Commenter Cove77 directed me to an article in The Economist, discussing the “curious” lack of inflation in Japan: Entrenched expectations built up through decades of little to no inflation play a big role in explaining why rising producer costs have not fed through to consumer prices. Domestic companies are notoriously unwilling to pass on increases in the prices of imports to consumers. At a press conference in October Kuroda Haruhiko, the governor of the Bank of Japan, attributed this reluctance to habits picked up during the country’s periodic bouts of deflation. Companies have a good reason to resist increases. Last week Kikkoman, a producer of soy sauce, announced a 4-10% increase in its prices from February. Such an event might barely be noticed in America. But in Japan it made the national news.Another crucial factor is the weakness of Japan’s consumer recovery. Private spending fell in the third quarter of the year, and is now 3.5% below where it was at the end of 2019. Spending on durable goods, the source of much American inflation, has been practically flat for the past eight years in Japan. The second paragraph is correct; a lack of consumer spending is the cause of Japan’s low inflation. (I prefer to focus on NGDP, but the two aggregates tend to move together.)Given the lack of NGDP growth in Japan, low inflation is inevitable. The supposed “reluctance” of firms to raise prices (mentioned in the first paragraph) plays no role on the low Japanese inflation. To claim it does is to confuse causes and symptoms.  (Conversely, in America you see people complain about “price gouging” by oil companies, an equally erroneous claim.) It is theoretically possible that an unwillingness of firms to raise prices would lead to lower inflation, at least for a period of time.  Thus suppose the BOJ increased Japanese NGDP at 5%/year over the next few years.  If Japanese firms refused to raise prices then real GDP would also rise at 5%/year.  At some point, however, you run out of workers; the growth in real output could not continue at that pace. But this is not what is happening in Japan, where NGDP growth since the late 1990s has been negligible.  Slow NGDP growth (i.e. tight money) fully explains the lack of Japanese inflation since 1996.  After accounting for near-zero NGDP growth, there’s nothing left to explain from the pricing behavior of Japanese firms. PS.  Take a second look at the graph.  It shows levels of NGDP, not growth rates.  This is one of the most mind-boggling graphs in the entire history of modern macroeconomics.  And by the way, Japan’s total population in 2020 is about the same as in 1996; so per capita NGDP is also flat.  Imagine no raise in a quarter century!  (In real terms Japan has done OK, but even there I’d say its performance has been a bit disappointing compared to countries such as the US, Australia, and Germany.) (2 COMMENTS)

Economists are often suspicious of gifts in kind, arguing that the same money value in cash provides more “utility” to the recipient (puts her in a more preferred situation) because she can use the cash to buy what is on top of her preference scale (her “utility function” in economics). If you don’t buy the gift that she would have bought for herself, your gift is worth less to her than what you paid for. (See Joel Waldfogel, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” American Economic Review 83[5] [1993].) There are many objections or qualifications to this idea. In certain circumstances, a gift in kind will provide more utility to the recipient. If you know your recipient enough to have a good intuition of her preference scale, you may be able to approximate what she would have herself purchased with the cash. A well-chosen gift in kind signals that you know what she likes or that you have made some effort to please her. The pleasure and surprise in opening many boxes also count. This at least partly explains the resilient popularity of gifts in kind. In their microeconomics textbook Price Theory and Applications: Decisions, Markets, and Information (seventh edition, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 110), Jack Hirshleifer, Amihai Glazer, and David Hirshleifer express a similar idea: Does that mean that donors should always give cash? Not necessarily! A noncash gift may signal that the donor cares enough to devote time and thought to what the recipient desires or needs. Even if the choice itself misses the mark, the recipient may value the expression of concern that lies behind it. For somebody whom the giver does not know well, cash or a gift card can be the best option. Yet, another option has developed which, even for persons you know well, marries the advantages of cash and of gifts in kind: wish lists, especially online like that of Amazon. You are sure to give her something she wants and there are boxes to open. Still another reason for some gifts in kind is that the recipient may ignore how much utility something will give her. Your gift may make her discover it. Although economists assume that preferences do not change, it is mainly for methodological reasons. We sometimes discover things that we previously did not think we would enjoy. Not only the preferences of a gift recipient must be considered, but also her budget. Any choice of buying or not buying is the product of two factors: preferences and budget