciences.  In 2016, enough American voters—many who are arguably the heirs to the long-ridiculed citizens of Dayton—rose up and pushed back.

The Scopes trial, so badly mischaracterized in Inherit the Wind, better illustrates another Biblical verse, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

Amen.

A Thought about Conspiracy Theories

Unfalsifiable hypotheses.

A conspiracy theory (e.g., LBJ was behind the assassination of JFK) is often dismissed because, it is said, no party to the conspiracy has ever admitted that there was such a conspiracy or has left any evidence of it.

Why would a party to a conspiracy talk about it or leave any evidence of it? The darker the conspiracy (e.g., the elimination of a president) the less likely it is that a party to it would say anything about it or leave any evidence of it. What evidence that might be found is readily dismissed as circumstantial or coincidental. A person who might have been privy to a particular aspect of the conspiracy, and who years later admits some knowledge of it, is readily dismissed as delusional, senile, or publicity-seeking.

What about the conspiracy against Trump: to defeat him in 2016, to hamstring his presidency, to deny him re-election in 2020, and to legally harass him and thereby make him unelectable in 2024? I would call it an ad hoc conspiracy; it developed over time as various parties acted to advance particular interests of their. But it wasn’t a conspiracy that was carefully planned at the outset and executed according to that plan.

An effective conspiracy leaves no trace but the outcome of the conspiracy. An effective conspiracy is planned and executed by persons who are committed fully to its success and competent to make it succeed without detection of the conspiracy and its workings. Suspicions may abound, but they are left without sound footing.

Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

The Interest-Group Paradox

“Free lunches” abound.

Pork-barrel legislation exemplifies the interest-group paradox in action, though the paradox encompasses much more than pork-barrel legislation. There are myriad government programs that — like pork-barrel projects — are intended to favor particular classes of individuals. Here is a minute sample:

  • Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, for the benefit of the elderly

  • Tax credits and deductions, for the benefit of low-income families, charitable and other non-profit institutions, and home buyers (with mortgages)

  • Progressive income-tax rates, for the benefit of persons in the mid-to-low income brackets

  • Subsidies for various “essential” industries and products (e.g., solar panels, wind farms, EVs)

  • Import quotas, tariffs, and other restrictions on trade, for the benefit of particular industries and/or labor unions

  • Pro-union laws (in many States), for the benefit of unions and unionized workers

  • Non-smoking ordinances, for the benefit of bar and restaurant employees and non-smoking patrons.

What do these examples have in common? Answer: Each comes with costs. There are direct costs (e.g., higher taxes for some persons, higher prices for imported goods), which the intended beneficiaries and their proponents hope to impose on non-beneficiaries. Just as important, there are hidden costs of various kinds (e.g., disincentives to work and save, disincentives to make investments that spur economic growth).

You may believe that a particular program is worth what it costs — given that you probably have little idea of its direct costs and no idea of its hidden costs. The problem is that millions of your fellow Americans believe the same thing about each of their favorite programs. Because there are thousands of government programs (federal, State, and local), each intended to help a particular class of citizens at the expense of others, the net result is that almost no one in this fair land enjoys a “free lunch”. Even the relatively few persons who might seem to have obtained a “free lunch” — homeless persons taking advantage of a government-provided shelter — often are victims of the “free lunch” syndrome. Some homeless persons may be homeless because they have lost their jobs and can’t afford to own or rent housing. But they may have lost their jobs because of pro-union laws, minimum-wage laws, or progressive tax rates (which caused “the rich” to create fewer jobs through business start-ups and expansions). And they may be homeless because programs meant to aid the homeless encourage more homelessness.

The paradox that arises from the “free lunch” syndrome is like the paradox of panic, in that there is a  crowd of interest groups rushing toward a goal — a “pot of gold” — and (figuratively) crushing each other in the attempt to snatch the pot of gold before another group is able to grasp it. The gold that any group happens to snatch is a kind of fool’s gold: It passes from one fool to another in a game of beggar-thy-neighbor, and as it passes much of it falls into the maw of bureaucracy.

The interest-group paradox has dominated American politics since the advent of “Progressivism” in the late 1800s. Today, most Americans are either “progressives” or victims of “progressivism”. All too often they are both.

