Here’s The Donald:

‘To be on the cover of Time as Person of the Year is a tremendous honor,’ Trump said.

Facepalm.

PS.  At least they gave him devil horns.

PPS.  Very different people, but similar chairs:

Stop complaining that I should go back to doing macro posts. I never stopped. Most are now at Econlog, but if you are too lazy to click over that’s your problem. I still do more macro blogging than almost any other blogger. I did two macro posts there just yesterday, I’ll do another later today.

Stop saying, “No, you are wrong, it’s actually X, Y and Z” in posts where I said it’s X, Y and Z.  If you are too lazy to read the entire post, then please don’t comment.

Stop earnestly informing me of facts I knew before leaving Junior High School.

Stop trying to be clever, if you are not clever.

Stop being a Bob Murphy, and reading into posts things that are not there.  And don’t blame me for not being clearer—I see exactly the same stuff in the comment section at Marginal Revolution, and no one can accuse Tyler and Alex of not being good writers.  If you think I said something about Trump, provide an exact quote.

For instance, if I say my plumber is horrible, that’s not a prediction that my plumber will significantly reduce America’s GDP. Ditto for any one person, including the president. I never said the economy would do poorly under Trump. America would have had a Great Depression even if Smith had won in 1928.  We would have had a New Deal even if Hoover had won in 1932.  We would have had a Vietnam War even if Goldwater had won in 1964.  We would have had a tech bubble even if Dole had won in 1996.  We would have had an Iraq War even if Gore had won in 2000 (despite his claims to the contrary.)  Kerry would have given us a housing bubble and crash.  Presidents make far more difference than most people, but still make little difference in the broader scheme of things.

Stop saying I’ve changed my tune.  The tune may change but the lyrics don’t.  Pay attention to the lyrics, not the tune. In the future, I’ll have lots of posts praising Trump for things like the Taiwan phone call, and lots of posts criticizing him.  None of those posts have any bearing on my view that he’s the most despicable politician in American history.

Stop claiming I’m too angry.  It’s all a pose to jazz up my writing.  Trump’s like a gift on a silver platter for me, much as Clinton’s election in 1992 made Rush Limbaugh’s career.  Four years of Hillary would have been a nightmare for me—now I’m liberated.  Poor H.L. Mencken had to write about people like Coolidge—imagine if he’d had a Trump to go after!

And don’t write comments saying I’m too “emotional” to see things clearly, at the end of posts where I defend Trump voters.  I’m one of the least &$#*@%# emotional people in the whole country right now.

Like Elvis Costello, I’m not angry.   (great performance, BTW)

I see lots of obscure foreign films that most people don’t watch.  I recall one B&W film from the 1960s, which took place in Uzbekistan.  I was struck by the “1960s feel” of the film.  It could have been French.  Then it hit me that the 1960s were everywhere, even places that you might have expected to be closed off from global fads.  It was sort of “in the air”, like a global flu pandemic.  Later I read about young women in Kabul walking around during the 1960s wearing miniskirts:

That made me think that what’s going on today in the “Islamic world” isn’t really about Islam at all.  After all, Afghanistan was an Islamic country in the 1960s. Alternatively, women in Saudi Arabia often covered their faces before the Islamic religion was even founded.  Don’t confuse cultural changes, with the supposed justifications offered by proponents of those cultural changes.

Recently we’ve see nationalism sweep across Europe, Asia and the US (Canada and Latin America have so far avoided the bug.)  One explanation is that it’s a backlash against globalization.  I’m not so sure. I wonder if it’s not just something in the air. Consider this recent story from the Economist, describing India:

In India ethnic nationalism, never far beneath the surface, is worryingly resurgent. Since 2014 the country has been ruled by Narendra Modi of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party seeks to distance itself from radical Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) groups, which criticise it as “soft” on Pakistan, Muslims and those who harm cows (which are sacred to Hindus). And Mr Modi is urbane, pro-business and friendly towards the West. But he is also a lifelong member of the RSS (National Volunteer Organisation), a 5m-strong Hindu group founded in 1925 and modelled loosely on the Boy Scouts.

Members of the RSS parade in khaki uniforms, do physical jerks in the morning, help old ladies cross the street, pick up litter—and are occasional recruits for extremist groups that beat up left-wing students. And last year Mr Modi’s minister of culture, Mahesh Sharma, said that a former president was a patriot “despite being a Muslim”. The minister remains in his job.

Hindutva purports to represent all Hindus, who are four-fifths of India’s population. It promises a national rebirth, a return to an idealised past and the retrieval of an “authentic” native identity. Its adherents see themselves as honest folk fighting corrupt cosmopolitans. They have changed India’s political language, deriding “political correctness”, and calling critical journalists “presstitutes” and political opponents “anti-national”. The RSS also exerts huge sway over education and the media. Some states and schools have adopted textbooks written by RSS scholars that play up the role of Hindutva leaders and marginalise more secular ones.

