The Year Progressive Assumptions Collapsed

In the most important ways, 2021 was a calamitous year: Covid continued to rain death upon the planet, rioters stormed the Capitol with awful intentions, China continued to crack down on Hong Kong, and there were countless other terrible events.

One under-appreciated confluence, however, is the many progressive sacred cows that were slaughtered in 2021, problems that we thought we had solved as a society but were in reality being held back by continuous action and the continued efforts of Republicans, largely. Democrats advocated for being more acquiescent to new policies because society and our understanding of economy had evolved to a place where progressive thinking would actually help us progress. These three issues are crime, inflation, and the whether paying for unemployment causes unemployment.

I've seen only one of these discussed in this context: Democratic policies have led to a surge in crime. The author puts the realization in 2022, but it was clear in 2021 what was happening. Namely, in the run-up to 2021 and especially in 2020, Democrats had all the power in criminal justice. Democratic fundraisers had been "overhauling the US justice system" (other sources: 1, 2, 3); there was the defund the police movement; and also the drive to end bail. The result to this new approach to crime, as Republicans warned, has led to an increase in crime. 

It's edifying to put this in the historical context. Crime surged in the second half of the 20th century, and was a major problem and political issue into the 1980s. Mayor Giuliani is the most well-known representative of the turning of the tide. Since the 1990s, crime rates have been gradually declining across the country. Whenever a problem is solved to this extent, it becomes a smaller and smaller factor in elections and also creates the false impression that the underlying problems have been solved when they have not. This opened the door for people who have more theoretical ideas about society and crime to become ascendant and set the agenda, and now, unfortunately and at great cost, we have learned that those ideas were wrong.

Inflation is another problem we thought we solved, coincidentally, around the same time crime started to fall. Paul Volcker, during Ronald Reagan's first term, engineered a recession to break the inflation spiral we were in in the early 1980s, and since then, under several Federal Reserve regimes, inflation has come down and been steady at around 2%. Like crime, inflation was a distant, bad memory and therefore we believed it was a permanently solved problem leaving us free to experiment. In addition to this, Republicans were proven wrong time and time again when they predicted inflation after excessive spending, most notably after the 2008/09 financial crisis, bailouts, and stimulus.

It was no surprise that Republicans and conservative economists were quiet during the stimulus debates, particularly over whether it would lead to inflation. This also opened the floor for MMT, an unapologetically high-deficit, no worries philosophy--Keynesianism on steroids. The most prominent critic of the stimulus, particularly the 2021 American Rescue Plan, Larry Summers argued that it was largely unnecessary given the economic conditions at the time and there was a good chance it would lead to inflation. He wasn't only disagreed with, he was mocked and ridiculed. (Personal plug: I did a thread on his discussion with Krugman regarding stimulus). Well, it's no longer news, but Summers was proven right, inflation has become a problem again, and most believe that stimulus was at least partially to blame.

Finally, Democrats have been arguing for at least a decade that unemployment benefits have no effect on unemployment rates and Republicans have been arguing for at least a decade the opposite. Back in the summer of 2021, when some red states ended their unemployment benefits before others, media outlets (and) and economists quickly pronounced that there was evidence that the unemployment benefits didn't matter. But in November, after all states had ended their unemployment extensions, it was clear that these slowed the labor recovery, though there was no similar round-up of evidence from the same sources.

Taking in all of these, it's clear that 2021 provided ample evidence that problems we thought we had solved were not, but were held at bay by past policies and that the progressive ideas to move the ball forward would be counter productive.

Thoughts on Don't Look Up

For those who haven't seen it, Don't Look Up is a satirical film by Adam McCay (the director of The Big Short, and Vice and before that straight comedies like Step Brothers and Anchorman) revolving around the discovery of a comet that is destined to hit Earth and how the political and cultural apparatus reacts to it. Politicians receive most of the skewering here, but by no means are they the only victim. The media in his world don't escape mockery or tech CEOs. Additionally, the citizenry are either knuckle-dragging denialists or pop-culture obsessed social media viewers. The only group that conducts itself well in this movie are the scientists. 

That many groups are criticized in this film may lead you to think it's pretty balanced, but it's not. The politicians come off worst and their supporters come off worst of all. Both are thinly, extremely thinly, veiled stand-ins for conservatives. The president, played by Meryl Streep, is how the left imagines Republicans (not just Trump, but surely George W. Bush) act when they're in the Oval Office--nominating unqualified people in cowboy hats to be judges, ignoring the science, sending the FBI after scientists. The president's voters are told and convinced to "not look up" when the comet is clearly visible in the sky. 

