Is there something in the water? Brexit, cross-national nuttiness and the problem of "globalization"
Ooooh! Scare quotes! Just because this is a new blog doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing the sarcasm thing.
However, I shall make a valiant attempt to avoid any discussion of sharpies. We'll see how this goes.
How are things going over in the UK? Um... As one of my students put it this week, they don't get to make fun of us anymore. Our turn! The original Brexit vote itself was a head-scratcher, but the events of the last week have just been whiplash-inducing. Boris Johnson was always going to be unusual, but this... OK, then. His coalition collapses, the prorogation effort backfires, we don't know what's going to happen with a new election, and... Boris Johnson. Yeah.
The pen on my desk right now isn't a sharpie. It happens to be a Waterman Carene, inked up with Faber Castell Carbon Black ink. No sharpie talk here. Why? This matters.
This. What is... this?
It was standard issue commentary, several years ago, to proclaim that there was some underlying trend that connected the Brexit vote to the election of Trump. Somethin' in the water. (Hey, water... Waterman... Oh, never mind.)
And not just Trump. Not just Brexit. Brazil. They elected Bolsonaro. In Hungary, Viktor Orban continues to entrench himself in power, and we can continue going down the list, looking for common threads. Somethin' in the water. Let's pick this apart. This is actually a problematic argument, from a political science perspective.
First, the basic premise is that there is something intrinsic to the world that just makes people wacky. The world. Well, in social science, we need variance. Variation. Meaning, it's gotta vary. Be different. If it's the whole world, it ain't varyin'.
Unless, it either varies by country, or has varied over time. So let's start with time. See what I did there?
Here's a sort of punditry-type claim. The world was sane, and now it's going crazy.
So, a little historical perspective here: It has only been about three decades since the end of the Cold War, and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. Fukuyama thought that the conflict between western-style small-d democracy and communism was the last big struggle, and the defeat of communism meant that everything after that was kind of small potatoes. Thinking back, then, what's our period of sanity, in a global sense? Keeping in mind the fundamental, hilarious wrongness of Francis Fukuyama. (Which is not necessarily to say that Sam Huntington's "clash of civilizations" argument is right, because not everything is "manichaean," to bring back one of my last threads from The Unmutual Political Blog...)
I'm not sure how much global sanity we ever had. Internally, the US looks pretty wacky right now, and the UK is about as wacky as it has been in modern history, but they've got a loooong history. There is, though, some similarity across nations in the particular way that wackiness is being expressed, and not because of cross-national organization in the same way that, say, the Soviet Union spread its insanity across national boundaries in the 20th Century, organizationally.
So, "globalization." Yeah, scare quotes. Why the scare quotes? They serve two purposes. First, pundits who talk about "globalization" as a pseudo-social-science explanation for whatever they don't like (e.g. political trends) don't tend to define it in any coherent way, and second, it serves as a boogeyman for some segment of the polity anyway, so emphasis on the scare part of the scare quotes.
Among the things I regularly explained back on The Unmutual Political Blog were the role of comparative advantages in trade, the success of capitalism over mercantilism and the fallacy of zero-sum thinking in economics. Most of these principles, though, require some degree of economics education. If you are reading this, it means you found your way from The Unmutual here. You understand this stuff. Most people don't. That makes people susceptible to fallacious thinking.
So, hypothesize: An increase in this thing called "globalization," among an economically uneducated populace causes a backlash around the globe. Sounds reasonable, right?
The problem is that we need to unpack it. What's "globalization?" Generally speaking, in economic terms, it has to do with the extent to which economic activity is based on international trade rather than purely domestic activity. Sure, we can elaborate on it in a lot of ways to incorporate things like... oh, immigration, and I'll get to that shortly, but trade is a big part of it in any coherently constructed definition, so let's focus on it here.
So, as time passes, economies become more interconnected, and proportionately more dependent on trade with each other. People don't understand how trade works, so backlash ensues. Right?
Here's the big problem with that. The US? The UK? Economically, relatively similar, as advanced, wealthy nations at various stages of transition from manufacturing to service, but whatever. Brazil? Hungary? You start looking at the other countries where we observe anything that could be called a backlash to globalization, and their positions with respect to international trade based on the structure of their economies are very different.
It is easy, right now, to focus on the UK because... it's a spectacle in the same way that the US has been a spectacle for the last three years, and there are some clear similarities between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Their aversion to trade and desire to withdraw from international agreements, along with many aspects of their personal politics make the comparison tempting. However, if we have any seriousness about the concept of "globalization," we need to look beyond that simple US-UK comparison, and the other countries where we have seen the rise of anything comparable to Trump do not resemble the economic position of the US in any way regarding trade.
We would then have to ask, what other import-heavy countries have not seen the rise of Trump-like backlashes? In utilitarian terms, trade is not zero-sum. If I sell to you, then you gain by buying, or you wouldn't buy, and I gain by selling, or I wouldn't sell. Thank you very much, Adam Smith. However, in terms of the moving around of stuff, the net balance of my dollar gain and your dollar loss is zero. The mercantilist fallacy doesn't come out of nowhere. This leads to a question about where the dogs aren't barking. And that matters. Where isn't there another Trump? Where haven't we seen something like Brexit and Boris Johnson? Specifically, in import-heavy countries, because this does serious damage to the argument that there's something about "globalization," defined in terms of trade (rather than immigration) that causes a backlash towards the kinds of things we are seeing in the US, the UK, Brazil, and so forth.
