Permanent Minority Government: Some Form of Civil War Is Inevitable

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Trump presidency is that it was attained with a minority of the votes cast for the office.  This is an indication of the biases built into the electoral college system which favors low-population states relative to high-population states.  The bias is even more pronounced in the Senate where states receive equal representation regardless of population.  A relatively small fraction of the population could control the Senate, thus controlling the passage of all legislation and determining the makeup of the Supreme Court.  This minority could also preclude any constitutional amendment that might threaten its dominance.  How such an enshrined minority control might play out over time is the topic of a thought-provoking article be Jonathan Taplin in Harper’s Magazine: Rebirth of a Nation.

Taplin begins with this eye-catching lede.

“Can states’ rights save us from a second civil war?”

That statement derives from a comparison of a potential future history with the past history that led to the secession of the slave states.

“Donald Trump’s presidency signals a profound but inchoate realignment of American politics. On the one hand, his administration may represent the consolidation of minority control by a Republican-dominated Senate under the leadership of a president who came to office after losing the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Such an imbalance of power could lead to a second civil war—indeed, the nation’s first and only great fraternal conflagration was sparked off in part for precisely this reason.”

The ability of the Republican Party to control the Senate even while being outvoted by the Democrats is based on being the dominant party in a number of low-population states.  To illustrate how powerful the arithmetic becomes because of the low population bias, Taplin quotes some analysis from David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.

“If every state’s and district’s election results on Nov. 6 were a uniform eight-point swing in the Democrats’ direction from the 2016 presidential result, Democrats would gain forty-four House seats—almost twice the twenty-three they need to control the chamber. But with that same eight-point swing, the party would lose four Senate seats, leaving them six seats short of a majority.”

The Republican advantage in the Senate will only increase as urbanization continues in future years.  Taplin quotes these numbers attributed to Norman Ornstein.

“By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent [of the voters] will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent.”

Would 70 percent of the population be willing to be controlled by the 30 percent?  Taplin thinks it unlikely, which leads him to raise the specter of a second civil war, though not necessarily one waged with guns.

“These Republicans are increasingly alienated in part because we are approaching an age of extreme minority rule, and their party is advancing a set of policies that fewer and fewer Americans actually support.”

“A poll in July from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed that 71 percent of Americans believe that Roe v. Wade (guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion) should not be overturned. And yet Trump has said appointing justices who would help overturn Roe is a major priority. The same is true for the Supreme Court’s support of various states’ voter-suppression laws, including the conservative majority’s decision in 2013 to repeal key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Despite there being in the past three senatorial elections 15 million more votes cast for Democrats than for Republicans, the Republicans continue to rule the Senate and thus the Court.”

Taplin suggests that there is a peaceful tactic for waging war that could be quite successful at disarming this coming majority-minority split.  In fact, blue states are already using it to counter the repression under which they suffer from the red-state minority.  They are taking to the courts to argue that edicts emanating from Washington are impinging on the constitutional rights accorded to the individual states.  The long-term basis for escaping from minority control derives from the Tenth Amendment.

 “…the Tenth Amendment, which declares that any power not specifically reserved for the federal government is granted to the states.”

State attorneys general have been waging war on Republican edicts in the courts.

“Since Trump took office, twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general have sued the Trump Administration. Nineteen attorneys general sued to stop Trump from putting an end to certain Obamacare subsidies, eighteen sued to stop the rollback of environmental protections, and sixteen sued to reverse Trump’s decision to rescind ­DACA protections for young immigrants. Although these lawsuits are working their way through the courts, the Trump Administration has lost many of the early cases, including a suit in August 2017 in which a California judge ordered the EPA to enforce its own clean-air standards.”

“California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, has sued the Trump Administration thirty-eight times in the past twenty-two months and has won twelve victories in the lower courts. He understands these cases may go to the Supreme Court, where California would ultimately make Tenth Amendment claims. For Becerra, this is a long fight born out of an immigrant childhood. His father grew up in California in the 1950s, when restaurants posted signs with the words no dogs or mexicans allowed. Now Becerra is asking: Where does it say in the Constitution that the president or the federal government should control immigration or auto emissions? And, more profoundly, he’s posing the Jeffersonian question: Where does the power to govern reside?”

Using states’ rights as a political tool will seem uncomfortable for many liberals who have learned to associate the term with racism and suppression of rights, but there are plenty of precedents for its use.

