White Patriarchy and Politics: How Women Vote

 Women are reliable voters, more so than their male counterparts.  That suggests that a gender-based political movement would be powerful force—if there were such a thing.  Rebecca Traister takes her readers through a sequence of political realities that effect female issues, female politicians, and female voters in her book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.  She argues that our nation was constructed to be led by a white male minority, and much of our history and current difficulties can be better understood if one takes that perspective as a starting point.  Her book was published in 2018, leaving the 2016 presidential election to be the critical political event. 

“White patriarchal minority rule was established by America’s founders when they encoded slavery into our founding documents and built our electoral apparatus around its protection.  It was strengthened when they granted white men the franchise and violently guarded that exclusivity for almost a century, ensuring that it was only they who created and controlled the courts, the businesses, the economic systems, who wrote the legislation and created the customs and set the norms on which the country was built.”

Much of Traister’s focus is on the norms that have been created and imprinted into our national psyche that constrain women in pursuing their goals by limiting the actions deemed acceptable for them.  That will be a topic for another day.  Here we are interested in some insights she provides into how the white male minority has used its position of dominance to maintain its power.

“White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population.  The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority.  And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some while denying them to others.”

The main strategy is to pick off white women voters and use a dependence on their white male spouses and parents to keep them in line.  This, of course, has been the strategy of would-be patriarchs since the inception of the practice thousands of years ago.  “If you stick to doing the womanly things that need to be done, we will provide your social, racial, and economic needs in our dangerous manly world.”  This argument continues to be effective.

“And so, some American women have been offered the advantages of white supremacy, advantages that turn on other women’s disadvantages…And women’s dependence on men has in turn made it in many women’s interests to support policies and parties that protect the economic and political status of the men on whom they depend.”

“But the particular form of the subjugation and ensuing dependency also works to divide them from nonwhite women, to whom none of the advantages and protections of this economic or social or political supremacy accrue, and discourages potential alliances between white and nonwhite women who might otherwise rise up together to challenge white male power.”

The attraction of this “proximal power” white women gain from their allegiance to white men has enabled patriarchy to be a potent force over the millennia.  Women have been their own worst enemies in the effort to escape subjugation by males.  Traister reports some startling voting trends.

“Those white women who are or have been most directly connected by marriage to white men are far mor likely to vote Republican than their never-married peers.  According to a paper published by political scientists Dara Strolovitch, Janelle S. Wong, and Andrew Proctor, who reviewed the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election study numbers on voting patterns, a majority 59 percent of never-married white women voted for Hillary Clinton, compared to the almost reverse majority of married white women, 57 percent, who voted for Donald Trump.  Sixty percent of white widows voted for Trump; 56 percent of white women who were separated from husbands voted for Trump; and 49 percent of white divorced women voted for him.  In other words, the study concluded, ‘The more distant’ white women are ‘from the benefits and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates,’ i.e., candidates of the party more likely to support traditional white heteropatriarchy.”

Nonwhite women are not only disadvantaged by the minimal support received from white women, but also because their men can be attracted to the male advantages of patriarchy without the ability to provide the same proximal power that white wives receive.

“Bur racial advantages are not the only thing the white patriarchy is willing to dole out to divide people.  There is also patriarchy itself, the benefits of which have been offered up to men of all races.  Though nonwhite voters overwhelmingly chose Clinton over Trump, in all racial categories, more men than women voted for Trump.  Only 4 percent of black women voted for Donald Trump, but 13 percent of black men did…Black men may enjoy, and work to perpetuate, advantages that accrue to their gender, even as they are oppressed because of their race.”

With only their anger and frustrations to motivate them, black women have taken the lead in the battle against gender and racial injustices.

“Black women have long been the backbone of our political and progressive past: the strategists and protestors and organizers and volunteers, the women who’ve gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions.”

“Which makes it a terrific injustice that the movements to liberate women and African Americans have so often been understood as having been led by white women and black men.  They are understood this way because white supremacy and patriarchy permit white women and black men greater access to money, and more proximity to the media that covers social movements and the politicians who respond to them, than black women have.” 

Traister provides some final advice on this topic.