constraint. A gift has an income effect. The recipient will be able to consume more than before she got the gift. This income effect may be canceled if your recipient gives you the same value in gifts that you give her. Indeed, this is what happens on Christmas, although the wealthier of the two gift-exchangers will frequently end up transferring a net amount of money (that is, of goods) to the poorer one. But even when the income effect of receiving gifts is canceled by the cost of giving gifts in return, playing this exchange game gives utility to the two participants. Otherwise, one of them would not participate. In human relations, exchange is omnipresent—and much preferable to violence. As Adam Smith suggested, man is an animal who trades. I have ignored the special case of business gifts, which are part of a more standard exchange. A gift to one’s customer is a price paid in the hope of continuous patronage. But note that an exchange of gifts between two friends, lovers, or family members can also be considered as a price paid for the continuation of a mutually beneficial exchange relationship. The festive atmosphere of Christmas adds to the utility produced by the exchange. All this illustrates that economics is not about money, except in the subfield of monetary theory. It is not about telling one how to behave efficiently, even if it can inform one against many fallacies (the sunk cost fallacy, for example); it is about understanding individual choices and their actual social consequences. (0 COMMENTS)

In and of itself, social mobility is far from ambiguously good. Imagine a society of 10 individuals ranked by income from the poorest, No. 1, to the richest, No. 10. Assume that a good government (the one you would prefer) jacks up the income of No. 3 to between that of No. 6 and No. 7, putting its favorite in the 6th income slot. No. 3 has now become No. 6; No. 4, No. 5, and No. 6 have all fallen down one slot. The government could increase social mobility more if, from the same starting point, it moved each odd-numbered individual one rank up and, consequently, each even-numbered individual fell one rank down: half the population would have been mobile up and half mobile down. Relative social mobility up is necessarily accompanied by social mobility down. Few people would consciously argue that social mobility in this sense is unambiguously good, especially if the arguer is among the downward-mobile. Whether relative social mobility is good or bad must depend on its causes and consequences. If people switch relative places but the absolute incomes of all move up in the process, social mobility can be said to be absolute: everybody gains. Economists would say that the new distribution is a Pareto-improvement if everybody gains or at worst stays put, and nobody loses. Note that the only social mobility that will eliminate envy is complete immobility when everybody earns exactly the same income. That’s the only way for everybody to be in the middle class, although in reality the equalizers would probably fare better than the equalized. The main point here, however, is that what people generally want is economic growth, not relative social mobility per se. (In a free society, ascetic tastes are of course allowed too.) A widespread measure of absolute social mobility is the probability that a child will grow up to earn more than his parents. One way to avoid clear thinking about social mobility is to loosely equate it with “equality of opportunities.” Cecilia Rouse, chairwoman of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors, declared to The Economist (“The Democrats’ Social-Spending Package Cannot Repair the American Dream,” November 6, 2021): Most would agree that our current rates of social mobility are too low. There is not equality of opportunity. Kids are not starting at the same place. That “kids” all start at the same place is of course impossible (see Anthony de Jasay, Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick, Liberty Fund, 2014). Even if, as some 19th-century French revolutionaries wanted, the state stole children from their parents in order to educate them in a perfectly egalitarian way, young adults would not start at the same starting gate. Besides genetic factors, the state’s educators would not be all equally competent or they would themselves form a new aristocracy and fight hard to protect their privileges. If we follow James Buchanan and most classical liberals, this does not mean that some minimal education should not be available to all children. Social mobility, then, is not a fundamental or ultimate value. It is an instrumental or secondary value. It is valued as a consequence of individual liberty and an accessory of general prosperity. Individuals thriving to improve their conditions generate social mobility and constant disruptions of old ways of doing things, and disruptions are necessary for economic growth. In competing to offer consumers (individuals in their consumer activities) what they want at the lowest possible prices, producers (individuals as producers) continuously jostle the distribution of income. In the process, the absolute incomes of nearly everybody increase or are anyway maintained much higher than they would be in an unfree society. A related argument is given by Friedrich Hayek, who shows that, in a free society, nobody can