Re: Barcelona
 

That's a mean thing to say. Oops, median. That's a median thing to say.

Re: Barcelona
 

My very high level, beyond anyone else posting here's ability to understand, science degree came from two schools. When transferring credits I somehow convinced the final school that I already had statistics. I know fuck all.

Re: Barcelona
 

If the median Trump voter is at the national average, we can safely assume that Trump voters are not affluent. What the 50K national median tells you is that an awful lot of US citizens generally are impoverished.

That a shitload of this country earns a subsistence living does not undo the point that a typical Trump voter is likely struggling to keep up with cost of the American Dream. Those below him have no hope of achieving it. He is, OTOH, just deluding himself, and he's angry that he cannot achieve it. Instead of punching up, however, he is stupidly targeting those below him as the cause of his insecurity.

But, in fairness, he can't punch upward. Because the rich aren't the cause of his stagnancy either. It's just a conflation of economic conditions, policy decisions, and their own decisions, that are causing these Trumpkins to become redundant or obsolete.

And he can't rely on the Democratic Party to help him. That party cannot undo global economic conditions or automation. All it can offer him is more robust safety nets -- more transfers to him. And I'm not sure the Trump voter wants that. The angry Trump voter I see, and this is anecdotal, but keep in mind, I run into a fair number of them in this backwash state of mine, wants opportunity. He wants to be able to provide and feel like he's part of the economy.

So when faced with no hope of policy that will aid him, I think he decides to vote for Trump. And the calculation is simple: "This guy will either create some magic and change things in a way that will help me, or he'll just burn it all down."

I'm no anthropologist, but if people are given the option of either accepting defeat or blowing up the game, they pretty predictably pick the latter.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

HOW MUCH OF A TOTAL MORON ARE YOU?

You realize this has been corrected over and over again. This isn't Fox, repeating incorrect information over and over again doesn't make anyone believe it more.

Get a clue.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

The median Trump voter is 72k. The average US income is 75k. Adder’s correction was to a statement that the average Trump voter’s income was 72k. He’s right. That’s actually the median.

So if the median, or mid-point, of Trump incomes is 72k, and that is close to the US average income, although a rough estimate, it can be safely said that it is unlikely that the majority of Trump voters are affluent.

ETA: Again, 2/3 of Trump voters were under $100k: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/why-trump...ou-might-think How far does 100k get you these days? Is that affluent? (This stat alone refutes the argument that Trump voters trended economically comfortable or affluent.)

Re: Barcelona
 

Translation: I do not understand math.

ETA: Apparently I'm avoiding work again, so let's play with very basic statistics.

Here's a set of data with a median income of 72:

1, 3, 4, 5, 72, 347, 774, 852, 982

Can we say that 72 is typical of incomes in this group? No. Can we say that the typical person in this group is not affluent? No. Can we say that in general, people in this group are struggling? No.

Of course, this set is not likely to reflect the real world, but it illustrates what you can and cannot say about a group based on the median.

Here's another set of data with a mean, or arithmetic average, of 72:

0, 0, 0, 144, 144, 144

Can we say that 72 is typical of incomes in this group? No. Can we say that the typical person in this group is not affluent? No. Can we say that in general, people in this group are struggling? No.

Now, we could say that assuming a normal distribution of incomes, an income of 72 is typical of the group, except that we know that incomes are not normally distributed, especially on the high end.

Here's another set of data, this time with a mode of 72:

0, 1, 3, 7, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 747, 894, 999

This is what you're looking for if you'd like to generalize about what's typical in a set of data we know is far from normally distributed.

Anyway, again, the Trump voter median income is about 40% greater than overall median income, which tells us that the set of Trump voters is, overall, significantly more affluent than the generally population. It either contains a lot more higher incomes or a lot fewer lower incomes (someone else posted data suggesting it's the latter, btw, a fact your could have used in your favor if you weren't busy arguing in favor of your straw man and against the observation that the poorest didn't support Trump).

If you want to compare that information to the overall mean income, you're going to need the mean income of Trump voters. The fact that the median income is higher than overall median may suggest that the mean is also higher than overall, but we don't know that for sure because we don't have any information about the distribution of incomes within the sample.

Okay, that was a waste of time.

Re: Barcelona
 

You two are really putting me in a mode.

Re: Barcelona
 

Neoliberalism and unrealistic expectations. Our middle class from the Depression through the 60s was an aberration. It concentrated gains in the US in a manner that delivered so well for all tiers of US society that we now expect that indefinitely. Neoliberalism has no plan for addressing the losers in a system that is across borders at exponentially speed.