The BJP has made a big push to control the judiciary by changing rules for appointments, but has met strong resistance. It does not control most states in the east and south. Many of the educated elite despise it.

Hmmm; national rebirth, idealized past, anti-Muslim, anti-PC, anti-press, anti-cosmopolitan.  Seems kind of familiar somehow. [Let’s hope there aren’t any nationalists reading this post.  I fear that the same low-IQ alt-righters who think “cuckservative” is a clever putdown will also latch onto presstitute.]

India faces many problems, but this is obviously not about “globalization” or “trade” or the “rust best” or “stagnant incomes”.  Or perhaps I should say if it is about globalization, it’s about the cultural aspects, not the economic aspects.

So my theory is that nationalism is some mysterious force that is sweeping the planet (like the freewheeling 60s did earlier), and it manifests itself in different ways in different countries, depending on local conditions.  Those local conditions don’t cause the nationalism; they shape it in particular ways.  Thus nationalism in the UK is not anti-trade, because the UK is a trading nation.  That’s its heritage.  If someone were to talk about making Great Britain great again, they would be referring to a time when Britain dominated international trade like a colossus.

Even in the US we tend to overstate the importance of trade in the election, as Trump actually lost Mahoning County, Ohio.  That’s the home of Youngstown, and often cited as the perfect example of Trump country.  But perhaps I’ll put that issue off for another post

PS.  I’m no expert on India, but based on what I’ve read, Modi is actually quite similar to Trump.  The Congress party is like the Democrats in America, a coalition of minorities and educated elites.

PPS.  I see that the right wing nationalist candidate in Austria got 46.7% of the vote in yesterday’s presidential election, and lost.  Trump got 46.2% in America and won (vs. Hillary’s 48.2%).  I suspect the Austrian lost because they don’t have an electoral college.  Perhaps someone with more knowledge of Austria (mbka?) can tell me if the nationalist did better in thinly populated rural areas, and might have won with an electoral system that reduced the influence of big cities like Vienna.

PPPS.  I enjoyed this FT.com article:

Last week, UBS released a survey of 1,200 of its American clients and their attitudes towards the US election. It revealed some striking insights — after the election, for example, the proportion of investors who were bullish about US stocks jumped from 25 per cent to 53 per cent, while those who were bullish about growth rose from 39 per cent to 48 per cent. There was, however, an even more important detail: 36 per cent of respondents said that they did not tell their friends and family who they voted for, because they wanted to “fend off arguments or avoid judgment”.

Yes, you read that right. Among these wealthy and (presumably) educated UBS clients, more than one-third were apparently too nervous or embarrassed to reveal their election choice. Call it, if you like, a plague of squeamish silence.

. . .

As I criss-crossed the US this past year, I often heard middle-class, professional people tell me — with slightly embarrassed smiles — that they “understood” the appeal of Trump’s promises about change. Yes, their comments were typically laced with distaste for his aggressive persona and words — you only have to look at his outburst against Saturday Night Live to see why his tweets make people wince. But what struck me on my travels was that people voting for Hillary Clinton were rarely embarrassed to admit to it. Instead, they were resigned or dutiful. In political terms, a vote for Clinton seemed akin to eating spinach. A vote for Trump, however, was more like eating ice-cream laced with whisky for breakfast — something that establishment people did not want to admit to. . . .

It is striking, for example, that the one poll that was more accurate than most was conducted by the right-leaning political consultancy the Trafalgar Group. Early on, it decided that people were lying about their voting intentions. So it started asking questions such as how respondents’ neighbours were likely to vote. Not only did this deliver a different result but it enabled Trafalgar to predict the result in both Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The author calls these “shy voters”.  But it’s clear that the emotion being described is shame, not shyness.

Back in the early days, before Trump Derangement Syndrome set in, I did a post entitled:

Are the laws of physics mere social conventions?  No, they are social conventions.

The basic idea was that theories are beliefs, but not “merely” beliefs.  There is nothing more important in the entire universe that mental states such as beliefs. Now, after a delay of 7 years, David Deutsch has left the following comment:

The astronomy example puzzles me; how closely our model reflects objective reality is somewhat orthogonal to whether “objective reality” exists in the first place. Elsewhere, the author asks if a model that is right 99.8% of the time is “false” while one that is right 99.99% of the time is “true” (or something to that effect). Truth is quantitative/probabilistic, not binary; some models are more “true” than others, but their level of “truthiness” is still an objective fact.

