There has recently been a lot of discussion about how all of the conspiracy nuts are moving over to the GOP, whereas not so long ago they were at least as common among Democrats. Matt Yglesias has a very good post that points out how this is a problem for both sides.

The TLDR is that Republicans increasing suffer from a lack of people with the knowledge required to craft good public policy, and the Dems suffer from an epistemic monoculture with no dissenting views. Here are a few excerpts:

Similarly, I think policy-relevant research done in economics departments is a lot more useful and credible than other forms of social science, not because economists are so great but because an economics paper is much more likely to clear the “has at least one conservative read this?” test.

For reasons that sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are probably better-situation to explain, if you work in an environment where all your colleagues and peer reviewers and people you talk things over with in a seminar are left-wing, you are going to get biased results. Again, not necessarily because anyone is trying to bias the results, but because each individual person has their own biases and when almost all of those biases are mutually reenforcing, you get a bad outcome. . . .

The basic problem is that just saying government programs should help address problems that aren’t addressed by the market alone, while true, offers basically no guidance about what to actually do. It is very, very important to come up with correct empirical analysis or else you’re not going to accomplish anything.

Yglesias uses this analysis to explain how the public health establishment screwed up during Covid.

The GOP has a different set of problems:

Are conservatives succeeding in building compelling institutions that can address their concerns about trends in American life? I think they pretty clearly are not, even according to conservatives. And on a policy level, they are completely up the creek without a paddle.

The pandemic revealed that many longstanding conservative criticisms of the drug approval process have some merit.

But there is no post-pandemic FDA reform push from the GOP, and certainly no agenda to take lessons learned from Operation Warp Speed and apply them to other issues. Republicans have become the party of conspiracy theorists who believe Bill Gates is using vaccines as a covert mind control program, so even when they hit on something that works, they don’t dare talk about it or build compelling narratives around it.

Read the whole thing.

Tyler Cowen has recently talked about how you need serious expertise to do effective deregulation. With the GOP well on the way to kicking all intellectuals out of the party, where will it find that expertise? Read some of JD Vance’s comments on economic policy, and just imagine him being put in charge. (Yeah, I know—the Dems. But doesn’t a country need at least one party that understands economics?)

Reason magazine has a very good article on how Trumpistas are jockeying for position in the next administration:

“A red flag went up if a prospective employee answered ‘deregulation and judges’ when asked to name their favorite Trump policies,” Swan wrote, also in 2022. “It was a sure sign the applicant could be a weak-kneed member of the establishment.”

But the solution to Trump’s first problem—ensuring his new staff is fully ideologically aligned with him—pulls against the solution to his second. He can have people who are true believers or he can have people who are competent; he probably can’t have both, because there are simply too few of them. . . .

“The best way to describe these lists is it looks like they’re looking for incompetence as the chief qualification,” says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Firey. “The bureaucracy, whether you love it or hate it, is an extremely complex machine that is extremely hard to operate….It’s like giving my 8-year-old the keys to a steam shovel. Nothing’s going to happen but a disaster.” . . .

Yes, a whole brood of groups, new and old, have positioned themselves to help a second Trump administration do better. But there are reasons to be skeptical that they’re up to the task. Behind the scenes, the various organizations are busy squabbling among themselves and jockeying for prominence. And several of them are gimcrack enterprises headed up by 20-somethings whose biggest claim to fame is acting out online via inflammatory social media posts.

Eh, what could go wrong? Read the whole thing.

PS. Razib Khan has a tweet showing that in per capita terms his blog has a much bigger audience in New York than Texas, and a much bigger audience in Washington than Florida. Even conservative bloggers are much more widely read in liberal states.

PPS. Watch this 60 seconds, and then extrapolate another 4 years of increasing senility. I’m going to have so much fun. Future historians will call this the era of senile old men.

One of my biggest frustrations over the past 15 years has been the economics profession’s drift away from certain well established propositions, such as the fact that the Fed controls the price level. But there are signs of light. David Beckworth has a twitter thread discussing how inflation has recently fallen sharply despite absurdly large budget deficits as far as the eye can see:

Ironically, our biggest inflation episode (1966-81) occurred during a period of relatively small budget deficits. The gross federal debt ratio fell from 40% of GDP in 1966 to 31% of GDP in 1981. Today, it’s over 120% of GDP and likely to rise much higher.

Read Beckworth’s entire thread.

Brad DeLong directed me to a tweet that contained this intriguing graph:

If you polled 51 million Americans and found that 50 million supported X, whereas 1 million opposed X, that would be a highly significant survey. So what should we make of the fact that over the past 35 years, Democratic presidents have “created” (been associated with) 50 million net new jobs and GOP presidents have been associated with 1 million net new jobs? Isn’t 51 million a statistically significant sample size?