Theodore Dalrymple Speaks for Me

Almost none of the news is fit to print.

Here:

Among the proofs that we [humans] were not made for happiness but on the contrary often seek out its opposite is the fact that so many of us follow the news closely, though we know it will make us wretched to do so. We pretend that we have a need to be informed and are shocked when we meet someone who hasn’t the faintest idea of what is going on in the world. How can he bear to be so ignorant, how can he be so indifferent? It is our duty as citizens of a democracy to be informed, or to inform ourselves, even at the cost of our own misery; because, of course, news rarely gives us reasons to rejoice.

Economic news is almost always bad. The currency is too strong or too weak, never just right. The interest rate is too high or too low. Inflation is worryingly slow or fast. Natural resources are running out or no longer needed, and all the equipment to obtain them is redundant. Too much is imported and not enough exported, or vice versa. The minimum wage is too generous or too mean or should not exist at all. Shares are overvalued or undervalued, but however they are valued, the next crash is round the corner—though, of course, no exact date can be put upon it, which somehow makes the anxiety all the greater.

Political news, especially in relation to foreign affairs, is yet worse. The leaders of even the best countries are scoundrels, otherwise they wouldn’t be leaders. They are incompetent in everything except self-advancement and self-preservation. They don’t care a fig for the man in the street (of whom one is one). Whoever replaces them, however, will be even worse. Not for nothing did Gibbon tell us that “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The main point:

For the vast majority of those who follow the news, there is nothing they can do about it. They follow the news not because, by doing so, they might make it better, or because they will base any personal decisions on it, but because they are addicted. Somerset Maugham pointed out that great readers often read because they have the equivalent of withdrawal symptoms (in this case, boredom) if their eyes do not fall on print for any length of time, and they would rather read a railway timetable or the label of the ingredients of a prepared food that they have never eaten than nothing at all. “Of that lamentable company am I,” said Maugham—and so am I.

People are addicted to news that has a deleterious psychological effect on them but that they are impotent to affect [emphasis added].

I live with a news junkie, and abandon the TV room immediately after the local weather forecast so that I am not subjected to NBC Nightly News (a shoutfest of gloom and doom).

In general, I eschew “news” (usually propaganda) about current events for the reason a vampire eschews sunlight: It shrivels my soul.

Baseball's Greatest Hitters for Average

Something to chew on (bubblegum, of course).

I published several posts at my old blogs about the American League’s greatest hitters for average: here, here, here, here, and here. The analysis that underlies the findings in those posts is complex — and unnecessarily so. In the last of the posts, I address and dismiss another writer’s exceedingly complex approach to the question of who was the greatest hitter.

That writer and I are both guilty of having glossed over the statistical uncertainties that arise from complex approaches that try to account for such differences as these (and others):

  • Ballpark advantage/disadvantage (a broad measure that doesn’t reflect individual hitting patterns and adjustments)

  • The (apparent) downward trend in reaction time (a mass phenomenon, if true, but one that may not apply to the best ballplayers of various generations)

  • Age (which must matter, but the effect isn’t uniform).

I am therefore reverting to a simple method that paints a broad picture of relative batting prowess.

I am also including National League hitters. Thus the title of this post.

Here’s my new method:

  1. To be considered, a player must have won at least two batting titles.*

  2. I computed for each player (list below**) a series of centered, three-year batting averages for three-year spans in which the player averaged at least 400 plate appearances a season. I used three-year averages to “smooth” year-to-year ups and downs and weed out one-year wonders.

  3. To normalized the raw batting average, I computed a series of centered, three-year league batting averages for each major league.

  4. I adjusted the AL averages downward (by .0067) for the years 1973 through 2022, to account for the rise in the league batting average with the AL’s adoption of the designated-hitter rule in 1973.***

  5. I divided the centered, three-year averages for each player (step 2) by the corresponding centered, adjusted, three-year league averages (steps 3 and 4). The resulting value (e.g., 1.25) indicates how well the player hit for the three years (plotted against the middle year) relative to the league average for the same three years (e.g., 1.25 = 25 percent above the league average).

Figure 1 is a chronological comparison of the adjusted averages for each player who had the highest average at least once. The legend lists the players in the order in which they first attained the highest average.