You net the cost of placating the underclasses against the cost of upending the status quo. If we move toward nationalism and protectionism, it hurts you and me, but theoretically helps the losers in our economy. Theoretically, they 'git thur jobs back.

Fundamental misunderstanding of Trump voters, I think, is that they want handouts. Some do, but just as many actually want opportunity.

If we regulated the things that are doing the "disrupting," we could do so in a manner that would not create such rapid and extreme job losses in old line industries (See: NY cabbies). We don't.

I don't think we should. I love the efficiencies. But there's a compelling argument that the govt should intervene to make the lard landings softer and slower, so the losers can acclimate.

I agree with this completely. We've done a piss poor job of explaining all of the "stealth" transfers along the lines of those you listed.

I don't think the govt has an obligation to do more for them in terms of safety nets or redistribution. I think the govt has an obligation to find a way to provide them with greater opportunity. Perhaps, among other methods, by breaking up larger corporations to create more market competition.

There are a lot of things that lead to populism. Ignorance, xenophobia, etc. are rampant in populist movements. But the spark is always economic. Inequality is that spark.

I don't think that assumption can be made with much confidence. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the Trump voters making over $100k (1/3 of them) were concentrated in or around urban areas.

You're making extreme inequality the enemy of relative inequality. And inequality is a very relative thing. I can't prove this, but I'd wager the dirt poor don't think much about inequality. They're just struggling to survive, and the idea of being wealthy is just a fantasy. The people in the middle who are being arbitrarily washed out of the economy are the ones feeling acute inequality. The American Dream was within reach, perhaps even in their grasp, and economic changes and policy decisions have taken it away from them. The economy no longer delivers for them. And they're mad about it, and resentful toward those for whom it does deliver.

I agree with this.

I assure you that inference is way, way off base. I hate that GOP talking point.

This is 180 degrees from my thinking about the working poor.

I think the poor should get help and do, and the middle is ignored. I don't have a favored horse in that race. My point is to explain why populism has arisen. And it has arisen from the middle. So I was telling you what was going on with the middle, and how you and I were ignoring it.

It's impossible to figure out what you're saying. You're just as slippery as I can be. But what I do know is, you don't think much about how relative inequality between the middle to lower class losers in the economy has led to populism. And you don't seem to like my indictment of people like us for ignoring this rising populism, which has been bubbling up for many years. You seem to prefer to duck it using Harry Frankfurt's argument that, "we should only focus on helping the absolutely destitute." Okay. I can abide that approach. But understand, this populism thing - arising from relative inequality - is not going away any time soon. It is a disease. And as long as our middle class continues to hollow, the only question is how it manifests itself: Left or Right? Trump 2020, or more Ocasio-Cortezes? Or both. In any scenario, it's not good, because Left or Right, these people are idiots.

It's not a narrow problem. You advocate for finding a group to blame because this makes it easy to take a side. This is seeking false comfort, false certainty. It's this thinking that has led to our tribalization.

Think a little critically about how then differs from now.

Interconnectedness via the internet ain't like interconnectedness by steamship and telegraph.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

I remember explaining some of how this stuff works to my kinds when they were in grammar school. They got it.

Re: Barcelona
 

This all rests on the assumption that income is far from normally distributed. If I remove that assumption and replace it with the assumption income is distributed with a high a number of modes near the median, which is just as likely, your theory goes up in smoke.

And I merely said Trump voters were not affluent. 2/3 make less than $100k. Under $100k is not affluent.

You chose to assess them against the general public because you cannot argue that people making less than $100k are generally affluent.

Your comment, that they are more affluent than the broader public, also dovetails with what I said earlier: "That a shitload of this country earns a subsistence living does not undo the point that a typical Trump voter is likely struggling to keep up with cost of the American Dream." 2/3 of Trump voters under $100k are struggling to attain the American Dream, as $100k is not a lot of money, particularly for a family household. That a whole lot of other Americans are doing worse does not undo this fact. It just means that, below the struggling 2/3 of Trump voters are people struggling even more.

Re: Barcelona
 

I sense one of my periodic rages about Americans and numbers come on. Sebby is triggering me.

Re: Barcelona
 

2/3 of Trump voters earn < $100k. This means 2/3 of Trump voters are unquestionably not affluent.

You can argue until you're blue in the face and not get around that statistic.