have a guaranteed position in the distribution of income (or in the social ranking, which I have assumed to be coextensive with the distribution of income, which is not always true). The shuffling of relative positions, that is, relative social mobility is necessary for economic prosperity. A short quote from his Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 94) may serve as an introduction: The frequent recurrence of such undeserved strokes of misfortune affecting some group is, however, an inseparable part of the steering mechanism of the market: it is the manner in which the cybernetic principle of negative feedback operates to maintain the order of the market. It is only through such changes which indicate that some activities ought to be reduced, that the efforts of all can be continuously adjusted to a greater variety of facts that can be known to any person or agency, and that the utilization of dispersed knowledge is achieved on which the well-being of the Great Society rests. … If we were all to be consistently deprived, as the socialists proposed to do, of all ‘unearned benefits’ which the market confers upon us, we would have to be deprived of most of the benefits of civilization. (0 COMMENTS)

As, I suppose, many other viewers, I welcome the Apple TV series “Foundation” as a dream coming true. I remember reading Asimov’s Foundation as a kid of 9 or 10 years old. Science fiction and comic books were my path toward the appreciation of literature. I read (in the Italian translation) many novels of the golden era of American sci-fi: A.E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein and, yes, Asimov. While I never quite cared about his Robot stories, I loved the Foundation ones. I was unaware of the fact Asimov was somehow loosely inspired by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which instead I read only recently and would recommend heartily: it is such a magnificent work), but echoes of the fall of Rome were all over. How can we make the Middle Ages run faster? That is the question which Asimov and his alter ego, Hari Seldon, asked. Seldon is the founder of a discipline called “psychohistory”, which is a pseudo-scientific version of the old dream of forecasting the future so that you can change it. It’s been literally more than twenty five years since I read it last, but Titus Techera has a marvelous essay on our sister website, Law and Liberty, on Asimov’s work. Here’s a bit: In the Foundation trilogy, politics as a grand imperial adventure quickly turns into a boring affair of managing social unrest while keeping productivity growing. It’s fun to outsmart barbarians in the process of modernization, of rationalizing our decisions and actions, but the result is supremely uninspiring. As a result, Asimov can believe in scientific futurism, but not that science will elevate most men. All ordinary men can do is busy themselves to become wealthy while losing their religion, their politics, and their ways of life. The Foundation’s commercial empire degenerates into despotism, on the pattern of modern regimes called “dictatorships” by people too cowardly to say they are tyrannies. Asimov is not, after all, interested in the Roman Empire, but in our modern problem—individualism. After the three modernizing geniuses whose individuality was tied up with a great enterprise on behalf of the Foundation, the protagonists in the Foundation trilogy are no longer rulers. Individuals don’t matter in a technological society; whatever their talents, they can only cause trouble. They look elsewhere. Asimov’s theme changes from the scientific improvement of society to morality, through a quest for the meaning of psycho-history. You see, Seldon had originally started two foundations. We’ve seen the one dedicated to natural science; the other masters magical powers of mind control. Half the trilogy is about the Foundation’s quest to discover and control this Second Foundation. Seldon needed this second one, too, because after all, once you predict the future, you have to make the prediction come true. Mankind’s destiny is in the mind, not the cosmos. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Connecticut State Representative Kimberly Fiorello released the 1-hour video of my discussion with her and her constituents about Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 book, Economics in One Lesson. Some highlights follow. 0:00 to about 1:30: Intro from Kimberly. From about 1:30 to about 12:00: My opening remarks. I cover labor unions, minimum wages, and tariffs. 14:00: How absence of the minimum wage helped Hazlitt early in his career. 16:00: Hazlitt’s answer on why it’s so hard for people to understand economics. 24:20: FEMA. 26:20: Answering Andy’s question about time horizons. 29:40: Andy’s suggestion for required courses in high school. 30:10: Wendy’s question. 32:40: One strategy for persuasion. Persuasion as therapy. 34:45: Taxes. 39:00: Inflation. 42:10: Interaction between inflation and marginal tax rates. 45:20: Scotty Post on trying to persuade on rent control and minimum wages. 48:55: Bracket creep in Connecticut. 49:50: Ramya on climate change. 52:30: Effect of cheap immigrant labor. 54:50: David Card and Nobel Prize. 57:50: Andy on handicapping Thomas Sowell for the Nobel Prize. 1:00:36: My ending comments on why Hazlitt’s book is still relevant: the issues don’t go away.       (0 COMMENTS)