“…there’s a long tradition of progressives using the Tenth Amendment as a political tool, most notably, and successfully, in the 1850s, to resist the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Northern states abolished slavery decades before the Civil War. Wisconsin pioneered unemployment insurance for its residents twenty-four years before the federal government; Wyoming allowed women to vote in 1864, more than fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment enacted suffrage nationwide.”

And in recent years, many significant societal changes have emerged from “social experiments” conducted at state and local levels.

“…most major progressive reforms have been incubated and become law at the state level—commonsense gun control, tackling climate change, ensuring ­LGBTQ rights, marijuana decriminalization.”

Basically, what Taplin would like is for time to heal some of our wounds.  Let the blue states contend with the red states in terms of demonstrating the best form of governance, and over time perhaps a new consensus will emerge; political dispute will retreat to dealing with mere details because the existential issues will have been resolved.

Let us hope there is reason for optimism, because the alternatives could be dire indeed.

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Economic Development: Taking the Red State Low Road or the Blue State High Road

Louisiana Turns Itself into an Industrial Sacrifice Zone

Modern Monetary Theory: A License for Deficit Spending?

Every once in a long while, you come across something that provides you with a totally different perspective on an issue that you long thought was well-understood.  Katia Dmitrieva provided such an epiphany in an article in Bloomberg Businessweek with the intriguing title A Hedge Fund Guy Lefties Can Love.  There are several “hedge fund guys” who are beloved of lefties because they contribute funds to liberal causes.  However, in this case, the beloved, Warren Mosler, has been promoting an economic theory that could provide a solution to the greatest problem liberals face: how to pay for all the things they feel a need to do.

For many years Mosler has been espousing an economic theory referred to as Modern Monetary Theory (MTM).  Consider this summary of the implications of MTM.

“Its main argument is that governments with their own currencies can’t go broke. They have more room to spend than is usually supposed and don’t need to collect taxes (or even borrow) to pay for it. One thing they can, and should, spend money on is a jobs guarantee—offering work to anyone who wants it.”

How revolutionary is that!

A more detailed explanation of MTM and why it has finally begun to receive some respect from the economics community is provided by Atossa Aroxia Abrahamian in The Nation: The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory.

The US dollar is a fiat currency.  That means it has the value assigned to it based only on the credible word of the government producing and providing it.  There is no specified amount of gold or some other commodity backing it up.  This means the amount of dollars in circulation has no physical limitation.  There may be economic or social constraints that enter into the equation, but MTM proponents claim that false economic constraints that have produced great social harm have been applied for decades. 

Abrahamian provides this perspective.

“Conventional wisdom holds that the government taxes individuals and companies in order to fund its own spending. But the government—which is ultimately the source of all dollars, taxed or untaxed—pays or spends first and taxes later. When it funds programs, it literally spends money into existence, injecting cash into the economy. Taxes exist in order to control inflation by reducing the money supply, and to ensure that dollars, as the only currency accepted for tax payments, remain in demand.”

“The point is that, once you shake off notions of artificial scarcity, MMT’s possibilities are endless. The state can guarantee a job to anyone who wants one, lowering unemployment and competing with the private sector for workers, raising standards and wages across the board.”

Mosler has acquired some credible allies in promoting MTM.  One of the leading proponents is Stephanie Kelton.

“Stephanie Kelton recalls initially disagreeing with some of Mosler’s theories about taxes; then her colleague L. Randall Wray told her to do her own work and show how he was mistaken. ‘I wrote it up in the Cambridge Journal of Economics and set out to prove he was wrong,’ Kelton recalls, ‘but I arrived at the same place he did’.”

“From then on, Mosler became something like the movement’s sugar daddy, funding graduate research, making donations to the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability at the University of Missouri, even opening a research center in Switzerland.”

Some economists continue to dismiss MTM as nonsense, but a greater number of them are now willing to at least debate its main points.  The biggest area of contention involves how likely injecting significant amounts of money into the economy is likely to create an unacceptable level of inflation.  The MTM people claim that inflation is not an issue unless the economy is utilizing labor and other resources at full capacity, and that we are far from such a state at present.  They claim that they predicted effects that befuddled traditional economic thinkers.