FIGURE 1

Here’s how many times each player attained top rank:

Altuve’s total — and possibly Cabrera’s — will drop as new names join the list of those eligible for consideration.

Figure 2 offers an age-based comparison, for what it’s worth. It certainly simplifies matters.

FIGURE 2

Figure 2 highlights Cobb’s dominance. The rest of the players, except for Rose and Yastrzemski are there on merit. Rose and Yaz simply persevered.

Rose, for many reasons, deserves obloquy. I will restrict my remarks here to Rose’s mistakenly praised accomplishment of compiling more hits than Cobb did: 4,256 vs. 4,189. Rose had 14,053 at-bats to Cobb’s 11,440. If Rose had hit .366 (as Cobb did), he would have compiled 5,146 hits, 890 more than his actual total. Here’s another way to look at: If Rose had compiled 4,189 hits in his first 11,440 at-bats (as Cobb did), he would have gone 67 for 2,613 in the rest of his career — a risible average of .026.

A final note: Ted Williams’s record would shine more brightly if he hadn’t missed most of five seasons to military service during World War II and the Korean War. He will come to the fore when I get to all-around hitters — batsmen who hit for high average with power.

* I made exceptions for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who each won one title but are legends of the game. Nor could Shoeless Joe Jackson be neglected. I also made exceptions for Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline, who each won one title and had long, outstanding careers. I rejected Larry Walker, who derived the unquestionable benefit of playing almost half of his games in Coors Field, where there’s plenty of room to hit the ball where the outfielders aren’t — and into the stands because of Denver’s thin air. I also rejected Barry Bonds and Manny Ramirez of PED infamy. (Though Ramirez had only one batting title, he enjoyed a long, high-average, but tainted career.)

** Here’s the list of batters I considered, with the spans of their major-league seasons in parentheses. The links lead to their pages at Baseball-Reference.com, from which I drew all the statistics used in this analysis:

I began with Lajoie and Wagner because of their prowess and also because their careers substantially overlapped the early years of the American League. Lajoie started in the NL, but ended up playing most of his games in the AL.

*** The DH adjustment is .0067, which is the difference between the changes in the American and National Leagues’ averages between two spans: 1901-1972 and 1973-2022. The AL average increased slightly — by .0003 between 1901-1972 and 1973-2022. But the NL average dropped by .006 between those two spans. I attribute the difference of .0067 to the AL’s adoption of the DH.

The Paradoxes and Consequences of Liberty and Prosperity

The age of the Golden Mean is long past.

How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

That stands as a metaphor for America’s decline.

Here’s another one: The soil in which the seeds of decline were to be planted was broken in the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The seeds were planted and nourished by “leaders”, “intellectuals”, and “activists” from TR’s time to the present. The poisonous crop burst blossomed brightly in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, but it had not yet engulfed the land. It continued to spread slowly (and often unheeded) for several decades before racing across the land in recent years. Its poisonous vines are now strangling liberty and prosperity.

These are the paradoxes of liberty and prosperity: Without a moral foundation they lead to their own destruction.

If you value liberty, you do not countenance speech and actions that subvert it. If you value prosperity, you must be careful not to let it breed the kind of idleness (of mind and body) that gives rise to speech and actions that subvert liberty — and thus prosperity.

The Founders understood those things. They believed that the Constitution would preserve liberty and foster prosperity because they believed that Americans would remain religious and moral. They did not believe that Americans would undermine liberty by being soft on crime, by feeding masses (and elites) at the public trough (and at the expense of taxpayers), or by accommodating foreign aggression. They did not believe that Americans would countenance such things, nor that political leaders would suborn and join efforts to ostracize, suppress, and oppress those Americans who oppose such things.

The Founders, sadly, were wrong. The did not and could not foresee these events (and many more not mentioned):

  • A goodly fraction of Americans would spurn religion and become morally slack and complacent about the preservation of liberty.

  • Freedom of speech and assembly would be turned against liberty, to foster crime, lack of personal responsibility, and the accommodation of deadly enemies, within and without.

  • Firearms, always omnipresent in America for useful purposes, would become violent, murderous extensions of a growing tendency to toward psychological instability in a morally rootless populace.

