WEEK 11

Wednesday, April 23

The sensitivity of the stock market to Trump's pronouncements is startling. Every time he opens his mouth, the Dow goes 1,000 points up or down. One would expect that market movements would be driven by economic fundamentals but the uncertainty seems so overwhelming that investors are just reading his lips.

Thursday, April 24

In the light of the Executive Order entitled RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY, the target is no longer anti-Semitism but anti-discrimination policies based on race and gender. I do not know whether the authority vested in the President includes repealing or amending the regulation for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the EO asserts. But the reference to it shows that the intentions of the government are far reaching: the target are not just the policies of the Biden administration with regard to the DEI but the role of the government in preventing discrimination on any grounds.

I was always of two minds about DEI: Why was it required of theoretical physicists to submit statements about DEI? My experience with compulsory "sensitivity" training at NYU was abysmal: mindless people were spewing banalities. The serious question is whether remedial policies should be targeted by some fixed identities. France still refuses to target its policies this way. An article in the NYT some time ago proclaimed that "French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas --- specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism --- are undermining their society." Are these ideas "progressive"? It is obvious that there are enormous disparities --in income, morbidity, access to practically everything --by skin color, both in the United States and in France. Taking a few minutes subway ride in NYC or the RER from the Luxembourg station in Paris, moves one to neighborhoods in which life expectancy is shorter by six years. It is also obvious that these disparities are due to various forms of discrimination. Should remedial policies be targeted to groups defined by identity or should they be formulated in universalistic terms, such as "Everyone must have equal access to medical care"? "Affirmative action" policies have complex and often unclear effects, so I do not have fixed views about them, but I instinctively react against the divisions they perpetuate. The long-term cost of identity-based policies is that they reinforce these identities, they fragment the society into antagonistic groups and solidify divisions. Still, eliminating the role of the government is preventing discrimination -- on any grounds -- can only exacerbate inequality, however one conceptualizes it.

An article in The Atlantic is entitled "Pete Hegserth's Patriotic Duty Is to Resign." Isn't it a pity that "patriotic duty" sounds hollow these days? I am thinking about James B. Donovan, a Republican lawyer who defended a Russian spy because he was committed to the ideal of the rule of law. (See his memoir, Strangers on a Bridge, or the film, Bridge of Spies.) Where are such Republicans today?

Totally minor but intriguing. The bag stolen from Kristi Noem contained $3,000 in cash. Why would anyone carry $3,000 in cash these days?

Friday, April 25

For me, this is the most significant anti-democratic move to date. President's Memorandum of yesterday, entitled "Investigation into Unlawful 'Straw Donor' and Foreign Contributions in American Elections," directs "the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, to use all lawful authority, as necessary, to investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fund-raising platforms to make 'straw' or 'dummy' contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees, and to take all appropriate actions to enforce the law." The target is ActBlue, the main Democratic fund-raising platform. I have always thought that the defining feature of democracy is that governments remain vulnerable to the possibility of losing elections. This possibility incentivizes the current opposition to wait peacefully for its turn. And, as James Madison already observed, it forces the current government to listen to the voice of the people, to anticipate electoral consequences of its actions. Hence, throughout the past 10 weeks I was repeatedly surprised that the Trump administration appeared oblivious to the electoral effects of its policies. I entertained the possibility that Trump believes that his actions would be electorally successful. But my dark thought has been that he does not care because he is planning to repress the Democratic opposition by force. Now, in a cliché, the cat is out of the bag.

I stayed away from the labeling which engages a lot of people on the media: Is the US still a democracy? I considered that Trump won an election and that he is pursuing his announced program, so the question does not arise. Constitutionalism, "rule of law," may be at stake, I thought, but not democracy. But denying the opposition the possibility to compete in competitive elections is a flagrantly anti-democratic, "backsliding," move. It places Trump in the company of Chàvez, Erdogan, Modi, and Orban. The only question now is how far will he go.

I saw the exhibit on "Degenerate Art" at the Picasso Museum in Paris. The art to be banned, in Hitler's words, "portrays cripples and malformed cretins, women who can evoke only disgust, men closer to beast than to man." But why was the justification of banning works of art couched in the language of "degeneration"? The concept of degeneration was popularized by Max Nordau in a book published in 1892-3. In his conception, degeneration is everything that undermines the social order created by nature and it is perpetuated only by people who are in some ways psychologically crippled. Hence, everything that threatens politically defined "normality" should be politically repressed. In Nazi Germany, "degeneration" acquired a racial connotation, because it was deemed to occur when naturally unequal races mix. To my best knowledge this word was not a part of the Soviet vocabulary, so it is ironical that while a close synonym of "degenerate art" in Germany was "Cultural Bolshevism," the Bolsheviks banned the same art that the Nazis did. I find it particularly puzzling that both regimes banned purely abstract art, rather than consider it unpolitical, but both did.