“’We built credibility,’ Kelton says, ‘and that helped us get established as a school of thought. The [New Economic Perspectives] blog helped us get a voice. It also gave us a historical record about being right about things like how the US downgrade wouldn’t make interest rates go up; that quantitative easing wasn’t inflationary; and that the eurozone would run into trouble. We were saying that in 1998’!”

And suddenly, economics is boring no longer.

American Misogyny: The Forgotten “American Plan” to Imprison “Immoral” Women

One of the peculiarities of the US Constitution is that when written, the founding fathers seemed more concerned with the procedures government agencies can use when enforcing laws than in the content of the laws themselves.  Consequently, unless free speech or the “right to bear arms” are infringed upon, governments can write any damned fool law they want, no matter how unfair and discriminatory it might be.  For example, civil forfeiture laws are in place that allow confiscation of private property based only on a suspicion that it is associated with criminal activity.  No proof is needed, and the individuals involved are presumed guilty until they manage to sue the government and prove their innocence.  Disturbing laws are produced and generate enough public outrage that they are no longer enforced.  But they are often neither repealed nor ruled unconstitutional, living on waiting for circumstances to change again to where some political wing will wish to reimplement them.

Scott W. Stern was a Yale student who stumbled upon a forgotten period in US history when “social hygiene” laws were used predominately to incarcerate women who were deemed a threat to society.  Stern recorded what he learned in his book The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women.

Several reviews of Stern’s work are available to describe what he discovered.  Heather Ann Thompson produced An Enduring Shame for the New York Review of Books, and Kim Kelly provided A Forgotten War on Women for The New Republic.

The story begins when the US thrust itself into the war in Europe in 1917.  It had to quickly provide a large number of troops for a type of war with which it was unfamiliar.  Social scientists stepped in to provide assistance.  One gave intelligence tests to the soldiers in hopes of filtering out men who were so dumb as to be a threat to their units.  What the tests indicated was that the average intelligence of an army recruit was just barely above that of a moron.  Needless to say, the army did not send the majority of troops back home and managed to participate in the war successfully. 

However, there was another concern raised that was more concrete and more observable.  It was known that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or as they were known then, STIs (sexually transmitted infections) were common among troops in Europe.  With more than a million men on the move to various training camps and being shipped overseas, it was thought important that this force not be incapacitated by STIs.  Normally, one imagines females being hidden in cellars or closets for protection when the military comes to town, but this concern turned that logic on its head and decided that it was the army’s healthy men that needed protection from promiscuous women.

Thompson provides this perspective.

“At the turn of the century, when antibiotics had yet to be discovered, syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant in American cities. Notably, concern among reformers and government officials over venereal diseases (as sexually transmitted infections—STIs—were called at the time) was fueled by a more general rise in white anxiety over changing ethnic and racial demographics across the nation: 14.5 million people immigrated to the US between 1900 and 1920, and half a million African-Americans moved to northern cities from the South during World War I.”

“Governmental and reformer concern with venereal diseases escalated dramatically upon America’s entry into World War I, when the sexual health of soldiers became a military priority. Many thousands were infected as they socialized in cities where they were stationed before heading to the front, which resulted in the dismissal of over 10,000 men and countless lost hours of work. Recasting venereal disease as a national security issue led to the creation in the late 1910s of several laws that came to be known as the American Plan.”

This “American Plan” is not to be confused with strategies employers used in the 1920s to foil unionization, an activity it deemed to be “un-American.”

“What began as a local effort to reduce prostitution around military bases quickly expanded. Federal agents divided the nation into ten districts within which paid supervisors and field representatives were “to investigate the presence of alcohol, prostitution, and general female promiscuity in a given area.” Should investigators discover women they considered likely to have an STI, they had the legal authority to examine them, quarantine them indefinitely, and subject them to medical treatments that were thought to be a “magic bullet” but were known to be extremely painful and carry terrible side effects. At the time, Stern writes, ‘no effective treatment existed for syphilis or gonorrhea.’ This practice ‘went on for decades’—well after the supposed need to protect soldiers in both World War I and World War II passed—and incredibly, ‘the age listed for a first “offense” or “delinquency” was often as low as seven’.”

Stern, while still a student at Yale, uncovered this old notice apparently provided to women who had been arrested in San Francisco.

 This activity lost its federal funding in 1922, but the enthusiasm for it generated funding from other agencies.  Programs were active in almost all states and went on long after both world wars had passed.  It became clear that the motivation was more to control the lives of women—particularly poor and colored women— than to protect society.