  • Governments, political “elites”, and corporations would celebrate and reward (or fail to punish) persons based on the color of their skin (as long as it isn’t white or “yellow”)*, their pro-constitutional political views (which “exonerate” many whites), and their sex (preferably female or confused).

  • Abortion would become legal and support for abortion would be openly and boastfully proclaimed by political leaders and “elites”. Unborn human beings would be disposed of as inconveniences and treated like garbage.

  • Parents would lose control of the upbringing of their children, who might be cajoled into psychologically devastating treatments and surgeries by teachers and others under the rubric of “gender-affirming care”.

  • Women and girls would be forced to room with, shower with, and compete against males who “identify” as females (or “other”).

  • Intelligence and superior (non-athletic) skills would be denounced as unfair and “white supremacist” (with Asians counting as white).

  • Lawlessness and pathological deviancy would be rewarded (or not punished).

  • Leading politicians and “activists” would bay and howl for the confiscation of arms, under the rubric of “gun control”, when the underlying problem isn’t gun ownership by moral and mental depravity.

  • Political “leaders” would enable and allow a virtual invasion of the country, despite its negative consequences for the “little people” whom those “leaders” and other “elites” claim to champion.

  • The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo-science to force Americans into isolation, disrupt the economy, and burden the poorest Americans because of a virus that would have run its course naturally and less destructively than had it been combated scientifically.

  • The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo science to make Americans (especially poor Americans) poorer in an unnecessary and futile quest to “save the planet” from the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and other productive substances that the majority of the world’s populace will not refrain from using. (Regarding the state of science, see Maggie Kelly’s, “Professors Publish ‘Controversial’ Paper Defending Merit in Science”, The College Fix, May 2, 2023.)

  • Prosperity — a fruit of liberty — would foster the moral softness and the mental laxity that gives rise to addle-pated schemes such as those outlined above.

  • Vast numbers of Americans — having been indoctrinated in public schools, in left-dominated universities, and by the Democrat-allied media — would believe and subscribe to such schemes, which are made palatable by the application of double-speak labels to them (e.g., “defense of the homeland”, “combating misinformation”, “following the science”).

  • Government officials, including law-enforcement officers, would collude with and encourage the press and other purveyors of “information” to distort and suppress facts about much that is alluded to above, to discredit and hound a president (Trump) who opposed them, and to help elect and protect possibly the most corrupt president in America’s history (Biden) because it is through him that the left’s agenda is being implemented.

  • All of this (and more) would occur because almost-absolute power would accrue to the morally (and sometimes venally) corrupt politicians and their powerful enablers who advance and enforce such schemes.

Had the Founders foreseen what later generations of Americans would make of the liberty and prosperity bequeathed them, what might the Founders have done differently? It doesn’t matter. What matters now is what happens next.

In the best of possible worlds, there would be a voluntary return to something much closer to the America that the Founders envisioned. (Even a return to the post-New Deal 1940s and 1950s would do.) If such a return were in the cards, it would show up in the statements of political elites — chief among the being Democrats in government and their highly placed power-brokers, donors, and “intellectuals”.

Those statements would have to come when there is not an election at hand, which is when leftists often start making moderate noises so as to lull independents and even some nominal Republicans into voting for them. (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are masters of hypocrisy.) But aside from a few lonely voices (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.), it is unlikely that the Democrat Party will actually reject the leftist dogmas that have sundered the nation and are threatening to impoverish it.

Might rejection come when enough “minority” voters and women have had enough of “enlightened” policies and their economic and social consequences? Old habits are hard to break, and it would take a major turnaround in voting habits to yield the kind of wholesale rejection of Democrats that would drive them from power, let alone cause them to change their spots.

I don’t mean something like the turnaround in the House of Representatives following the elections of 1994 and 2010 (GOP gains of 12 and 15 percent). I mean something like the turnaround of 1930-1932 (total Democrat gains of 91 percent). In the wake of that turnaround, Democrats went on to control the House for the next 60 years (except for post-World War II reaction of two years).