While this is clearly a satire, and a good one (I laughed at many points and much of the criticism was tied to how the real world functions), I worry a lot that many people believe this is truer than it is. I am confident that many people, at some level, believe this is how a Republican government behaves, and it's just not true. Democrats like to believe that their leaders conduct themselves like The West Wing while Republican leaders conduct themselves like this when the truth is clearly in between. President Biden did not follow the Science(TM), with his school masking recommendations and policies, nor when he talked about price controls, etc, etc, etc. Politics and science are always at odds in the White House. It's vitally important for everyone to understand that.

Secondly, the satire represents how McKay views the climate change debate. Viewers should understand though the many differences between the science behind a comet striking the Earth and climate change. There are immense differences in the two. To begin, astronomy is a much more developed science than climate change; it has been under study for thousands of years. From 1609 to 1619, after millennia of observing the motion of stars and planets, Kepler published his laws of planetary motion. In 1687 Newton refined Kepler's laws when he published his own law of universal gravitation, which Einstein added to in the early 20th century. The product of these (and many, many more contributions from the shoulders of others), meant that we now have a method of predicting the motion of celestial objects with an enormous amount of accuracy.

Climate science, on the other hand, is much less precise for two reasons: it's a much younger science but importantly it's a much more complex science. Climate is the interaction of a multitude of factors including atmospheric composition, tilt of the earth, temperature, wind conditions, water temperatures and currents, solar activity. In addition to these, every location on earth has its own climate, and climate change is different in them all. A comet has one and only one trajectory. This is in no way meant to say that historical observations and trends are wrong. Clearly temperatures have risen over the past century, on average, and there is also indirect evidence of this (sea level, glacier volume, etc.) and temperatures are likely to rise further, but these things are about all we know with a high amount of certainty. The projections on how high temperatures will rise are much less precise (see the most recent IPCC projection range for instance, and compare that to previous). 

We also don't know what the costs of those changes will be to humanity. This is another departure from the comet allegory. For the cinematic comet, we knew with certainty (and we would also in the real world) what the damage would be: it would end the world. For climate change, there's a significant debate about the effects of any amount of temperature change. Economists predict that it will be less than 5% of world GDP (which is not the catastrophic 100% of the comet nor those that claim that it's an existential threat--it's not).

Last, as an economist, I can't avoid talking about the Tech CEO's proposed solution--to break up the comet and let its components fall safely to the Earth so we could use the minerals to keep the tech industry booming. In the movie, they claim this would make the world extremely wealthy (imagine a million tons of gold falling safely from the sky), but the comet would not create as many jobs or as much wealth as they claim. The tech industry currently is not generally limited by these minerals, and having more of them wouldn't make tech products free or ubiquitous. Tech companies would continue to use the minerals at about the same pace as they are now. Perhaps prices would drop or supply would increase some small amount, but not enough to make a huge difference in people's lives. Even if it was gold, though, the reason gold is valuable is because it's scarce. Increasing the supply of gold just reduces its price, so that, too, would not significantly add to the wealth of the world.

Gerrymander Rejoinder

Many news outlets (NY Times, Wall Street Journal) are talking about gerrymandering, but they all basically say the same thing:

• Gerrymandering's been going on forever
• Republicans are the primary culprits and Democrats the victims
• Democrats are using it effectively this year to negate the Republicans' historic advantage

They're also all leaving out many important points:

• Democrats had a huge advantage from gerrymandering for 50 years.
• Gerrymandering's effect in 2018 and 2020 was almost nil.
• Democrats gerrymandered in 2010-2020 as well, and the most gerrymandered state is California.
• Democrats passed numerous commissions in the 2010s to reduce gerrymandering, but those are basically ignored.

Why Is This Important?

I imagine for most readers who aren't following this every day, their eyes glaze over as soon as they start reading the word gerrymander. It's one of those words that is easy to forget its exact meaning because it's rarely used, its meaning can't be intuited from the term itself, and is only used in the context of boring political stories. While you can easily look up the definition somewhere and get an explainer, simply put, it signifies the process for determining who gets to vote for each of the 435 congressional seats, which matters to which political party controls Congress. Politicians in each state get to figure out who will vote for each of their state's representatives to Congress. This process is known as redistricting because they draw the lines for the districts, and who falls into what district. Politicians can draw these lines in a way so certain voters fall within certain districts and thereby determine whether the district has more Democrats or Republicans. If they do it well, they can distort the number of seats that each party will win in their state.