Trade? Um... There are a lot of differences between the US/UK and Brazil, Hungary, etc., and way too many silent dogs for trade to be a compelling answer to me. Why is the UK so wacky? I'm not saying I have an answer, but "globalization," defined as trade? Not convinced.
So what about immigration? Well, we have to ask the same question about where the dogs are and aren't barking. After all, even in the US, have you seen this DHS report? Even before the 2016 election, illegal immigration numbers were dropping. Economics are about adding value through labor and all of that jazz so that you aren't in zero-sum territory, but migration is intrinsically zero-sum in terms of where people wind up. And those numbers were dropping prior to 2016.
Does that mean that we can't observe a response to immigration that simply isn't empirically-based?
Um... well...
Time for a reminder of post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. We can make a lot of observations about trade, immigration, and any number of other ways to describe "globalization." In the US, though, the basic observation about 2016 is that the Democrats had won two presidential elections in a row, and one party rarely wins three, unless the economy is extraordinarily strong. It wasn't. Trying to draw a connection between that and, say, the Brexit vote, or what is happening now with Boris Johnson's flailing attempts to... I don't know what he's trying to do... it's very tempting. There's that word. "Globalization." Trade, immigration, the connections are there, calling out to us. There's something in the water, around the world, making the same thing happen across countries. Otherwise, why is the same thing happening in the US, the UK... Brazil, Hungary... (because, yeah, let's throw Hungary in here)?
There are a lot of dogs that aren't barking, though, and anyone looking at the world right now and thinking, "this is nuts," remember that it has only been three decades since the Cold War. We are coming up on the 18th anniversary of 9/11.
Bird's eye view. Sanity? Is that the historical norm?
My goal in stepping back from day-to-day nuttiness was to de-stress the process of writing this stuff. I don't know if that worked today, but at least I got to write some different things, talk through some social science process-y type stuff, and not mention sharpies, except to mention that I'm not mentioning them. My verdict right now on the Waterman Carene is that the nib is quite smooth, but perhaps not the best feed. A little skippy. For serious writing, it'll still come up short compared to, say, a Lamy 2000.
Off topic. I'll still do that, periodically.
As I've said, sorry about the hard-restart on the blog. Technical ineptitude on my part. If you still like what's going on here, keep reading, and spread it around.
However, I shall make a valiant attempt to avoid any discussion of sharpies. We'll see how this goes.
How are things going over in the UK? Um... As one of my students put it this week, they don't get to make fun of us anymore. Our turn! The original Brexit vote itself was a head-scratcher, but the events of the last week have just been whiplash-inducing. Boris Johnson was always going to be unusual, but this... OK, then. His coalition collapses, the prorogation effort backfires, we don't know what's going to happen with a new election, and... Boris Johnson. Yeah.
The pen on my desk right now isn't a sharpie. It happens to be a Waterman Carene, inked up with Faber Castell Carbon Black ink. No sharpie talk here. Why? This matters.
This. What is... this?
It was standard issue commentary, several years ago, to proclaim that there was some underlying trend that connected the Brexit vote to the election of Trump. Somethin' in the water. (Hey, water... Waterman... Oh, never mind.)
And not just Trump. Not just Brexit. Brazil. They elected Bolsonaro. In Hungary, Viktor Orban continues to entrench himself in power, and we can continue going down the list, looking for common threads. Somethin' in the water. Let's pick this apart. This is actually a problematic argument, from a political science perspective.
First, the basic premise is that there is something intrinsic to the world that just makes people wacky. The world. Well, in social science, we need variance. Variation. Meaning, it's gotta vary. Be different. If it's the whole world, it ain't varyin'.
Unless, it either varies by country, or has varied over time. So let's start with time. See what I did there?
Here's a sort of punditry-type claim. The world was sane, and now it's going crazy.
So, a little historical perspective here: It has only been about three decades since the end of the Cold War, and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. Fukuyama thought that the conflict between western-style small-d democracy and communism was the last big struggle, and the defeat of communism meant that everything after that was kind of small potatoes. Thinking back, then, what's our period of sanity, in a global sense? Keeping in mind the fundamental, hilarious wrongness of Francis Fukuyama. (Which is not necessarily to say that Sam Huntington's "clash of civilizations" argument is right, because not everything is "manichaean," to bring back one of my last threads from The Unmutual Political Blog...)
I'm not sure how much global sanity we ever had. Internally, the US looks pretty wacky right now, and the UK is about as wacky as it has been in modern history, but they've got a loooong history. There is, though, some similarity across nations in the particular way that wackiness is being expressed, and not because of cross-national organization in the same way that, say, the Soviet Union spread its insanity across national boundaries in the 20th Century, organizationally.