Turkey’s President Erdogan is probably the world’s most famous proponent of NeoFisherism, the view that low interest rate policies are disinflationary and high interest rates policies are inflationary. Academic NeoFisherians, however, would presumably be horrified by the approach he has taken to implement this idea.  This FT article is from a month ago: Turkey’s central bank has defied warnings from the business world and opposition parties by slashing its main interest rate despite rising inflation and an ailing currency. . . .The Turkish president, whose view that high interest rates lead to inflation runs counter to established economic orthodoxy, has increasingly meddled in monetary policy as he consolidates his control over the Turkish state. He has pushed for rate cuts even at the cost of soaring inflation and turmoil in the financial markets.   So how is the new policy working out?  A more recent FT article shows that the lira has now plunged even lower: The Turkish lira suffered a historic retreat after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised a recent interest rate cut and declared that his country was fighting an “economic war of independence”.The currency, which is down more than 40 per cent against the dollar this year, plunged as much as 15 per cent on Tuesday — a drop that eclipsed even Turkey’s currency crisis of 2018 — and broke through the symbolic threshold of 13 to the dollar after Erdogan used a combative speech to expound his vision for the country’s economy. This doesn’t mean that NeoFisherism is wrong (although I do believe it is wrong).  After all, despite these rate cuts Turkey still has both high nominal interest rates and high inflation, the exact correlation predicted by NeoFisherians.  Erdogan’s mistake was in not understanding that interest rates can fall due to either an easy money policy or a tight money policy.  He made the mistake of trying to cut rates with an easy money policy, and now Turkey is paying the price with high inflation.  In other words, he confused correlation with causation.  (0 COMMENTS)

In my recent Hoover article, “Railroad Regulation’s Poor Track Record,” Defining Ideas, November 18, 2021, I wrote the following: It is true that in some circumstances, shippers will be “captive”: they will be at the mercy of the one railroad that goes to or by their location. To deal with this, federal regulators adopted “Competitive Access Rules” in 1985. These rules give the STB the power to force reciprocal switching. But to do so, the regulators must show a market failure and harm that results from that failure. The aforementioned Pociask and Sigaud write, “To be clear, since 1985, regulators have not found a single incident of anticompetitive actions by railroads that justified reciprocal switching” [italics in original]. If that is true, it seems that Biden’s proposed regulation is in search of a problem. Notice my “if” in the last sentence of the paragraph. The reason for that is that I worried that Pociask and Sigaud exaggerated but did not have an easy independent source to go to. But after the article was published, Ted Greener, who is the assistant vice president for public affairs with the Association of American Railroads, contacted me, noting the article. So I took the opportunity to ask him if an “if” was required. He said it wasn’t. Specifically he wrote: It is indeed true, yes. Underscoring the potential flaws of a significant shift in how switching is handled via regulation. The 2016 NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rule Making], which could theoretically be implemented without a new proposal, removed the need to show competitive harm in petitioning for forced access. That proposal was largely based on 2011 data, meaning a 2021 rule could be supported by information now a  decade old. This raises clear questions.     (0 COMMENTS)

Two recent, related COVID news items: The U.S. death toll from COVID passed 750,000 earlier this month, according to both the National Center for Health Statistics and Johns Hopkins University. JHU further estimates that world COVID deaths have topped 5 million. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll indicates that nearly two-thirds of Americans either believe “the government is exaggerating the number of COVID deaths” (38%) or at least they don’t know it’s not exaggerating (22%). History provides plenty of reasons to be skeptical of government pronouncements. But in this case, I believe the U.S. COVID death numbers are either spot-on or underestimate the count. I’ll explain why below. But before doing so, let’s take a moment to consider some of the reasons people give for why they don’t accept the COVID numbers. I’ve encountered some who believe that authorities are outright fabricating the death count. Others, however, believe the numbers are inflated because of various classification errors: Some people who were not infected with COVID, but who died of causes like influenza & pneumonia and chronic lower respiratory disease that have similar symptoms to COVID, are being wrongly attributed to COVID. Some people who were infected by COVID but died of other causes are being wrongly attributed to COVID. For some people, COVID may have been the immediate cause of death, but these people were in deteriorating health already, so COVID