“The post-2016 moment offers a chance for white women to be awakened to the many reasons that they should be angry.  But crucially—urgently—the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women, women who experience those injustices in part due to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women.  And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgement that white women are late to the party.”

 

The Delusions of Crowds: Stock Markets

 Humans spent most of their history evolving to maximize the success of the small bands of hunter-gatherers in which they lived.  Of necessity, numerous pro-social attributes designed to facilitate cooperation and sharing would develop.  One would be the ease with which we can be influenced by the actions and words of others in our group.  Peer pressure can be exceedingly strong, prompting individuals to take actions in a group that they would never participate in as an isolated individual.  Edward Chancellor discusses this “madness of crowds” in an economic context for an article in the New York Review of Books titled Waiting to Deflate. 

“Imitative behavior was a successful adaptation for early Homo sapiens—if one of our ancestors was seen fleeing from some unspecified danger, it probably made sense to run, too, without asking many questions. But in the complex modern world, imitation can amplify maladaptive behavior, allowing delusional beliefs to take hold. This problem is exacerbated by another innate tendency: our susceptibility to engaging stories, especially ones that transport people from their immediate surroundings and isolate them from the facts of the real world.” 

The first serious exposition on the folly of following the actions of others in the world of speculative finance appeared in 1841 by Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 

“Mackay’s book…covers an eccentric miscellany of popular delusions, from the witch mania of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to alchemists, magnetizers, slow poisoners, and the ‘influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard’.”

“The book’s opening three chapters—which describe the Tulip Mania of 1636–1637, the ‘money mania’ of John Law’s Mississippi Scheme of 1719–1720, and the South Sea Bubble (also of 1720)—comprise the first popular account of speculative manias.”

Chancellor reviews the more recent work of William Bernstein presented in his book The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups.

“Bernstein, a trained neurologist and the author of several investment books, is particularly well suited to the task of updating Mackay, and his Delusions of Crowds is a worthy supplement to the original. Yet more accurate historical accounts of speculative manias and advances in the psychology of decision-making have failed to produce any noticeable improvement in financial behavior. On the contrary, over the past quarter-century, we have witnessed a succession of speculative bubbles, from dot-com stocks to the current craze for new technologies such as electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.”

There is a hint of something called “the wisdom of crowds,” but the term is misused because it actually applies to a collection of individuals acting independently.  A crowd is by definition an assembly of interacting people.

“Errors appear when individuals become overly influenced by what others think. ‘The more a group interacts,’ Bernstein writes,

the more it behaves like a real crowd, and the less accurate its assessments become…. As put most succinctly by Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Madness is rare in the individual—but with groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule.’ Mackay also recognized this; perhaps the most famous line in Extraordinary Popular Delusions is ‘Men, it is said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one’.” 

For a crowd to develop delusions it is necessary that communication between participants be available.  The greater the ease of communication, the more contagious a notion can become. 

“…manias of financial speculation have frequently coincided with advances in communications technology. The earliest stock market boom occurred in London’s Exchange Alley in the 1690s, at a time when newspapers were deregulated and lists of share prices were first published in trade publications. The advent of steam railways and the electric telegraph in the nineteenth century provided both objects of speculation and means for more rapidly spreading speculative hype. The same was true of radio and telephony in the 1920s.”

“Likewise, the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s served as both the medium of speculation and its object.”

History tells us that financial bubbles are not spontaneous eruptions, they require promoters and sponsors who will benefit in some way.  And for a bubble to see spectacular growth, the inducement of new participants to financial speculation is required.

“Governments frequently have a leading role. The French and British governments encouraged bubbles in the Mississippi and South Sea Companies because they wanted public creditors to swap their debt holdings for overpriced stock in these companies.”

“Modern politicians often view the level of the stock market as a measure of their personal success: during his term in office, President Trump tweeted new highs on Wall Street and browbeat the Federal Reserve to loosen monetary policy in order to send shares even higher.”

“The financial media, whose advertising incomes rise and fall with the markets, encourage trend-following behavior. Roger Ailes joined the business channel CNBC in 1993, just before the dot-com boom took off. According to Bernstein, ‘Ailes taught his anchors and production staff to treat finance as a spectator sport.’ Skeptics dubbed the channel ‘Bubblevision’ for its relentlessly upbeat presentation of market news, while Ailes’s protégé Maria Bartiromo became known on Wall Street as the ‘Money Honey’.” 