But the mass rejection of the GOP in 1930 and 1932 was a consequence of an economic upheaval, the Great Depression, that hit vast numbers of Americans and hit them suddenly and hard where it hurts: in the pocketbook. The policies that are now engulfing the land, onerous as they may be, are insidious by comparison — and are practically ignored or touted as “good things” by most media (including “entertainment” media).

Moreover, “woke” America is the laughing-stock of its enemies. And too weak to stare them down. The growing unwillingness and inability of America’s “leaders” to deter and fight enemies** really doesn’t matter to those enemies. In the end, the will to resist aggression and to accede to the wishes of aggressors depends on the will of the populace to stand together against aggression. That will, in turn, depends on broad (if not unanimous) allegiance to the survival and success of the nation.

There is no longer such an allegiance. The left hates what America long was, and will not relent until that America is destroyed. The right hates what America is rapidly becoming at the hands of the left. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I used to believe that an event that threatened the lives and livelihoods of all Americans would re-unite them. I no longer believe that.

I now believe that a national divorce — a negotiated partition of the nation — is a dire necessity. (Its precursor, a concerted secession, is legal under the Constitution.) It would allow a large fraction of Americans, perhaps half of them, to break free of the economic and social oppressions that emanate from Washington. It would also allow those same Americans to defend themselves against invaders from the south and overseas enemies instead of wasting their treasure on the left’s destructive agenda.

Absent a national divorce, everyone will go down with a sinking ship. Across the land there will be declining material comfort, rising criminality, rampant social acrimony, the suppression of views that threaten the grip of the ruling class, the oppression of persons who express those views, and a fascistic arrangement between politicians and favored corporations — those that subscribe to the quasi-religion of “climate change” and the “wokeness” that propels schemes that put skin color, sex (or lack of it), and other personal characteristics above truth, above merit, and above the rule of law.

My apologies to readers who have seen my many other posts that deal with the subjects of this one. I had to get this off my chest. I will now move on to other subjects.

* Proponents of anti-white discrimination might feel justified because some Founders held slaves, and slavery certainly played a key role in anti-black discrimination — some of it state-enforced. But if racial discrimination is wrong, why should today’s whites be victimized when none of them holds slaves and almost none of them derives any benefit from slave-holding in the distant past. “White privilege” and “white supremacy” are mere slogans that are meant to draw attention away from the fact that, on average, whites do better than blacks because whites are more intelligent than blacks.

** The so-called proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a costly and inconsequential sideshow. See, for example, this, this, and this.

For much more, browse “Blog History and Index of Posts”, especially the posts listed under America Divided; Economics and Economists; Liberty, Rights, and the Constitution; Politics, Politicians, and Government in Action; Science, Pseudoscience, and the Tools of Science; and War, Peace, and the Tools of Strategy.

Here’s a minuscule but noteworthy sample of recent posts and articles by other writers that bear on the theme of this post:

Mark Hyman, “‘Woke’ Defined”, The American Spectator, April 15, 2023

Victor Davis Hanson, “Can We Do Anything about America’s Decline?”, American Greatness, April 18, 2023

Kevin Slack, “American Despotism”, American Greatness, May 6, 2023

Dov Fischer, “The Whole Thing Stinks — And Now the Trump Farce”, The American Spectator, May 10, 2023

J.B. Shurk, “‘The Official Truth’: The End of Free Speech That Will End America”, Gatestone Institute, May 28, 2023

Stats and Commentary: May 10, 2023

Economics and politics by the numbers.

GDP Trends

Here’s the latest, including the first (April 2023) estimate of GDP in the first quarter of 2023:

The exponential trend line indicates a constant-dollar (real) growth rate for the entire period of 0.77 percent quarterly, or 3.1 percent annually. The actual beginning-to-end annual growth rate is also 3.1 percent.

The red bands parallel to the trend line delineate the 95-percent (1.96 sigma) confidence interval around the trend. GDP has been below the confidence interval since the government-induced pandemic recession of 2020. Come to think of it, the back-to-back recessions of 1980-1982 and the Great Recession of 2008-2010 were also government-caused — the government in those cases being the Federal Reserve. The short recession of 2022, which may soon be followed by another one, can also be chalked up to the Fed.