“This decades-long initiative to ‘reform’ poor women in the name of protecting the public was made possible by the strong support of well-respected female reformers like Jessie Binford, by the substantial funding of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other well-known philanthropists, by the aggressive enforcement of J. Edgar Hoover, and by the deep conviction of jurists such as Earl Warren that the American Plan was necessary for national security.”

“Stern is entirely right to concentrate on the underappreciated damage that the plan did to poor women across the country. The program, he shows, was never really about venereal disease—it was an effort to clean up the streets and police the behavior of women. He recounts how local law enforcement used the American Plan to ‘commit girls between the ages of ten and seventeen’ for ‘frequent[ing] saloons,’ or ‘lounging upon the public streets,’ or ‘attend[ing] any public dance, skating rink or show’ without a parent’s permission, but never boys.”

We must turn to Kim Kelly’s account for appropriately outraged comments.

“Sex workers were the prime targets, but so was any woman deemed ‘suspicious’—which at that time could mean anything from being seen in the company of a soldier to eating alone in a restaurant. As the program became more firmly rooted within the legal system, with undercover agents from ASHA (American Social Hygiene Association) acting as its enforcers, a stark reality became apparent: Any woman, at any time, could legally be arrested, sexually assaulted, and hauled off to jail with no trial, no lawyer, and no idea when she’d be released. Those who were imprisoned in detention hospitals were subjected to involuntary medical examinations, inhumane living conditions, and treatments for gonorrhea and syphilis. Unfortunately, at that point, the most common ‘cure’ for these diseases was a strict regimen of continuous doses of mercury and arsenic, toxic chemicals which poisoned these women’s bodies while doing absolutely nothing to cure their ills.”

“The ideas at the heart of the program have, however, proved remarkably resilient. Its tendrils of influence crept into the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Japanese internment camps, and the responses to the AIDS epidemic, and helped to lay the groundwork for the current mass incarceration crisis. As Stern has uncovered, the same Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps that were later used to imprison Americans of Japanese and German descent, prisoners of war, and conscientious objectors during World War II originally functioned as ‘concentration camps’ for women incarcerated under the American Plan.” 

Stern used the details of Nina McCall’s life to describe what these laws could do to an individual woman.  When Nina was eighteen years old she was spotted by a woman, Ida Peck, who was hired to seek out “suspicious” women.  She lived in a small town in Michigan that was hardly a den of iniquity, but it had a railroad station on a line that transported servicemen off to war.  These men had to be protected from eighteen-year-old girls.  Nina was directed to show up at a doctor’s office, that of Dr. Carney, for an exam, even though she claimed she couldn’t possibly have a sexually transmitted disease.

“Within hours she had been given a rough and painful gynecological exam, diagnosed with gonorrhea, and informed that she now had two choices: she could either have a placard affixed to the door of her home warning the public that she was diseased and quarantined, or she could check into a local hospital where she would have to stay until she was fully cured. Despite her fervent insistence that it simply wasn’t possible for her to be infected, Nina chose detention over the prospect of bringing shame on her mother’s house.”

While in detention she was additionally diagnosed as have syphilis as well.  The injections she received caused intense pain, caused her hair and teeth to begin to fall out, and risked her life.  According to Stern:

“….[they] caused, among other things, throbbing pain, kidney damage, inflammation or ulceration of the mouth, and terrible skin rashes….It could [also] stunt growth, affect the memory and basic mental functioning, bring about deafness or blindness, and result in death.”

After three months she was finally released, a marked woman in the small town.  Yet she continued to be harassed by the authorities.

“She was required, according to Peck, to continue to undergo treatment (the dreaded mercury injections) even though she had been released. According to Carney, they hadn’t been giving her the right kind of mercury, and she needed a new regimen. Should she refuse to comply, Nina was told, she would be locked up again.”

Once she began to recover from a series of injections she would be called back for another series.  After a year of this abuse she sued Peck and Carney.  She lost her case initially, but then won it on appeal.  It was a victory for her, but a pyrrhic victory for women in general. 

Kelly provides this perspective.

