The Coming US Presidential Election

The next US Presidential election is on November 3^rd, 2020, with the first phase of this process beginning shortly after the January 2020 new year celebrations end. This means that within weeks from now, candidates will start to declare their intention to run.

Donald Trump has already done so. His election machine, now a combined operation with the Republican National Committee (RNC), is up and running, with banners printed and a new slogan – Keep American Great.

On the Democrat side, Elizabeth Warren has clearly and firmly signaled her intention to run and many others are about to do so. In the frame are Jo Biden, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Beto O’Rourke, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, Michael Bloomberg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Kristen Gillibrand, Terry McAuliffe, Deval Patrick, and many others. Indeed, there could be a very complicated field of up to twenty candidates.

The problem is, unless something dramatic happens, Trump-Pence will win. They have command of a solid base of support, they have the levers of power and Trump, in particular, knows how to command the news space. Indeed, his campaign strategy is to dominate the news (good or bad) so that his name recognition is total and he can leverage “free” coverage to get out his message. His base does not seem to care whether he is lying or telling the truth, whether he is serious or not and whether he is behaving responsibly or not. Some have even suggested that he is sent by God to “save America”.

The democratic national committee (DNC) challenge is not just to find someone with a personality that resonates with the public, but to develop policies which do so. Therein lies the problem. Trump has no policies that are describable – policy comes in 150 characters each morning, depending on his mood. The DNC needs a systematic policy frame that captures what Americans need – universal health care, border security, a growing economy, care for seniors and a revival of the US education system. The DNC won’t do this. They are, like the media, preoccupied with the cult of personality – of finding a democrat Messiah.

One other development could also occur – an outsider with already strong public recognition could enter the field, win primaries and run as a Democrat. George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and Oprah Winfrey have all explored the idea, however briefly. Clooney is a serious campaigner, having worked hard on issues in Sudan, Darfur, and other atrocities and is an active liberal, married to one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers. A decision by him to step on the election stage would change the metrics of the game, but in the end, he would lose – Democrats find it difficult to unite behind a single leader and platform and to stick to it for a year and a half.

Some have suggested that Hilary Clinton will make a third run for the White House in 2020. She has lost this race twice – once to Obama and once to Trump. She’s done. Finished. She can have more influence on the policy side and from the sidelines than she could if she ran in the primary races. Yet, she is permitting the rumour of her candidacy to circulate and she has refused to rule out a third run in interviews conducted as recently as last month.

What the US needs is a vision for the post-truth, post-exceptionalism stage of its history. This vision has to speak to a renewal of its democracy and institutions, a restatement of its global intentions, a focus on reducing the rapidly growing levels of income inequality, a restoration of the public good (especially in health and education) and a recognition that the US does have a trust problem. What the DNC needs more than a charismatic leader is a platform that inspires and encourages Americans to vote. There is no sign of this appearing. This is the major reason Trump, unless something happens, will win a second term.

American Exceptionalism After Trump

One big idea dominated the 20^th century in the United States – “exceptionalism”. The idea is simple – the US is the greatest country in the world and the greatest country the world has ever seen. The idea had its origins in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America (1835/1840) but was later used extensively as a leitmotif for USA political rhetoric.

The problem: it was never true. The US has no systematic approach to ensure access to health for all of its citizens, has out of control gun-use which results in more deaths each year from gun violence than the rest of the world combined, incarcerates more people per capita than any other developed nation, has no truly functioning democracy (according to former President Carter), and performs poorly in its education system when compared with other nations around the world -  outranked by 38 countries in math, 24 in science, and 22 in reading in the 2015 OECD PISA results. 

The US also used genocide to secure white supremacy in the early history of the country – killing, raping and seizing the lands of indigenous people. It practiced slavery and fought a civil war over the issue. It has fought wars all over the world and, though it made major contributions to securing peace in Europe, lost in Vietnam and has not done well since the Korean war, despite unusually large expenditures on its military.

And now it cannot be trusted to keep agreements made from one day to the next. The recently negotiated replacement to NAFTA – the USMCA. – is under threat over issues connected to the Mexico border. The US has unilaterally pulled out of agreements related to climate change (the Paris agreement), tacking ISIS (pulling out of Syria), trade (pulling out of the TTP) and weapons security (pulling out of Iran and the Russia nuclear agreement). It has also abandoned the widely supported and UN agreed strategy for an Israel: Palestine two-state solution by abandoning the idea of Jerusalem as the “shared space” of that solution.  Trust in the US government is now at an all-time low, according to Edelman's annual trust survey.

