Male Fail

I'm going to give a brief reaction to this piece in the New York Times: Many Gen Z Men Fell Left Behind.  Some See Trump as an Answer.  There are three points I'd like to make.  

First, while at the Democratic Convention most if not all of the speakers took shots at Trump himself and deservedly so, little if anything was said about those voters who support Trump, other than those ultra-MAGA types who were directly involved in the January 6 events.  (Adam Kinzinger did speak to them as fellow Republicans.)    If we really are to get past the Trump era, and if it is really true that many Trump supporters are hurting both emotionally and economically, as I believe it to be the case, then these people should not be punished because of their collective guilt but rather should be helped out so they can be repaired and in that way the country may get repaired as well.  This will be hard to do politically as those who support Harris in this election and are part of the working class will expect that they themselves should be the exclusive targeted beneficiaries of a Harris Presidency.  But it needs to be done and, indeed, it needs to be ongoing for quite a while.

Second, there is something wrong with how macroeconomics is done these days as the various statistics, such as the unemployment rate, aggregates over various sub-populations which are having quite different experiences.  The Democratic Convention itself focused on a sub-population, the working class.  It did not talk much at all about people living in poverty.  On the other end of the spectrum, it did not talk about those, like me, with advanced degrees and a career trajectory where income was reasonably good, if not spectacular.  If there is underemployment within a sub-population, that needs to be addressed by fiscal policy targeted at that sub-population.  We should not let the aggregation of different experiences from different sub-populations hinder us in taking political action. 

Third, the scale of intervention that is needed is typically underestimated.  Part of this is worrying about creating huge deficits that will ultimately create a terrible inflation.  Another part is by eyeballing how much actually can be collected in additional taxes from the upper tier in the economy, without that creating a huge political, if not economic, fallout.  Being aware of this underestimation issue is not the same thing as resolving it, but maybe it will help in sizing programs that actually get political consideration.

While the Green New Deal has been an idea floating around for quite some time, it seems to have lost some currency.  Eight years ago I wrote my own post about it entitled, Hard Hats That Are Green.  The virtue of that post is that it manipulated the numbers to get concrete cost estimates of such a program and the scale of the offering.  We've had substantial inflation in the interim and that needs to be accounted for, so the post could use some updating that way.  But it does give a method for thinking through implementing such a program.  Our recent activist fiscal policy, such as the American Rescue Plan, has been near-term intervention to bring the economy out of a slump.  The underemployment in certain sub-populations is a structural problem that will take much more time to solve.  That needs to be understood.  It won't be one and done.

Let me advance one more way of thinking about sub-populations and then close.  This time the focus will be geographic.  Many people who live in rural areas have suffered economically, with low employment prospects, yet with a preference for the rural lifestyle.  While most economists had argued that the solution is for such people to migrate to urban areas, Covid may have put the lie to that suggestion.  Might it be possible to have a sensible intervention with these people perhaps migrating a little but still retaining the rural lifestyle?  About six years ago I wrote a post called The Morrill of the Story, which called for the Land Grant Universities to serve as hubs for Green New Deal type interventions.  I hadn't seen that suggestion made elsewhere and, admittedly, since I live in such a college town, I may be biased in proposing it.  But it seems to me something like that should be done.  

In closing, I wonder whether any of these suggestions would be politically possible, because the targeted population favors Trump now.  At present that seems a vice.  If the Democrats do have a big win in November, maybe it will come to be seen as a virtue, as the agenda to repair the nation takes on prominence.