The term “speculation” implies a willingness to accept risk to attain financial gain.  It differs from investment in that the intention is to strive for short-term gains rather than long-term returns: shares are bought on the assumption that they can be resold at a profit.  The motive for purchasing shares need only be because they are currently going up in value, not because of intrinsic worth.  If this is the dynamic in play, them stock markets in a bubble phase have the trappings of Ponzi or pyramid schemes: early participants become wealthy at the expense of later participants. 

In all cases, easy credit is the fuel that feeds the speculative flames.

“Credit enables investors to buy assets with debt; easy money boosts the demand for speculative assets, driving up prices and increasing potential gains for those who can cash out in time. Falling interest rates also encourage investors to take greater risks, pursuing capital gains to replace lost income from their debtors. The greatest speculative manias have all been fueled by easy money, from the Mississippi Bubble down to the recent US housing bubble, which took off after the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in response to the dot-com crash.  As Bernstein writes, ‘low interest rates are the fertile ground in which bubbles sprout’.”

Stock market behavior since the beginning of the Covid pandemic has been truly astonishing: indicative of madness and worthy of bubble designation.

“As global economic output contracted sharply in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the financial markets took off. Over the course of 2020, the S&P 500 index rose by 16.3 percent. The share price of electric-car maker Tesla climbed nearly eightfold; the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, priced at around $7,000 in January 2020, traded above $32,000 a year later and a few months after that rose above $63,000. Millions of brokerage accounts were opened in the United States, a record amount of money was raised by initial public offerings (IPOs), and American house prices soared to new highs, as did household wealth.”

“Last year the Federal Funds Rate was reduced to zero and the US central bank doubled the size of its securities holdings. As a result, the money supply surged, and US Treasury yields fell to an all-time low. Easy money has encouraged the use of leverage: earlier this year, a fund run by the Korean-born investor Bill Hwang lost billions of dollars; Hwang is believed to have leveraged his investments by as much as nine times. Retail investors have also been using debt to make purchases on the stock market. As in 1929, margin debt has reached an all-time high. A recent investor survey reveals that 40 percent of individual investors have borrowed to buy stocks (the figure rises to 80 percent for Generation Z investors).”

“Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner Charlie Munger has described the latest stock market frenzy as ‘the most dramatic thing that’s almost ever happened in the entire world history of finance.’ He was hardly exaggerating.” 

Chancellor compares the current situation to famous bubbles of the past.

“In the early eighteenth century, the South Sea bubble was marked by the appearance of nearly a hundred so-called bubble companies; these enterprises, according to a contemporary journal cited by Mackay, were ‘set on foot and promoted by crafty knaves, then pursued by multitudes of covetous fools, and at last appeared to be, in effect, what their vulgar appellation denoted them to be—bubbles and mere cheats’.”

“Similar words might be applied now to the promoters of special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), shell companies that are listed on stock markets and used to acquire unlisted companies, thereby providing a back door into markets without having to go through regulatory processes for initial public offerings. SPACs raised $93 billion in the first few months of this year.”

“The bubble companies of 1720 covered a miscellany of ventures—from a ‘company for the transmutation of fluid mercury or quicksilver’ to one for ‘emptying necessary houses [public toilets] throughout England’ and another, most famously, ‘for carrying an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’—and recent SPACs are scarcely more credible. They include several flying-taxi start-ups, a space-travel venture, and a ‘developer to augment humans to enhance productivity and safety.’ Cashing in on Tesla euphoria, many SPACs are makers of electric vehicles, sensors, and batteries. In place of the ‘crafty knaves’ of 1720, the SPAC ‘sponsors,’ as they are known, receive such a generous ‘promote,’ usually a 20 percent stake in the company at the IPO, that they stand to profit even when their deals lose money for outside investors.” 

To keep a bubble going, it is helpful to provide a mechanism for inducing new participants to join the game and garner what looks like easy money.  One should beware because easy investment options encourage new investors to put their meager wealth at play in a game best won by “crafty knaves.” 

