The progression of Trump's tariffs

 From the FT

Click to enlarge

Travel to the USA has cratered

 Is anyone surprised?  It's no longer safe to visit the USA.  You could be disappeared into a hellhole in El Salvador, tortured or killed, held in chains, forced to sleep on a concrete floor, denied your medication.  And your embassy would be helpless to save you.

From the FT.

Uncertainty skyrockets

 

Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics

 From the FT

“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden). Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative.

The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.

Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass.

It’s not every day that concepts from public health analytics find a use in politics, but if you’re a strategist on the right, then now might be a good time for a primer on untangling age, period and cohort effects(opens a new window). Age effects are changes that happen over someone’s life regardless of when they are born, period effects result from events that affect all ages simultaneously, and cohort effects stem from differences that emerge among people who experience a common event at the same time.

This framework is used to understand differences in a population and whether they are likely to be lasting. This makes it perfectly suited to interrogating why support for conservative parties is so low among millennials and whether it will stay there.

Let’s start with age effects, and the oldest rule in politics: people become more conservative with age. If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.

On to period effects. Could some force be pushing voters of all ages away from the right? In the UK there has certainly been an event. Support for the Tories plummeted across all ages during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, and has only partially rebounded. But a population-wide effect cannot completely explain millennials’ liberal exceptionalism, nor why we see the same pattern in the US without the same shock.

So the most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

This is borne out by US survey data showing that, having reached political maturity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, millennials are tacking much further to the left on economics than previous generations did, favouring greater redistribution from rich to poor.

Similar patterns are evident in Britain, where millennials are more economically leftwing than Gen-Xers and boomers were at the same age, and Brexit has alienated a higher share of former Tory backers among this generation than any other. Even before Truss, two-thirds of millennials who had backed the Conservatives before the EU referendum were no longer planning to vote for the party again, and one in four said they now strongly disliked the Tories.

The data are clear that millennials are not simply going to age into conservatism. To reverse a cohort effect, you have to do something for that cohort. Home ownership continues to prove more elusive for millennials than for earlier generations at the same age in both countries. With houses increasingly difficult to afford, a good place to start would be to help more millennials get on to the housing ladder. Serious proposals for reforming two of the world’s most expensive childcare systems would be another.

UK millennials and their “Gen Z” younger cousins will probably cast more votes than boomers in the next general election. After years of being considered an electoral afterthought, their vote will soon be pivotal. Without drastic changes to both policy and messaging, that could consign conservative parties to an increasingly distant second place. 

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch

 I expect most people get more conservative as they age.  I have not: I used to believe in neo-liberalism, and now I do not.  I am more progressive than I was 50 years ago.

The housing rental crisis

 I found this chart on Mastodon, and unfortunately no source was given, so treat its conclusions with caution.  It looks as if it's from the FT, but I can't be certain.

Across the Anglosphere, there are too few houses, and too few are being built.  This is part of the reason why rents are rising much faster than incomes.  But there is also a rental crisis in Germany, in Belgium  .....   But not in Vienna.

What is the solution?  Increasing the supply of housing is one.   Significantly increasing the supply of social housing (council flats) --- social housing built not to the cheapest and grottiest standards --- is another. 

1.5 degrees to be reached 11 years sooner

 From a toot by Professor Christopher May

The shortcomings of the COP series of meetings (and the failure of #ParisAgreement) have contributed to a shortening of the time by which we will reach 1.5c eleven years earlier.

So once we all got behind the Paris Agreements agenda on the #climatecrisis, things actually got worse.

I've said this before, but in the future (as our descendants grapple with #climatechange & its social disruption), our children's children will curse our political leaders for their lack of leadership & action(s)

The trend rate of increase in global prices has accelerated.
As it happens, we have already reached 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures,
if only temporarily (?)

And still we do too little to avert catastrophe.

People aren't moving right as they age, any more

 From a tweet by Matthew Sheffield

Millennials aren't moving rightward as they've aged, unlike Gen X, Boomers, & Silents. This is a good piece on the trend, but it doesn't note that the WW2 generation had a similar left loyalty. The common factor? Both gens got screwed by oligarchs.

https://archive.is/20221230225501/https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4

The FT's trenchant Brexit video

Long time readers of this blog will know that I have always thought that Brexit was a disastrously stupid policy.  This trenchant video by the FT (Financial Times -- not known for its far-left nature) demonstrates just how bad it has been for the UK economy.  Britain is poorer because of Brexit.  As the video says, "it's like a slow leak from a tyre".  Then the neo-liberal ideologues in the Conservative (Tory) Party produced a budget which suddenly led to the tyre blowing out.  Disastrous.  And since no one can admit just how bad it is, it's hard to see how it can be fixed.  Ideology has triumphed over pragmatism, leading to the UK going backward.

The war on science

From ClimateCrocks

When major corporations realized that mainstream science was a threat to their business models, they began the now 50 year long global War on Science – mustering the vast resources of the richest organizations the world has ever known, and the most sophisticated psychological tools of influence, they have destroyed the ability for a large part of our population to distinguish what is real, and what is not.

They wanted us to believe that cigarettes are fine, that acid rain was overblown, and that climate change was a hoax, perpetrated by evil scientists who wanted to control us. They’ve been wildly successful, and that success has bled over into a number of related areas.

Financial Times (paywall):


It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Republican party became the anti-science party, but the process probably began in the 1980s, when the Christian right first emerged as a major force in conservative American politics.

Since then, the journey has been smooth and swift. In 1982, 50 per cent of self-identified Republicans told the US general social survey they had “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community. Twenty years later 50 per cent had become 40, and last year just one-third of Republicans held that view, compared to two-thirds of Democrats.

It would be easy to dismiss this trend as merely exasperating — an obstacle to progress on climate change and a source of irritation at extended family gatherings — but over the past 18 months, the politicisation of attitudes to science may have directly cost as many as 60,000 American lives.
This is the stark implication of a new study from the Yale school of public health, which found that since Covid vaccines became widely available in the US, the mortality rate of registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida climbed by 33 per cent during America’s winter Covid wave last year, compared with just a 10 per cent rise among Democrats.

Since vaccines became available, Covid death rates are now almost three times higher in Republican areas than Democrat-dominated ones. With pandemics likely a recurring part of our future, anti-vaccine attitudes and the populist movements that carry them will continue to hamper public health campaigns across the world. But no developed country has a problem as entrenched and as lethal as the US.

US LNG exports are booming

 An interesting video from the FT (Financial Times, of London) about the boom in LNG exports from the US, mostly to Europe to substitute for the losses of gas from Russia.  It explains the process of creating LNG from natural gas, and shows how the US is now the world's largest exporter, with further increases likely.

Is the world locking in gas?  Prolly not, or at least not in the quantities implied in the question.  A grid powered by wind and solar will still need gas for cold, gloomy, windless periods  ("Dunkelflaute").    In countries with enough hydro, gas may not be needed, but even then gas will be necessary as back-up.  Until power-to-gas, i.e., converting surplus electricity to methane, becomes widespread, we will still need natural gas.  Producing surplus green electricity will require overcapacity in wind and solar, and we are a long way away from that now.  But by 2030, the need to curtail renewable output will be frequent, and in order not to waste it, we'll use it to make synthetic natural gas via the Sabatier process.  At that point, natural gas production will start to fall, and its place in the grid will be replaced by SNG.