Many see the US economy as its greatest strength. Yet the economy is essentially a system that favors elites, creates massive inequality and leads to a shift of public assets to private purses. 43 million Americans (13.5% of the population) live in poverty, including 15.3 million children. Some 15.6 million households live in a condition of food insecurity – they do not know where the next meal is coming from. In 2015, the top 1 percent of families in the United States made more than 25 times the bottom 99 percent did. Inequality is growing, not shrinking, in the US. The top 1% now own 39% of all of the wealth in the US - a 6% increase since the beginning of the present century. One example of this is CEO pay. In 2015, CEOs made 286 times the salary of a typical worker and 299 times more in 2014. Compare that to 1978, when CEO earnings were roughly 30 times the typical worker’s salary.

Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) feeds off the leitmotif of exceptionalism, but his approach to “enacting” MAGA is making explicit just how “broken” the United States are. In particular, he is showing just how broken its democracy is, how broken its legal system is and how broken its military is. As for the economy, the tax cut enacted in 2018 increased income inequality and the power of the wealthy. His international actions – trade wars based on a complete misunderstanding of trade deficits (a construct so basic it is a topic covered in high school economics),  support for dictators over democrats, reneging on agreements made in good faith, distrust of his own advisors, backroom dealings (Russia, North Korea) which have no substance – also show how broken US foreign policy is.

Trump is not the cause of the US current state, he is yet another [compelling] symptom of it – the collapse of the leitmotif of exceptionalism and the emergence of a new construct of the US as a fragile and damaged democracy.

As China begins to take on the role of a shaper of the world, we should look to Asia for leadership. China has never pretended to be a democracy and has a focused, long-term strategy to reshape the world. Consider these facts:

• China is in the process of surpassing the US economically. By one measure, 35% of world growth from 2017 to 2019 will come from China, 18% from the US, 9% from India, and 8% from Europe. By 2050, the top five largest global economies are most likely to be China, India, the US, Brazil and Indonesia. These shifts in economic geography demonstrates that the world is changing quickly.
• China is leading the largest urbanization and infrastructure development scheme on earth. Already in its fifth year, the $900 billion "One Belt and One Road" (OBOR) project includes new roads, shipping lanes and building projects stretching to over 65 countries. The idea is to literally rewire global trade from China throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. While details are hazy, OBOR is being financed by Chinese state banks, with a modest strategic contribution by a new Chinese-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in partnership with other institutions.
• China is set to become a global green powerhouse. China signaled its intention to take the lead on climate change reduction after signing the 2015 Paris climate agreement. By 2025, most new cars in China will be fully electric vehicles. China is aggressively cutting coal usage. Already, over 60% of high speed rail in the world is in China (10 times the length in Japan, for example). China also recently committed to achieving blue skies in all of its major cities within three years. The changes are already being felt: the air in Beijing is 30% cleaner this winter than last winter. 
• China is also setting the global pace on a digital economy, including cashless payments. In major cities, up to 90% of all commercial and retail transactions in convenience stores and cafes are occurring through Alipay and Wechat. E-commerce delivery in large Chinese cities through Alibaba is the currently the fastest in the world. One company, Alibaba, racked up sales of $25 billion in just one day – dwarfing the returns of so-called Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US. 
• Chinese universities are also vaulting to the top of the international rankings. Two schools – Peking University and Tsinghua University – leapfrogged from well below the top 200 to the top 30 within five years. There are another 40 universities that are not far behind and are set to enter the elite in the coming years. While Chinese students are still seeking out educations in top schools in North America and western Europe, soon they won't have to.

As the influence in the US declines and the US becomes intensely focused on its domestic challenges, we can expect to see turbulence in global markets and global politics – we already see this in relation to the Middle East, the EU and Brexit and the new tensions across Asia and India.

The next decade will be one of America introspection and rethinking – all aspects of the US “system” of democracy (sic) will be “up for grabs” as the nation adjusts to the post-Trump world in 2025 after his second term it will need to rebuild its understanding of what America is and, more importantly, what it is not. That debate has started. What it needs now is both political leadership and thought leadership, both of which seem remarkably absent.

