Category Archives: Business

The Trump Voters

They want respect, and here’s how to give it to them:

…trade and immigration haven’t been so costless for everyone. Those things provide the most benefit to cosmopolitan people who enjoy global travel (and have the means — professional or personal — to do a lot of it), who can hire nannies and landscapers to do work that other people have to do themselves, who have a taste for strange foreign foods, who are not directly competing with immigrants for jobs, because their jobs tend to be highly language-intensive, or rely on U.S.-specific social capital, in a way that’s hard to outsource. Immigration and trade have been worse for people who compete with immigrants, or tradeable goods and services, and who value a particular community and place over novelty.

Elites, then, tend to give themselves too much moral credit for their position, overlooking the fact that it is always easier to be in favor of enhancing the welfare of others if those enhancements do not cost you anything. But I think that’s not the only thing they overlook.

For one thing, they often seem oblivious to the fact that people care more about their role as workers than they do as consumers. If you go from having a relatively high status and secure job to lower status, lower-paid, and less secure work, the psychological stress of worrying about your future and feeling that you have lost ground may not exceed the psychological benefits of cheaper stuff.

Want to get more Trump? That’s how you get more Trump.

The Fate Trump Spared Us

Why despite my visceral dislike and low opinion of Trump, I’m still glad she lost:

I am sure Obama always remained ambivalent about Hillary Clinton from their 2008 contest, as he was very critical of Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in The Audacity of Hope. Then, too, we know that Hillary’s 2008 campaign was an organizational disaster from start to finish, reflecting her own disorderly mind, arrogant manner, and presumptuous character. It appears she learned nothing from that experience as the campaign approached.

Yes. As I’ve always said, she’s an incompetent, corrupt hack, and her administration would have been a disaster on top of terrible policy.

[Update late morning]

Hillary ran the worst presidential campaign ever. And there’s no reason to think that she’d have run the country any better.