I comment on this because "degenerate" is a word prominent in the vocabulary of Putin. In his 2013 speech at Valdai, Putin attacked the "degeneration" of the West. Russia was a moral bastion against the decadence, sexual license, pornography and gay rights of the West. In a 2021 speech, he contrasted the ideology of the West with Russia's "healthy conservatism" that repudiated revolution and pursued organic forms of development. There are only two genders and they are determined biologically at birth. Homosexuality is an offense against nature. Traditional family roles are the mainstay of society. "Genderism" is a mortal threat to national survival. Western culture is degenerate: it contradicts nature. As such it is doomed to fail.

Keeping an eye on measles and other potential health disasters: according to the NYT, "Measles Surge in Southwest is Now the Largest Single Outbreak Since 2000."

Saturday, April 26

This touches a raw nerve in me. Now the target of the administration's hatchet man, Ed Martin, is the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most valuable intellectual resource of the internet era. I still own lots of expensive math and stats textbooks, which I bought before 2000, but I never open them and nobody wants them even as a gift because we can look up in Wikipedia almost everything we want to learn. It opens access to general knowledge. It is an irreplaceable research tool. I use it to read biographies, I have used it to generate data sets on political events, I use it to read up on films and novels. I use it almost every day. I have long thought that it should have been a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, because it is a sum of what we know today as a humanity. That it would be attacked by semi-literate hacks makes me too angry to go on.

Sunday, April 27

Back to my obsession: Why many Germans did not predict Hitler's dictatorship? I am just trying to figure out how to think. Suppose that among the potential outcomes one is certain to transpire: the Nazis will come to power and establish a dictatorship. People are still uncertain what the outcome will be if they do not have full knowledge. They may still guess wrong entertaining false hopes. But the outcome is predictable and the errors are due only to human failings. Suppose, however, that the outcome may be one of three possibilities which are equally probable: the Weimar Republic may survive, a right-wing dictatorship may materialize, the Nazis may come to power. Now, as Diakonis and Skyrms point out in Ten Great Ideas about Chance, the outcome is still determined: if we knew the original position and the force applied to a coin, given the laws of physics we would predict correctly the result of each toss. But if this information is not accessible, all we know is that the two outcomes of a toss of an unbiased coin are equiprobable. This means that guessing correctly where the coin will land is just a matter of luck, as is the correct guess of a winning lottery number. Not being able to predict correctly is then due to conditions, not to cognitive deficiencies.

The 1930-33 period in Weimar was like a coin toss. By 1930 there was not a single precedent of a democratic regime that had lasted 11 years and fell. History could not have been a guide. But by now we have a lot of history behind us: this is why I, among many others, was able to conduct statistical studies of breakdowns of democracy. And the lesson of history was that the probability that democracy would fall in a country like the United States was practically zero. So perhaps now lessons from history only mislead. There is a Polish proverb which says "Pessimism is but informed optimism." But informed by what?

Now I need to put on the garb of a political scientist. There are, I think, three ways to confront the failure of the statistical results. One is to shrug shoulders: extremely unlikely events are not impossible and they may occur, so the US is just a fluke. The second one is to suspect that all the statistical models we have been using are conditioned on something we did not include or observe. The third one is that we have correctly identified the conditions that matter but have never encountered their particular combination that occurs now in the US. I lean toward the last possibility. When I regress breakdowns of democracy on per capita income, the number of past partisan alternations in office during the current spell of democracy, and income share of the top 1% recipients, I predict that the probability of it breaking down in the US is of the order of 1 in 2.6 million country years. When I introduce the interaction of the three variables, this probability jumps to 1 in 263 country years, by the order of 10,000. It is still very low but no longer as surprising: I would not want to get into a plane that has a 0.0038 chance of crashing. The exact numbers depend on the period under consideration, data sources, and the estimators so they indicate only orders of magnitude. But my intuition is that what is happening in the US is a consequence of an extremely rare, perhaps never encountered before, combination of historical conditions. This is why lesson from history fail and why we, as observers of the ongoing developments, are unable to predict where they will end.