“Alongside SPACs, we have witnessed the spectacular rise of the app-based broker Robinhood. Launched in 2013, Robinhood added 13 million new customers between January 2020 and March 2021. The recent surge in users has been ascribed to the fact that casinos and sports betting were closed during the pandemic shutdowns, and Robinhood’s mostly young clientele was flush with cash from stimulus checks.” 

“Robinhood has made the game of speculation easier to play and more addictive than ever. It enhances marketability in various ways: customers don’t have to meet a minimum account size, can conduct commission-free trades, and are able to trade in fractions of shares. The company hails from Silicon Valley and blends techniques devised by social networks to attract users’ attention with those of casino operators meant to keep people betting. New customers are offered a free stock upon joining; the app sends them emoji-filled notifications and erupts in confetti after a customer places an order; digits spin up and down like a slot machine when share price changes; and an alert is sent once a price rises by more than 5 percent. All these techniques are designed to draw customers back to the app.” 

As with many Silicon Valley products, free service to a user tells the user that he/she is the product being sold.

“Robinhood’s customers don’t pay transaction fees because the company earns money by selling information about their trades to financial firms, which are only too happy to take the other side of the bet.  As with Facebook and Twitter, Robinhood’s users are the product. If history is any guide, this won’t end well.”

One does not have conclusive proof of a bubble until the bubble actually bursts.  The rapid contraction can occur because of external events, or merely because the “crafty knaves” are sated with profits and quit the game.  We are in a perilous time: a perhaps unending pandemic, increasing job loss to automation, plunging birth rates, accelerating impacts of global warming—and the markets go sky high? 

Find a quiet dark place and think!

 

Demographic Futures: Too Many People, Too Few Jobs, or Too Many Jobs, Too Few People

Predicting the future has always been a risky endeavor.  Yet, ignoring the possibility of future disruptions provides risks as well.  Here we will discuss two visions of the future which demand some consideration on our part as to how to respond to the foreseen changes, should they occur.

The first future is provided by Daniel Susskind in his book A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond.  The author details how concerns about technology (automation) would replace humans as workers had proved to be false in the past.  Tasks were certainly automated, and particular types of activities faded in importance, but workers generally found other roles to play in a growing economy.  However, artificial intelligence (AI) developments in recent years have vastly expanded the potential reach and disruptive force of that technology.

“AI research, in fact, began many decades ago, with an initial burst of enthusiasm and excitement, but that was followed by a slump into a long, deep winter when little progress was made.  In recent years, though, there has been a rebirth, an intellectual and practical revolution that caught flat-footed many economists, computer scientists, and others who had tried to predict which activities machines would never do.”

Early AI was based on trying to program human-like logic into systems in order to compel the numerical system to behave like a human.  Current techniques essentially allow the numerical system to teach itself how to perform the task targeted by providing it with prodigious amounts of trial-and-error opportunities.  The impressive thing is that the system can work startlingly well; the troubling aspects are that the system can develop biases from biased data, just like a human, and the logic used by the numerical system is opaque to humans.  We do not know exactly how it arrives at results.

The result will be an economy where there will be jobs which require great amounts of learning and skill, but only a small fraction of the population will be capable of performing, and a slowly vanishing number of jobs that cannot yet be automated or are not worth trying to automate.

“…if you picked up this book expecting an account of a dramatic technological big bang in the next few decades, after which lots of people suddenly wake up to find themselves without work, you will be disappointed.  That scenario is not likely to happen: some work will almost certainly remain for quite some time to come.  But, as time passes, that work is likely to sit beyond the reach of more and more people.  And, as we move through the twenty-first century, the demand for the work of human beings is likely to wither away, gradually.  Eventually, what is left will not be enough to provide everyone who wants it with traditional well-paid employment.”

Susskind seems to believe that technology will continue to produce something for someone at a level that can produce continued economic growth as wage-earning consumers fall by the wayside.  This productive economy will produce the bounty that will allow these unemployables to be provided the means of sustenance.  His favored solution is a modification of a universal basic income scheme (UBI) which he labels a CBI, a conditional basic income.  The term “conditional” is appended to recognize a need, both on the part of the needy and the non-needy to see the income produce some contribution to the community attached to it. 