If this well known piece by Asimov has not been referenced yet, I’d be surprised, but here he sums it up quite well:

“When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

I have no idea if it is the David Deutsch, one of the smartest writer that I have ever read, but in the off chance that I have been honored with a comment from him, then I really need to offer some sort of response.  First, a bit of context.  I was defending Richard Rorty’s views on truth (sometime summarized as “truth is what my peers let me get away with”).  Or perhaps one might say, true things are things that are regarded as true. Not surprisingly, this drives lots of people crazy, because we all see things that others regard as true, which clearly don’t seem true, and there are things that we see as being obviously true.  Is this Rortian stuff too much relativism?

I don’t see it as relativism at all.  I don’t see it as the world of fuzzy post-modern philosophers attacking the virtuous hard sciences.  It’s important not to get confused by semantics, and focus on what’s really at stake.  In my view, Rorty’s views are most easily seen by considering his denial of the distinction between objective truth and subjective belief.  In order to see why he did this, consider Rorty’s claim that, “That which has no practical implications, has no theoretical implications.”  Suppose Rorty’s right, and it’s all just belief that we hold with more or less confidence.  What then?  In contrast, suppose the distinction between subjective belief and objective fact is true.  What then?  What are the practical implications of each philosophical view?  I believe the most useful way of thinking about this is to view all beliefs as subjective, albeit held with more or less confidence.

Let’s suppose it were true that we could divide up statements about the world into two categories, subjective beliefs and objective facts.  Now let’s write down all our statements about the world onto slips of paper.  Every single one of them, there must be trillions (even if we ignore the field of math, where an infinite number of statements could be constructed.)  Now let’s divide these statements up into two big piles, one set is subjective beliefs, and the other pile contains statements that are objective facts.  We build a vast Borgesian library, and put all the subjective beliefs (i.e. Trump is an idiot) into one wing, and all the objective facts (Paris is the capital of France) into the other wing.

Now here’s the question for pragmatists like Rorty and me.  Is this a useful distinction to make? If it is useful, how is it useful?  Here’s the only useful thing I can imagine resulting from this distinction.  If we have a category of objective facts, then we can save time by not questioning these facts as new information arises.  They are “off limits”.  Since they are objective facts, they can never be refuted.  If they could be refuted, then they’d be subjective beliefs, not objective facts.

But I don’t want to do that.  I don’t want to consider any beliefs to be completely off limits—not at all open to refutation.  That reminds me too much of fundamentalist religion.  On the other hand, I do want to distinguish between different kinds of beliefs, in a way that I think is more pragmatic than the subjective/objective distinction.  Rather I’d like to assign probability values to each belief, which represent my confidence as to whether or not the belief is true.  Then I’d like to devote more of my time to entertaining critiques of highly questionable hypotheses, than I do to less plausible hypotheses.

Thus if someone tells me that I really need to read a book showing how 9/11 was a CIA plot, my response is, “No, it’s not worth my time.” It’s possible that it was a CIA plot, but so unlikely I don’t want to waste limited time trying to refute the view that Al Qaeda launched the attack.  It’s not that I believe Al Qaeda’s culpability is an objective fact; rather my subjective belief that it was Al Qaeda is so strong that I don’t want to waste time on it. Ditto for my view that 1+1 = 2.  On the other hand, at some later date new information on 9/11 may arise and reach the headlines of the New York Times, where I see it.  Now I may want to read that book.  Similarly, I can imagine a physicist not wanting to read some idiot’s crackpot anti-Newtonian model in 1850, but finding anti-Newtonian models quite plausible after the work of Einstein.

The subjective/objective distinction would only be useful if it put some ideas off limits, not open to questioning.  There are certainly some ideas where it’s a waste of time to question them, but I don’t like this as a general category, because I don’t know where the boundary lies between claims that should be beyond questioning, and claims that should be open to question.  So it’s simply more pragmatic to regard all statements as being beliefs about the world that are open to question, and then assign probability estimates (guesstimates?) to the chance that these claims will be overturned.

The other point of confusion I see is people conflating “the map and the territory”. Then they want to view “objective facts” as aspects of the territory, the underlying reality, not (just) beliefs about the territory.  I don’t think that’s very useful, as it seems to me that statements about the world are always models of the world, not the world itself.  Again, if it were not true, then theories could never be revised over time.  After all, Einstein didn’t revise reality in 1905; he revised our understanding of reality–our model of reality.

Reagan said “Trust, but verify”.  That means it’s OK to believe that certain things are true, but always be open to evidence that these things are not true.

PS.  Recall this statement I made above:

Rather I’d like to assign probability values to each belief, which represent my confidence as to whether or not the belief is true.

Rorty was criticized when people pointed out that one often hears something like the following:  “Although most people believe X, I believe that Y is actually true.”  If there is no objective standard to determine whether X is true, then what can this statement possibly mean?  I seem to recall that Rorty said something to the effect that when people claim Y is actually true, despite most people believing X, they are actually predicting that in the future Y will eventually be regarded as true.  Or maybe it’s a claim that, “If other people had seen what I saw, then they would also believe Y is true.”