Monday, April 28

This is difficult to make sense of. All the most recent public opinion polls indicate that Trump's approval has declined and that majorities oppose his handling of particular issues. According to the ABC/WashingtonPost/Ipsos poll the margin of Trump's approval is now -16%: 39% approve, 55% disapprove. This is the lowest ever observed after 100 days in office, lower than Trump's in 2017. Several other polls converge to the same conclusion. But the support for Democrats is abysmal. Trump is seen as being "out of touch" by 60% of respondents but Democrats in Congress by 69%. Trump is particularly week on his handling of the economy, where he gets confidence of only 37% of respondents, but Democrats in Congress get 30%. Still, the recent NYT/Siena poll has Democrats leading 47% to Republicans 44% in vote intentions. Interestingly, the Democratic advantage seems to be totally due to young women. There is no evidence that Trump's base is eroding: among those who voted for him in 2024, 91% still approve of him.

The low support for the Democratic Party is likely due to the fact that it is deeply divided, unable to generate a unified opposition and even less so a coherent alternative. Other than opposing this or that, it is not easy to see what the Democrats stand for. Defending democracy requires more than opposing whatever the government is doing. The opposition must be more than an expression of ire. Defending democracy requires a positive, future-oriented program to reform it. This is not an easy task. Being against something unites, while being for something divides. When different groups opposing violations of democratic norms attach different values to democracy, the rejection of backsliding may command majority support while any given proposal for reform attracts only a minority. Perhaps this is the predicament of Democrats.

Last night I watched an old film by Ettore Scola, Una giornata particolare, with Loren and Mastroianni, which takes place during Hitler's visit to Italy in 1938. Mastroianni plays someone who is rejected, at the end of the film arrested, by the regime as "degenerate" because he is homosexual. This is not a good time to watch films like this one.

Tuesday, April 29

The occupation I would want least these days are school or small town librarians.

There is a new Executive Orders on accreditation of colleges and universities. The entire system is so complicated that I cannot make sense of it. The closest parallel that comes to me is the French wine certification system, which is conducted by regional associations of producers, not centralized at the national level, and independent of the government, yet honored throughout the country, "honored" at least by prices. Now Trump wants to control the network of accreditation, with the same ideological demands it made of universities. Is there any institution the MAGA crowd can keep its hands off?

A step farther, this time concerning State and local officials. Today's Executive Order: "The Attorney General shall pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to enforce the rights of Americans impacted by crime and shall prioritize prosecution of any applicable violations of Federal criminal law with respect to State and local jurisdictions whose officials:

(a) willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law, including by directly and unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety and law enforcement; or

(b) unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil-rights violations under the guise of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' initiatives that restrict law enforcement activity or endanger citizens."

Inflation is what everyone fears as a consequences of tariffs. What about empty shelves? I just saw a graph showing that the total cargo of ships arriving at US ports has been higher during this year than during the past two. But according to several sources the number of vessels from China expected to arrive during the week of May 4-10 is expected to fall sharply and their tonnage will be about one half of that of last year. The sense I make of these data is that some importers have been stocking in anticipation of the tariffs and that the current volume is imports from China is already falling. It looks like the time to buy Christmas toys is now because there will not be any on the shelves when Christmas comes. But for many products the shelves may be empty much earlier: some estimates are for mid-May.

I am trying to imagine what it is like to be an undocumented immigrant who has lived and worked in the US for years. The closest I can come up with is the Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, a novel about a Jew in Germany 1938. He cannot remain home because he would be detained, he is afraid to install himself elsewhere because he would be found, so he keeps taking overnight trains from one random place to another and back, with a predictable end. He is a German citizen, a wealthy bourgeois at that. But suddenly, he has no place where he can hide.

Former French president François Hollande proposed establishing a status of a "scientific refugee," in the mode of "political refugee." All over Europe there are initiatives to provide funds for receiving researchers moving away from the US. The main obstacle are salary differentials: with some differences across countries, European researchers earn between 1/3 and 1/4 of the American ones. Hence, even if the US researchers are willing to take large salary cuts, to some extent compensated by free access to health and education, they would still be earning more than the local ones, which is not a tenable situation. Another obstacle is that European scientific institutions remain hierarchical, while US researchers enjoy autonomy. Unless Europe is willing to invest more in scientific research in general and to restructure its research institutions, these initiatives are doomed to have only minor effects.