Re: Barcelona
 

It's not an assumption, it's a fact. The top 1% are something like 20% of all income. Jesus, man.

Is 2/3 more, less or about the same as Clinton voters? Is it more or less than the proportion of all incomes? I do not know, thus I am not making any claims.

Meanwhile, you're still arguing against a straw man.

Re: Sebby is ugly and below average
 

Trump voters are, by a statistically significant margin, more affluent than Americans as a whole.

Re: Barcelona
 

We don't know that stat as to Trump voters. You're assuming Trump voters mirror the general numbers.

I said Trump voters are not generally affluent. Does showing that 2/3 of them make less than $100k not make that point?

Re: Sebby is ugly and below average
 

Which means they tend to make a few more bucks than loads of people making near subsistence wages. So they're the lords of the slagheap.

Cuz call me nuts, but making $100k these days, you can't even afford to send the kids to college?

Re: Sebby is ugly and below average
 

Haven't I called you nuts before? What makes you think anything has changed?

Re: Sebby is ugly and below average
 

Because it's the holidays?

Re: Barcelona
 

Ty said the poorest did not vote for Trump. This is true.

You responded with, "not all Trump voters are affluent" (paraphrase). This is also true and undisputed.

The dispute was over your sloppy characterization of who you think the typical Trump voter is based on an inaccurate understanding of the statistics.

Now you've found another statistic that you don't understand, and have used it to make a categorial assertion. Here's my response: I don't know what "affluent" means in the abstract, but $100k is roughly twice national median income, and fully a third of Trump's support came from people making more than that. Which sounds actually like a lot.

But maybe it's not a lot. We'd need to know something about what percentage of Americans earn more than that. Here's something called bankrate.com (almost three years ago) saying that roughly 20% of households earn more than $100k: https://www.bankrate.com/finance/per...anymore-1.aspx

This from the WSL says $100k is 8th percentile (this is individual, not family): http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/

This, from Bloomberg, has an interesting title.

If those numbers are about right (feel free to spend more than 20 seconds Googling), then Trump got disproportionate support from people earning more than $100k.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

It's wrong for a different reason too, something I said yesterday that Sebby seems to have missed. Trump voters tend to well-off relative to where they live, but live in places that are not doing well relative to the nation as a whole. At least part of the sense of grievance comes from the sense of entitlement that comes from having been affluent, relatively, and the sense of threat that comes from feeling like your community's best days are behind it.

Re: Barcelona
 

THIS JUST IN! INCOME IS FAR FROM NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED!

https://www.census.gov/content/censu...9361951239.png

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

Many of those areas, of course, have made many choices that have repercussions, such as not investing in education and educational institutions, and many of those people don't have an economic grievance but a social and cultural one. They double down on past poor choices through support for Trump. Some of the sense of grievance isn't about economics, but about the godless hateful "religion" many of them spout and their own racism.

Re: Barcelona
 

Do you think Sebby knows what "normally distributed" means?

Re: Sebby is ugly and below average
 

And even more affluent relative to other people in places where they live, which are poorer than America as a whole.

Re: Barcelona
 

Trump voters are the high end of the struggling classes. This would indicate a more normal distribution with the majority congealing around the median and identical tails going to the poor on one side and Sheldon Adelson on the other.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

You don’t know this. That’s entirely conjecture. It’s a lot more credible and logical to say that the majority of Trump’s $100k+ voters are in or around cities. Cities are where the money is. Your argument, that Trump had lots of voters in the exburbs, and therefore landed his well heeled voters in significant part from the tiny pool of wealthy exburb and rural voters is far less likely scenario than Trump’s $100k+ voters coming from a much bigger pool of $100k+ greedy folks in and around cities.

Re: Barcelona
 

Oh my god, you really don't understand math. If 2/3 of Trump voters earn less than $100K and if it is also true that 2/3 of ALL PEOPLE earn <$100K, then it would be the case that Trump voters as a whole might be just as affluent as everyone else. Or more affluent. You still wouldn't know without more information. Put another way, saying that most Trump voters aren't affluent, alone, tells you nothing about the relative affluence of Trump voters. I know I don't usually argue substance with, but dude, this is just math.

Re: Barcelona
 

100k is not affluent, anywhere. You can’t afford to send a kid to college on that salary, no matter where you live.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

We have an economy right now where there are strong network effects driving good growth. The kinds of jobs that everybody wants are clustered in a small number of metro areas. Look at Amazon, choosing to expand in NYC and DC rather than any one of a number of other places. In the development sense, the rich (areas) get richer and the rest are stuck looking up at them. Fighting this dynamic is super hard. Individual places have done some interesting things, but no one has found a solution that works widely.