Republican Gerrymandering Isolated to 3 Election Cycles Out of Last 25

Taking a historical perspective, you can see that Democrats held the advantage in seats continuously from 1946 to 1994. With some years having an advantage of more than 40 seats. The average from 1958 to 1992 was 28. Then in the 1990s, after the Republican revolution, Republicans began punching above their weight, winning more seats than votes from 1996-2006, with a switch during the Democratic wave of 2008. Then, because Republicans were so successful at all levels in 2010, they finally had the chance to gerrymander districts for themselves, on a scale they were never able to before. You can see the effect of that in 2012-2016, where they averaged a 19 seat advantage for three cycles. Then in 2018, when Democrats retook Congress, that advantage shrank to just 1, then 2 in 2020.

The point of all this is that the effect of gerrymandered districts has historically advantaged Democrats, and at a magnitude much higher than Republicans' edge in the 2010s, yet it's only now that we hear about the scourge of gerrymandering, and always without the historical context. That context is important to understand when judging the scale of the problem and its import.

Gerrymandering Effect in 2018 Very Small

Using the election result data available from the FEC, I ran an analysis of the votes casts versus the seats won. If seats were distributed proportionally to votes, there would have been 2 additional seats awarded to Democrats, so nationally, there is a small effect. There are 8 states where Democrats have the advantage and 17 states where Republicans have the advantage, so there are about twice as many Republican states. This shouldn't be a surprise as Republicans tend to have a broader geographic appeal, holding majorities in more states than Democrats which is counterbalanced by the fact that Democratic states tend to have more people.

Looking state by state, California, has the largest discrepancy in votes vs. seats, and Democrats have a 10 seat gerrymandering advantage. They should won 36 seats, given the vote totals, but they won 46. The next highest was Texas, which gave Republicans an extra 4 seats beyond what their vote totals would merit. Adding up all the states individually, Republican gerrymandered states net them an additional 25 seats, and Democratic states net Democrats 20 seats. This doesn't match the +2 national Republican advantage because combining the votes across all states, including the 26 that show no advantage, produces a different outcome. What readers should take away from this is that Democrats still gerrymandered a great deal, but just not as much as Republicans.

States with gerrymandering commissions

Lastly, the other context that these articles consistently omit, is that in the 2010s, as Democrats realized they were newly on the losing side of the gerrymandering effect, they led a movement to eliminate gerrymandering altogether. Several states passed redistricting commissions to ensure district lines were drawn fairly and objectively, without favoring either party. According to ballotpedia, eight states have a commission to manage the redistricting process (California, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Michigan, Hawaii, and New Jersey). The National Conference of State Legislatures says the total is ten, Virginia having added one in 2020, and it also includes Montana. These are independent commissions which draw up Congressional district maps. 

In 4 states (Maine, New Mexico, New York, and Utah), there is an Advisory Commission, which draw up maps that are submitted to the legislature for approval in a conventional vote. Notably, this is less helpful, as the legislatures can easily, and on a partisan basis, reject the independent map, and adopt its own.

Lastly, in 3 states (Connecticut, Indiana, and Ohio), there is a back-up commission if the legislature can't agree.

Of these states, which purportedly want to reduce gerrymandering, New York's final map gets an F score from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. In 2018, New York's map provided Democrats a +2 seat advantage, and the new map will give Democrats three more seats. California, as mentioned previously, already has a pretty strong Democratic advantage already, and it's expected to either maintain the current composition, or give Democrats an extra seat.

The importance of including this information is so that readers and citizens understand that Democrats aren't as committed to fairly drawn districts as they say and also, the existence of a commission doesn't guarantee fairly drawn districts (which should make everyone wonder whether a federally mandated solution to this will only reward the more craven).

Background Links

Cook Political Report - Redistricting

Princeton Gerrymandering Project - They conduct pretty good quantitative analysis on the maps and effects.

All About Redistricting

National Conference of State Legislatures - Redistricting - more detail about the commissions

Ballotpedia

FEC Election Results

Notes on Methods and Sources

• I did analysis using different sources and at different times, so numbers don't always match up. Primarily, the state analysis and national analysis were done using different sources.
• National analysis used data provided through Wikipedia (their sources are always listed).
• The basic methodology was not strictly a gerrymandering analysis but was a comparison of the composition of votes by party to the composition of seats. In a randomly distributed state, with fairly drawn maps, this should not lead to a difference in seats of more than 1. 

It should also be noted that there are many complications to conducting this analysis. 

• Four races had only one candidate so the votes weren't tallied or entered.
• Taking the national composition and comparing to seats ignores that there are several states with only one seat so can't be gerrymandered.
• Because the voters are not distributed uniformly by party throughout the country, there can be discrepancies between the vote composition and seat composition due entirely to geographical distribution.
• Results can change from election to election based on turnout. When one party turns out in higher numbers, it gives the illusion of a temporary gerrymander.