I whipped this up last night. I will refrain from comment, but please tell me what you think...
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Growth and ungrowth - forcing the vote
Over the past 30 years the US economy has grown.
At the same time, middle class incomes have stayed flat.
I found a really great breakdown and analysis of earnings trends at this website. It's interesting to note that the sources here are not political sources or think tanks. This is the US census and a couple of investment advisers that have aggregated and charted the census data.
At the same time, there has been considerable growth in the income of middle class women, and some minorities.
The majority of middle class men have not been realizing these gains. Additionally, many recent college grads are not experiencing these gains. Link to wikipedia on income
There is a significant body of research on happiness that points to the concept that an individual's sense of happiness is a function of how they feel they compare to their self-described set of peers. When a person looks around at their friends they do a natural, precognitive comparison that establishes happiness on a sliding scale. In the case of the economy, the rule is similar. White men are still better off than most ethnographic groups in the US, but when they measure themselves based on growth, they feel left behind (they are left behind in growth).
Lastly, I'll leave this article on the slide of the American Middle class from the NYT.
Now I will make a logically unsubstantiated leap here and posit that a vast majority of Donald Trumps supports are accurately described by the above economic picture. I believe that Trump's base is built on the frustrations of white men (and those who are close to them and care about them) who have legitimate economic grievances regarding their individual situation.
It is really a shame that Trump is their mouthpiece, however, because his root cause analysis is deeply flawed. I don't think there are any credible economists out there who would blame illegal immigration for the trends I identified above. Certainly there are no economists who would blame ISIS or gay rights or a woman's right to freedom from sexual assault or any of Trump's other defining positions.
The shame here is that he a) provides an unproductive distraction to the people who are getting screwed. They're now getting screwed by him, too. b) His angry rhetoric is producing a dangerous death spiral in the form of a reactionary populist echo chamber. c) the result is that everybody who has been experiencing the gains in the economy assumes that those who are left behind are just racist crackpots. The whole argument becomes illegitimate.
Ironically, the result is very similar to what you see with Black Lives Matter. White men are not the subject of negative implicit bias and therefore are not systematically and consistently exposed to negative (and often lethal) encounters with the Police can't wrap their heads around the problem. They look at the movement, find the worst in it, see some looters or rioters and decide the whole thing is bullshit. Same story, different disenfranchised and marginalized set of experiences.
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| from http://data.worldbank.org/ |
 |
| from: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/ |
I found a really great breakdown and analysis of earnings trends at this website. It's interesting to note that the sources here are not political sources or think tanks. This is the US census and a couple of investment advisers that have aggregated and charted the census data.
At the same time, there has been considerable growth in the income of middle class women, and some minorities.
 |
| http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted_20131104.htm |
The majority of middle class men have not been realizing these gains. Additionally, many recent college grads are not experiencing these gains. Link to wikipedia on income
There is a significant body of research on happiness that points to the concept that an individual's sense of happiness is a function of how they feel they compare to their self-described set of peers. When a person looks around at their friends they do a natural, precognitive comparison that establishes happiness on a sliding scale. In the case of the economy, the rule is similar. White men are still better off than most ethnographic groups in the US, but when they measure themselves based on growth, they feel left behind (they are left behind in growth).
Lastly, I'll leave this article on the slide of the American Middle class from the NYT.
Now I will make a logically unsubstantiated leap here and posit that a vast majority of Donald Trumps supports are accurately described by the above economic picture. I believe that Trump's base is built on the frustrations of white men (and those who are close to them and care about them) who have legitimate economic grievances regarding their individual situation.
It is really a shame that Trump is their mouthpiece, however, because his root cause analysis is deeply flawed. I don't think there are any credible economists out there who would blame illegal immigration for the trends I identified above. Certainly there are no economists who would blame ISIS or gay rights or a woman's right to freedom from sexual assault or any of Trump's other defining positions.
The shame here is that he a) provides an unproductive distraction to the people who are getting screwed. They're now getting screwed by him, too. b) His angry rhetoric is producing a dangerous death spiral in the form of a reactionary populist echo chamber. c) the result is that everybody who has been experiencing the gains in the economy assumes that those who are left behind are just racist crackpots. The whole argument becomes illegitimate.
Ironically, the result is very similar to what you see with Black Lives Matter. White men are not the subject of negative implicit bias and therefore are not systematically and consistently exposed to negative (and often lethal) encounters with the Police can't wrap their heads around the problem. They look at the movement, find the worst in it, see some looters or rioters and decide the whole thing is bullshit. Same story, different disenfranchised and marginalized set of experiences.
Monday, February 29, 2016
Politics and Market Segmentation: Why is Trump/Sanders a surprise?
The current primary season had me thinking about market segmentation this morning. In particular, I was thinking about how the US population is traditionally understood:
If we assume that people are basically normally distributed along this one-dimensional scale, you end up with a distribution that would look sort of like this:
Where each of those little blue dots represents some voters (the data is made up, with a random, normal distribution). There are some way to the right and there are some way to the left, but most of them are clustered in the middle, with increasing density as you move toward the middle. The two major parties basically jockey over where the dividing line is and try to establish their candidates to capture as much territory as possible while playing chicken on the issues they think they can slide by on.
The fundamental problem is that this market segmentation is based primarily on how American politics is organized and not on how American individuals actually think. For example, let's assign some typically assumed attributes to each party:
Do these clusters make sense? If I believe strongly in Christian values does that mean I have to be opposed to affordable health care? If I think that affordable education is important, does that mean that I must also be opposed to gun control? This is a market segmentation strategy that is "Inside Out" -- it is based on how the governing parties are organized.
Smart market segmentation is "Outside In" and starts with the criteria people use to make decisions and then organizes around that.
Instead of this one-dimensional approach to segmenting voters, let's consider some two-dimensional approaches. For example, let's consider some classics, such as personal freedom v. national security or government size v. economic stability.
Or, let's make this very simple and assume the same old Left/Right continuum and add a single new dimension of "Anti-establishment". In this case, I might argue that the population looks more like this (this data is completely made up):
If we assume that people are basically normally distributed along this one-dimensional scale, you end up with a distribution that would look sort of like this:
The fundamental problem is that this market segmentation is based primarily on how American politics is organized and not on how American individuals actually think. For example, let's assign some typically assumed attributes to each party:
Do these clusters make sense? If I believe strongly in Christian values does that mean I have to be opposed to affordable health care? If I think that affordable education is important, does that mean that I must also be opposed to gun control? This is a market segmentation strategy that is "Inside Out" -- it is based on how the governing parties are organized.
Smart market segmentation is "Outside In" and starts with the criteria people use to make decisions and then organizes around that.
Instead of this one-dimensional approach to segmenting voters, let's consider some two-dimensional approaches. For example, let's consider some classics, such as personal freedom v. national security or government size v. economic stability.
Or, let's make this very simple and assume the same old Left/Right continuum and add a single new dimension of "Anti-establishment". In this case, I might argue that the population looks more like this (this data is completely made up):
The distribution along the X-axis is the same here as in the previous drawing. What's different is that I now have that Y-axis to represent that person's opinion regarding the political establishment. With a wild majority of people effectively sick of the status quo candidates and more interested in finding an anti-establishment candidate than a traditional left/right candidate. This is why Sanders and Trump are popular. Both of them represent a break from the traditional choice that voters are given and are a chance to vote on a different (more meaningful) decision vector.
It's easy to chalk up Trump supports as racists and Sanders supporters as crackpots -- and maybe there's some truth in each, but the reason for their popularity is that the two choices that are available fail to satisfy the buying public.
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