Re: Barcelona
 

It can't be that you still do not get this, can it? You're just doing your usual bs, right?

Re: Barcelona
 

You should move beyond "affluent," which you have defined in your head in a particular way, and instead work with numbers or something. Because you're getting tripped up on your subjective understanding of affluent.

Re: Barcelona
 

This in no way addresses anything I said.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Jesus fucking Christ. Wait. This makes perfect sense coming from a guy who thinks "colorblind" is a thing.

This thought: "'it's not your fault, the system has it in for you'...something conservatives castigated liberals for saying to minorities years ago. And rightly so: it deprives people of agency and responsibility" is fucking offensive.

First, liberals never turned to minorities and said this shit. What was said is, "We understand the deck is stacked against you and you have more to overcome." That's not taking away agency and responsibility. I know you can't see that because we've argued ad nauseam and then some about how you think we should apportion blame to black people for the situations we find ourselves in (and I still can't wrap my head around the fact that you think that blacks (i) act as a group somehow or (ii) haven't tailored their behavior specifically based on centuries of unfair treatment).

Second, this whole, "Stop removing agency from minorities and treating them like children," mantra is a way to ignore the fact that diverse people in this country are still second class citizens while pretending like you're doing your part to treat everyone the same. It's a slick way of ignoring the problems people of color face while pretending to care about them.

Third, it ignores the fact that it isn't our fault and the system does have it in for us. Maybe less so than 50 years ago, but you have to close your eyes and ears real tight to think otherwise.

White people love to ignore both (i) all historical context as to how people arrived where they are and (ii) the actual fucking racial realities in this country and point to individuals and say, "That guy didn't work hard enough, it's his own fault." If you point out the historical context or how people are still being treated, they point at someone who was poor and say, "But they succeeded," like that's an answer. It's like a sickness.

TM

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

There is an element of truth in what you said, but just that.

Here is the BLS' list of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates (actually 11, because two states are tied for no. 10):

Hawaii
Iowa
New Hampshire
Idaho
Minnesota
Nebraska
North Dakota
Vermont
Virginia
South Dakota
Wisconsin

Are the places you identified on that list?

Here is average income adjusted for average cost of living:

http://time.com/money/5177566/averag...te-real-value/

There are actually quite a few places in the country that have been doing pretty well.

Re: Barcelona
 

It does. I’m speaking in an absolute. Whether a Trump voter making $100k is affluent relative to a person earning less is immaterial in a world where $100k is not affluent anywhere.

Re: Barcelona
 

I really don't understand what goes on in your head.

Your constant point about Trump voters is that they voted the way they did because they are being left behind. You point out how they are not affluent (read: make less than $100k or whatever your personal definition of "affluent" is) as a way to support your contention. When it is pointed out to you that Trump voters generally make more than Clinton voters, you start arguing anything and everything that carries you away from the following conclusions:

1. Trump voters are more affluent than non-Trump voters
2. There are many people who aren't affluent who did not vote for Trump, which renders the "I feel left behind" argument flat-out wrong unless you also add in the fact that
3. Trump voters are overwhelmingly white--and the fact that what everyone considers to be "working class" somehow has become defined as only "white working class" is completely lost on you

People didn't throw a bomb into the system because they're being left behind economically. If that were the case, all non-affluent (any definition) people would have voted for Trump. White people felt left behind because they don't feel like they're in control or as important as they used to and Trump makes them feel like they are.

TM

Re: Barcelona
 

They are absolutely racist, if you want to speak in absolutes.

$100K really isn't that bad in, say, upstate NY. Taking into account the cost of living, it's like making $225,000 in Boston. Which means a Trump voter in Corning making $100K is affluent. https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-l...ning-ny/225000

God, you are a moron.

Re: Barcelona
 

Never mind.

Re: Barcelona
 

The sentence that I've underlined is interesting because it's a function of dashed expectations, not of economic growth itself (in other words, change in acceleration instead of change in speed). This is fundamentally different from pointing to bromides about inequality.

Maybe Obama raised expectations that things would be different and better, and Trump was partly a reaction to those high hopes.

At any rate, I think what you are trying to say is still not thought through. Sure, Trump is a reaction to the failures of neoliberalism, but that's like saying that the French Revolution was caused by monarchy, since the kings weren't making people happy.