“In a world with less work, it will no longer be possible to rely on the labor market to solve the distribution problem, as we have seen—or this contribution problem either.  So how can we create that sense of communal solidarity?  A big part of the answer must involve membership requirements attached to the basic income.  If some people are not able to contribute through the work that they do, then they will be required to do something else for the community instead; if they cannot make an economic contribution, they will be asked to make a noneconomic one in its place.  We can speculate about what theses tasks might turn out to be; perhaps certain types of intellectual and cultural toil, caring for and supporting fellow human beings, teaching children how to flourish in the world.  It will fall to individual societies to settle on what these contributions should look like…”

Susskind’s CBI begins to look more like a guaranteed jobs program, which could be a more effective point of departure than a UBI to solve the problem he envisages. 

Note that Susskind suggests a gradual increase in the unemployable over the remainder of this century as economic and political responses gradually occur.  We have about eight decades remaining in this century.  Is it reasonable that nothing will occur in our rapidly evolving world that would upset his neat little picture?  Surprisingly, population growth can operate on that timescale in a manner to counter his projections.  That viewpoint is presented by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson in their book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline.

These authors believe the accepted population projections that emerge from the UN too closely follow long-term trends and are missing dramatic changes in fertility levels that have become apparent in recent years.  In fact, their population projections suggest that in the future technology will not pose a threat to massive numbers of workers, but rather, it will provide a solution to a scarcity of future workers. 

“The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline.  Once that decline begins, it will never end.  We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but a population bust—a relentless generation-after-generation culling of the human herd.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“If you find this news shocking, that’s not surprising.  The United Nations forecasts that our population will grow from seven billion to eleven billion in this century before leveling off after 2100.  But an increasing number of demographers around the world believe the UN estimates are far too high.  More likely, they say, the planet’s population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060, and then start to decline…By the end of this century, we could be back to where we are right now, and steadily growing fewer.”

Most of the developed nations of the world have fertilities (the number of children produced per female) less than the required 2.05 to maintain population level.  In a few cases this has already led to population decline, but the first symptom recognized is the aging of the population as the paucity of children shows up as a decline in the working age population.  Countries who are worried about this trend have tried to encourage greater fertility, but with little or no success.

“Some of those who fear the fallout of a diminishing population advocate government policies to increase the number of children couples have.  But the evidence suggests this is futile.  The ‘low fertility trap’ ensures that, once having one of two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm.  Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god.  Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfillment.  And they are quickly fulfilled.”

Consider an extreme case, that of South Korea where this source puts the fertility rate there at 0.9.  And there is evidence emerging that the pandemic is driving fertilities even lower.  At that level, the current child-bearing generation will provide a new childbearing generation with less than half the people.  This kind of dynamic can lead to rapid changes in national population.  One estimate has the working age population dropping by 50% in 45 years, while the total population falls by about 5% per decade throughout this century.

For comparison, the US has a fertility level of 1,7, the UK 1.6, Italy 1.3, Germany 1.5, Japan 1.4, and China 1.7.  It is unlikely that the distant future will look anything like the past. 

Both books include with their projections the plea that economists and politicians begin planning to accommodate their particular futures.  We should thank the authors for providing us with interesting scenarios, but the future might be written by forces which they had not even considered.  Neither book was in a position to consider the influence of a long-term pandemic.  The latter volume considered a declining population a benefit in limiting global warming without considering details.

In an earlier, more benign time, just a few years ago, we could ignore pandemics and think of climate change as a problem for a future generation.  However, we now know that the Covid problem can get even worse and is likely to be around and troubling indefinitely.  Also, the scientists working on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have just stopped underestimating the effects of pouring carbon into the atmosphere and have finally spoken truth to power.  Our concerns about global warming began with timescales of centuries; then it became a matter of decades; now each year matters.  From a New York Times summery. 

“On Monday [today] the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body convened by the United Nations, released a major new report concluding that the world cannot avoid some devastating impacts of climate change, but that there is still a narrow window to keep the devastation from getting even worse.”

“Under most of the scenarios discussed in the report, warming will continue well beyond 2040, through the remainder of the century. In the worst cases, where the world does little to reduce emissions, temperatures by 2100 could be 3 to 6 degrees Celsius (5.5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. That would have catastrophic consequences.” 

Yes, it would seem some planning is in order!