“Nina McCall’s wasn’t a particularly special case, and even her fight for justice wasn’t altogether unheard of. Nina stood out to Stern, both because of her sheer audacity and because the Michigan state archives happened to have kept detailed records of her case. In 1921, she took her case against those who had wronged her all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court and won. The court decided that Carney had erred in his treatment of her, because he had no reasonable grounds for suspicion that she had been infected; but that if he had, his actions would have been perfectly acceptable. Her victory proved bittersweet: The ruling—known as Rock v. Carney—went on to provide the justification for decades more abuses. The ASHA [American Social Hygiene Association] used it to bolster the right ‘of the health officer to quarantine persons suffering with the venereal disease in an infectious state who constitute a menace to the public health’.”

Thompson describes the American Plan programs as a “method of maintaining the racial and economic status quo in the face of demographic and political disruption.”  She agrees with Stern that the attempt to maintain this status quo still informs public policy today although the laws used to justify it have changed over time.

“When we see the American Plan not in isolation, but rather as a part of a long history—from slavery in the 1800s to mass incarceration in the 2000s—Stern’s book is not merely the story of one women’s fight against injustice. His research exposes both the insidious ways in which calls for ‘public safety’ soon come to justify the curtailment of rights, and the extent to which today’s most destructive carceral apparatus has its basis in fear on the part of the powerful. Race, class, and gender profiling inform which citizens today are policed and imprisoned. The same factors determined who was surveilled and locked away under the American Plan.”

Let us finish with Kelly’s perspective on what this history means.

“None of the three federal laws passed in 1917, 1918, and 1919 have ever been struck down in appeals court or repealed; they remain on the books in various forms today, and the toxic attitudes they enabled continue to impact women in America today….When public officials detained a number of HIV-positive individuals in the 1980s and 1990s (many of them sex workers), the ghost of the American Plan reared its head once more; one court decision from 1990 directly cited a 1919 case that declared the quarantine of a woman infected with gonorrhea a ‘reasonable and proper’ action. Everything old is new again.”

“The truths revealed in this book are truly shocking, and even more so because they are so little known. The culture of silence that has impacted sex workers for so long has finally begun to dissipate, but potent dangers remain. More than 200,000 women are currently incarcerated, and represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population; up to 70 percent of women behind bars are or have been involved in the commercial sex industry. Women are still arrested on false pretenses, simply for how they look or present, or for carrying condoms in their purses; sex workers—particularly those who are trans women of color—are extremely vulnerable to police brutality and criminal justice abuses. Women like Nina McCall….fought against a system that saw them as less than human. One hopes the fact that more authors are now working to tell those stories means that more people will fight back.”

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

The Death of Justice and the Tyranny of Law

Bad Science Has Consequences: Eugenics and Emma Wolverton’s Story

Republicans Hate Uppity Women More Than They Hate Uppity Blacks

Economic Sanctions, Failing Alliances, and the Future of the Dollar

The United States has gone against the wishes of its allies in planning to reinstate sanctions against Iran even though everyone agrees that Iran has been living up to the conditions of the treaty that originally lifted sanctions against it.  The other countries have expressed the desire to continue to do business with Iran, but the United States has threatened them with financial harm should they do so.  How does the US obtain the power to bully other nations in this way?

The Trump administration’s leverage over other nations arises from the size of the US economy and the US dollar’s role as the currency of choice in international financial transactions.  Most international transactions take place via procedures developed to provide reliability and uniformity by a European outfit called SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication).  The US intelligence agencies have developed the capability to monitor all transactions using SWIFT.  Any financial entity involved in business with Iran would normally use this agency and be detected by a US outfit called OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), which has been provided with enormous power that can be used to force others to behave consistently with US policies.

From Wikipedia we get this perspective on OFAC.

“Sometimes described as one of the ‘most powerful yet unknown government agencies, OFAC was founded in 1950 and has the power to levy significant penalties against entities that defy its directives, including imposing fines, freezing assets, and barring parties from operating in the United States.”

“OFAC administers and enforces economic sanctions programs against countries, businesses or groups of individuals, using the blocking of assets and trade restrictions to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.”

Financial transactions between entities in different countries are normally handled by institutions such as banks.  Getting caught facilitating flows of currency between Iran and another entity would place at risk a bank’s ability to do business in the US.  There are few, if any, of significant size that don’t have a US presence as part of their business model.

Wielding this power is acceptable if the policies driving it are arrived at with voluntary acquiescence by a significant number of international players.  That has essentially been the case for decades.  But now the Trump administration is saying to its traditional allies it will do whatever it wants to do—because it can.  That attitude does not rest easily with other nations, generating interest in alternative mechanisms that would free them from US domination.  Should such a thing come to pass, the US would face a much different financial future—one with significant consequences.