Of course what’s really going on here is that we have only 6 observations, six administrations. Is it unusual that the three Democratic administrations were associated with fast job growth, or just luck? That’s actually not an easy question to answer. It’s at least partly luck, as no one seriously believes that the poor Trump performance is due to anything other than being in office when Covid hit. (Trump did mishandle Covid in some respects, but that wasn’t the deciding factor. Even though I’m a Trump hater, I don’t blame him for the poor jobs numbers or the poor crime statistics when he was in office)

If I were a Democratic partisan, I’d make a different argument. Ten of the past eleven recessions (since 1952) have occurred under GOP presidents. I mention this because the graph above is largely explained by the fact that each GOP president happened to finish his term in office during a recession or the early stages of recovery. It’s a business cycle issue. Republicans have been either very unlucky, or have been less adept at macroeconomic stabilization policy than Democrats.

So is this 10-1 ratio statistically significant? That’s not really the right way to think about these things. We wouldn’t be discussing the issue at all unless the ratio looked odd. We select usual patterns when deciding what to write blog posts on. A better approach would be to ask if there are policy differences between the GOP and the Democrats that can explain this pattern.

I imagine no one will like this answer, but I suspect that the 10-1 ratio is largely but not totally random. During much of this period, the GOP had more of an anti-inflation bias, whereas the Dems had more of a pro-jobs bias. As a result, some of the GOP recessions were plausibly caused by earlier Democratic over-stimulus. But not all. I’d say 1970 and 1981 are the two clearest cases of recessions that occurred under GOP presidents that were caused by previous Democratic over-stimulus. Maybe 1953, but that was probably more of a post-Korea War thing.

So the GOP is probably not as bad as the 10-1 ratio would suggest. Even so, there are some other data points that are hard to explain away. Why did Eisenhower have 3 recessions? Again, all of the Democratic presidents since 1952 have only generated one recession (in 1980.) And that was the mildest of the 11 recessions.

To summarize, the 50 million to 1 million ratio is a great talking point for Dems, but largely coincidence. On the other hand, a careful look at the factors causing recessions suggests that the Dems might really have been somewhat better on the jobs front.

Of course today’s GOP is nothing like the Eisenhower GOP. In addition, the Fed has gotten gradually better in lengthening the business cycle. I strongly doubt that we will see 3 recessions in the next 8 years, regardless of which party is in power.

PS. Don’t take this post as me dumping on Eisenhower, who was vastly better than recent GOP presidents.

Here’s Richard Hanania:

We can already see Republican candidates and institutions shifting over to Gribble messaging. The Heritage Foundation, once believed to represent elite conservative thought, goes to Twitter and implies that the Secret Service tried to assassinate Trump. JD Vance has praised Alex Jones as a truth teller. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy went around earlier this year predicting that the Democrats would make Michelle Obama their presidential nominee. Recall that Trump’s original rise to prominence within Republican politics was through his embrace of Birtherism. . . .

I’ve always said that if Trump loses this election, he’s got a very good chance of being the 2028 Republican nominee. But if he’s not in the running for whatever reason, then the Gribbles will be up for grabs. They won’t get anywhere in a Democratic primary given that the party is now composed of more educated and high trust voters. But on the Republican side, a candidate who consolidates Joe Rogan and Tucker types can be a force in a divided primary where it may take no more than a third of the vote to win. He may not be a conventional conservative, but it would be fitting if the Trump era culminated in Republicans becoming more moderate on policy while getting crazier and more paranoid.

Could this figure be RFK himself? Note that the Low Human Capital types who make up the Republican base love celebrities. There’s a reason that some conservative papers that sometimes do serious journalism like The Daily Mail and The New York Post double as gossip mags. The Kennedy family itself has a large role to play in QAnon cosmology. RFK has a history of holding liberal positions, but Trump showed that one can easily flip-flop, and even if you don’t, Republican voters can be very forgiving if you’re a celebrity who hates elites enough and endorses conspiracy theories. Kennedy has already started walking back some of his prior beliefs, like his previous views on gun control, that would be unpalatable to a conservative electorate.

I doubt that either Trump or Kennedy will be the 2028 nominee (partly because I expect Trump to win in 2024.) But Hanania’s entire post is well worth reading, if you like politics. Or should I say if you hate politics? And when you think about it, is there any difference?

The TLDR is “Yeah, we’re definitely a banana republic.”

PS. NYT headline of the day: “Trump Can Win on Character”

The FT has a good article that might be seen as being tangentially related to my earlier post on lab leak vs. zoonosis:

If a screenwriter were to come up with a storyline in which a tech tycoon drowns when his luxury yacht is hit by a freak storm just two days after his co-defendant in a multibillion dollar fraud trial — for which both men were recently acquitted — is fatally hit by a car in another set of ostensibly unsuspicious circumstances, they might very well be told this was rather too implausible for viewers to buy.

And yet this was the tragic real-life series of events over the past week or so. . . .

It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to start. Pro-Russia personality Chay Bowes posted on X a clip of himself speaking on the Russian state-owned RT channel in which he pointed out the low probability of being acquitted in a federal criminal trial in the US — about 0.4 per cent, according to Pew. “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive both meet tragic ends within days of each other in the most improbable ways?” asked Bowes.

The article also mentioned that back in 2009, two identical numbers came up back to back in Bulgaria’s national lottery, at odds of four million to one.

PS. The name of Mike Lynch’s yacht? Bayesian.

No, I’m not making that up.