isn’t really increasing the national death toll as much as the numbers suggest. Those explanations aren’t unreasonable, but I don’t think any of them are distorting the NCHS and JHU numbers. My evidence for this comes from a fascinating, if macabre, series of publications: the Centers for Disease Control’s annual Morbidity in the United States reports. Those, in turn, aggregate data from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, which are generated using death certificate information submitted by state health departments. The reports provide snapshots in time of what kills Americans. In recent years, year-end and year-out—until 2020—around 0.85% of U.S. residents died each year. To be more accurate, over the years 2012–2019, the percentage of Americans dying each year grew from 0.81% to 0.87%. This increase is attributable to the aging of the American population, with the median age growing by one year over the eight-year time span. Because many causes of death correlate with aging, an older America means a slightly higher percentage of Americans die each year. For that reason, the CDC reports include age-adjusted data for comparing death rates over different years (and different diseases and geographic areas). Figure 1 presents both the “raw” and age-adjusted death rates for the United States for 2012–2019. Notice that as the raw rate increases from 810.3 to 869.5 deaths per 100,000 people per year, the trend for the age-adjusted rate is basically flat, varying between 723.6 and 741.3. Not only does the age-adjusted death rate hold steady over this time frame, but so do the rates for most of the top 10 causes of death. These are graphed in Figure 2. The top two killers by far are heart disease and cancer, combining for nearly half of all U.S. deaths. (A bit of good news: notice that both are trending downward, indicating some success in combating these killers.) Significantly below them are deaths from unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza & pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide. (And a bit of bad news: notice the upward trends in unintentional injury and Alzheimer’s deaths.) But things changed in 2020. Total deaths jumped from 2,854,838 in 2019 to 3,358,814, according to provisional CDC data. The raw death rate for 2020 rose by 17.7% (while previous years ranged from 0.6% to 3.3%), from 869.5 to 1,019.4 per 100,000. The age-adjusted rate increased 15.5%, from 723.6 to 835.4. A new cause of death had become the nation’s #3 killer, with an age-adjusted death rate of 85.0: COVID. See Figure 3. Meanwhile, the top-10 causes of death over 2012–2019 basically continued along their long-term trends. There’s no indication that deaths from influenza & pneumonia and chronic lower respiratory disease were being wrongly included in the COVID 19 deaths: the age-adjusted death rate from flu & pneumonia increased from 12.3 to 13.1 (despite all of the social distancing, sanitizer use, and mask-wearing), while the rate for chronic lower respiratory disease fell only from 38.2 to 36.4. No other causes of death experienced significant declines. Moreover, though COVID’s dead were predominantly aged, it doesn’t appear that much of that death toll can be dismissed as simply depriving a few weeks of life from already-deteriorating victims. Again, half-a-million-plus more people died in 2020 than 2019. Something else worth noting: As previously said, a half-million more people died in 2020 than 2019, but the CDC attributes only 345,323 of those deaths to COVID. It’s possible that future analyses will indicate that another 50,000 to 100,000 deaths should be added to that count. And the grim beat has continued in 2021. In the first quarter of this year, the total age-adjusted death rate rose to 898.7 per 100,000 and the age-adjusted rate for COVID increased to 149.6, again according to provisional CDC data. This was before the more transmissible delta variant became dominant in the United States. An additional 400,000+ COVID deaths so far in 2021 seems likely, if not low. So, I doubt the grim government death statistics for COVID are exaggerated; if anything, they’re optimistic. Thomas A. Firey is a Cato Institute senior fellow and managing editor of Cato’s policy journal Regulation (0 COMMENTS)

Last week I gave a talk at California State University Monterey Bay’s chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. The talk is titled “Surviving the Zamzam.” It’s a story about my Aunt Jamie and Uncle Fred Henderson and their getting captured by the German Navy while on their way to Africa to be medical missionaries. They were taken prisoner on April 17, 1941 and their ship, the Zam Zam, was sunk. I pieced it together based on 6 books on various aspects of the Zam Zam, some reminiscences written by my aunt and uncle, some newsletters published by their church while they were prisoners, some Life magazine stories, and a few links on the web. I’ve posted on this in 2018 here, here, and here. More recently I’ve posted on items I’ve discovered in my research here, here, and here. It’s not my usual kind of talk. I usually make an argument for or against a particular policy or an argument about various factual or theoretical economic issues. Here I don’t do that. I just tell a story. But if you want a little content on the perils of central planning, go to 24:25 and 29:30. One thing I’m wondering and I don’t have the answer to happens at the 17:30 point. It strikes me that what Captain Rogge was doing–flying neutral colors–was, as I say in the talk, “illegal as hell.” But I don’t know.     (0 COMMENTS)