Peter Coy addressed these issues in a Bloomberg Businessweek article The Tyranny of the U.S. Dollar.

“By the latest tally of the European Central Bank, America’s currency makes up two-thirds of international debt and a like share of global reserve holdings. Oil and gold are priced in dollars, not euros or yen. When Somali pirates hold up ships at sea, it’s dollars they demand. And threats to be cut off from the dollar-based global payments system strike terror into the likes of Iran, North Korea, and Russia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the dollar’s primacy is at least as valuable to the U.S. as a couple of aircraft carrier strike groups.”

Coy indicates that dissatisfaction with the current system is growing.

“Political leaders who once accepted the dollar’s hegemony, grudgingly or otherwise, are pushing back. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said in September that it’s ‘absurd’ that European companies buy European planes in the American currency instead of their own. In March, China challenged the dollar’s dominance in the global energy markets with a yuan-denominated crude oil futures contract. Russia slashed its dollar holdings this year, claiming (inaccurately) that the greenback is ‘becoming a risky instrument in international settlements.’ And French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters in August that he wants financing instruments that are ‘totally independent’ of the U.S., saying, ‘I want Europe to be a sovereign continent, not a vassal’.”

It is difficult to know if any of this will lead to changes in the future, but the US should at least recognize what losing the dollar as the dominant currency would mean.  Coy indicates several consequences.  The first is that the cost of borrowing to service our national debt would increase.

“’In a hypothetical scenario where the U.S. withdraws from the world,’ damage to the dollar’s standing could cause average U.S. interest rates to rise by 0.8 percentage point, according to a December paper by Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley and two researchers from the European Central Bank.”

An extra 0.8% in interest on $21 trillion is about $170 billion in added expenditures each year, or $170 billion deducted from other budgeted items.  The net effect could be even worse if the world should decide that US debt is no longer a good investment.

“If the dollar loses its central role—to be sure, not an imminent threat—the U.S. will be more vulnerable when there’s a loss of investor confidence. The Federal Reserve might even have to do what other nations do when global investors panic: jack up interest rates to painful levels to keep speculative money from flowing out. As it is now, when trouble breaks out, investors flood into U.S. markets seeking refuge, oddly enough even when the U.S. itself is the source of the problem, as it was in last decade’s global financial crisis.”

There is also something called the “Triffin dilemma.”

“Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin observed in 1959 that for the U.S. to supply dollars to the rest of the world, it must run trade deficits. Trading partners stash the dollars they earn from exports in their reserve accounts instead of spending them on American goods and services.”

The good that comes from this is that the need for dollars means that the US can consume more than it earns from the health of its economy without having to raise interest rates.  In other words, consumers can “live beyond their means.”  Should the dollar lose its exalted status, countries would begin buying more US goods as they diminish their dollar reserves. This would generate a short-term boost in business for the economy, but forevermore, US consumers would be “living beneath their means” as the cost of servicing the debt would increase.

The Trump administration is playing with fire here.  Short-term advantages can lead to long-term disadvantages.

“America First” is not necessarily “America Best.”

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

2008: The Fed Saves the World Financial Order; 2018: Trump’s Assignment Is to Destroy It

Average Height as an Indicator of National Social Success

Carl Zimmer has produced an absolutely fascinating look at the various ways in which living things, including we humans, can inherit the characteristics that define us.  There are some very surprising pathways available.  He presents his work in She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.  One of the topics he covers is the inheritability of height.  There clearly is a correlation between parental height and that of a child, but the correlation is not perfect.  Figuring out exactly how this transference is accomplished genetically is not a trivial undertaking.  In the process of explaining the complexities of the necessary genetic analysis, he provides an interesting discussion of environmental factors.  Of particular interest was the discussion of how height could be affected by general health, nourishment and well-being.  In fact, researchers have spent a considerable amount of effort trying to use average height within a population as an indicator of national well-being.

The first effort in using average height as data is attributed to Luis-René Villermé who tallied the average height of the men who entered the French army during the Napoleonic Wars.  He discovered that this value declined during the war years but began to rise again once peace had been established.  He attributed this effect to wartime food shortages.  It would be a long time before the man’s hypothesis would be reexamined. 