PPS.  Back in 2013 I mentioned Deutsch in a post:

David Deutsch likes to sum up his philosophy as:

1.  Problems are inevitable.

2.  Problems are solvable.

The horrible nationalism sweeping the world was inevitable, and it’s solvable.  Good times will return.

PPPS.  I had a discussion of Deutsch’s views on quantum mechanics, and well as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s views, back in this 2013 post.

If I think that Trump’s policies would be bad for the economy, then how do I explain the recent strength in the stock market?  My answer is that stock investors see signs that Trump will not enact his economic agenda, and instead will govern more like a Mitt Romney Republican.  I hope they are right.

Yahoo.com has an article that fleshes out this argument:

4 Ways Trump’s economic plan is already morphing

Fewer tax breaks for the wealthy. Trump’s tax plan during the campaign included a huge tax cut for the wealthy, on the supply-side principle that they’d spend more and help create more jobs. In October, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that Trump’s plan would save the top 1% of earners an average of $215,000 per year, while middle earners would only save $1,000 or so. . . .

That no longer seems to be the plan. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, said recently there will be “no absolute tax cut for the wealthy.” What he means by “absolute” is that tax rates will still come down, perhaps according to Trump’s original plan, which would lower the top rate from 39.6% to 33%. But Trump would also put new limits on the amount of deductions filers can claim, and the wealthy tend to claim far more deductions than other filers . . .

A softer touch on trade. Trump talks tough about punishing trade partners if they don’t help create more American jobs, but Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is far more diplomatic. He recently told Yahoo Finance, “there aren’t going to be trade wars,” . . .

A lower infrastructure target. The Trump campaign plan called for $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending. The target has now been cut to $550 billion, according to Trump’s transition web site. . . .

Janet Yellen is okay after all. Trump strongly suggested that if elected, he’d replace Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve, arguing that she had politicized the central bank by favoring the policies of President Obama. But Mnuchin and Ross both praised Yellen after receiving their cabinet appointments, reflecting the view of much of the business community that she has been a steady hand on the economy during turbulent times. So expect no fireworks at the Fed. Trump has plenty of other battles to fight.

This last point is something I predicted a few weeks back.  The Trump people will have their hands full on other issues, and I doubt they’ll see any reason to take on the Fed.  In addition, if they did go after the Fed with legislation, the GOP Congress would come out with something hawkish.  It would not even get through the Senate.  More importantly, the Trump people don’t want a hawkish policy, as they are going all out for stimulus.  So why would they replace Yellen with John Taylor, or some other plausible choice.  And obviously Trump is not going to pick someone to the left of Yellen, like Christina Romer.  I suppose he might pick an obviously corrupt person, but there’s much more spotlight on the Fed than back when Arthur Burns was picked.  Someone transparently subservient to Trump would lead to a massive fight on Capital Hill.  I think we should expect about the same monetary policy under Trump as we had under Obama, give or take a bit due to incompetence.

BTW, the list above does not include deregulation expected under Trump, which is also a factor driving stocks higher.  Of course all of this remains to be seen.  And note that the sort of conventional policy mix described above will not bring back blue color jobs, or lead to sustained 4% GDP growth.  Trump’s also picking the same sort of foreign policy hawks that Marco Rubio would have picked, albeit a bit loonier.  So America was dragged into the gutter for 12 months, turned into a Philippine-style banana republic, to give us roughly what a Mitt Romney clone would have provided?

Off topic, Lorenzo from Oz always tends to leave some of the most thoughtful comments.  Here’s an excerpt from a couple of very interesting remarks that he left after the previous post:

If this is the new gilded age, then The Donald is leading us to a Republican Party that looks like its gilded age equivalent — the Party of the northern working class, protection and assimilation. The Democrats don’t seem to have noticed that their period of dominance (1930-1972) was based on a low migration period (1920-1965) when convergence of norms and expectations made Washington-based expansive programs look sensible. The more diverse the society gets, the less and less plausible trust-Washington-competence looks. (With its Northern charm and Southern efficiency, as JKF called it.)

The previous period of high migration (to 1920) was a period of Republican dominance. The more diverse the society gets, the more appeal the politics of national identity but central government reticence. (Austrian economics was born in the Danubian Monarchy, the most wildly ethnically diverse of the major Powers: not an accident methinks.)

Polls regularly show very low popular confidence in the US Federal Government and steadily trending downward trust therein. Yet the Democrats keep pushing that this increasingly distrusted level of government should do more and more and the society should become more and more diverse. Methinks there is some contradiction in their politics …