Arnold Kling has an excellent Substack post on the National Conservative Conference. I also recommend this piece by Nate Hochmann. My takeaway from both is that national conservatives may have a point in claiming that “all of the energy, all of the excitement, all of the intellectual innovation is on our side”. Other conservative groups, think tanks or “environments” broadly speaking have been quite silent lately – including, if you consider them members of the same broader intellectual family, libertarians. A number of libertarian groups have basically had no position on the pandemic and lockdowns. In itself, that signals the complexity of the issue, but it also makes people understandably wonder about the viability and relevance of a certain set of ideas. If libertarians do not enter the debate on unprecedented limitations of personal liberty and unprecedented growth in public spending and public debts, what are they good for? “National conservatives”, on the other hand, are extremely vocal on the issues of the day, beginning with left wing hegemony in education and race and crime. They are certainly growing in visibility. Yet one can still wonder, as Hochmann and Kling do, what they stand for. Arnold proposes to consider national conservatism as “20th century conservatism minus fiscal responsibility plus class warfare rhetoric”. There are a couple of things that crossed my mind in this regard. The movement was christened by the publication of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtues of Nationalism. I found that to be not a persuasive book, to say the least. But I think it was a clever book, as it proposed to conservatives, who were kind of shocked after Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, something that seemed to offer an ideological outlook. Lots of pieces are missing: why, for example, Hazony’s insistence on the biblical roots of modern nation states, or his notion that *true* (good?) nationalism is actually hard wired in the Anglo Saxon political culture, why, indeed, all this should lead to fiscal profligacy is not clear to me. That attitude toward a bigger spending conservatism was actually rooted in support for Trumpism. National conservatives fashion themselves as the intellectuals who take Trump seriously and endeavoured to weave a coherent approach out of his many idiosyncratic policies. The disregard for Paul Ryan (who looks to me an economically sensible, fiscally conservative Republican) is due to what I would consider national conservatism’s true business: a version of identity politics. If “nationalism”, in the form of industrial policy, connotes some of the national conservatives’ proposals, the “intellectual energies” they are mobilizing are concerned mainly with culture, not with economic policy. A rejection of the current fashion of critical race theory is what is bonding together a movement which is not without strong and vocal intellectual personalities. This may not be new. Economic policies are not typically useful in mobilizing people and one could argue that the battle over communism was indeed a “cultural war”. Yet the idea that Western countries should not look like communist ones was up to a certain extent bipartisan and based upon common political values, whereas now it is a challenge to find values the left and the right share – perhaps with the exception of their common allegiance to more economic interventionism. Writes Hochmann: Conference-goers — a politically disparate association of West Coast Straussians associated with the California-based Claremont Institute, post-liberals, right-wing populists, and any number of other ideological subgenres grouped together in what has come to be known as the “New Right” — come together in the belief that the conservative movement has failed to fully harness the relative cultural conservatism of the American electorate. There remains some ambiguity about what the national conservatives are for, but they know what they are against — what Israeli–American conference organizer Yoram Hazony described in his speech as “the idea of a public liberalism and a private conservatism.” For too long, national conservatives argue, the Right has seen the protection of liberty as the sole purpose of political life and has largely relegated discussion of virtue to the private sphere. But “there is no real wall separating the public from the private — that’s a myth,” Hazony says. “The public sphere reaches down into the private.” Politics, in other words, is not downstream from culture. In many ways, this is a reaction to a politicization of the private sphere which started on the left. The new idea seems to be opposition not on the grounds that the private lives of people are private and so should remain, but rather with a symmetric government advocacy for another version of what peoples’ personal identity should look like. This could be an inevitable blowback to culture trends that consolidated in the last few years. Yet I tend to share Arnold’s conclusion: what we see is “a dangerous and misleading political left with a dangerous and misleading political right”. (0 COMMENTS)