Moving on, you accused me of blindly promoting thing that just make me feel good but don't accomplish anything. Whatever. This conversation is about how to explain where Trump and populism come from, not what to do about it.

Then, I said that your "losers" don't benefit from the things they see the government doing, and don't see that the government is doing things that benefit from them. In other words,

https://barkbarkwoofwoof.com/wp-cont...e-11-21-16.jpg

You said,
Maybe that's part of it, but maybe it's more that Trump voters aren't stupid, but expect more than they are getting. Or replace "expect" with "feel entitled to". That starts to be a story about their psychology, not about their average incomes.

We weren't talking about what the government has an obligation to do. We're in explaining mode. My point, with which I think you agree, is that Trump voters feel entitled to more from their government and resent that they are not getting it. In other words, it's not that they are losers. It's that they have some resentment from not being treated more like winners. Again: this is not about inequality per se, though inequality if a feature of our economy so is not irrelevant.

This is backwards, and/or makes no sense. There are always economic conditions. And inequality. Always. So they are not a spark. A spark is something that ignites something in the conditions and sparks a reaction. You are right that economic conditions are relevant, because of course, but you are looking at a fire and you have not figured out what the spark was.

Sure, because people making that much money tend to live in urban areas. But you're not really getting what I'm saying.

Let's make this more specific. Tulsa and San Francisco are cities. San Francisco has a lot of money, and few Trump voters. Tulsa is poorer and has more Trump voters compared to San Francisco. The Trump voters in Tulsa are more affluent than the non-Trump voters in Tulsa.

Trump voters are mostly Republicans. The more money you have, the more likely you are to vote Republican. The less money you have, the more likely you are to vote Democratic. At the same time, the states with higher incomes are more likely to vote for Democrats, and the states with lower incomes are more likely to vote for Republicans.

You're making the English language your enemy.

Um, duh.

I don't understand why you are so insistent about try to slap the label of "inequality" on this.

This would make more sense if you expressed the same idea without the word "inequality." The worst off are in the least "equal" position, so the fact that they are not upset here should tell you that what's driving the anger is not "equality" but something else -- the something else that you describe here in your last three sentences. Trump voters have a grievance about expectations and reality, a resentment towards other people whom they see as getting more than their share. Yes! That's not about inequality. Now figure out what it is about.

To complicate things for you: People who are not white who are in the economic position you describe do not go for Trump populism. That suggests that there's something important about ethnicity going on.

Then I suggested that you have some view of the lower class as being poor people who don't work.

I guess I didn't make myself clear. You seemed to be using "the working poor" and "the middle class" as if the former is a subset of the latter. Implicitly, there is someone poorer than "the working poor" who is not part of the "middle class", because "middle" means between two other things. These poor people presumably are not "working," because you refer to the "working poor" to distinguish them from the other poor, who are implicitly non-working. The idea that poor people just laze around may be 180 degrees from your "thinking about the working poor," but I was suggesting that's what you were implying about the people poorer than the middle class, since you seem to thinking that they are poor and are not working.

And I am saying that a lot of the specific things you have said about the middle seem right, but that referring to the problem with the label of "inequality" is not right, because you are talking about voters who are more affluent than the people in their communities who are not populist. And white. They are white.

Dude, I voted against it. If you want to focus on who these populists are and what they stand for, you ought to start with the fact they tend to be affluent whites, older than most of us, and they vote for Republicans. I haven't ignored shit. I didn't vote for a third-party Libertarian candidate. But again -- I'm not talking now about what to do about it, I'm just talking about what it is. I'm disagreeing with you about how to understand what is happening.

Populism is not about inequality. And it's not a disease. And if you think left-wing populism is our problem, you have your head up your ass.

No. I advocate for finding a group to blame because different people have done different things and bear more and less responsibility for what has happened.

Undeniably, my view about what has happened drives me to take a side. If you're not going to pick a side and stand for something, then you don't stand for anything, and blaming everyone is just a cop-out.

I'm not tribalized. That's a populist thing. There's a fundamental asymmetry here, which is that the right feels like a beleaguered tribe in a country they feel entitled to, and the left does not.

And then I said that globalization is not new. And you said,

No shit, Sherlock. That is exactly the point I am making. Since globalization has been around for a long time, and this populism we have now is emergent, then you need to think critically about how then differed from now, because just saying things like "globalization" and "inequality" isn't it.

Re: Pennsylvania: where the men are ugly and all the children are below average
 

Try to find where the cities are:

https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2016/...630&quality=65