Understanding Literacy in Canada - Why Level 3 Literacy is Important

This is a guest post from my friend and colleague T Scott Murray of DataAngel - see more about Scott and his work here. This post was written in response to a post by Canadian researcher Christine Pinsent-Johnson. Her original post is available here.

Enough Already: An Angry Rebuke to Dr. Christine Pinsent-Johnson

In a recent blog post, Christine Pinsent-Johnson argues against using Level 3 as a literacy standard to which we should aspire. I argue that such a position is misguided, immoral and extraordinarily disrespectful of the people whose lives are touched by inadequate literacy skill levels.

The quotes from both the OECD’s William Thorn and ETS’s Irwin Kirsch are technically correct – there is nothing about the IALS, ALL or PIAAC proficiency scales themselves that might be interpreted as a standard. Our argument for using Level 3 as a minimum standard is based on the relationship of proficiency level to individual outcomes and to the level of skill demanded by jobs in Canada. More specifically, I argue that four things justify the use of Level 3 literacy as a critical threshold:

1.     First, the threshold between literacy level 2 and 3 is a cognitively crucial one. Level 2 tasks only require the application of routine, procedural knowledge, however acquired, in the recall processes in the back of the brain. In sharp contrast, Level 3 tasks require the activation of the fluid problem-solving processes in the pre-frontal cortex. In a world in which SIRI can handle all Level 2 literacy tasks, one does not need to be a genius to figure out that workers might need to be able to handle at least Level 3 literacy tasks.

2.     Second, the structure of the Canadian economy is changing rapidly in response to the diffusion of digital technologies throughout the economy, the globalization of markets for key inputs and the rapid growth of literacy skill supply in countries with much lower labour costs than Canada’s. Canada is one of the few OECD countries with a system that tracks the demand for key Essential Skills, including literacy. As illustrated in the following chart,  97% of the jobs created between 1997 and 2014 demanded Level 3.

Figure 1 Number of paid jobs by literacy skill level demanded by the occupation according to the ESDC’s Essential Skills Profiles applied to monthly Labour Force Survey employment by occupation estimates, Canada, 1997 - 2014

Roughly half of adult Canadians aged 16 to 65 are classified as Level 1 and 2, so, by definition, 47% of adults are vying for the 3% of  new jobs that demand that skill level, and 44% will find themselves out of work or in a job that demands higher levels of literacy skill than they have.

 

3.     Third, our analysis shows that significant differences in the rate of real wage growth in jobs that demand different levels of literacy. As documented in the following chart, adults holding jobs that only demand Level 2 literacy realized 1% real wage growth between compared to 9%, 17% and 16% at Levels 3, 4 and 5 respectively  These differences are precipitating a massive increase in skill-based wage and income inequality.

	2	3	4	5
1999	$12.71	$16.34	$21.06	$27.16
2003	$12.06	$16.46	$21.51	$28.37
2007	$12.18	$16.87	$22.53	$29.28
2011	$12.80	$17.44	$23.64	$30.99
2015	$12.87	$17.80	$24.57	$31.49
	$0.16	$1.47	$3.51	$4.33
		138%	191%	245%
	1%	9%	17%	16%
Yearly equivalent increase in real wages @ 2020 hours 1997-2014	$321.67	$2,961.08	$7,099.16	$8,742.08

4.     Fourth, having Level 1 and 2 literacy skill level has a profound impact on a broad range of other individual labour markets, health, educational and social outcomes.  Depending on the outcome measure, the likelihood of experiencing poor outcomes ranges from 2.5 to 13 times more likely, even after removing the effect of a broad range of other variables known to increase the odds of experiencing poor outcomes including age, gender, education, immigrants status, language and Aboriginal status. For example, the following chart shows the impact that adults with Level 1 and 2 literacy are 2.5 times more likely than their more skilled peers of being in fair or poor health. Such levels of skill-based inequality are unfair.

The fact that research shows that the relationships between literacy skill and outcomes is causal and that adults at level 1 and 2 bear the disproportionate burden of poor outcomes, renders Level 3 the moral threshold to which Canadian’s and public policy should aspire.

More directly, given the choice, no one would choose to remain at Levels 1 and 2 given the negative impact that these skill levels have on one's own health and welfare.

Comments about this guest post can be left on this blog site.