“Villermé’s insight went neglected for the next 150 years, until a small group of economists led by Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel started charting height in different countries over the course of decades.  They made a compelling case that height could serve as an economic barometer, recording the well-being of societies.”

The historical data is quite compelling—and quite interesting.  Data from Europe goes back about 30,000 years.  There was a human culture at the time referred to as the Gravettians.  They seemed to be hunter-gatherers who had a diet heavy in meat.  This ample protein supply elevated their average height to about six feet.  When the beginnings of an agricultural economy arrived in Europe, this development delivered a host of new diseases as population density increased.  The dietary focus also shifted to lower protein sources such as grains.  Average height indicated this “progress” was very hard on humans.

“When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature.  Men lost eight inches in height….For the next seven thousand years, European stature hardly changed, wavering just an inch or two from century to century.  In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood five foot five.”

Those moving to America in colonial times must have found the environment considerably healthier than that which they left behind in Europe.

“When English people emigrated to the American colonies, men swiftly climbed to five foot eight, becoming the tallest men in the world.  By the end of the eighteenth century, American apprentices at age sixteen stood almost five inches taller than poor sixteen-year-olds in London.”

However, the current data on height suggests that the United States is no longer considered a particularly healthy place in which to watch your children grow.

“In both the United States and Europe, the average height dipped in the first half of the nineteenth century.  But then, starting around 1870….people in both Europe and the United States started getting taller.  Over the next century, Americans grew by about three extra inches on average, hitting a plateau in the 1990s.  In Europe, the boom was even more dramatic.  With each succeeding decade, Europeans added about half an inch of average height, and kept growing that way into the twenty-first century.  Northern and central European countries were the first to begin this ascent, but the southern regions started catching up by the mid-1900s.  Today, Latvian women have become the tallest women in the world, jumping from about five foot one to five foot seven.  Dutch men rose from five foot seven in 1860 to just over six feet tall, making them the tallest men on Earth.”

Just a few years ago data such as these became available for most of the countries of the world.  One can peruse data on people born from 1896 to 1996.  National ranking for both genders can be found here.  Line plots providing more detailed information over that period are available here for average height in each country.

US women born in 1896 ranked fourth in average height behind Sweden, Norway, and Iceland.  US women are now ranked forty-second in the world.  Latvian women headed in the opposite direction, going from twenty-eighth to first.  US men born in 1896 ranked third behind Sweden and Norway.  US men are now ranked thirty-seventh.  Men from the Netherlands moved up from twelfth to first.

If one believes that height data is a measure of the “quality” of the society which produces it, then there are significant political implications.  Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson addressed those political issues in American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. 

“Height has a lot to do with genes, but height differences across nations seem to be caused mostly by social conditions, such as income, nutrition, health coverage, and social cohesion.  Indeed, one reason for the correlation between height and achievement is that kids whose mothers are healthy during pregnancy and grow up with sufficient food, medical care, and family support tend to be taller adults.”

“So it’s striking that Americans are no longer the tallest people in the world.  Not even close: Once three inches taller than residents of the old world, Americans are now three inches shorter.  The average Dutch height for men is six foot one, and for women, five foot eight—versus five foot nine for American men and five foot five for American women.  The gap is not, as might be supposed, a result of immigration: White, native born Americans who speak English at home are significantly smaller, too, and immigration isn’t substantial enough to explain the discrepancy in any case.”

These authors then add an even more troubling aspect to the height data: it is mostly our current young who are losing ground to other nations.

“….average heights have barely budged in recent decades, so young Americans—again, even leaving out recent immigrants—are barely taller than their parents.  Older Americans are roughly on a par with their counterparts abroad; younger Americans are substantially shorter.  The United States is the richest populous nation in the world.  Nevertheless, its young are roughly as tall as the young in Portugal, which has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) less than half ours.”

Our professional basketball teams—where height is critical— have long been dominated by black athletes.  The number of US whites making it into professional ball dropped significantly as black athletes gained greater access to improved training methods and high-level competition.  A new trend has emerged recently that has seen an influx of good white players.  Where are they coming from?  Mostly, they are coming from those taller, healthier European nations.

So much for a brief diversion into sports.  As for the political implications, make of the data what you wish, but at least the Europeans are finally catching up to the Gravettians of thirty thousand years ago.  We are unlikely to ever get there.

 

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

Early States, Capitalism, and the Domestication of Humans