Here’s another depiction of the general decline in real economic growth:

And here’s another view:

The trend lines, which reflect the rate of growth during each business cycle, are getting progressively “flatter”, that is, the rate of growth (with a few exceptions) is dropping from cycle to cycle.

However you look at it, the steady decline in real GDP growth is the handiwork of government spending and regulatory policies. For much more about that plague, which has existed for more than a century, see this and this.

Unemployment

The government-reported unemployment rate of 3.4 percent for April 2023 is actually 10.1 percent. What the government doesn’t publicize is the labor-force participation rate, which has dropped from its January 2000 peak of 67.3 percent to 62.6 percent. (See this post for details of the calculation.) Here’s an up-to-date graph of nominal vs. actual unemployment rates:

The good news is that the labor-force participation rate is on the rise:

That’s a good sign for inflation. Perhaps it will actually “cool” — but it has a long way to go.

Inflation

The index of prices for urban consumers (CPI-U) is the one that gets the headlines. There has been much ado in recent days about the drop in the rate of inflation, which only means that prices (as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) aren’t rising quite as rapidly as they had been.

Here’s how things looked through April 2023:

Today’s big headline in the leftist media is that inflation “cooled” to an annual rate of 4.9 percent. Big whoop! It “cooled” from 4.98 percent to 4.93 percent, a difference that is surely well within the margin of error for CPI statistics. Moreover, the four-quarter average of annualized monthly readings has been rising since December 2022 and is now 6.81 percent.

Rumors of the demise of inflation are premature.

The Stock Market

A bear market is usually defined as decline of at least 20 percent in a broad stock-market index. The S&P 500 index topped out at 4818.22 in January 2022, dropped to 3636.87 in June, rose to 4325.28 in August, dropped to 3491.58 in October — the low (to date) for the current bear market, 27 percent below the January peak.

Since then, the index has risen, dropped, and risen again. Yesterday’s closing price of 4119.17 left the index almost 15 percent below its peak. Technically (and arbitrarily), the market is no longer in bear country, but that doesn’t mean that the bear market is over.

Here’s the story to date:

The dashed red line is 20 percent below the January 2022 high. The meandering route of the weekly average (which I use for analysis of long-term trends) has taken the index above the “magic” 20-percent line more than once.

The indicators that I use suggest that the bear market is over. Now, the question is how long the current (weak) bull market will last. There’s no guarantee that the market won’t take another dive before it reaches the January 2022 peak. There were back-to-back bear markets in 2000-2003. And after the collapse of 2007-2009, the market didn’t return to its (nominal) pre-crash peak until four years after it had hit bottom.

As the man said, the market is a random walk down Wall Street. Anything can happen, and it usually does: war, riot, natural disaster, political turmoil, unexpectedly bad or good economic news, etc., etc., etc.

Stay tuned.

Presidential Popularity: Obama, Trump, Biden

I have followed the Presidential Tracking Poll at Rasmussen Reports* since Obama was elected in 2008. The straightforward Approval Index (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) doesn’t quite capture the way that likely voters assess a president’s performance. So I concocted an “enthusiasm ratio” — the number of likely voters who strongly approve as a percentage of the number of likely voters who venture an opinion one way or the other (thus omitting the voters who are non-committal). Here’s a comparison of the enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden (through 05/10/23):

You might ask how Biden caught up with Obama. I have no answer other than the fact that most voters have short memories and seem to care little about the consequences of leftist governance. It will take a major change to move the needle downward; for example, irrefutable proof of Biden’s direct involvement in the family influence-peddling business. Even better, irrefutable proof that some of the classified documents found in various places owned or controlled by Joe were used by Hunter in the conduct of said business.

Right Direction or Wrong Track

Rasmussen Reports also publishes a weekly poll in which 1,500 likely voters are asked whether the country is going in the right direction or is on the wrong track. The results, as you would expect, are volatile — reflecting the recent headlines and media spin. Government shutdowns, for example, which are actually good news, are widely viewed as bad news. Here are the comparative results for the presidencies of Obama, Trump, and Biden (through 05/08/23):

The mood of the voters polled during Trump’s term in office never reached the depths that it reached under Obama. Biden has challenged Obama’s lows but is now in Trump territory. How long will he stay there? See the discussion of presidential popularity, above.