So, "globalization." Yeah, scare quotes. Why the scare quotes? They serve two purposes. First, pundits who talk about "globalization" as a pseudo-social-science explanation for whatever they don't like (e.g. political trends) don't tend to define it in any coherent way, and second, it serves as a boogeyman for some segment of the polity anyway, so emphasis on the scare part of the scare quotes.
Among the things I regularly explained back on The Unmutual Political Blog were the role of comparative advantages in trade, the success of capitalism over mercantilism and the fallacy of zero-sum thinking in economics. Most of these principles, though, require some degree of economics education. If you are reading this, it means you found your way from The Unmutual here. You understand this stuff. Most people don't. That makes people susceptible to fallacious thinking.
So, hypothesize: An increase in this thing called "globalization," among an economically uneducated populace causes a backlash around the globe. Sounds reasonable, right?
The problem is that we need to unpack it. What's "globalization?" Generally speaking, in economic terms, it has to do with the extent to which economic activity is based on international trade rather than purely domestic activity. Sure, we can elaborate on it in a lot of ways to incorporate things like... oh, immigration, and I'll get to that shortly, but trade is a big part of it in any coherently constructed definition, so let's focus on it here.
So, as time passes, economies become more interconnected, and proportionately more dependent on trade with each other. People don't understand how trade works, so backlash ensues. Right?
Here's the big problem with that. The US? The UK? Economically, relatively similar, as advanced, wealthy nations at various stages of transition from manufacturing to service, but whatever. Brazil? Hungary? You start looking at the other countries where we observe anything that could be called a backlash to globalization, and their positions with respect to international trade based on the structure of their economies are very different.
It is easy, right now, to focus on the UK because... it's a spectacle in the same way that the US has been a spectacle for the last three years, and there are some clear similarities between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Their aversion to trade and desire to withdraw from international agreements, along with many aspects of their personal politics make the comparison tempting. However, if we have any seriousness about the concept of "globalization," we need to look beyond that simple US-UK comparison, and the other countries where we have seen the rise of anything comparable to Trump do not resemble the economic position of the US in any way regarding trade.
We would then have to ask, what other import-heavy countries have not seen the rise of Trump-like backlashes? In utilitarian terms, trade is not zero-sum. If I sell to you, then you gain by buying, or you wouldn't buy, and I gain by selling, or I wouldn't sell. Thank you very much, Adam Smith. However, in terms of the moving around of stuff, the net balance of my dollar gain and your dollar loss is zero. The mercantilist fallacy doesn't come out of nowhere. This leads to a question about where the dogs aren't barking. And that matters. Where isn't there another Trump? Where haven't we seen something like Brexit and Boris Johnson? Specifically, in import-heavy countries, because this does serious damage to the argument that there's something about "globalization," defined in terms of trade (rather than immigration) that causes a backlash towards the kinds of things we are seeing in the US, the UK, Brazil, and so forth.
Trade? Um... There are a lot of differences between the US/UK and Brazil, Hungary, etc., and way too many silent dogs for trade to be a compelling answer to me. Why is the UK so wacky? I'm not saying I have an answer, but "globalization," defined as trade? Not convinced.
So what about immigration? Well, we have to ask the same question about where the dogs are and aren't barking. After all, even in the US, have you seen this DHS report? Even before the 2016 election, illegal immigration numbers were dropping. Economics are about adding value through labor and all of that jazz so that you aren't in zero-sum territory, but migration is intrinsically zero-sum in terms of where people wind up. And those numbers were dropping prior to 2016.
Does that mean that we can't observe a response to immigration that simply isn't empirically-based?
Um... well...
Time for a reminder of post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. We can make a lot of observations about trade, immigration, and any number of other ways to describe "globalization." In the US, though, the basic observation about 2016 is that the Democrats had won two presidential elections in a row, and one party rarely wins three, unless the economy is extraordinarily strong. It wasn't. Trying to draw a connection between that and, say, the Brexit vote, or what is happening now with Boris Johnson's flailing attempts to... I don't know what he's trying to do... it's very tempting. There's that word. "Globalization." Trade, immigration, the connections are there, calling out to us. There's something in the water, around the world, making the same thing happen across countries. Otherwise, why is the same thing happening in the US, the UK... Brazil, Hungary... (because, yeah, let's throw Hungary in here)?
There are a lot of dogs that aren't barking, though, and anyone looking at the world right now and thinking, "this is nuts," remember that it has only been three decades since the Cold War. We are coming up on the 18th anniversary of 9/11.
Bird's eye view. Sanity? Is that the historical norm?
My goal in stepping back from day-to-day nuttiness was to de-stress the process of writing this stuff. I don't know if that worked today, but at least I got to write some different things, talk through some social science process-y type stuff, and not mention sharpies, except to mention that I'm not mentioning them. My verdict right now on the Waterman Carene is that the nib is quite smooth, but perhaps not the best feed. A little skippy. For serious writing, it'll still come up short compared to, say, a Lamy 2000.
Off topic. I'll still do that, periodically.
As I've said, sorry about the hard-restart on the blog. Technical ineptitude on my part. If you still like what's going on here, keep reading, and spread it around.
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